Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 5
**The PlanetQuest Mission: To inspire the people of the world with the thrill of individual discovery, a better understanding of our uniquely precious planet, and a wider perspective on our place in the universe.**
Dear Friends,
It seems every time we send out our Newsletter, some big event happens, and we have to wait for the following issue to tell you about it. Right after our last issue, CNET News.com published a fine article about us on their website! (See the link below.)
This last month, our observing astronomer Dr. Robert Slawson arrived at Siding Spring, Australia to begin a month-long run observing in Baade?s Window (see his excellent report below), and a few days ago, we received our R (red) filter for the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory. We also continue to make progress with the development of the Collaboratory, several new Learn pages have been added to our website, and we are very close to putting up some of our pages in German! Many thanks to those helping us with these projects, and thank you Friends of PlanetQuest for your continued interest and support.
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**News!
?Astrophysicist Laurance Doyle wants to get the world discovering worlds?and in the process get children jazzed about science and math.
?With record low test scores in the sciences in the United States, American schoolchildren are lagging behind youth of other nationalities and causing concern about the future of the country?s thought leaders and astronomical discoverers. That concern has driven Doyle and his team at nonprofit PlanetQuest to develop software to harness the computing power of millions and help people discover new planets and stars.?
With these words, CNET News.com staff writer Stefanie Olsen began an excellent article on PlanetQuest dated May 31, 2005. If you haven?t seen it yet, you can read the full text at
http://news.com.com/from%2bplanetquest%...2100-1008_3-5726511.html?tag=nefd.lede.
**Our Education Project**
We?re quite pleased with the progress of our Learn pages (
http://www.planetquest.org/learn/) on the website, and have just added nine new pages on cultural and historical aspects of astronomy, as well as archaeoastronomy sites throughout the world. We have many more scheduled for completion in the coming weeks and months, and hope you will enjoy them. We welcome any suggestions you may have for other topics.
**The Collaboratory**
We continue working hard to bring the Collaboratory to life. PlanetQuest cofounder Dr. David Gutelius is working with a team of design experts on the look and feel, and David Rowland has made significant progress in translating the ideas into OpenGL BOINC project. Programmer Dr. Jay Doane is working with our resident signal detection expert, Dr. Jon Jenkins, on optimizing the algorithms we?ll be using in the Collaboratory. Our alpha test runs are looking strong so far, and we are on track for our Beta testing program late this year.
**Astronomy and Observing**
As noted above, our astronomer Bob Slawson is at Siding Spring, Australia observing in the region of the sky known as Baade?s Window. For a good look at Baade?s Window, see
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021223.html. Imagine trying to identify an individual star in that region! But that?s precisely why we are observing there?the more stars, the better the chances of finding a planet. As you can see, the software designed to sort out all the variations in light received by our CCDs from each one of those stars has to be extremely complex and sophisticated, and that is why the Collaboratory is so important.
Bob has reported that Siding Spring greeted him with quite a bit of rain the first few days, but then he was able to get some data. There have been some fairly minor technical details that needed to be worked out, but it sounds like he?s settling in, and if the weather proves more cooperative, he should be able to obtain a reasonable amount of data for PlanetQuesters to analyze. These observations will also be used to study a technique codeveloped by Laurance Doyle, Hans Deeg, and Jean Schneider using eclipsing binary stars to discover planets. To see live how the weather is for observing at Siding Spring, try this site:
http://nightskylive.net/sd/
Here is Bob?s report:
FIRST WEEK AND A HALF OF PLANETQUEST AT SIDING SPRING OBSERVATORY
Wednesday, June 29: More rain is falling. Managed to get 2 nights of data earlier this week although only 1 of the nights was ?photometric.? Those are the only usable nights out of the first 12.
The field that we are monitoring is known as Baade?s Window, a line-of-sight toward the center of the Milky Way with surprisingly little interstellar dust. Dust absorbs and scatters starlight, dimming and reddening the stars. As a result of the lack of extinction and the concentration of stars toward the Galactic center, there are a high number of stars accessible with only a modest-sized research telescope. At the southern hemisphere latitude of SSO, Baade?s Window passes nearly overhead around midnight at the end of June. So this is the optimal time, astronomically, to be here.
The telescope is a 40-inch Boller & Chivens built in 1963 owned and maintained by the Australian National University, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. On the telescope, we?re using the Wide Field Imager, a camera built 6 years ago that consists of 8 4K x 2K CCDs arranged as an 8K x 8K pixel mosaic. (Unfortunately, one of the CCDs is no longer working.) With such a large focal plane, 3/4 of a square degree of the sky can be imaged at a time. Each raw image produces a data file of 140 Mb.
The primary scientific goal of the observing project is to try and detect the presence of third bodies orbiting around eclipsing binary systems. Eclipsing binaries are two stars in close orbit about each other but that, since they are far away, appear as only one star in the sky. Their mutual orbit is oriented so that when one passes in front of the other, some or all of the light from the other as seen from Earth, is blocked. This results in a periodic dimming of the light from the ?star? that can be accurately measured. An unseen third body, a Jupiter-sized planet perhaps, orbiting around the pair should induce small changes in the time of the eclipse depending on its size and distance from the stars. To date, no planets have been found by this method so we are hoping for a first.
The weather, however, has not been good for astronomy. As of yesterday, 137.8 mm (5.4 inches) of rain has been recorded falling on Coonabarabran, the nearby town of some 3000 persons. More is falling here as I write and there was even some snow up at the observatory at the end of last week. Tough on astronomers but very good for farmers. Australia has been suffering from a 5 year drought, the worst on record. Last year the total rainfall in Coonabarabran for the entire month of June was only 26.2 mm and the average rainfall for June for the last 125 years is only 56.1 mm or about 2.2 inches.
Three more nights for this half of the run, then 4 nights off to let someone who really needs moonless nights use the telescope. After that another 15 nights in Baade?s Window. --- Bob Slawson
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Recent fundraising efforts have focused on becoming more well-known through such articles as the ones by CNET?s News.com and Wired.com. We are hoping to excite potential donors about this cutting-edge, educational science project, the first ever with the potential to involve millions of people, from all cultures and regions, in the search for extrasolar planets. If you too would like to make a difference in and bring positive change to our world, please consider a contribution (we?ve made this easy: just go to
http://www.planetquest.org/support/donate), and tell your friends about us. For as little as $10 per month, you can help us build PlanetQuest into the world-changing organization it can be! For those thinking of contributing on a large scale, we are happy to meet with you and explain our project in more detail. We are a registered 501(c)(3) US nonprofit organization, so your donations are completely tax-deductible. As always, thank you for your interest, enthusiasm and support!
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**Quote of the Month**
?We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.?
Carl Sagan
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Best Wishes,
J. Ellen Blue
Director of Publications
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
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Sir Ulli
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