Disk Detective Night Sky Survey - Nightly Night Sky Survey A thorough Night Sky Survey is essential to a successful application to the International Dark Sky Places program. There are a variety of ways to approach it and improve upon it. These include: The Sky Quality Meter SurveyThe Bortle Scale InterpretationThe Photographic Evidence Sky Quality Meter Survey This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to achieve quantities measurements of the darkness of your location’s dark skies. It is simple to use and effective at measuring sky brightness at zenith. Using this device a “grid” of the locations may be made. In the map above a suggested method is shown for creating a survey. Bortle Scale Interpretation The Bortle Scale works to estimate sky brightness and interpret how light pollution is affecting your view of night sky phenomenon. This method is less quantitative than the Sky Quality Measurement. Steve Owens, International Dark Sky Places Committee member, is credited with the flow char below. Photographic Evidence
SpaceWarps EL PAISAJE PERFECTO - Nightly Radio Galaxy Zoo Andromeda Project Finding Bubbles in the Milky Way A huge team of volunteers from the general public has poured over observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and discovered more than 5,000 "bubbles" in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. Young, hot stars blow these shells out into surrounding gas and dust, highlighting areas of brand new star formation. Upwards of 35,000 "citizen scientists" sifted through the Spitzer infrared data as part of the online Milky Way Project to find these telltale bubbles. The users have turned up 10 times as many bubbles as previous surveys so far. Volunteers for the project are shown a small section of Spitzers huge infrared Milky Way image (left) that they then scan for cosmic bubbles. All of the user drawings can be overlaid on top of one another to form a so-called heat map (middle). At least five volunteers must flag a candidate bubble before it is included in the final catalog (right).
Map and measure a million Moon craters! I give talks about asteroid impacts quite often, and sometimes people ask me why we should worry about them. I reply, "Go outside and look at the Moon. Then tell me we don’t need to worry about asteroid impacts!" The Moon is covered in craters, and it really brings home — literally — the fact that we need to understand impacts better. I’m not being facetious, either. Looking at the Moon is a great way to learn about craters. Well, it depends on how big the team is. I signed up and started right in, and find it somewhat addicting. The blue circles are craters found using automated software. Sound like fun? And remember: this isn’t just fooling around, this is real science. Related Posts: - Find cold, distant worlds with Ice Hunters - YOU can find extrasolar planets - Two exoplanets discovered by “citizen scientists” - GLOBE at Night wants you to look up!
Join the 2012 Hubble's Hidden Treasures Competition Over two decades in orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope has made a huge number of observations. Every week, we publish new images on the ESA/Hubble website. But hidden in Hubble’s huge data archives are still some truly breathtaking images that have never been seen in public. We call them Hubble’s Hidden Treasures — and we’re looking for your help to bring them to light. We’re inviting the public into Hubble’s vast science archive to dig out the best unseen Hubble images. For an extra challenge, why not try using the same software that the professionals use to turn the Hubble data into breath-taking images? Both parts of the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition close on 31 May 2012. The best datasets that you identify will also be featured as future pictures of the week and photo releases on spacetelescope.org. For more information, watch Hubblecast 53, and visit the Hidden Treasures webpage at www.spacetelescope.org/hiddentreasures. Links Contacts About the Announcement Images Videos