QUEST Community Science Blog

In 1968, John Dobson started the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers with the help of two boys who loved astronomy but couldn’t join an amateur astronomy club in the city because they were too young. So the trio created their own club, carting two homemade telescopes onto Jackson and Broderick Streets and inviting curious passersby to take a look at the craters of the moon, the rings of Saturn, the banded clouds of Jupiter.

Forty years later, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers is still going strong, boasting a web site replete with a monthly star chart, specific for San Francisco, a calendar of monthly amateur astronomy events, a helpful “cheat sheet” of astronomical facts and answers to questions that routinely come up if you set up a telescope on your neighborhood sidewalk, and where to go if you want to borrow, build or donate a telescope.

Another great resource for the budding SF amateur astronomer is the Randall Museum, which hosts star parties, lectures by amateur and professional astronomers and classes for making your own Dobsonian telescope from scratch. The free public lectures at the Randall Museum take place on the third Wednesday of each month, sponsored by the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers.

Since 1952, the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers have been an invaluable resource for stargazers to learn about the choicest observing sites throughout the Bay Area, monthly star parties and make contact with a community of like-minded folks. Be sure to also check out their astrophotography web page, where they have uploaded photos and even videos shot with their telescopes of galaxies, comets, moons, planets and nebulae.

If you can’t get enough of amateur astronomy clubs in the Bay Area, check out the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the Astronomical Association of Northern California. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific, founded in the 19th century, has members from 70 countries and claims to be the largest astronomy society in the world. It also boasts educational outreach programs, such as Astronomy from the Ground Up, a National Science Foundation-funded program that helps informal science educators such as docents and volunteers by giving them the tools and training to more effectively communicate astronomy information to the public.

If you should need to buy equipment or talk with some very knowledgeable folks about the right telescope, accessories or CCD digital camera to begin your foray into astrophotography, check out Scope City, a retailer in San Francisco specializing in telescopes and binoculars.

Watch the “Amateur Astonomers” TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

Making Every Photon Count

Last week I went to a talk given by the leader of the Supernova Factory collaboration at LBNL. What is SN factory? This is an ambitious project to study supernovae like never before. I mentioned this project briefly in a previous post , now that they are so close to releasing their results I want to discuss it a bit more.

The main idea of this project is to study several hundred nearby supernovae using an instrument known as the Supernova Integral Field Spectrograph, or SNIFS. This type of instrument is essentially a blend between a traditional imaging camera and a spectrograph.

The resolution in an integral field spectrograph is defined in spaxels instead of the pixels that have become all too familiar with the advent of digital cameras. A spaxel is quite similar to a pixel, there aren’t nearly as many and each one carries at least a 1000 times as much information.

In your digital camera, the light passes through the lens and directly onto the CCD. Each pixel on the CCD counts the number of photons in the red, the blue, and the green. Typically, there are millions of pixels, each counting photons from a slightly different region of the subject of your photograph.

Now imagine that instead of just counting red, green, and blue, that each pixel counts the entire rainbow of light from your subject. Now you have a spaxel. In an intregral field unit, the light passes through an array of microlenses and prisms before landing on the detector. We would call each set of microlenses and prisms a spaxel. The resulting image carries information about every wavelength of light from every region of your target.

Spectrum of the first SN observed with SNIFSThe advantage to an integral field spectrograph like SNIFS is that you gain a lot more information than either an imager or spectrograph alone. With an integral field spectrograph you can basically identify and organize every photon that reaches the telescope.

Specifically designed to observe supernovae, SNIFS is being operated at the 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea. Spaxels are quite expensive - this particular instrument has only 225. However, this is more than enough to observe the entirety of a galaxy, a supernova, and the background.

The members of the SN Factory have now observed over 100 SNe using this new camera. Last Thursday, I saw the data from the first 25 well-calibrated supernovae and was very impressed. The data showed the evolution of each supernova and the properties of the host galaxy in great detail. I’m sure the supernova community will be equally impressed when they first see these new results.

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Last night we completed our observations for the Supernova Legacy Survey. This was a five year program to study supernovae using a 4-meter telescope in Hawaii in combination with several of the largest optical telescopes in the world.

The project was headed by a group at a university in Toronto and a group at a university in Paris. Canada and France sponsor the 4-meter telescope that is used to discover and observe the supernovae from the point of explosion to the final days when the supernova fades from view. We call this the imaging part of the program. This data constrains the apparent brightness and life cycle of the supernova, and eventually the absolute distance to the supernova.

Our contribution to the project was primarily through our affiliation with Keck Observatory. We were typically awarded four nights a year to observe recently discovered supernovae spectroscopically. The data is used to determine the redshift and the kind of supernova explosion.

The supernovae are used to study the rate of expansion of the universe. It was this type of experiment that was first used to discover that the universe is actually dominated by dark energy.

No one really suspected the presence of dark energy for almost the entirety of the 20^th century. Now, we not only know it exists but are actually trying to understand it in the same way we understand gravity, protons, and electrons. That is where projects like the Supernova Legacy Survey come in. With projects like this, we work to collect enormous samples of well-studied supernovae that can improve our understanding of dark energy.

We use a certain type of supernova as yardsticks to measure distances in the universe. We then model the affects of dark energy on the expansion history of the universe by comparing distances and rates of expansion. This comparison is typically represented in a Hubble Diagram.

The Supernova Legacy Survey has been very successful in its attempts thus far. On the right, I show the Hubble Diagram from the first year of data. This is less than 20% of the full sample. The dotted line outlines the expectations of the 1990’s cosmology crowd. The solid line shows the prediction from the more sophisticated cosmologists of the 21^st century. As you can see, the original expectations were pretty far off the mark - the supernovae just don’t lie on top of the dotted line.

Now that this program is finishing up, we should be seeing similar figures that are teeming with supernovae. Future programs should do an even better job of making these measurements. Someday we may actually understand this dark energy thing, it may turn out to be something else completely new and unexpected!

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Illustration of a blast of solar wind impacting
Earth’s protective magnetic field. Credit: NASABreathe in, exhale. Feel the air in your mouth, windpipe, and lungs. That’s a sample of Earth’s atmosphere: the thin layer of gases enveloping our planet.

Did you know that the Sun also has an atmosphere, and that the Earth is inside it? In fact, the Sun’s envelope of gases extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto, out to the regions of the solar system where the 3-decade-old Voyager spacecraft are only now reaching.

“Space weather” refers to the conditions in space caused by the outflow of electrically charged gases (plasma) coming from the Sun—what we call the “solar wind.” The term “space weather” may conjure images of cosmic tornadoes, astral lightning bursts, and some Star Trek version of a galactic hurricane– but actual space weather is nothing so Earthly and familiar.

First of all, the “air” in space is nothing like the atmosphere we draw our breath from. Earth air, at the surface, is made of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other trace elements, and is relatively dense. “Space air” is mostly hydrogen– ionized hydrogen at that (meaning stripped of its electrons and so electrically charged; the separated electrons are also blowing along in the solar wind).

Second, the gases of the solar wind are extremely rarified. Despite the talk of a solar atmosphere, solar wind, and space weather, space within the solar system is still almost a complete vacuum. At Earth’s distance from the Sun, the average density of the solar wind is somewhere between 6 and 9 atoms (mostly hydrogen) per cubic centimeter. If you spread out the gas contained in an ordinary party balloon to this same thinness, it would fill a volume of space over 10 miles across!

Third, the solar wind, for all its sparseness, blows fast! Depending on conditions of space weather, the flow of solar wind past the Earth can speed along anywhere from 200 to 900 kilometers per second! Earth’s fastest winds slug along at only a few hundred kilometers per HOUR.

So how does space weather—the changing conditions of the solar wind—affect us on Earth? How might you, personally, have experienced, directly or indirectly, the effects of the Sun’s gentle breeze?

The most familiar phenomenon caused by space weather is Earth’s beautiful auroras —the northern and southern lights. Interactions between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field and electrically charged particles trapped in it excite atoms in the upper atmosphere to emit light. And it’s not just a softly glowing night light: the most powerful auroras can generate up to a trillion Watts of power!

Solar wind “storms” can not only produce more active auroras, but can cause fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field whose effects can be felt on the ground. These “geomagnetic storms” usually pass unnoticed, perhaps causing a tiny change in the direction that compass needles point– but have also been known to overload electrical power grids and cause blackouts.

In the space around Earth, solar storms have been known to damage or disable satellites, and can put unprotected astronauts at risk. Space walks on the International Space Station are scheduled for times when space weather is - so to speak -”sunny and calm.”

Thinking about space weather on Earth might seem like worrying over Atlantic hurricanes here in the Bay Area—but with more and more human activity taking place beyond the confines of our atmosphere, this is a very real and vital concern, and is taken very seriously.

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

It’s approaching that time of year again: Spring Equinox. The blaze in my home’s interior hallway has been signaling this for the last week.

The shadow of Chabot’s “solar clock” at noon
on the equinox produces a pattern of solid green
straddling the gnomonI noticed late in the afternoon a couple days ago that the windowless hallway where we hang all of our family photos was afire in a shaft of bright sunlight, entering a window in the adjacent bedroom. Only around Equinox (Spring or Fall), when the Sun sets about directly west, does this happen in my house. The rest of the year the Sun sets too far north or south for this window-and-hallway alignment to take place. It’s a striking event because for only a few days of the year my normally dark hallway explodes with radiance.

Ancient cultures all around the world made use of the changing rise and set position of the Sun to track the seasons, and either observed special alignments of sunlight and shadow with geographical features, or built structures that made the special alignments. Stonehenge is one famous example, but there are plenty of other seasonal observatories in just about every part of the world.

Unlike the more distant stars in the sky, which always rise and set at the same points on the horizon, the Sun (a star too, of course) wanders northward and southward in the sky throughout the year, and so its rise and set points migrate. On the Equinoxes the Sun rises directly at the east point on the horizon and sets directly at the west point-but at Summer Solstice in the Bay Area it rises a full 30 degrees to the north, and at Winter Solstice 30 degrees to the south.

The reason for the Sun’s annual wandering comes from the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis with its orbit around the Sun. At our (Northern Hemisphere) Summer Solstice, our hemisphere is tipped toward the Sun and the Sun appears at its most northerly point in the sky; we receive more hours of sunlight and more direct rays from the Sun-so it’s warmer. Winter Solstice is opposite, with our hemisphere tipped away and the Sun and the Sun farthest to the south, making for shorter hours of daylight and less direct solar rays–and so it’s colder.

Equinox is a middle point between solstices: the Sun is poised between the northern and southern extreme points of the solstices-positioned directly over Earth’s equator-and the hours of daylight and night are about equal.

Does your home or place of work function as a solar seasonal calendar, as mine does? Is there a special time of year when you notice a striking pattern of light and shadow, a special alignment of walls, windows, doors, or other features? From the location of Chabot Space & Science Center, at equinox the Sun sets directly on the Golden Gate Bridge… .

If you have noticed something like this, then you’ve experienced what many ancient peoples noticed about the seasonal changing of the Sun. Their observations led them to understanding, or at least making use of, the cycle of the Earth revolving about the Sun to establish the earliest calendar systems.

Take a look and see what you notice, especially around Equinox (March 19, Pacific Time-March 20 GMT).

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

H-R diagram of 47 Tucanae

I started off my last post talking about the well-known properties of globular clusters, but I chose not to dive into the details of the stars inside the clusters. The stars really deserve an article all to themselves. Now is the time for that article.

Basically all of the stars in a globular cluster have the same age and formed under the same conditions. Observations of a globular cluster are a snapshot of one point along the evolutionary track of all these stars. Each star will have well defined properties depending on its mass and the age of the cluster. In the early 1900’s, Ejnar Herstzprung and Henry Norris Russell made the first observations of this age and mass relation, thus earning the honor of having the model named after them. Not to be confused with more common corporate acronym, we now refer to the model describing the brightness and color of stars as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, or H-R diagram.

The H-R diagram shows the relationship between the brightness of a star and its color. In the figure at the top of this page, the y-axis shows the brightness of the stars in the cluster. The brightest stars are represented by the dots at the top of the figure. The faintest stars are near the bottom. The x-axis shows the color of these stars – red stars are on the right and blue stars are on the left.

All stars start on the main sequence, regardless of their mass. A star on the main sequence is burning hydrogen in its core. The more massive main sequence stars burn much more hydrogen, making them hotter, bluer, and brighter than the lower mass stars. The main sequence stars can be seen as the dots below the objects labeled “subgiant branch” in the H-R diagram at the top of the page. You should be able to see the bluer-brighter relationship that describes the main sequence stars.

The massive stars also consume all of the hydrogen in their cores very quickly, causing them to evolve off the main sequence much sooner than the lower mass stars. The stars that have just evolved off the main sequence are the “subgiant branch”. These stars still burn hydrogen but only in regions away from the core. They mark the turn-off from the main sequence and are used to determine the age of a globular cluster.

The more massive a star is, the further it has evolved from the main sequence in an old cluster. The more massive stars can be seen as the red giant branch, the horizontal branch (burning helium in the core), and the asymptotic giant branch. These stars are all still burning their material through fusion, but appear much different in color, size, and brightness than stars on the main sequence.

Finally, there are some stars that have made a huge jump from the top right hand corner of the H-R diagram to the bottom left. These are the white dwarf stars, seen as the faintest and bluest objects in globular clusters. These stars have burned the last of their available fuel and change from big, cool, and red to very small, hot, and blue very quickly when they purge their outer layers. They no longer burn any material in their cores and are simply radiating the last of their energy left from a lifetime of fusion into space.

I found many good examples of the H-R diagram on the web and you’ll need to run Java on your computer to see my favorite. This is a really cool program that allows you to simulate the evolution of stars. Just give it a mass and watch it go. You can see how it changes brightness, color, and size as it grows old. Check it out!

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

latitude: 37.8769, longitude: -122.247

The original Oakland Observatory in the 1880’s,
at Lafayette Square in Oakland. Credit: Chabot Space
& Science Center archives.This year marks an anniversary for the astronomical heritage of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area: Chabot Observatory turns 125!

Originally established as the Oakland Observatory in 1883, the facility was a unique creature from the very beginning. Conceived by then Oakland Public Schools Superintendent Jewett Gilson, who was inspired by a school observatory he saw in Philadelphia, the observatory was created for use by Oakland schools and the general public at large.

Gilson looked for, and eventually found, a donor to fund the observatory project: Anthony Chabot, a wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist who made his fortune building municipal water systems in the Bay Area– including Lake Temescal and Lake Chabot. Anthony Chabot stipulated as part of his original $3,000 gift that the telescope shall forever be available for public observation at not cost– a tradition that continues today.

Chabot didn’t want the observatory to be named for him, so in its earliest years it was called the Oakland Observatory. The public, as the story goes, insisted on calling it Chabot Observatory in gratitude for the gift– and eventually the name was made official.

The original location for the observatory and its 8-inch Alvan Clarke and Sons telescope (”Leah”) was close to downtown Oakland in Lafayette Square– which today remains a square block of parkland, at 10th and 11th Streets and Martin Luther King Junior Way and Jefferson Street. In those days, 10 or so visitors on any given night would climb the tower-like structure to the telescope dome and peer at the heavens through the high quality instrument. Reservations had to be made in advance– sometimes as long as a month or two.

As Oakland grew, and particularly as it converted its street lighting from gas-powered lamps to electric lights, the necessity of moving the observatory to a darker spot grew. The observatory’s first director, Charles Burckhalter (who is said to have been the first person in Oakland with an astronomical telescope, set up in a backyard observatory at his home on Chester Street), arranged for the relocation. A number of different sites were considered– including a spot near Redwood Peak, the current location of the observatory– but a small hill next to the Mills College campus was finally adopted.

In 1915, Chabot Observatory opened at its new site, along with a new 20-inch Warner and Swasey telescope (”Rachel”), and continued to wow the public with the astronomical vistas it conveyed. In 1923 the directorship passed to Earle Linsley, a Mills College professor, who expanded the reach of the observatory to the public through outreach to schools and the establishment of an amateur astronomy group (today the Eastbay Astronomical Society).

Having visited this Chabot Observatory as a child in the 1960s, I now appreciate how long and distinguished a career those two telescopes spanned. At the time, I had no idea that Leah, even in 1968, was 85 years old-older than my grandparents! Then the observatory was run by the beloved Kingsley Wightman — “Mr. Science” to a generation or two.

It took the moving Earth to relocate the observatory a second time– literally. Because of Chabot Observatory’s location almost directly on top of the Hayward Fault, and the fact that the aging buildings were not quake– safe in the first place, another site had to be found: the present location of Chabot Space & Science Center, adjacent to Redwood Peak.

Happy 125th to Oakland’s special connection with the stars!

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

47 Tucunae

My research group has temporarily stepped away from the distant universe to focus on the stars that are actually inside our galaxy. We’re looking at these stars because they are so bright and so well understood that we can use them to test the calibration of the telescopes we use to study the most distant supernovae. The other day my co-worker showed the results of the analysis and my jaw dropped. I had forgotten how amazing certain observations of nearby stars can be.

We are looking at stars in a very specific environment known as a globular cluster. For those of you lucky enough to find yourself in Chile or Australia, this particular globular cluster is visible to the naked eye. It is known as 47 Tucanae. The stars in this and all globular clusters formed at roughly the same time and under the same conditions. All the known globular clusters in our galaxy are more than 10 billion years old, almost as old as the galaxy and the Universe.

Pleiades

Similar to globular clusters are groups of stars known as open clusters. Probably the best known open cluster is the Pleiades. The Pleiades are extremely close–the brightest stars are discernible to the naked eye and inspired the logo of the Subaru motor company. These stars are so bright because they are blue, massive, and most importantly–young. Pleiades was giving birth to its first stars just as our Earthling dinosaurs were bracing themselves for the killer asteroid!

There are several differences between globular clusters and open clusters, but the most important is the difference in density and mass. Globular clusters form in much denser environments and remain gravitationally bound. It is very rare for a star to escape from a globular cluster. Open clusters are not nearly as dense and are not gravitationally bound. Stars escape much more quickly from open clusters than they do from globular clusters.

Because globular clusters and open clusters are so spectacular and bright, they are some of the best targets for viewing with smaller telescopes available to the public. If you are interested in seeing a few for yourself, you should ping my fellow QUEST astronomy blogger, Ben Burress. I’m sure he or another astronomer can point the Chabot telescope at some of the best looking clusters in the Bay Area sky.

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

latitude: 37.8769, longitude: -122.247

Extreme close-up of the Sun’s visible surface,
showing ‘bubbling’ cells of convecting gas–each the size of
Northern California. credit: Hinode JAXA/NASA/PPARCBy all accounts, a new cycle-Cycle 24-in solar activity has begun… something you probably didn’t notice since the beginning of a solar cycle is quite subtle….

First things first: what is a solar cycle, and why is this one number 24? You’ve probably heard of sunspots and solar flares and disturbances in radio communications caused by solar activity, but had you noticed NOT hearing much about these things in the last two or three years?

The Sun exhibits a cyclic rise and fall in its level of magnetic activity. Being an enormous ball of roiling, circulating plasma (electrically charged gas), the Sun generates powerful magnetic fields in a way similar to how the circulating electricity in an electromagnet creates one.

Over the course of a solar cycle, the intensity and amount of magnetism generated by the Sun increases, like soup warming up on the stove, reaching a violent climax in which twisting, tangling magnetic fields break loose and release their energy in the form of solar flare explosions, coronal mass ejections, and tremendous heating of the solar atmosphere.

Sunspots are surface features formed by the presence of strong magnetic fields, and in general the number of sunspots that can be seen and counted indicate the level of magnetic activity on the Sun. For 400 years, since Galileo first started counting sunspots through his telescope, observers have kept track of sunspot counts, and over time a pattern in their number emerged. On average, the number of sunspot activity peaks every 11 years at a time called solar maximum.

I remember when I first started working at Chabot Space & Science Center, back in 1999/2000, during the last solar maximum. Using our Sunspotter telescopes on public observing days, in teacher workshops, and in my solar summer camp, we could easily count many sunspots-sometimes as many as 20 or more! Those were the days!

In the past two or three summers, however, it’s a lucky week to spot just a single sunspot! Most of the time, the Sun’s face has been a bland disk with few discernible surface features.

That status quo should start to change, now that we have allegedly reached solar minimum and are stepping onto the uphill slope toward the next maximum, which should happen sometime around 2011 or 2012. If you want to keep tabs on the rising solar activity, and you like lots of graphs and numbers and stuff like that, check out the Solar Cycle 24 website.

Oh, why is this Cycle 24? A 19^th Century astronomer who studied the then newly discovered sunspot cycle, Rudolf Wolf, established the cycle that spanned 1755 to 1766 as Cycle 1…and they’ve been counting up ever since.

But even in this “nap time” of the Sun, today’s modern solar observatories and spacecraft, with their arrays of high-tech cameras and sensors, see plenty on the Sun to keep them busy.

Japan’s Hinode spacecraft, launched in 2006, has returned libraries of amazing pictures and movies of solar flares, activity around sunspots, circulating hot gases, fine details of the life and times of magnetic fields…and all of this during solar minimum! I can’t wait until the Sun really gets going and Hinode becomes like a camera-happy tourist in Tahiti….

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

Saturn’s moon Epimetheus from the Cassini spacecraft.
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
and APOD.

On the bus in Denali National Park a few years ago, I found myself sitting next a couple from the East Bay. If you’ve ever been on the Denali bus, you know that it’s a long ride and it was just a matter of time before we struck up a conversation. As often happens, we wound up talking about work and then about astronomy research. Both of them were very interested in the field but were unsure of where to find good information on the web. At the time, I hadn’t really thought about that and wasn’t much help.

Now that I’m writing for QUEST, I am much better suited to answer them. I spend a lot of time surfing the web for images and links to websites to provide the full details for readers who want to follow up on my posts. Over the course of a year or so, I’ve discovered quite a few resources and have settled on a few favorites. Of course, being a Berkeley and Cornell grad, I have a few biases…

First of all, it is common for a university astronomy department to organize a public outreach campaign. I won’t bother with the obvious disclaimers and instead will just say that two of my favorites are “Ask an Astronomer” at Cornell University and the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics.

These two sites are quite different. As the name implies, the Cornell site encourages questions and suggestions from readers. The content of the site is therefore governed by the public, covering a wide variety of topics in fairly brief, straightforward language. The Berkeley site is much more structured. They cover the history of cosmology and outline the history of our universe with all the appropriate links (scroll down to see the links). This provides a very detailed and organized explanation of a specific field of astronomy.

In addition to universities, there are quite a few NASA missions that maintain excellent public relations. Almost everyone knows the Hubble Space Telescope and Mars Rovers. Both sites are updated almost daily with galleries, discoveries, and recent news. NASA also has several other large missions at other wavelengths that are probably not as well known. Three examples are the Chandra X-ray observatory, the WMAP mission, and the Spitzer infrared observatory. Like the Hubble and Rover sites, these space-based observatories perform ground-breaking science and do an excellent job explaining their discoveries to the public.

Besides QUEST, there are also quite a few other excellent blogs out there. Each site has a different approach and finds its own balance between astronomy coverage, opinion, and discussion of general science. One of the most popular is the Bad Astro site–we even have a link on the right hand side of the QUEST blog web page. You can also check out About.com’s top ten space and astronomy blogs.

Of course, one obvious place to learn about astronomy is from journalists. Two websites that do a very good job of covering the field are Space.com and New Scientist (some content requires subscription).

Finally, if you enjoy beautiful images of the sky, a great place to look is the “Astronomy Picture of the Day.” This is where I got my image for today. If you look tomorrow you’re guaranteed to find something just as exciting!

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

latitude: 37.8768, longitude: -122.251