Hello Cosmic Diary readers! I have recently started writing (here’s hoping for more consistency…) for NASA Goddard’s ‘Blueshift’ blog, particularly about travel and astronomy….both of which I love. Just the past few months, I’ve been on work-related trips to Germany, Hawaii, Santa Cruz, and New York City. You can read about my Hawaii trip (as well as other cool astro stuff by other people) here…

…there’s always something going on! Besides lots of cool astronomy stuff (a White House Star Party?! Awesome!), there are tons of other events for anything one may be interested in.

After spending six years in the desert (Arizona) in grad school, I am totally loving living in a place with seasons again. I’ve lived in Maryland for a little over a year now, and am just as excited about fall this year as I was last year.

I was lucky enough to snag a couple of tickets to the Kennedy Center’s Salute to Apollo Celebration that was held a couple of weekends ago, and it was amazing! This was my first time to visit the Kennedy Center, and to hear the National Symphony Orchestra live.

I totally admit it, I’ve been a slacker lately when it comes to this blog.  Sorry!  I could list the generic list of astronomer excuses (conference travel, referee reports, buried in data, lost in coding etc. etc.), which are all true, but I won’t go into the details and just let it be.  There.  :)

I’m sure most readers who follow the Cosmic Diary blogs heard about the satellite collision last week. Thankfully, the experts are saying that the debris poses little risk to the astronomers currently living in the ISS and that the next shuttle launch–currently scheduled for no earlier than Feb. 27–shouldn’t be affected.

This collision mishap has of course raised lots of questions about international space policy concerning satellite tracking methods and the cleanup and regulation of space “junk”. One of my favorite websites (Astronomy Picture of the Day…it’s my browser home page :)) had a graphic a few days ago of orbiting objects and the projected orbits of the new debris…it’s amazing how much stuff is actually up there! Here’s the link.

One of my first concerns when I heard this news was about the next servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (”SM4″–the 4th Servicing Mission. Kind of. That’s what the official name is, anyway :)). SM4 was originally scheduled for last year, but has been delayed until May for reasons I might blog about later. And sure enough, just yesterday there was a story about it on Discovery’s News blog. However, there have been no formal delays, and so we are still really hoping for May 12. I say “we”, because I work extensively with Hubble data. In fact, a large part of my thesis work utilized data from HST, and the two main projects I am working on now are with data from Hubble. I would certainly not be the only astronomer to say that HST has revolutionized our view of the Universe. So, here’s to hoping that this recent addition of more space junk after this accident doesn’t prevent or delay the servicing mission.

Hello Cosmic Diary readers!  As this is my first post, I thought I would give a quick intro … and start by saying that I’ve blogged off and on on other websites before in the past, but have never been very consistent.  I am going to do my best to post here weekly, though.