The Cost of Astronomy

Papi's Story

My visit to Montreal
The latter half of last week found me in Montréal, Canada.  I was invited by colleagues in the astrophysics group at the Université de Montréal to give a talk on my research. Wednesday I boarded a plane for Montreal, arriving in the early evening.  I've never been to Montréal before, and the only other time I was in Canada was over 30 years ago, when I was too little to remember.   I don't speak French, but I know enough to be polite, and everyone speaks Engli

Get your shots!
Image Credit: Patuxent Widlife Research Center, USGS When I was a kid, I thought that whooping cough was a disease caused by whooping cranes (pictured above).  But, it isn't.  It's caused by bacteria.  Whooping cough, a.k.a. pertussis, is a highly contageous disease, it is very dangerous

It's the size of Earth with lots of oxygen, but not a nice place to be.
Image Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey Some acquaintances of mine in the United Kingdom have discovered two white dwarf stars that have a lot of oxygen in their atmospheres.  One of them, with the typical boring star catalog name of SDSS J1102+2054, is the blue

Planets come and planets go, but not in 2012
Image Credit: NASA / Don Davis Today, the movie 2012 opens in theaters.  The basic plot is that the Mayan calendar ends on the solstice in 2012, portending doom for all on this planet.  I'm not going to see the movie, as I'm not a fan of disaster movies (except, perhaps, the Samuel L. Bronkowitz classic "

Water, water, everywhere.
Last month, after NASA's LCROSS spacecraft failed to make a noticeable splash when landing on the moon, I blogged about how it could take months for the data to be analyzed.  Well, it took only about five weeks.  Today, NASA announced that LCROSS did indeed detect water, and a fair amount of it.  Final results will still take months, but the data are clear that water was present. Why didn't we see the show from Ear