Astronomy

I've been trying to get IRAF running on my laptop all day, and it's exactly as much of a headache as my officemates warned me it would be. That said, I've nearly got everything working, but I was wondering if anyone could give me any advice...

IRAF is installed and working more or less as it should be. The only thing I can't get working properly is XGterm (and splot doesn't work properly in any other terminal). I'm running a Mac Powerbook G4 running OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Has anyone else tried installing IRAF on OS X Tiger? Is the X11IRAF 1.3.1 package the latest version out, or is there a newer one with bug fixes out there somewhere?

Thanks in advance!


EDIT--
Specifically, I can now open an XGterm window, but can't type anything into it (so can't launch IRAF). On the one or two occasions when this window could be typed into, it closed again due to an error when I tried to plot a spectrum.

Strange.

The first lawyer to earn a degree specifically in space law graduates Saturday. [article]

WASHINGTON -- NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations

Link

The Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated and burned up on re-entry in 2003. Pieces of the shuttle were scattered over Texas and Louisiana. A hard drive from the shuttle containing important information on experiments conducted on board was found in a dry lake bed six months after the crash. The hard drive was melted, corroded, and fused... yet 99% of the data it contained was recovered.

[article]

Some weeks ago, the members of this group helped me out with the astronomy and physics for a short story I was writing.

I'm pleased to tell you all that the story, "Calibration," has been accepted for publication by, of all things, Nature Physics, in their "Futures" fiction feature.  Expect to see it next summer, if you have access to that journal.

My thanks, once again, to all of you. 

I've been reading on APOD and other places about the Messier Marathon that takes place around this time of year. This was featured on APOD--Every object of the Messier Catalog imaged in the SAME DAY in in 1999. Have any of you participated or had any experience with it?

Something about astrophotography is so incredible to me. It's a combination of highly skilled and technical photography with an intricate knowledge of the locations and apparent motions of celestial objects--absolutely amazing. And it's kind of cool to know that if the Greeks saw this today, they would freak out.



PS. Unrelated, but funny. I just read Carl Sagan totally debunk the craze of UFO sightings in the mid-1900's, and the #5 most searched topic on Yahoo! today was "UFO Sightings".

Oh what would Sagan do with us in this apocalyptic era of fundamentalism, capitalism, The Hills, gas price hikes, and UFO enthusiasts?

Just a reminder: On a few nights centered on May 5th the trails of fragments left behind by Halley’s Comet will come streaking across the night sky at 44 miles a second. Named after a star in the constellation Aquarius, the eta Aquarid Meteor Shower’s radiant appears to come out of the 4th-magnitude star eta Aquarii that’s 184 light years away from Earth and sits almost exactly on the Celestial Equator. Look towards the eastern horizon around 2:30am as Aquarius rises and expect to see 5 to 10 meteors per hour. New Moon on the 5th!
Good seeing!
//bob

Galaxy Zoo has started a new project, checking images for potential mergers. This is a quick project following on from the large scale analysis and bias testing of the original zoo, and before the new detailed analysis of Galaxy Zoo 2 which will follow eventually.

I have produced a new website to handle this activity, it's not as pretty as the original zoo, but it was produced very quickly to meet the needs of this project.

Merger Checking Website

"Bob Berman's Strange Universe" column in June 2008's Astronomy magazine that arrived in my mailbox today is one of the best things I have ever read in my life.


I am deeply saddened that no free internet copy exists here to which I can link.


Did anyone else get to read it?

This is this sites header,

*From the solar system we call home to the far reaches of the cosmos, understanding the universe we live in is part of what defines our species*.

Thanxs to all the following for showing the world what a great bunch of species they are.

1]. user=real_live_troll
comment=death spam

2]. user=saintofkizzles
comment=wat

3]. user=cor_tenebrarum
comment=lol internet disease

4]. user=webofglass
comment=lol

5]. user=londonfever
comment=is she yet another Russian whore or a starlet?

6]. user=slothywaffle
comment=i was just wondering that too.

7]. user=fermi
comment=and this has WHAT to do with astronomy? 

So light is made up of three colors right? Blue, Red and Green. The red light (mostly) is reflected back into space, the blue light lands down and reflects off the ocean and sky making them blue... what happens to the green light? And do we see the sun's light as yellow before of some weird color combination of those, or because it's a yellow star?

This isn't my actual question but it's related and... i ponder weird things (Like who was the first person to eat an egg? "Look! Something just fell out of that chicken's bum, lets eat it" I actually really do wanna know how people came to eat eggs but that's neither here nor there)

So, my ACTUAL question is:

Binary star system (just pretend my senario is out there someplace) F and K star. So if the F star is orangish and the K star is blueish/whiteish and I was sitting on a planet looking at them, would their combined light be purple? How would these two stars in relation to one another effect the perceived light on a habitable planet in the system? (say if it was an eclipsing system)

I mean, I'm sure the perceived light has more to do with atmosphere and the colors of light being reflected and reaching the planet than the actual color of the stars themselves, but I just don't know if that's true or not, so basically I want a confirmation that the light would probably still be yellow if there was a planet like earth... only imaginarily around an F and K star.

By an enormous burst of gravitational waves that accompanies the merger of two black holes the newly formed black hole was ejected from its galaxy. This extreme ejection event, which had been predicted by theorists, has now been observed in nature for the first time. The team led by Stefanie Komossa from the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) thereby opened a new window into observational astrophysics. The discovery will have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe, and also provides observational confirmation of a key prediction from the General Theory of Relativity (Astrophysical Journal Letters, May 10, 2008).

[article]

An extremely valuable 4.5 billion year old meteorite which was expected to sell for more than $2 million at an auction today went unsold... however two chunks of fossilized dinosaur dung did sell.

[article]

Okay, forgive me for the really stupid question:

I was always under the impression that as a star cools, it gets bigger, like our sun will eventually do, swelling and eatting up planets til it gets full and bursts. But I was reading about the classifications of stars today, and the cooler, red stars are smaller. But aren't they older and on their last legs of life? (this being a relative term *heh*) Betelgeuse is a HUGE red star, but isn't it a lot cooler than our sun? SO... wouldn't it be a class M? But isn't a lot of class M stars a lot smaller than our sun?


So how do stars get classified? By luminosity, surface temp, mass, or radius or none of the above?

Confuuused!

Thanks in advance for explaining cause I've been reading about stars all day and now my brain hurts.

Indian rocket puts ten satellites into orbit... on a single trip: [article]

Saturday's safe return of the latest international space station crew occurred during an anxiety-filled half-hour of official silence that only later was explained by the cluelessness of Moscow Mission Control as to the whereabouts (and even the continued existence) of the Soyuz spacecraft and its three occupants.

[article]

A team of researchers in Italy are claiming to have directly detected dark matter particles. [link]

So, like most members of this community, I firmly believe that astrology is crap... or at least, I did... but I finally found a horoscope I believe in: [The Onion's Horoscopes]

They're hysterical.

My most recent Onion horoscope (Libra) "The human body is made up of 70 percent water, which helps to explain the sound you'll make after hitting the pavement this week."

There are syndicated feeds for each sign.

Turns out, nifty things happen when the moon passes through the Earth's magnetotail: [link]

- and -

What the solar wind does to the unprotected moon's surface: [link]

The Milky Way's central super massive black hole, now dormant, is believed to have briefly awoken in the 1700's: [article]