This program is designed to get high school students involved in current research projects in an attempt to encourage them enter lunar science or just science in general as a career choice. Teams of students are teamed with up-and-coming lunar scientists to spend most of the school year tackling an problem related to the moon. There is a lot of lunar geology involved but no experience is required. You learn everything along the way.

Students first spend a month learning about the moon from the basics up to current knowledge of the moon and its formation. Then one of the projects ideas is selected by the team and they tackle the issue however they choose to working with their mentor via the Internet and their teacher at the local school.

2009-2010 was the first year and only 4 school participated. All 4 projects were converted in published “conference posters” and displayed at a national conference. A team of scientists chose one team to attend the conference based on which project they thought was most insightful.

The research topic list is supplied by a team of scientists and the team chooses one of the topics to focus on. Most are related to age and surface characteristics of the lunar surface as part of a long-term effort to understand the formation and evolution of the moon and an effort to one day send people or robots to continue lunar exploration beyond the Apollo missions.

Interested students can sign up or just contact Mr. Newland.

Astronomy is one of the oldest of human past times. You DO NOT need expensive equipment or software to poke around in the world of astronomy.

One of the easiest things you can do is just use your eyes! If you want a map of what’s up in the sky, you can actually get a good one for free online at SkyMaps.com. Then you can start locating and naming constellations and star patterns and learning the names of the brightest stars which can indeed be seen from the city. The SkyMap comes with highlights of what’s good to see in the night sky and upcoming celestial events. It even works for both hemispheres and comes in multiple languages. There is a new one every month so check it out.

Then there is free and fantastic astronomy software that can turn your computer into a planetarium. In fact the software is used at the Houston Museum of Natural Science planetarium from time to time. It’s called Stellarium and works with Windows, Mac, and Linux. Did I mention it’s free!

Then of course there is the Astronomy Picture of the Day which has a different astronomical image posted daily. You can also see what the sun is up to over at the Solar Dynamics Observatory website. Up to minute coverage means you can see what crazyness the sun has in store for us and HD too.

The purple tint to the images is more a factor of the new purple filter but I have noticed that light that is only infrared like the IR LEDs in a TV remote show up as a sort of bluish-purplish light. The effect is just much greater with the crazy filter.

Plants look bright in the wavelengths of IR that show up on the iPhone 3GS camera so my neighborhood has a crazy look in near-IR.

Check out the same shot with and without the filter.

UPDATE: I created a slightly better filter for my iPhone and it also works with my Canon PowerShot. All I needed to do was dig through some photo negatives until I found 2 exposed ends. Then cross them as polarizers and bam! IR filter…. Try it yourself!

Backyard. Notice the fig tree in the distance.

The banana trees looks strange.

The dog wonders what I’m up to.

The rear blinker/brake light cover is normally deep red on my Toyota Corolla.

I posted ALL my results to a Flickr photo set if you want to see more.

The seeing was really great for a Houston summer night. The milky way stood out clearly and many of the deep sky objects I normally have to star hop to find actually were visible to the naked eye. I just pointed the scope and there it was. One of the usual operators of the research dome was out as well and we even got to use the 36″ Gueymard telescope.

Gueymard Research Telescope

The mosquitoes weren’t even all that bad since we had a big fan blowing on us the whole time.

There were lots of Messier objects out to see. My targets were open clusters M6 (aka the Butterfly cluster) & M7 (the Ptolemy cluster) in between Scorpius and Sagittarius, the open cluster NGC 6281 in the scorpion’s tail, M8 (Lagoon nebula), M20 (Trifid nebula), M17 (the Omega nebula – which I stumbled across and had to identify later), M10 (globular cluster in Ophiuchus the serpent bearer), and a failed attempt to find M101 (the Pinwheel galaxy in Ursa Major). The light pollution from Sugar Land is getting pretty bad at the George.

I used Stellarium to try and give a sense of what the sky looked like towards the south. If you move your mouse over the image, labels will appear over various parts of the image. See if you can pick out Scorpius without the labels. The teapot asterism of Sagittarius is also there. If you can see Ophiuchus without the label that is impressive. If you want to see the originals you can see the image with labels or the image without labels.

Looking S @ George Obs 8-1-10 10pm

Ophiuchus is actually the 13th zodiac constellation since the sun spends some time traveling through this area of the sky. There are some cool stars in the south. Antares is the bright red giant at the heart of Scorpius. The stinger of the scorpion is made up of Shaula and Lesath. Rasalhague and Yed Prior/Yed Posterior are at the top and bottom right of Ophiuchus. Note the 2 Kaus Media and Kaus Astralis which make up the middle and bottom of the Sagittarius archer’s bow. The other not labeled is Kaus Borealis – the upper part of the bow. Awesome… I know.

Anathem cover

So I finally got around to reading/listening to Anathem by Neal Stephenson and wow what a great book. There are a lot of things to say about why I loved this book but here’s the gist. I couldn’t put it down even with the book having almost a thousand pages and I found myself caught up in the content and the world so close to but different from our own.

This is tale that uses cosmology, physics, math, and philosophy as tools to tell the story. Part of the fun is working out the little puzzles comparing the world of the book to our world. There is even a dictionary of terms from “Orth” that are analogs of our own words.

The story centers around the account of Erasmus who is the student from an important “cosmographer” (meaning astronomer)name Orolo. As the events unfold his world and others are changed forever. In this world scientists, mathematicians and philosophers live a cloistered monastic life like pre-renaissance monks. This is called the mathic world and the people who choose to follow “the Discipline” live in “maths” that are isolated from the world for 1, 10, 100, or 1000 years. I found myself drawn to the idea again and again and even now think I could have flourished in the mathic world.

Layered and complicated this book is worth the time it takes to digest some of the “dialogs” used as exposition and to teach the reader as much as the characters learning from the more knowledgeable Fraas and Suurs. The ideas of Plato, Godel, Einstein, Roger Penrose and a host of others are woven into a story that shows a world slow to change but capable of great intellectual richness.

Neal Stephenson has a lot of information on his site about what inspired him and where he got many of the ideas in the book. There is even an section of music from Anathem. The mathic world is driven by tradition and formality and musical talent. So the pieces are related less to God and more to the important ideas of math and science.

Religion is afforded a secondary place in the story. More than that religion is seen as less capable than religion in answering questions about nature of the cosmos (or cosmi) and reality.

One theme is intricate mechanical clocks at the heart of the monastic “maths” where the “avout” live and work. The author was inspired by the 10,000 Year Clock Project whereby we humans design and build a clock that is meant to run for multiple thousands of years.

Prototype 1

I listened to the first 20% of the book as an Audible.com  download while commuting to the Unknown Moon Institute last week. Over the weekend my family and I headed to Barnes & Noble where I got the paperback for less an $10. I set to reading and made it through the remaining 80% of the book in a day a half.

Perhaps some of the content is nerdy…. yeah. I dig that. A lot. If you love tales for the nerdy then this is a must-read. Get to it!

Taurus at LPI

The lights in the LPI Great Room are placed such that they look like Taurus and the single red light represents the red giant star Aldebaran. Note the V shape in the image from LPI and in this image from Stellarium. The bright stars of the V are all part of an open cluster called the Hyades with the exception of Aldebaran which is unrelated.

V of Hyades in Taurus from Stellarium

We had two great talks today. One was teleconference and one was at LPI.

Desert Rats: learning to use the SEV

Jake Bleacher from NASA Goddard talked about challenges of exploring the lunar environment – either with humans or robots. One crazy issue is the temperature variation which is over 400 degrees – that means that from dark to light the difference in temperature is over 400 degrees. Dang…

Desert RATS

He gets to drive the new human-driven rover in the field. We are learning how to extend our knowledge of how to explore in extremely dangerous environments such as an asteroid or the Moon or Mars. They use analogs on Earth to test the ideas and engineering of these technologies before we implement them in space. There are Flickr photo sets and accounts on Twitter and Facebook so the public can participate in the awesomeness so follow the link to check that out. I really dig these teleconference talks actually. I shall miss them.

Mini RF image shows probable ice signature

Then we heard from the the infamous Paul Spudis about all the ways in which the moon is culturally, scientifically, and even politically important as a target for future robotic and human exploration. He was really cool and let us pepper him with SO many questions. I am reader of his blog and although we don’t always agree he was a phenomenal speaker and he convinced me – not that I needed much convincing – that NASA should be focused on a lunar exploration goal ASAP and not at some distant time in the future. Check out his strong opinions at his Smithsonian-hosted blog – The Once and Future Moon Blog.

Lastly all the astronomy teachers started talking about collaboration so I am going to put together a single page with many resources on it for astronomy teachers to get a head start on creating astronomy curricular materials.

This has been a fantastic workshop at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Tomorrow is the last day so I will return to my normal blogging routine of a mix of topics and not just astronomy.

Awesome Teleconference Talk from Ben Bussey

Another excellent talk about The Lunar Poles from Ben Bussey Jonhs Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.

Mini-RF CPR Lunar Polar Mosaics from LRO

Hot off the presses Mini-RF data from LRO. Sweeeeeet. It looks like LRO has confirmation of what looks like water in some of the permanently shadowed lunar polar craters. Water on the poles! How much? How did it get there? This data is very new. We got exposure to near-real-time data from an operating mission. Cool beans…

Now there is a star party so I’m heading back. I brought a solar scope and my other star party accoutrement but we shall see what I need. After all this isn’t my show.

Teleconference with Noah Petro at NASA Goddard

Noah Petro who worked with the moon mineralogy mapper on-board Chandrayaan-1 talked about how remote sensing technology helped to find water in low amounts on the upper surface of the moon. This was of course big news and the addition of data from LCROSS has made the pile of evidence even deeper. There are a lot of unknowns about the water on the moon and how we might make use of it when we return. Still the M^3 is a cool instrument. Infrared and ultraviolet astronomy have as much to offer the discipline as visible data. In fact they all mean more in concert. One cool thing – Noah wasn’t at LPI – he was teleconferencing from NASA Goddard where a similar event is being held. Cool stuff…

Differentiation Lab

We also did an activity meant to demonstrate some open-ended modeling pedagogy. We had to make a model of the lunar interior from things like rocks and syrup and beads … and glitter. Why is there always glitter? My cohorts at Unknown Moon are fun and even though the bottle model of the moon – rocks are core, syrup is mantle and oil and glitter are the crust – is nasty looking, it was fun. Still gross…

Giant Impact Theory of Lunar Formation

We also heard from Walter Kiefer from LPI who gave an in-depth evolutionary lunar morphology lecture. I just eat up all this nerdy stuff. He was great. He let us ask questions well into the time for the next activity and we covered a lot of ground – some of it purely theoretical stuff just now being nailed down.

ZOMG MOON ROCK! Apollo 15 mission

Lunar crustal material from Apollo 15 mission

Next we got to go into the clean room at the lunar sample lab. The vault where the rocks and soil returned from the moon by astronauts is kept. We had to all go through clean room prep including the “bunny suits” and a cleaning process in a strange air shower… thing. The entire process was surreal and completely awesome. The actual moon rocks are here. The ones…. gathered by astronauts from the moon and returned to earth. In all my life I have never seen anyone take such good care of artifacts. Not in Washington DC with the founding documents or the library of congress. Not in any museum. These people are serious. Every grain of material is accounted for from these samples. Crazy… oh ZOMG MOON ROCKS!

Clean Room Procedures and the bunny suits

More photos of Unknown Moon are posted on Flickr

This has nothing to do with LPI but since it’s a moon map from 1829 I thought I would include this Boing Boing link.

1. Camera phones (like my iPhone) can see IR from a remote. So when I demonstrate the EM spectrum in class I can do a real-time demo of a continuous spectrum and show them the near-infrared capabilities of a CCD. I have heard of the Makers creating cheap IR cameras from old digi-cams but this was cool. Here is a shot of my DirecTV remote with my iPhone 3GS camera.

IR from DirecTV Remote with iPhone

2. We also got to use the ALTA designed by Dr. Alan Tremain to measure the reflectance of different types of lunar and terrestrial rocks. This was a simple and neato gadget. They are pricey but I might get one for my classroom.

ALTA Refletance Spectrometer

3. We did some image analysis today but the images were rather poor quality and were from Apollo missions. One in particular bugged me – prolly cause I got it wrong but still. The mapping of locations for the Apollo 15 landing site were apparently taken when the sun angle was something strange because it’s hard to tell if the features are raised or depressed.

HPL Central Plaza Sidewalk Astronomy

Come out to the Houston Public Library Central location July 19th and August 16 on the plaza for some solar and lunar daytime astronomy.

These events are always fun even with the summer heat. Lots of people didn’t know you can see the moon during the day but you can for part of the month every month. In fact the moon is always up during the day (except at full moon) but the question is what part of it can you see. The moon will be a few days past first quarter and good for daytime viewing.

Moon during the day 4-13-2008

There will also be solar observations using special filters to bring out cool features of the solar disk.

While you’re at the library come up to the 3rd floor and check out the awesome astronomy display I put together.

Astronomy Display @ HPL Central 3rd Floor

Moon July 2nd 2009 (taken by me)

Starting tomorrow and running through Friday I will be attending an education workshop called Unknown Moon at the Lunar and Planetary Institute near Johnson Space Center. NASA and Houston have a history. The fact that LPI and JSC are the curators of our human-retrieved lunar artifacts goes unnoticed by many in the city. At least we love NASA around here.

I so love the moon. The mysterious stuff, the history, the moon landings, the science, and most of all observing the moon. Lately there has been some ongoing drama in astronomy circles over the shift in NASA and US space policy away from a return to the moon.

There is a lot of stuff to say about this topic but I think the safest and simplest is this: the plan we had was a mess and needed to be rebooted. Humans need to return to the moon. I however completely agree that a lot more science can be done by using robotic systems.

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

The debate is far from over and the mud slinging hasn’t died down. Either way I am very excited to get to learn from some of the very people at the center of the drama. It looks to be an awesome week.

In the meantime I encourage everyone to take a look at the LPI MyMoon site and meet Todd. Apparently that’s the moon’s real name – Todd. You can ask him on Twitter yourself if you don’t believe me.

I will be posting a bit more about a chance for you to come to the Houston Public Library and look at the moon through some telescopes very soon. I have been putting on some sidewalk astronomy events since last year and one is coming up! More soon…

Most of these campy 80s educational cartoons (to quote Lisa Simpson) can be found on online.

For reasons I can’t explain of all the ones out there I have had My Hero Zero running through my head. So I had to watch it this morning. Neat.

From our booth

Somer and I love Indian food. We’ve had many types. So when we saw that a failed Great Wraps had been converted into Great W’Kana a self-proclaimed Indian food boutique – we were intrigued.

The place has some growing to do. The wait staff is still getting the hang of things. But the food was fantastic. The garlic naan and the lentil side dish were some of the best I’ve had at an Indian place. And the chicken tikka and tandoori chicken were excellent. They had a limited menu so we are eager to head back and try other things. I am hoping that have more grilled things on the menu but I’m up for just about anything when it comes to Indian food. So head down to Meadows Place which is in Stafford just south of beltway 8 on 59 and try out this place.

The Planetary Society blog has some ways to follow along including a couple of Twitter feeds.

Full Solar Disk

The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched in February of 2010 with a lot of high-tech hardware to stare at the sun continuously so we humans could study our star and possible gain insight in potentially threatening solar storms. I could write a lot just on how much data this system continuously produces and how solar scientists managed to get such a high-bandwidth arrangement to work but I wanna talk about the eye candy.

One benefit we get is access to the images and movies taken on a daily basis. There is so much to see. And things change everyday. The sun is slowly entering into a more active part of its cycle and there will be more to see as we reach the peak. Spend some time looking at these images. The detail is unprecedented and breathtaking.

Solar Prominence Detail

If nothing else think about the fact that we can open the SDO homepage and get a up-to-the-minute update on what the sun looks like in a dozen different wavelengths. They are all false-color and amazing beautiful.

"The Sun Now" from SDO

You can also get push notifications about SDO events from the 3D Sun app which itself is amazing. The app provides 3D images of the sun from the twin STEREO spacecraft giving an almost full-sphere view of the sun.

We also still have the SOHO spacecraft out there doing awesome science too. Don’t forget old SOHO. This is all data free to us. Anytime we want it. Don’t squander and chance like that folks.

You can click and drag and even add elements while the game is running. Very cool indeed.

CSSSolarSystem

Although this only works with webkit enabled browsers (Safari and Chrome) it is amazing nonetheless.

Webmonkey at Wired has more including a link to a walk through of the code and a bonus of what it looks like in fail mode… err in Internet Explorer.

Try it out:

http://lifehacker.com/5583436/get-wildcard-suggestions-in-google-autocomplete

BlueJ 3.0.1 Released

In my AP/IB computer science course I use a variety of tools but the most common is the integrated development environment (or IDE). The IDE a coder uses should provide tools for editing code, managing software projects, producing documentation, and debugging. For a beginner the IDE can be your best friend or it can make things daunting and scary.

Over the years, and the languages, I have tried a lot of different IDE tools. The best I have come across for the beginner Java coder is BlueJ. This IDE was written for editing Java using actual Java code and has student programmers in mind at every step. BlueJ is free and comes in flavors for Windows, Mac, and even a JAR version that works an all platforms.

Well recently BlueJ 3 was released and the editing tools have some really cool features I wanted to mention.

Object Inspector in BlueJ

First there is the newer object inspector pictured here with one of my projects. The look and feel of the GUI is just cleaner and more up-to-date although the functionality is the same. Still the fact that the constructed objects look the same on the bench and when you double-click it is a nice intuitive touch. The programmer can construct objects and interact with the various public methods and fields and even investigate the inheritance hierarchy.

BlueJ 3 Editor Changes are colorful

The next feature which quite frankly is probably the best feature in terms of what my students can get out of BlueJ is an updated editor. There are two big changes here: 1) colored coded object & variable scope tracking making fixing scoping errors a breeze 2) a scrollable miniature version of the whole file letting you get a birds-eye view of things. Being able to easily move between chunks of code is something I didn’t even know I wanted until I used it. So…. awesome…. I can readily see where I am even when there is a whole lot of code. You can drag the box that shows your what code is currently visible and even click on any other area and move the display to that chunk of code. The colored coded scope tracking will alleviate one of the most troubling of n00b coding issues. Students don’t know that if a variable or object exists in one method that it’s not accessible anywhere else. Now this problem is immediately evident. Nice.

BlueJ 3 Code Completion

The last addition is code completion. I have always been torn about code completion but much like the authors of BlueJ I must concede that benefits to students outweigh the risks. I don’t think code completion lends itself to lazy coding techniques any more than many other features of modern IDE packages. Besides if students even remember the class name I will be happy. Just hit ctrl-space and a code-completion window opens that will show a list of matching methods using what the coder types.

I would still be happy with BlueJ even without the updates. You get a top-notch student-centered IDE for free. Head over to Mik’s blog to get the skinny from one of the creators if you don’t believe me.

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead Compendium 1

This is a fantastic and creepy comic series I started after a week ago. I had been meaning to read this series after seeing it mentioned on Boing Boing years ago and then my family gave me the first two volumes and I ran through them in just a couple of hours. Amazon.com has the compendium for $38 which is a lot less than at Borders. These are the George Romero type of zombies. Slow and stupid and hungry for live humans to munch on. The story is character-driven. This isn’t World War Z although I feel like the characters would fare better had they read anything by Max Brooks. Incidentally Max is the son of famed comedian Mel Brooks. You can read the first ever issue of the comic online for free. Give it a try but I they are creepy indeed.

Unseen Academicals

Unseen Academicals UK Cover

I am also reading the 37th in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett – Unseen Academicals. You do not have to read this series in order. In fact you can read just one from anywhere in the lineup and have a whopping good time. Pratchett is funny, snarky, and strange. His characters are brilliant as is his satire. This magical universe has no consistent logic but it seems all too familiar. The librarian is a recurrent character in this series and he’s back again. You can see him in image above holding the ball. So if you have never visited the city of Ankh-Morpork then you must have a read.

For The Win

For The Win

Anyone who knows me understands that I love the work of author, blogger (and co-founder of Boing Boing), and professional nerd Cory Doctorow. His novels and short stories are fantastic. They are up-to-minute relevant in today’s tech deluge and copy-wrong nightmare. I first came across the ideas in For The Win in his short story Anda’s Game. Even the name is poking fun at the ludicrous idea that titles are copyrighted. Back in 2004 Ray Bradbury got all up in arms when Michael Moore used Fahrenheit 911 as the title for his controversial film. Since reading this I have decided I won’t read any more Orson Scott Card novels due to his anti-gay attitudes. So making fun of Ender’s Game is a good start. The theme of this YA novel is gold farming in the online gaming world. And it isn’t fiction. I got a copy of FTW at the 2010 ALA conference but Doctorow gives away his material for others to enjoy as well as selling stuff in traditional formats. You can get a creative-commons licensed edition of the book in a variety of formats including ePub.