Asterisk

Free APOD 2013 calendar now available

Alice — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 10:29:19 +0000

Some of the best APOD images of 2012 appear in the downloadable PDF APOD calendar for 2013; information and a link for the download are available here.

We hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays!

How to submit an image to APOD

Alice — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 15:41:20 +0000

I get questions occasionally on how images can be submitted for consideration as an Astronomy Picture of the Day. Here’s how:

Post the image on Starship Asterisk, the discussion forum for APOD by following these instructions.
Send links to the pictures if the image is already on the web (in a Flicker account, for example) to Drs. Bonnell and Nemiroff
Send the images as email attachments to Drs. Bonnell and Nemiroff

Please note the text at the bottom of the About APOD page regarding submissions and uses of the image.

For posting, please keep images under 400K; posting a link to a larger image is helpful. For emailing, though larger images can be sent, sending an image under 2M is helpful; if you have the image in a larger size and can make it available, please say so in your email.

Though Drs. Nemiroff and Bonnell write the texts for APOD themselves, please let them know what they are seeing when you send your image. If there are interesting details about the image or the circumstances under which it was taken, they welcome reading them.

Please note that submitting an image does not guarantee that it will appear as an APOD; many images are submitted, far more than can possibly appear on APOD. Fewer than 1 in 10 submitted images becomes an APOD. Posting images on Starship Asterisk is encouraged so others have the opportunity to see the many fine images that are submitted even if they do not become APODs.

I hope this helps! If you need more information, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

APOD editor interviewed: Robert Nemiroff on Technorama

Alice — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:48:41 +0000

Check it out, APOD fans: the very cool Robert Nemiroff, one of the two APOD editors, was interviewed by Chuck Tomasi for a Technorama podcast! You can listen to the podcast here.

(The other editor is totally rockin’ Jerry Bonnell, but you knew that already!)

APOD’s back online!

Alice — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:17:23 +0000

YAY!!

That is all.

Power outage is affecting APOD

Alice — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 14:17:44 +0000

A derecho hit the DC area (and lots of other areas) on Friday and there are widespread power outages here; Goddard Space Flight Center and APOD are dark as a result.

The Taiwan mirror site has today’s APOD up and I’ve mirrored today’s APOD here, too.

Please check this thread on the Asterisk forums for updates; if you have any questions, please post them to the Asterisk thread so that all may benefit from the answer; thank you!

ASOW now has its own site!!!

physics.x2010 — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 12:32:46 +0000

For a while we have been working on a new site for Astronomy Seminar of the Week (ASOW). Starting this week, our presentations will be posted there. Please leave feedback through comments and tell us how you like our new site!!

New ASOW site is here: http://asterisk.apod.com/wp/asow/

Astronomy Seminar of the Week (2012 June 24)

Alice — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 22:00:51 +0000

2012, Week 27
Audio (MP3, 70Mb)
Galaxies in Collision
Presenter: Dr. Rob Knop
Professor of Physics, Quest University, Canada
Stars within a galaxy like our own almost never collide with each other. Galaxies themselves, however, run into each other all the time. What’s more, when the Universe was younger and smaller, they ran into each other more often. In this talk, Dr. Knop gives an overview of the sorts of things we see observationally when galaxies run into each other, causing not only the beautiful cosmic collisions that we’ve seen images of, but also triggering huge bursts of star formation and even tremendous activity at the nucleus of those galaxies.
First presented in Second Life in October, 2008.

Questions and comments can be posted on the discussion thread on Starship Asterisk; Dr. Knop will answer a selection of questions posted by July 8, 2012.

PDF of slides (5Mb)

Discussion thread and files

Files also available here: http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Galaxies_in_Collision

Astronomy Seminar of the Week (2012 June 17)

Alice — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 22:00:49 +0000

2012, Week 26

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)
Presenter: Dr. Fiona Harrison
Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Caltech and
Principal Investigator for the NuSTAR Explorer Mission

The new X-ray telescope NuSTAR was launched last week. This mission deploys the first focusing telescopes to image the sky in the high energy X-ray (6 – 79 keV) region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Previous orbiting telescopes have not employed true focusing optics, but rather have used coded apertures that have intrinsically high backgrounds and limited sensitivity. The NuSTAR instrument consists of two co-aligned grazing incidence telescopes with specially coated optics and newly developed detectors that extend sensitivity to higher energies as compared to previous missions such as Chandra and XMM. The observatory will provide a combination of sensitivity, spatial, and spectral resolution factors of 10 to 100 improved over previous missions that have operated at these X-ray energies. Dr. Harrison presented “The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)” and here we offer the slides from her illustrated lecture.

Questions and comments can be posted on the discussion thread on Starship Asterisk.

The original PowerPoint slides are available here.

Additional Resources
NuSTAR Home
NASA mission page
NuSTAR blog
Wikipedia entry
NuSTAR news thread
High Energy Astronomy Picture of the Week

More Venus transit images

Alice — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:56:53 +0000

The transit was such a photographic (and photographed) event, images are still coming into APOD. The variety is amazing, as you can see from the five images I’ve just posted here.

I was clouded out (~~ sigh ~~), so am especially glad to see so many images of this event. (Actually, I’m burning with envy, but trying hard to get over it!)

Astronomy Seminar of the Week (2012 June 10)

Alice — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 22:00:54 +0000

2012, Week 25

Audio (MP3, 37Mb)
Dark Matter
Presenter: Dr. Paul Doherty
Senior Scientist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and
director of The Splo Museum (in SL)

A brief overview of what we know about dark matter, some history of when the idea arose, and current experiments designed to detect or otherwise figure out what dark matter is.
This talk was presented in Second Life in February, 2012.

Questions and comments can be posted on the discussion thread on Starship Asterisk; Dr. Doherty will answer a selection of questions posted by June 24, 2012.

PDF of slides (4Mb)

Discussion thread and files

Files also available here: http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Dark_Matter