Help NASA name Node 3... after Whedon's Firefly!

Pic from gizmodo.com

NASA is running a contest on its website for the name of the next Node space station. The contest ends March 20, 2009. The website says:

Help us to name another important addition to the station - Node 3 and its cupola!

NASA wants your opinion in naming the International Space Station’s Node 3 – a connecting module and its cupola – before the two segments travel to space and are installed on the orbiting laboratory. The name should reflect the spirit of exploration and cooperation embodied by the space station, and follow in the tradition set by Node 1- Unity- and Node 2- Harmony.

Well, "Serenity" (the name of the ship in Joss Whedon '87's Firefly) fits pretty perfectly with that theme - and right now, it seems the rest of the Internet agrees, since it's winning with 82% of the vote.

Support Wesleyan alumni - vote for "Serenity" at the NASA website!

A Celestial Celebration of the New Year

Brace yourselves as the planets have now aligned to celebrate the New Year. Tonight, tune-in to watch as Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and the Moon illuminate the night's sky just after sunset. Happy New Year!

Venus, brighter than all other planets and stars, will dangle just below the thin crescent moon in the southwestern sky. It'll be visible -- impossible to miss, in fact -- just as the sun goes down, assuming skies are cloud-free.

Soon thereafter, Mercury and Jupiter will show up hugging the south-southwestern horizon (just above where the sun went down) and extremely close to each other.

All the planets, along with the moon and sun, traverse an arc across our sky called the ecliptic, which corresponds to the plane in space that they all roughly share. For this reason, you could draw an imaginary line from the general location of Venus and the moon, down through the other two planets, and the line would point to where the sun went down.

Yahoo!: Celestial Show Set for New Year's Eve

Starbursts and Milky Ways!

Join the Astronomy Department and Science Hall for a special open observing night Thursday, April 17th from 8-9PM in the Van Vleck Observatory. Have you ever wanted to see the sky up close and personal? Well here is your chance to see both Saturn and the Moon through the telescopes! Don't worry if it is cloudy, we'll have the planetarium out too! (The weather looks good, so there should be clear skies for viewing)

Everyone is welcome! Bring your friends and prefrosh!

Where: Van Vleck Observatory (top of the hill)
When: Thursday, April 17th (tomorrow)

Edit: fixed font--Xiaoxi

Prof Herbst's team analyzes star particles

Prof Herbst has been studying the star KH15D, which is actually two stars orbiting around each other. KH15D is uniquely located with some fairly unique properties such that his team has been able to determine more about the star's makeup and formation.

Back in 2002, astronomers from Wesleyan University concluded that a star brightening and waning in an unusual 48-day rhythm was dipping in and out of stuff swirling around the star in a so-called protoplanetary disk. At the time one astronomer called the system “a Rosetta stone,” for understanding how planets form.

Now, after six more years of observation with an international group of astronomers, led by William Herbst of Wesleyan, researchers say they know what the stuff in this disk is. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature, they report that it is made of sand-size grains, roughly a millimeter in diameter, which must have grown from infinitesimal dust particles over the three million years that the star, known as KH 15D, has been in existence.

“This is the first step in going from smoke particles to macroscopic things like planets and asteroids,” Dr. Herbst said in an interview, noting that these grains were about the same size as those found in many meteorites. Observing starlight reflected from these grains, he said, represented a rare opportunity to study the structure and chemical properties of material in the inner parts of another planetary system.

Read more of the NYTimes article or the Slashdot discussion of it.