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Three themes permeated many of the sessions at the recent American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis, MO June 1-5, 2008.

  1. The International Year of Astronomy (IYA) 2009 is going to be a BIG, world wide event.
  2. The number of excellent astronomy related web resources are growing faster than any single individual can track them, let alone take advantage of them.
  3. Data flow from the new ground based and space based observatories is escalating and we are going to be inundated with new discovery announcements from now on.

Catherine Cesarsky, the IAU (International Astronomical Union) president said that more than 115 countries have now signed up to participate in the IYA2009 (http://www.astronomy2009.org ). It has official UN support.

One goal is to have 10 million people take their first look through a telescope in 2009. To enable this, they commissioned the design of a < $10 price, good quality, plastic telescope, they call, the IYA2009 Galileoscope (http://www.astronomy2009.org/cornerstone-projects-mainmenu-80/the-galileoscope-mainmenu-83.html). This will be ready for purchase by groups and individuals before 2009.

Another goal is to build an aggregating web portal for astronomy. They’ve termed this project, the Portal to the Universe (PTTU) and describe it at http://www.astronomy2009.org/cornerstone-projects-mainmenu-80/the-portal-to-the-universe-mainmenu-85.html.

The idea is to have a one-stop shop web site which will link to everything important about astronomy on the entire web. This will have links to all the observatory home pages, all the print publications, blogs, videos, galleries and educational resources.

There will be a slew of IYA2009 program announcements in the next few months. Check the www.IYA2009.org home page for updates.

The half day workshop on how to tap into astronomy resources on the web focused on how to post or data mine content on the web. All astronomy enthusiasts should subscribe to at least one astronomy blogger’s list. The four popular ones, which definitely deserve a check out are:

http://www.universetoday.com

http://www.badastronomy.com

http://www.starstryder.com

http://www.astronomycast.com

Each of these have between 20,000 and 500,000 members who regularly view the blogs, podcasts or participate in forums.

For the serious astronomer fan who wants to do more than read about astronomy, there is a new term to learn: citizen science. This is how the web has enabled every citizen to participate in the progress of good science. The coolest site in this category is http://galaxyzoo.org/.

A few years ago, Kevin Schawinski, a graduate student at Oxford, was given 50,000 galaxy images by his thesis professor and asked to classify them as to elliptical, CW spiral or CCW spiral or irregular. And do it by the end of the month.

After he finished this task, on time, he vowed never to do it again, but instead, enlist the help of people on the web. Galaxy Zoo is his creation, sort of like Tom Sawyer, getting his friends to whitewash the fence for him because he told them it was so much fun.

By signing up, anyone can participate in scientific research on the number distribution of galaxies, learn some galactic astrophysics and have fun. More than 100 million galaxy like objects are in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database and one at a time, they are displayed on your screen. You get to classify each one, and then its added to a database. So far, 50 million galaxies have been classified and four scientific papers have been written based on the results.

Are there more CW spirals than CCW spirals? Is there a net handedness to the universe, an angular momentum asymmetry to the universe? The initial results found 52% of the galaxies with CW spirals. However, when the images were reversed and re-classified by the 150,000 participants, the results came out again, 52% with a CW spiral. This suggests a human bias in seeing CW spirals. To within < 1%, there is no handiness to the universe.

The second must see site is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, http://www.sdss.org, and the database interface page, the SkyServer, http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en.

This is the best school research program on the web. There are projects for middle school, high school, college and graduate, intro and advanced levels, all taking advantage of data mining the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database of the more than 300 million objects cataloged. Simple online tools let you search the database and plot results. Directions guide you or your students through building your own Hertzsprung-Russell diagram or Hubble Diagram.

The show floor was inundated with each special NASA mission, prime contractor and large observatory trying to convince visitors to use them for their next satellite build, buy time at their observatory, or use their data in their next paper. It’s easy to understand the feeling of being overwhelmed by the information flow coming from observatories.

For example, on the http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html web site, there are 75 current missions listed that relate to space exploration. These include Hubble, Chandra (X-ray telescope), and Spitzer (IR), in addition to the ISS, the space shuttle and all the planetary explorers.

Then there are ground based observatories, like the National Optical Astronomy Observatory http://www.noao.edu, which includes Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo in Chile. Or, the National Radio Astronomy Observatories, http://www.nrao.edu/, which includes three facilities, Green Bank, the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Very Long Baseline Array, spread out at over 10 facilities world wide.

Each of the telescopes has their own website, touting their latest observations and discoveries daily.

This is only a short summary of a handful of sessions at the AAS conference. Tapping into what’s new in Astronomy really is like sipping from a fire hose.

Published in July 2008 Cosmic Messenger