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Notes from the Astronomy Underground- Astropalooza
According to the tagline in Ridley Scott’s 1979 blockbuster Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” It’s true that sound waves, unlike light, need a medium- some kind of...
0 CommentsA.k.a. The Digital Universe: Now with 10% more dark energy.
Things have been rather frenzied this summer, to say the least. I'm quickly learning that the once-venerated HST is a dilapidated geriatrics ward of telescopy, one whose shoddy WFPC2 camera I can only imagine was MacGuyvered from popsicle sticks, dryer lint, and unsold copies of Deep Blue Something's latest album. Because, well, we're never really going to run out of those, now are we?
But there has been one very positive development in the last few months. As a serious Dude of Outreach here, I've had a chance to look into the Hayden Planetarium's latest version of their Digital Universe Atlas. This runs on Partiview, visualization software that allows you the thrill of aimless, haphazard flight without the disappointment of waking up from that amazing dream or crashing from that Friday night post-rave mescaline high.
Or in my case, it saves me from doing grownup work and lets me play with astronomical pornography all day.
And let me tell you, this stuff is pretty awesome. NotThe Dark Knight awesome, sure, but at least this won't leave you sobbing silently into your pillow from a deluge of unmitigated angst and cinematic despair afterward. I pieced together a tour of the Universe for this month's Astrofest, and seeing those galaxies spinning around in a polarized eyeglasses-induced 3D perspective is almost as cool as punching out that vapid animatronic gopher that sells lottery tickets on TV here would be. Seriously, Pennsylvania, I'm sure you can tax poor people in a less sadistic way.
The salient point, however, is that the software is completely FREE. Which, to a grad student, is the most beautiful word in the English language. Unless of course, it's a preface to “free colonoscopy,” or something.
Anyway, here's a quick, abbreviated selection of screen shots, similar to what I would show in a typical presentation:

Our lovely home in the cosmos- the Milky Way, surrounded by Large and Small Magellanic clouds, a smattering of boring dwarf galaxies, and a superimposed spherical grid indicating the maximum extent of Patrick Swayze's creepiness.

The Andromeda galaxy and its dwarf companions, looking back on the Milky Way. Looks kind of lonely and bitterly ostracized out here, doesn't it? It's giving us the shifty eye out there, hovering in the distance, endlessly plotting its unspeakable revenge. Kinda like Gargamel from the Smurfs, when you think about it.

The view from the interior of the Virgo cluster, a metropolis of 2,000 + galaxies, Alicia Silverstone's career, and where your puppy actually went when your parents told you he went to go live on a farm Upstate.

The clumpy distribution of galaxies in our universe on larger scales. Any aliens out here will still be blissfully unaware of the XFL and The Magic Hour with Magic Johnson for another ten million years. But the clock for them is ticking.

Galaxies in the 2MASS catalog demonstrating their preferential distribution into city-like clusters (red dots), highway-like filaments (green-yellow dots), and nearly empty voids. The so-called “Great Attractor” is up at the top right, a spot in the universe drawing in the nearest 100 million galaxies at speeds from 600-1000 km/s. This is a place of enormous gravitational significance, matched only by Michael Flatley's 1996 post-Riverdance ego.

Here we've zoomed out to scales of tens of billions of light years, or a volume of the universe encompassing just about everyone who would rather drive a flaming pitchfork into his spinal cord than see Space Chimps. Note the honeycomb pattern of clusters, filaments and voids, along with our incomplete coverage of the sky.

One of the trippier overlays: the WMAP cosmic microwave background map placed in the distance at the epoch of recombination. In the foreground are Sloan-imaged quasars, then more normal galaxies and well-defined large scale structure as you move towards the present at the bottom right. This splotchy color scheme is also what I saw when I slammed my head into a door a week ago.
What I personally find even more exciting is the enormous potential this software has for high school- introductory level astronomy education. This package has some rudimentary statistics commands and visualization procedures for picking out subcategories (e.g. galaxy morphology, luminosity, redshift...) and doing actual analysis while you're looking right at your universe. You can spin clusters around while looking at the morphology-density relationship for galaxies, zoom out and do a census based on any neophyte-applicable observable, or comb through the Great Wall of galaxies. And that's just for the “Extragalactic” shell. The “Milky Way” variant has a striking tableau of accurately rendered nebulae, molecular clouds HI, OII, and HII regions, and the galaxy viewed from the inside in radio to gamma wavelengths. Plus, you can visualize where all our extrasolar planets have been lurking in space.
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Well, that and for microwaves to stop having that damn “timed cook” button on them. I mean come on, you're a microwave, it's cooking something for a specified length of time is what you do. I shouldn't have to press an extra button for this.
So definitely check this stuff out! The 300+ page manuals can seem a little daunting, but a lot of the commands they go over are mighty useful. And stay tuned for what's hopefully the final installment of the Unappreciated Topics in Astronomy series, provided I can find my kneecap-busting crowbar and track down my remaining interviewees. You either talk about astronomy, or get Nancy Kerriganed. That's just how I roll.
BLOG ARCHIVE (click headings to sort — select list size below)
| TITLE | Author | DATE | Comments | RATING |
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Notes from the Astronomy Underground- Astropalooza
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Brendan Mullan | 9/28/08 | 0 | |
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Notes from the Astronomy Underground: Another Shameless Plug
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Brendan Mullan | 7/25/08 | 0 |





