A telescope for primary school children

How did I come into astronomy?

I was interested in nature and natural sciences quite early. This is not so surprising, as I grew up virtually in the middle of nature, far away from large cities. When I was ten years old, dinosaurs and everything ancient were very "in". I can remember that once I "tortured" my fellow schoolmates with a lengthy presentation about dinosaurs. How I then ended up exactly in astronomy is lost in history. Taking into account the dark countryside night sky, this is not entierely surprising. When I was twelve years old, I baught from my pocket money my first real telescope from a catalogue firm. Its optical and mechanical quality was not very high, that's why I tinkered on it quite a lot, without much success. Soon the telescope was in a state that it didn't make much fun anymore using it, and it would not create much joy if I gave it away to somebody else.


Then last year the JENAM (Joint European National Astronomy Meeting) 2008 took place in Vienna, Austria, where I could hear about the fantastic activities that were planned for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. There I had the idea that I could buy a new telescope and donate it to a school. Nowadays, you can get a telescope of fair quality and even larger size for the same amount of money that I then paid for my first telescope. Since now I work as postdoc at the univeristy and earn a decent salary, such an investment does not put a large financial burdon on me. But to which school should I donate the telescope? What suggests itself is of course the primary school that I used to attend at the age of six to ten, in my home village of Geboltskirchen in Austria. No sooner said than done! First, I sent an e-mail to the school principal to ask whether such a gift would actually cause much joy. Her answer was very positive! So I searched on the Internet for a suitable offer and found a refractor with 80 mm aperture and 900 mm focal length to be the best one. End of October last year the handing over of the telescope (and two books for beginners in astronomy) took place in the school. Here a foto of this event:






The children were very excited about the present. As a countermanoeuvre, they made drawings of their fantasy universes and gave them to me as a present. I pinned them up in my office, so that my colleagues, too, can admire the pieces of art:







Now the telescope also has to be used to show the wonders of the starry sky to the children. As an expert in that field, this is my job. That's why we made an appointment for end of April for a stargazing evening with the children. In this blog you will get too read about how the evening went!


Stay tuned,
Stefan

Second lecture of the IYA2009 series in Leuven

Hello!

Past Tuesday evening, March 3, the second talk of the lecture series that we are organising on occasion of IYA2009 took place in Leuven. The speaker was Professor Ewine van Dishoeck from the Sterrewacht Leiden in the Netherlands. The title of her talk was "From molecules to planets". Ewine is investigating the chemistry of interstellar clouds, out of which new stars and planetary systems are forming.


I didn't know Ewine personnaly before this presentation, nevertheless I have been told by a couple of people that she is not only an excellent scientist, but also a brilliant speaker. Possibly she is one of the most outstanding scientists of our time, at least in the field of astronomy. Accordingly, the audience numerously followed the invitation to her talk, the auditorium was overcrowded once again with about 230 people! By the way, the next talk of our series will be given by Ewine's husband, Prof. Tim de Zeeuw, current ESO director general. His talk will certainly take place in a larger auditorium!


Ewine concentrated in her talk on the immediate solar neighbourhood, i.e. about everything within the next 1000 lightyears. She dealt with the molecular clouds of our Milky Way Galaxy, which have orders of magnitude lower density of the best vacuum on Earth (~10000 particles per cubic centimetre) yet giving birth to new stellar systems, with the cemistry of these clouds (up to date about 130 different molecules have been identified in interstellar space), the formation of planets in gas and dust disks around young stars, the detection of planets around stars other than the sun (more than 300 such exoplanets have been found so far), and finally with the formation of life on these planets. Comets, which are something like the "remainder" of planet formation, probably play a major role in this last step, because in the bombardement by planetesimals of a young planet such as the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, the heat largly destroys organic molecules. The comets and dust originating from them gently rain down onto the surface of the young planet later on, to replenish the seeds of life. Finally, the so-called panspermia theory, as well as observatories and instruments for the observation of the chemistry of interstellar clouds were discussed. A number of interesting questions of the audience rounded off the talk.


Here are some pictures of the lecture:











The talk was certainly in itself the best advertisement of the lecture series one can imagine. One may expect that next time there will be a comparably large audience. Fortunately, the larger auditorium is reserved already!


Read you soon,

Stefan

What professional astronomers do in their job

Hello everybody!
The motivation to start this blog was to write something about what professional astronomers are doing in their job, and to give some insight into their lives. Here is a little story that summarises the most important features of the live of an astronomer.

Imagine you are an astronomer, and you attend a conference on your research subject. The conference takes place in a nice little city with ancient buildings and a rich history, so it is a pleasant place to visit. Sometimes the conferences take place in other continents than your own, so you get to travel a lot. The relaxing atmosphere in the city and at the conference stimulates discussion with your colleagues on scientific topics. You discuss a particular question with your fellows, and suddenly you have a brilliant idea on how to find answers to this questions by observing a number of celestial objects, which are your research subjects. After the conference, where you also gave a talk on previous results of your research and you listened to talks by other researchers, you go home to your institute and write an application to an observatory to get the observations done that should answer your burning question about the Universe. Since the deadline for submission of the observing time proposal is in two weeks, you have to hurry up to write down a precise description of the science case and the observations you want to do. You are not writing the proposal all alone, but rather with three co-investigators, some at institutes in other countries somewhere around the globe, thus it takes some time to discuss the issue and to define the application text. You as principal investigator finally manage to submit your proposal on time.

A committee of the observatory usually composed of other professional astronomers reads your application and those of other astronomers to decide which ideas are the best and should be granted observing time at the highly sophisticated and very expensive instruments of that observatory. You are lucky and the committee decides that your idea is brilliant and deserves the observing time that you asked for. Some of the other proposals are not as brilliant as your and have to be declined, because there is not enough time available to execute them all, while others will be executed as well.

A few months later your objects of interest are finally observable, because at this time of the year they rise high in the night sky above the observatory. You applied for service mode observations, which means that in this case you are not traveling to the observatory yourself to get the observations done, but rather an astronomer employed at the observatory will do the observations for you. (Sometimes astronomers still travel to the observatory to do the observations themselves, which is called "visitor mode", but this is becoming somewhat rarer.) Thus, you send the precise coordinates, exposure times, instrument settings, etc. to that observer, and he executes the observations. When he is done, he sends you the digital data that the instrument (can be a camera, spectrograph, interferometer, etc.) has recorded on a DVD, or you download it from the on-line archive of the observatory.

You receive the data, reduce it, and work on it for months on your computer, do complicated calculations, compare the observed data to model calculations that are provided by some of your co-investigators, and so on. Finally, you find the thing you where looking for in your data (actually, sometimes you don't find it; nature does not always do everything what you expected it to do). Thus, together with your co-investigators and one of your students, who has in the meantime joined the research team, you go and write a scientific article about it for a journal. It takes another three months to write the article (also called a "paper"), nevertheless you finally finish writing and you submit it to a journal that is dedicated to astronomy-related research.

Another professional astronomer (the "referee") gets your article to read and decides whether it is worth publishing, and/or which changes you are asked to to make on the manuscript. You are lucky this time and you get a "nice" referee that asks only a few modifications to your paper before it can be published, which takes you and your student a few weeks to implement (the referee of the most recent paper was really "nasty", the obligations he put on you took you another four months before the paper could be re-submitted!). You make these suggested changes, and your paper finally gets accepted and published in the journal. Now all astronomers in the world can read about the discoveries you have made. Some of them do research in the same field as you, and they cite your paper in their articles because your results are really of significance to them.

You also go to conferences to present your discoveries, and discuss them with your fellow scientists to get feed-back. In a discussion at the conference dinner about another open question in astronomy, one of your colleagues has a brilliant idea of how to solve this question by carrying out some observations. After the conference, she or he starts to write an application for observing time ...

This little story on what astronomers do in their job is of course a bit simplistic. Some astronomers also work on the construction of instruments for telescopes or space observatories, give lectures, calculate theoretical models, do public outreach, etc. Nevertheless, I hope it gives some insight of how astronomical research and the work of a professional astronomers is organised.

Read you soon,
Stefan

This blog is not dead!

Hello everyone!
This blog is not dead! I intended to post here about every week or so, and link it to www.cosmicdiary.org, as part of my activities for IYA2009. Well, I asked how to link my blog to the cosmic diary, but instead of doing so, the organisers created a new blog account for me on cosmic diary!


So, I have two blogs now. I decided to blog in German on cosmic diary, because I would like to reach the "general public" (i.e. teachers, students, interested teenagers, etc.) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other germanspeaking countries. If you want to reach people not working as professional scientists in these countries, you have to use German. Also, there are already many astronomy-related blogs in English, but few in German. Not only English (nativ) speakers should become invloved in IAY2009 activities!


Nevertheless, once in a while I will blog here also during the year of astronomy. And particularly more frequently when the year of Astronomy is over! This year is a good opportunity to become a blogger, and to use the possiblities of the internet to start outreach activities. I was always interested in telling other people about astronomy and the universe, so this is just a natural thing. I hope you like what I have to say about the topic!


Read you soon,
Stefan

Hello everyone!
Yesterday was the last talk of the "Year of the Earth" lecture series here in Leuven (see their web page). It is thus in some respect the "precursor" of our lecture series on the "Year of Astronomy" (I have promised more details about this, I didn't forget it!). Yesterdays talk was by Iain Stewart, a famous geologist who is known for his BBC series on geology and its connection to human culture. I have to confess that I didn't know him before. In any case the presentation was very good. He made a few very remarkable points on the outreach activity on scientists.

One important point was that scientists have the assignment to do outreach to make their knowledge available to the society, and to use it for its best. (Unfortunately, this information is often ignored, but this is another story.) According to Stewart, not every single scientist has this duty, but at least every scientific organisation or institute has this very duty. I fully share his opinion. Nevertheless, not every outreach activity is equally good. Sometimes bad outreach is worse than none at all, in particular if the audience gets confused or only gets to hear scientists who do not agree on their conclusions. Also, we scientists have to learn to speak in a language that non-scientist do understand. Words like "theory", "uncertainty", or "hypothesis" are terms that we scientist are used to and know how to deal with them, but not necessarily every man in the street. Scientists have to use such words with caution when communicating with the general public. After all, outreach can be very rewarding.

In conclusion, all scientists are called to get actively involved in outreach events, to help that the knowledge they produce is used to everybody's best.

Read you soon!

So, what are professional astronomers actually doing?

The belief of the general public probably still is something like: "Astronomers are gazing into the stars with their telescopes every night, and in case the weather is bad, they are forced to do nothing and are very unhappy." Of course, that is not true. Sometimes we astronomers even get mixed up with meteorologists. Why is the public image of astronomers still so ancient? Nobody believes that physicists still throw stones of different weight from towers, or that biologists are chasing after frogs and butterflies in the fields and woods.

One reason might be that the modern research facilities of astronomers, the observatories, are usually placed on remote mountaintops and/or in the desert, far away and well-hidden from the "general public". As an example, see the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile, or the Keck Telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii. This is even more true for astronomical satellites. The astronomical institutes in the cities, where the research is actually happening, are much less prominent buildings than large observatories and are mostly left unnoticed by passers-by. Well, we cannot do anything about that, because there are very good reasons to build telescopes on remote mountain tops rather than close to big cities (e.g. better weather conditions, less light pollution, etc.).

A second reason might be that in the past maybe indeed too little outreach has been done by the astronomers. If that were true, it is something we want to change with this unique opportunity of IYA2009!

There are, however, two occasions when also professional astronomers are gazing into the stars.

The first one is during outreach activities such as science weeks, nights of open doors, etc. On these occasions, the word "public viewing" takes on another meaning... On the one hand, astronomers want to show to the public what kind of work and research they are doing. The star gazing activity just serves as an "appetizer". On the other hand, the stargazing may actually foster the ancient image of astronomers. There are always two sides of the coin...

The second occasion is during the spare time to just enjoy the calm and dark night sky. Many professional astronomers actually started out as amateur astronomers (I am one of those!). Also for professional astronomers, it is just incredibly beautiful to look at the starry night sky! To see so many stars in the sky excites your imagination like nothing else in the world. You start asking yourself questions like: How do all these other worlds look like? How are the planets like, circling around these other stars? How would it be like walking on one of Jupiter's moons? Images of childhood autumn evenings come to life...

I realise that I haven't actually answered the introductory question. This will be made good for in the next post!

Read you soon,
Stefan

As you may know, or may not know, the coming year 2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) by the UNESCO, on proposal by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Check out www.astronomy2009.org for more information. Now you certainly know about it.

In any case, the IYA2009 organisers asked professional astronomers to engage in the activities of the IYA2009, one of the many possibilities of doing so is starting a blog. So, that's how I came to start the blog, because I am a professional astronomer.

I work as a research assistant at the Instituut voor Sterrenkunde (institute for astronomy) at the Katolieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). One other thing I am doing for the IYA2009 is organising a series of public lectures on astronomy related topics here in Leuven. I will not give a talk myself, because I am actually from Austria and my Dutch is not (yet) good enough to give a public talk on a science topic in that language. I wonder if my Dutch will ever be good enough to give a talk... Anyway, we will have about eight talks here in Leuven by some big shots, I will report on it in a later post.

Today I just want to explain how I came to name the blog "Stefan Sternthaler". "Die Sterntaler" is a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm (read the English or German Wikipedia entry of it). It deals with a very poor girl that gives away all her belongings to even poorer people. Because she is so very kind-hearted, she is finally awarded lots of gold coins (Taler) that fall down from the starry skies. Since I am an aficionado of astronomy, a former school mate once named me "Stefan Sternthaler" (danke Isi!), because it is close to my real name. I liked it very much, so I chose it as the name of my blog.
If a native English speaker happens to read this blog, could you please tell me how ridiculous this name sounds to you? Just let me know. I think it is a nice name anyway.

Read you soon!