Sat April 10, 10
Halfway Around
WISE has passed 50 percent coverage of the sky on day 100 of 2010.
Tue April 6, 10
Interview
One of our papers from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (the “Bright Source List”) accumulated enough citations that Thomson Reuters interviewed several of us about the work. These were interesting questions, because they made us think about how to reach out to those who are not already fascinated by astronomy. You can read [...]
Wed March 31, 10
Telescope Time for 2010B - Spring is back!
Well, like last year the month of March is characterized by a drop in my Blog posting. I should remind those who are not astronomers that in March (and in September), we are facing all the deadlines to ask for telescope time. This is a tedious but necessary task, since in my case if I [...]
Mon March 29, 10
Borobudur Redux
One of my favorite place to visit is Borobudur, i never bored to visit & the last vernal equinox, i have an opportunity to return there. I will not write much about Borobudur, i have written much about it on my previous post; nonetheless, the trip might be an escape way from my tedious routinity, [...]
Sun March 28, 10
Ancient women in astronomy
Yesterday night I went to the cinema (yes, Lowell, in the end I made it…) and saw Agora, the last movie by Alejandro Amenabar (premiered in Germany on March 13). What does this have to do with astronomy? Well, as you may know, it tells the story of Hypatia, a scholar in the ancient Alexandria, [...]
Fri March 26, 10
APEX-3 is here
Last week, we got a new toy at APEX. As I mentioned in earlier posts, we are in altiplanic winter time now, and this time is not used for science operations, but rather for installations, upgrades, and maintenance.
One of these upgrades was the addition of a new frequency band to the SHFI receiver (I think [...]
Wed March 24, 10
Light pollution in Physics Today
A short one related to my previous post. A paper on light pollution appeared on Physics Today is now publicly available. If you are interested, you can read it here.
The curtain falls on CIE 2010
I finally find some time to report about the last day of the CIE conference in Vienna. Where was I? Ah, yes, the Gala dinner. It was very nice, accompanied by Strauss and Mozart music, plaid by three young musicians (piano, violin and cello). At some point a number of dancers appeared. The men with [...]
Tue March 23, 10
Programming Ninja
Like many astronomers, I have to do a lot of programming. But also like many astronomers, I am hardly a trained computer scientist.
One of the amazing things about WISE is the sheer amount of data it generates: something like 7,000 images per day. This translates to about 50 Gigabytes of data, each day, every day, [...]
Mon March 22, 10
Two trillion pixels
WISE has now observed the Galactic Center and is scanning into small positive longitudes. All of the frames near the Galactic Center have such a high density of objects that the automated astrometry pipeline failed, but the raw images show good image quality with at most a few percent of the pixels saturated. [...]