Table of Contents
Astro News Articles (please cite the source)
Please put newest articles at the top!
Facts of Life for New Teachers in the Astronomy Nonmajors Curriculum - Oct 27 - really interesting personal account of what teaching intro astro is like.
Rubber ducks aid NASA study - Sep 22 - NASA uses 90 rubber ducks to study a melting glacier!
March 19 gamma-ray burst was first visible to naked eye - Sep 10 - The brightest thing in the sky ever recorded by man. The GRB peaked at mag. 5.6 in the visible and it was something like 7 billion light-years away. The paper was written by Berkeley Prof. Josh Bloom and his grad students Dan Perley and Adam Miller (other authors include Alex and a bunch of postdocs and grad students from Berkeley).
Multibillion-dollar experiment to probe nature's mysteries - Sep 7 - The Large Hadron Collider will have first attempt at circulating a beam September 10. It's the largest particle accelerator in the world and costs about $9 billion. Lawsuits allege it could generate black holes that could eat the Earth. Scientists say these allegations have no merit. Awesome.
NASA Chief Vents Frustration in Leaked E-mail - Sep 7 - Politics getting in the way of NASA and science, yet again. “Practically speaking, the Russians can sustain [International Space Station] without US crew as long as we don't actively sabotage them, which I do not believe we would ever do, short of war,” [NASA chief Michael] Griffin wrote. “We need them,” he later added. “They don't 'need' us. So we're a 'nice to have.'”
Still Raw - Sep 5 - Hilarious XKCD comic regarding a favorite topic of Ay 10 students!
Milky Way's black hole seen in new detail - Sep 3 - Summary of a Nature article on the highest resolution image of the central BH of the MW ever. They used a radio interferometer made up of dishes in CA, HI, and AZ. (The California dish was an element of Berkeley's CARMA array, and the underlying paper involved UC Berkeley astronomers Geoff Bower, Holly Maness, Dick Plambeck, and Dan Wertheimer.)
Very Short Movie: The Clouds of Mars - Sep 2 - Short movie of water-ice clouds flying through the Martian sky from the Phoenix lander.
Mars Lander Samples All Layers of Surface - Aug 22 - NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has scooped up another sample of Martian dirt into one of its onboard laboratory ovens. The sample will complete a profile of all depths of the surface layer of Phoenix's arctic landing site.
General Astro Reference Sites
Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) - A classic site with awesome daily astro pr0n.
Bad Astronomy - An awesome site with tons of bad astronomy from TV, movies, and the news, as well as some common astro misconceptions.
Encyclopedia of the Cosmos - A “better”(??) alternative to Wikipedia. “Like the Wikipedia, authors can create new articles or add to existing ones. The key differences are that you have to be an expert with credentials to obtain authoring privileges (AAS membership will suffice in most cases), you have to use your real name to contribute or edit, and a topic editor reviews articles before they are moved … to the public view.”
Sky & Telescope - A website for the famous amateur astronomer magazine. Mostly articles on naked-eye observing or observing through a small telescope, but this can be helpful for observing labs or in preparation for star parties. This is also a good resource for any special naked-eye astronomy events (e.g. meteor showers, eclipses, transits, etc.).
Space.com - A pretty solid site with astrophysics stories aimed at the general public. They're very good at citing information about the technical paper that the article is a summary of (i.e. the authors, their affiliations, the journal it was submitted to, etc.).
Space Flight Now - More geared towards spaceflight (duh) and manned and unmanned space missions, but occasionally has articles on actual astronomy. Some people might be into the space mission side of astronomy and this site can have good articles on Solar System probes and space telescopes which can both be directly related to Ay 10 (and 7).
WikiProject Astronomy - A project from Wikipedia that is supposed to guide the organization and style of Astronomy-related articles.
Heavenly Errors - A list of more than 1700 common astronomy misconceptions, compiled by Neal F. Comins of the University of Maine, taken from his book “Heavenly Errors: Misconceptions about the real nature of the Universe.”
