The Net is Out Of This World

Using the Net to Explore the Universe!

By Don Rittner

On one summer evening in 1957, my friend Jackie Fitzpatrick and I were laying on the grass at Sage Park looking up to the skies and contemplating the future. To our astonishment there in the heavens we saw a bright comet with two long tails crossing the constellations Ursa Major and Coma.

I would learn later that we had witnessed Comet Mrkos but that evening was the beginning of a fascination with the Universe and an introduction to astronomy.

For a baby boomer, the last 30 years have been pretty amazing. We have seen space travel go from science fiction to science fact. Within a few short years astronomers have discovered new solar systems and planets, the glue that holds the universe together, proof of the Big Bang, and the birth of galaxies. It's a pretty exciting time to be an astronomer - or just an interested citizen!

Thanks to the Net you can reap the benefits of all this research with easy access to thousands of images and space data, and you can even get personally involved in some cool space projects! Help search for ET! Remotely control optical and radio telescopes from your home computer. Here's how!

ET, Send Email!

The long running Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project looks for signs of alien communications by gathering radio signals from the huge radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico and then analyzes them. They separate the noise made from stars, dust, and earthlings from those that may be made from another civilization. It takes a lot of number crunching to analyze the tons of data.

You can become a part of the project by helping to analyze the data from your home computer. Programmers from the University of California at Berkeley wrote a software program, actually an application and screen savor, that will gather chunks of the raw data and analyze it while your computer is sitting idle. While you are taking a break your computer signs on automatically to the SETI server, grabs a bunch of data and then analyzes it, sending the results back after it's done. You can view the action live on your monitor if you wish.

The project called SETI@home already has 40,000 volunteers. Who knows you may be the person who actually makes contact with ET!! Become part of the project by surfing over to:

http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Grab Your Own Photographs of the Cosmos

I've always wanted to own a professional telescope so I could take my own astro photographs, but they cost thousands of dollars. That isn't a problem anymore. Enterprising astronomers have built robotic telescopes that let any Net user control them. As an example, the 18 inch University of Bradford Robotic Telescope is located high on the moors in West Yorkshire, England and operates by itself -- well actually you send it instructions using your Web browser. The telescope decides by itself when the conditions are good to make observations of the sky making the presence of an astronomer obsolete.

Anyone with a Net connection can register free and ask the telescope to look at anything in the northern night sky. When time and observing conditions are ripe, the telescope takes your picture and you can download it.

You can also view the last 100 images the telescope has taken, as well as check the weather conditions at the site. If you are new to astronomy and would like a tutorial there is a nice educational CDROM that you can view online.

You can take your own photos at http://www.telescope.org/rti/use.html

Go to http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/rti/automated.html to find more automated telescopes.

How Many Telescopes Are There?

Well hundreds of them and if you surf over to http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/www/yp_telescope.html you can find all the information you desire on what each of them do. This database gives you an alphabetical listing to more than 350 scopes along with the links to their Web pages, as well as observatories and other useful space information.

One Stop Shopping

AstroWeb (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/astroweb.html) is a complete astronomy database that lists software, people, publications, space data, telescope observing information, astronomy departments and agencies, and much more. You can search the database by keyword.

Looking for a Star?

If you are looking for a particular star in the cosmos the ESO HST Guide Star Catalogue (http://archive.eso.org/gsc/gsc ) probably has it. This site contains coordinates and brightnesses for some 19 million objects. The Guide Star Catalog (GSC) was constructed to support the operational need of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Just type in the coordinates or an object by name and search for all the stars around it.

Speaking of Hubble

If you would like to view some amazing photos taken by this space telescope, visit http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html, the Web site of the Space Telescope Science Institute. View the latest releases of Hubble or a section called The Best of Hubble. Hubble is sponsoring a program that lets people vote on pointing the scope to a galaxy of their choice. Go to the Mount Wilson Observatory for info at http://www.mtwilson.edu/Science/TIE/.

Educational Resources

Finally if you are a teacher or parent looking for educational material for your kids, go over to our own NASA Web site. It has its own educational section (http://education.nasa.gov/) that contains hundreds of great educational resources for teachers, parents and students. A calendar of events lets you know when NASA Sponsored space events will take place. May the force be with you.

Reach Don at drittner@aol.com or PO Box 50216, Albany, NY 12205