I was on a panel today, the Latest News from Mars and as soon as I walked in felt out of my depth. The other two panelists were scientists¹ and here I was, a writer. I mean, one of them brought in a globe of Mars. He was totally ready. I had launchpad, my twitter feed and reading Bad Astronomy to bring to the table.
But astonishingly, I totally held my own. We started with the question of what was the most exciting recent news. The glaciers! were my pick. I figured that the audience would be up on that, too, but it was news to most of them. We had a good dicussion about what this meant for SF in addition to the science of it. I learned that there’s lichen on Earth, plus some insects that can live in our glaciers so it’s not unresonable to posit life in the glaciers. Likely? No, but you just need the what if potential for a cool story.

I was also amazed at how much information I’d retained from Launchpad. Paricularly when we started talking about how the Rovers work. Granted, if I was pressed for detail, it became quickly aparent that I had only a surface understanding, but it was still cool because, as Mike Brotherton planned, I know the frame and the right questions to ask. It was a pretty exciting panel for me.

1. I don’t have my program book on me and it has their names in it.  Lovely men and a fun conversation. [↩]

Just in case you haven’t been able to tell from the sheer volume of information I posted, this week has been an amazing experience. I am sad to leave these astronomically lovely people. Tomorrow we all head our separate ways, a number of us to WorldCon where we will sit on a panel about Launchpad and attempt to talk about Astronomy for writers. I’m sort of anticipating that my answers will be incoherent because the material is still settling into my brain.

Meanwhile, as a lovely parting gift, Mike Brotherton has posted a list of links he gave us into a sort of
Online Astronomy Resources for Writers.

Raw notes:

Exoplanets.org is a catalog of stars with planets. It behooves you to check the catalog to see if the star you setting your story around has planets so that you are at least consistent with what is existing. This won’t be all we know in the future, but it’s a good place to start.

International Astronomical Union is the name police of astronomy

More than 50% of all stars in our Milky Way are binary systems. center of mass=balance point of the system. Both masses equal => center of mass is in the middle, r_A =r_B

Kepler’s 3rd law. Period squared of a planet’s year in Earth year, is equal to its orbital radius. P_y²=a_AU³ He didn’t know why it worked, but it did. Valid for the solar system: star with 1 solar mass in the center. This works for a system with a single central objects.

Newton discovered that it also works around binary systems. M_A + M_B = a_au³/P_y² Using this, we can discover the sum of their masses. We can also discover where their center of gravity. This is how they found the mass luminosity relationship in the main sequence.

The ideal case: Both stars can be seen directly and their separation and relative motion can be directly observed.

Spectroscopic binaries. In that case, what you are looking for absorption lines. As the stars move toward and away from you these lines will be doppler shifted. That gives you the radial velocities.

Eclipsing binaries: A small hot star orbits a large cool star, and you see their total light. As the hot star crosses in front of the cool star, you see a decrease in brightness. When it passes behind, the light returns to normal.

Extra-solar Planets

Hard to see them next to a very bright star.

Two indirect techniques available. Like a binary star, but where the 2nd “star” has extremely low mass.

-Watch for Doppler wobble in position/spectrum of star.¹

-Watch for “transit” of planet which slightly dims light from star.

The first planet’s found tend to be bigger than Jupiter and very close to their suns. As the techniques get better, they get better at spotting smaller ones. The problem with spotting something out in a Jupiter-like orbit is that it takes 12 years for Jupiter to go around the sun, so you’d need to watch that star for at least 12 years.

When you look at the stars, you have to pick stars with their ecliptic edge on to us.

Stars are hotter than planets. Planets emit blackbody radiation. The Spitzer telescope is picking up blips of infrared which are consistent with planets.

Terrestrial Planet Finder. Likely use both interferometry and coronagraphs to image Earth-like planets.

Which planets can retain which planets.

You plot escape velocity against temperature Kelvin. That will tell you which gases a planet can retain. Jovian Planets can retain all gases.

Earth and Venus can retain all except H₂. Cold trap on Earth preserves our H.

Mars can retain C0_2. Barely retains H₂O

Titan and Triton only moons which can retain atmospheres.

Make sure that your planets make sense.

1. Mike ran back and forth across the room and said that they can measure that degree of wobble across interstellar distances. That’s astonishingly precise. [↩]

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Raw notes:

The environment out there is inherently strange to us. It is by definition not earthlike.

When you are thrown out an airlock, you don’t explode. Odds are you won’t be at 14psi. 3 lbs of pressure per square inch isn’t that much. You don’t blow up, you don’t even bleed. NASA had a suit blow while testing it in a vacuum chamber and the guy survived fine.

From space you will see stars as well as you do from Earth, which means that if you are in a lit space station, it would be like looking out a window on Earth at the night sky because your eyes will adapt to the light level that you are in.

Most stars will look white or yellow. Technically our sun is a slightly green star, but even a red K-type star will look white because the eye adapts.

What will living in space require? Everything. Air, food, water, shelter.

Air, plus a way to recirculate and regenerate the air. Though your nose and brain will eventually stop responding to bad smell, but your psyche doesn’t. The space station astronauts talk about it. That the miasma really weighs on them after awhile. In the Apollo capsule, they were actually doing calculations to see if they could vent the air and refresh it.

Got to figure out a way to make your food taste better. The body is adapted to keeping the blood from pooling in your legs, but not your head. So you get stuffed up and can’t taste food as well. You tend to spice up your food.

Disorientation of zero g. Move in three-dimensions, but we are used to travelling only in two. If you grab something, conversation of movement means that you transfer that movement to whatever you grab.

3-dimensional navigation.

Air does not naturally convect in space, because it’s a gravity fed phenomenon. You have to have fans on every heat generating source. At a certain scale, it makes sense to spin your station so you get gravity and don’t have to have so many damn fans.

Why should we go?

If we can build a sealed environment that would protect you in space, why not do it on Earth? If they just go there because they want to, they have to have a lot of disposable income. If the environment on Earth got so screwed up that we had to leave, we’d first do sealed environments on Earth ’cause you don’t have to deal with gravity or lofting something into space. Just think about the practicalities.

One thing Jay points out is that going into space takes you into someplace where there isn’t any jurisdiction.

Because it’s there is a perfectly valid reason, but you’ll have to have money and energy.

Sex in Space!

It’s almost certainly happened, or at least tried. Married couple has been in space, so Jerry is beginning to suspect that the reason no one is talking is that it’s not that good. There was an experiment with the KC-135 Zero-g plane. What they found was that it was hard to just cling each other. Any motion causes spin. Plus the motion causes you to push apart, so you needed a third person or something similar to keep you from floating apart.

Pregnancy in space. There’s a lot of hormonal function that is gravity based. They’ve tried breeding zebra fish and it’s not happy. It’s looking like we need gravity for fetal development. If an astronaut got pregnant on the space station, likely NASA would tell them to use the emergency pod to return to Earth.

Jerry asked Stan Schmidt what one thing he would like us to know. “Tell them why its unlikely to have a habitable planet around a planet with a name.” The named ones are the large bright ones. If you do put one there, make sure you do the math to get it right.

Get the timing right, if you have someone looking at the sky on Earth.

In terms of stars, everything you see rising today, will rise four minutes earlier tomorrow.

The moon rises an hour later everyday, because it’s orbiting toward the east. The full moon is always directly overhead at midnight — by sidereal year. A sidereal day is how long it takes the earth to rotate and point again at the same spot in the stars. That’s four minutes shorter than a solar day. A solar day is how long it takes the earth to rotate to face the sun.

High tide points at the moon and the sun. Roughly, if the moon is rising in the sky, then the tide is coming in. If it’s setting, the tide is going out. The atmosphere also has a tide. In theory, without a moon, we’d have a calmer atmosphere.

The moon appearing larger overhead is a perspective shift.

Computers in Astronomy, really?

Computers have infiltrated almost everything. Something that frightens him is that they have computers in the cars and they all have to work together. The fact that he can get to the grocery store is a minor miracle.

Computer Uses

Controlling Equipment - In this context you might think of telescopes.

Automating Repetative Tasks - This is how computers started.

Organizing and retrieving data - This is our bread and butter.

Building/Exploring Scientific Models

Controlling Equipment

The first computerized telescope he saw, which wasn’t the first one, but it was revolutionary to him, was the, LX 200. It tracks the stars as the earth rotates. It’s very cool, but isn’t good enough to do simple photography.

Vehicle control - We’ve been doing fly by wire technology for decades. He flies small planes for a hobby and when he pushes a pedal, it moves a cable which the rudder. A military plane, which requires constant attention, uses a computer to translate pushing the pedal into moving the rudder. Not direct control.

Old Technology

Feedback technology was originally developed for manufacturing. The roots of “cybernetics” a la Norbert Wiener. These can be sophisticated and adaptive so that the computer drive a robot hand to pick up a can and crush it,then turn around and pick up wine glass.

More Old Technologies

Telerobotics (Waldos)

Pilots in the MidWest fly their planes remotely, in Afghanistan. That’s really phenomenal. They are flying by pure instruments, without haptic feedback.

Unmanned Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are coming and having successful field trials.

Latest Technologies

Mars Rovers.

Run on RAD6000 boards, which are essentially radiation hardened pcs.

AI and The Mars Rovers

The rovers cannot operate during the martian night, because the computers can’t work at those temperatures. They shut down.

During hte night, human “drivers” decide the rover’s next missions

Build a sequence of commands, run simulations to make certain that they will, send them to the rover.

To Ruben this is frightening, because they write custom programs every day. One bug and no telling what happens. But this is the best compromise, since they can’t control it in real time.

When they sent the robots the software wasn’t ready, so they uploaded it after launch. It makes him shudder, “they are living on the edge.”

The next generation of Rovers will make the simple choices locally, like “hey, this is deeper than I expected, I’ll deal with it” and the people on Earth will decide the high level goals like, “Go get that rock.”

He looked at the resumes of the drivers. They all have advanced degrees. One had degrees in computers, paleoanthropology, electronics and robotics.

Automating Tasks

We depend on automatons for tasks that are:

• too important to be left to (Careless) humans (like temperature control)
• Too boring for (most) humans (sorting records)
• too time-intensive (crunching numbers)

Searching for Comets

Old-school comet hunters scan the sky comparing what they see with a mental map. They’ve memorized it,because if you have to take their eye off the eyepiece to compare it to a sky chart, then they lose valuable time. It takes on average 400 hours to spot a new comet.

This is pretty hard to do well, but many amateur astronomers enjoy it. It’s a competitive “sport.”

Automated Searches.

• This search is a perfect candidate for automation.
• The computer stores a “mental” map of the sky.
• It “looks” at the region each day
• It can determine if anything changed (moved) or if a new “fuzzy” object appears.

He confesses that it takes a lot of the romance away for him. But you can do the same trick for other things, such as supernovas.

Traditional approach is to “blink” two photographic plates of the same location to see any visual differences. Computers can do this continously. Now he says that it is easy, but to compare to images is actually fairly complicated.

Humaning Tasks

Some tasks (even boring ones) are still better left to humans.

The Galaxy Zoo, for example, uses human power (distributed via internet) to classify galaxies. That’s what grad students are, but you do run out of them. That’s what the internet is for. ¹

Data Processing

Data Processing is what made computers popular and affordable. Dull, but important.²

Astronomical Data

A lot of stuff is still in Fortran. Astronomical survey data, covers a wide range of sky in different wavelengths. Sloan Digital Sky.

So how do we make the data available? Sloan data is available through Sky Server. It includes tutotials and educational materials. It also hosts images from the survey. To the Pros they give the data in digital form.

• Spectral
• photometric data
• Spectroscopic data

The search facilities are vital. That’s what’s hard. You have the data but if you can’t find it, then it is useless. Users can search the data using the frontend tools or by providing the raw SQL commands. SQL is OK. It’s from the 70s, like go-go boots, but we want better ways of searching the data.

The problem is that it puts a lot of responsibility on the astronomer to write fast queries, but writing code isn’t their specialty.

Astronomy with Google

The next generation of survey telescopes will push the limits of data storage.

8.4 meter telescope

30 Terabytes of memory per night. To rock your brain, that’s almost 1/2 of the Library of Congress EVERY NIGHT. 1/20th of YouTube

Google is partnering with LSST to provide IT support. (Microsoft works with Sloane)

This is not the first foray into scientific data. They have already volunteered to host terabytes of scientific data, and to make them available to other scientists and the public. Data is sent faster by sneakernet.³

The original idea behind Google

“Better” web pages have lots of links into them.

Note: the hard part in building a search engine isn’t so much finding matches but prioritizing the matches.

Google File System

Uses commodity hardware. PCs running Linux. Lots of Internet bandwidth, arranged in groups (with superfast network connectivity within each group)

Map Reduce

Map operations that do something to the data and then reduce operations that reduce the data and they have lots of these running in parallel. “The internet is great. We have five or six copies laying around the office.”

Google is Academe

Stanford has drunk the coolaid and now teaches MapReduce to their students. Cloud Computer or Utility Computing.

They’re going to far.

Chris Anderson suggested that Google is the end of theory. With petabyes of data running loose, it becomes harder to make any overall sense of the dataset. But there’s no need! GoogleTech lets us sift through this data and find useful relationships.

Google, IBM, and the NSF are building the Cluster Exploratory.

• 1,600 processors.
• TB of memory
• PBs of disk
• Software: Tivoli, GFS, MapReduce

Projected use includes modeling the human brain.

Personally, he thinks this is no replacement for theory and/or models

There is room for model-less science

But the end result should be an understanding of the world.

Ideal sequence: Brahe, Kepler, Newton.

Brahe was a cataloguer. That is data collection.

Kepler looks at the data and is able to infer things from things. he didn’t know why, but he saw the patterns. Kepler science is the Google science. Searches.

Newton is the next step. He looks at these things and says, “I can explain these things.”

Models strike back.

In the 19th and 20th century, models were complicated equations. Many equations are too hard to solve analytically.

The solution is to “integrate” these models by simulating them in a computer. That is what super-computers are doing 90% of the time, solving really hard differential equations.

Computers can give us new insights and new techniques to advance science.

1. Laura says that it’s like a video game PLUS you’re doing real science. [↩]
2. That’s what he said, not me. [↩]
3. They ship a three terabyte array to astronomer, who uploads their data and sent it back. [↩]

Raw notes plus two fiction bits from me.

Jeffrey Lockwood was at a conference in New Mexico, funded by the Templeton Foundation. Doug Backoff, from SETI Institute. Doug was supposed to design a program from active SETI. Insteading of shotgunning the universe with messages we can now target them. Doug was working with visual artists asking what sort of images should be sent. Jeffrey asked if he’d done anything with writers. He hadn’t. Some stuff with Sagan, but nothing with fiction.

5 C’s motivation (for crafting fiction for aliens)

1. Craft - That this would stretch them in ways that they hadn’t encountered before. Different problems, pushing outside comfort.

2. Consciousness - To push writers in deeper inquiries of themselves. The act of crafting a message for another intelligence pushed them to inquire more deeply about what it meant to be human. In ways that we simply in our ordinary writing lives we don’t have to do. When you can’t take any of that for granted, you have to ask really hard questions about the nature of the mind.

3. Could happen - It’s a stretch, but it is greater than zero. There’s an element of immortality, influence, power, and responsibility. That focused their attention in ways other things hadn’t.

4. Culture - One of the things that NASA wanted them to do is to foster an appreciation of space science.

5. Connections - The connections between the sciences and the humanities is where some of the best work is being done. An understanding of science can be a powerful creative force.

Four or five small writing prompts each session. Assume you have made preliminary contact with some intelligence that is travelling through at a high rate of speed. Moreover let us assume that there is no serious limitation between each other with respect to language.

We each wrote 5, then traded and picked the best one of our partners questions. These are

What does home mean?

Why?

What’s the most important thing you have to tell us?

What would you like to learn from us?

What is your origin?

How does your ship work?

What life forms have you encountered?

Could you swap our beings for one of ours?

What is biological basis?

How is your craft moved?

Is your consciousness housed in a physical body?

When will you come again?

How would you describe yourselves to us?

Will you send us images of yourself?

Will you trade goods or information with us?

This was a way to getting them to focus on some important aspect.  So pick a question to answer, as if the aliens had sent these same questions to us.  This is what I wrote in answer to “What does “home” mean to you?”

“Home” represents different things to different cultures and individuals.  For most people the connontation is different from “house,” which is merely a dwelling and represents a place of emotional safety and comfort.  In English language, we have an idiom. “Home is where the heart is,” which means that “home” is where a person’s passion is, be that another person or place or activity.
But in simpler terms, “home” is called the planet Earth which is the third planet from the sun.  I, personally, live on the North American continent, which is the smaller of the two land masses in the northern hemisphere.

Complementary modalities.

Quality of being prime is that which we can not reduce to anything else.

Prime numbers

Craft a piece, a poem, a meditation, a scene about something about human beings that is prime. BUT you have to craft it according to the prime numbers. For instance, a poem might have the first line have one word, the second line two, the third three, the fourth five, etc…

Fibonacci series.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… pattern we see all kinds of places.

Craft a piece, a poem, a meditation, a scene about the importance of pattern, prediction, rhythmicity. Use fibonacci numbers as the structure.

I chose the Fibonacci sequence and wrote this.

Eve. Adam. Two people. A child comes. The first family is born. Then they reproduce to make their own families. This pattern repeats, carrying humanity forward through the ages with parents and children. We reach our time, where a woman sits heavy with her child; behind her, in a hospital bed, rests her mother. This is not the first time that a woman has watched her mother die, but she feels it as keenly as if she were watching Eve and the first death in the universe had finally ripened as the vicious fruit of the knowledge of good and evil here in this hospital, with its antiseptic smell. As she sits watching, time stretches out into the shallow space between each contraction, so that if she could have a choice, she would sit balanced between them until her mother had left the world, so that she could see her out of life before focusing on the new life pushing urgently to exit her body, but there is the sharp pain again and then the gush of wetness and she knows,she knows that she must call the nurse and welcome the next generation before her mother leaves.

Ten lessons in the class he taught.

1. I don’t know. — You know about publishing, but you don’t know the first thing about being an alien and so you don’t know what will be good communication for them.

2. Writing? – send complementary modalities hoping that one might be the Rosetta Stone for them.

3. Absurdity

4. Alien – Think about terrestrial aliens and then magnify the challenge to imagine extraterrestrial alien

5. The 1st Act of Creation - It’s the creation of your reader. We assume that they are like us, but you can’t make that assumption with an alien.

6. Universal and particular - What it is to be human is the particular. Use the particular to articulate the universal. To communicate with the alien, it would almost have to be a collection of vignettes demonstrating the range of experiences like grief or happiness.

7. Whole being - The nature of being human is to be an embodied mind.

8. Serious play -

9. Complementarity - Using multiple modes of communication.

10. Prayerfulness

Hubble’s Law

When we measure the distances to galaxies and their velocities, we find out that they are correlated. We take the spectrum of the galaxy and can tell distance. But because of the geometry of space/time things that are far away do not always look smaller.

We can model what’s happening in the Hubble’s Law by imagining a block of space. Space expands carrying the galaxies along with it. The galaxies themselves are not expanding. On large scales, galaxies are moving apart, with velocity proportional to distance. It’s not galaxies moving through space. You will measure the same Hubble’s Law no matter which galaxy you are in. The velocity is proportional to the distance. The ones farther away appear to be expanding faster.

You can take an overlly simple version of the Hubble’s Law and try to run it backwards to see when everything was together. Time = distance/velocity

Velocity = (Hubble constant) * distance.

T ~~ d/v = 1/h ~ 14 billion years.

The more distant the objects we observe, the further back into the past of the universe we are looking. As we look further away, we are looking back in time. If the universe has a finite age then we can only see to a finite distance, which does not mean that the universe has an edge. The radiation from the very early phase of the universe should still be detectable today. Black body radiation with a temperature of T = 2.73 K. It was discovered in mid-1960s as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

Wilson and Penzias wrote this innocuous paper about this noise in their system that they couldn’t get out. Cleaned out pigeon crap and other things, because they didn’t expect to see this radiation. At Princeton someone knew about the Big Bang theory. There should be a time in the universe when everything would have been like the surface of the star. But the expansion would stretch it out from a 3000 degree blackbody that would redshift to 2.73K. The team at Princeton was building a machine like Wilson’s and Penzias’s to detect the microwave background radiation, but Wilson and Penzias beat them to it by accident.

Universe cools as time passes and expands as time passes. Temperatures range from 1 degree Kelvin up to 10¹⁰ degrees Kelvin. Expanding space is completely consistent with understanding of general relativity.

First a dense ionized gas. Then low-density ionized gas. Then neutral recombined gas. It’s hard to look through a plasma like ionized gas. So it’d be like trying to look through the surface of a star. You can look a little way, but a star is opaque. The universe was like that. At optical wavelengths H is transparent. If you look back in time, recombination happens so we can look back through H and the universe looks like the surface of a star.

Early universe is very high energy. There are electron and positron pairs. It was a soup of particles and radiation. There was an equilibrium between particles and energy, with most of the energy being contained in radiation. We go from the soup of particles and radiation to a time when particles are able to remain stable. That is a high energy gamma-ray photon no longer exists with enough energy to blow them apart. We have both protons and neutrons in the universe. Proton and neutrons form a few helium nuclei.

There were only a few minutes where the universe was like the heart of a star. Photons are incessantly scattered by free electrons. The early universe was opaque. We call that the radiation dominated era. Protons and electrons recombine to form atoms => Universe becomes transparent for protons. This epic of recombination happens at redshift 1000, which is a few hundred thousand years old. Be careful when talking about size. Universe was a billion times denser then.

After recombination, photons can travel freely through space.

when we look at the gas between galaxies today, the gas is ionized. Therefore there was an epic of reionization. We’ve identified it as redshifts of about 6. It started around 16 and by the time you get to 6 the whole thing is ionized.

Cosmological Principles. These may not be strictly speaking always true.

• Homogeneity: On the largest scales, the local universe has the same physical properties throughout the universe. Every region has the same physical properties

• Isotropy. On the largest scales, the local universe the same in any direction one looks.

• Universality. The laws of physics work the same everywhere.

Shape and Geometry of the Universe.

Back to our 2-dimensional analogy. How can a 2-d creature investigate the geometry of the sphere? Measure curvature of its space.

According to the theory of general relativity, gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time. The effects of gravity on the largest cosmological scales should be related to the curvature of space-time. The curvature of space-time, in turn is determined by the distribution of mass and energy.

Deceleration of the Universe

The theory says that the universe is expanding, but the gravity of the universe should be slowing it down. We can define the critical density, which is the critical density of matter, which is just enough to slow the cosmic expansion to a halt at infinity.

If it’s perfect critical case, the universe flat. If we’re going to expand for ever, it’s hyperbolic geometry. If it’s going to collapse, its curved geometry

Problems with the Classical Decelerating Universe model.

The flatness problem. The thing is, if the universe weren’t perfectly flat from the beginning, it turns out that for it to be this close to critical density today, in the past it would have to be hugely different. Extreme fine tuning required.

2. The isotropy of the cosmic microwave background.

We talked about the size of the observable universe, back when the universe was a feew hunderd thousand years old at the time of the recombination. Light has not had time to travel across the universe at the age of recombination.

The solution is that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. There is no speed limit on the expansion of space because nothing is actually moving. The idea is that universe is really tiny, really dense at one point and then it inflates. Grand Unified Theory. If we apply the period of sudden expansion during the early evolution of the universe the it solves the problems.

By observing type Ia supernovae, astronomers can measure the Hubble relationship at large distances and measure the deceleration.

Universe expansion is accelerating. SURPRISE! They went out to measure the deceleration and discovered that it wasn’t happening. Basically, as you look at more distant objects, more distant supernovas, they turn out to be a little more distant than we expected giving their velocities.

Cosmic acceleration can be explained with the cosmological constant. Lambda is a free parameter in Einstein’s fundatmental equation of general relativity; previously believed to be 0. Einstein didn’t think it looked like the universe was expanding, so he put this in to make correct for that in his equation. Then Hubble showed that the universe was expanding. So people set Lambda to be 0. Energy corresponding to Lamda can account for the missing mass/energy and makes everything work. We call it “Dark Matter.”

Evolution and fate of the universe.

The big empty or the big rip. Not sure which.

The big empty, things would keep traveling apart until nothing outside the galaxy would be visible.

The big rip, the curve would cause atoms to rip.

Fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Angular size of the CMB fluctuations allows us to probe the geometry of space-time. We can do models that relate the curvature and the spot size pattern and compare it to what we actually see and it’s very much like the flat model universe. We can analyze the frequency of signal.

I have a ton of information from today’s lectures, but I’m going to take it easy and just show you this picture that we¹ took. We went into the image lab and manipulated it today. Then tonight, we went onto the roof and looked at it with a telescope. It looks astonishingly close to this — though the colors are quite as pretty.