Your friendly neighborhood astronomer
With the semester rapidly winding down, I find myself looking back and thinking about what went well, and what I could do better the next time. I had a great class, and two fantastic labs to boot. As always, I spent a lot of time preparing slides, but hopefully that had a positive impact on my students’ understanding of the material. Continue reading “Stay curious, my friends”
Over the weekend, we said goodbye to 14 newfound friends from the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. It was a long, fun, and challenging week but by far the hardest challenge was realizing that had come to an end. Here’s why:
Launchpad is essentially astronomy 101 crammed into a one-week crash-course tailored for science fiction & fantasy writers, editors, filmmakers, and other creative professionals. It’s held on the campus of the University of Wyoming where my friend Mike Brotherton is an Associate Professor of Astronomy. Last year, he invited me to be a guest instructor and as much as I enjoyed myself then, I had a much better experience this second time around for several reasons.
For one thing, I had a much better idea of what to expect this year, and was able to prepare my lectures accordingly. Mike had me teach the same topics as last year, plus asked me to teach some new topics, including binary stars and exoplanets. In fact, I have a post on my slides from launchpad you can peruse, though it may not make as much sense without me explaining them. In any case, the great preparation and coordination with Mike and fellow instructor Andria Schwortz meant that I wasn’t staying up as late preparing for my talk the next day. I did, of course, stay up just as late talking with Mike about all sorts of nonsense.
As much as I enjoyed giving and watching the lectures, getting the attendees out of the classroom and into the lab was even better. Attendees got to try their hand at identifying elements from their spectra, detecting exoplanets from Kepler data, and processing Hubble images.
Even better, we were able to get up to the Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO) on Jelm mountain on Wednesday night. It’s always a treat to come face-to-face with a 2.3-meter telescope. Even better, the students were taking spectra of a binary star system, which is a topic that is always near and dear to my heart 🙂
As much fun as it was, it was a lot of hard work so taking a break with a hike in Vedauwoo national park was a nice change of pace, even if 1/3 of our group fell at some point.
But my favorite part of this year’s Launchpad was that my wife joined me this time. Jeri is a pretty good writer in her own right and it was great being in an environment where she could talk shop with fellow writers as well as geek out on astronomy. As much as she already knew about astronomy, this was her best exposure to it yet. Besides, we like being together:
As much fun as it was, it was a lot of work, especially for us instructors. And yet, we’re already thinking about next year!
For others’ perspectives on this year’s launchpad, check out my listing of everyone’s blog posts and recaps. And once again, a huge thank-you to our funders this year, without whom, none of this would have happened!
Below are links to PDFs of my talks from Launchpad 2013:
One of the great things about having an astronomy workshop for writers is that they tend to write about the workshop as it’s going on. That’s a good thing for me because as an instructor, the near-real-time feedback on our lessons is invaluable.
The downside to being an instructor is that there is no time to blog, myself. So, while I shall endeavor to offer my thoughts on a later date, I’ll share the posts from the attendees here and keep updating throughout the week (in theory):
Brenda Clough – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Liz Argall – Monday, day one of Launch Pad (Liz also has a running comic she’s making during the workshop as well)
Chaz Brenchley – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks – Launch Pad workshop: Day 1
Doug Farren – Launchpad 13 Day 2
Jamie Todd Rubin – Launchpad Day 1: Space is Big… And So Are Robots
Liz Argall – Day 2 at Launch Pad, part one. All kinds of light and a little angular momentum
Chaz Brenchley – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks – Launch Pad workshop: Day 2
Doug Farren – Launchpad 13 Day 3
Jamie Todd Rubin – Launchpad Day 2: Sex In Space and Other Interesting Scientific Tidbits
Chaz Brenchley – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Chaz Brenchley – Liveblogging Launch Pad (second post)
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks – Launch Pad workshop: Day 3
Brenda Clough – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Doug Farren – Launchpad 13 Day 4
Anna Leahy & Doug Dechow – Launch Pad: Astronomy for Writers
Jamie Todd Rubin – Launchpad Day 3: At the Top of the World
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks – Launch Pad workshop: Day 4
Brenda Clough – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Doug Farren – Launchpad 13 Day 5
Chaz Brenchley – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Doug Farren – Launchpad 13 Day 6
Chaz Brenchley – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Jennifer Campbell-Hicks – Launch Pad workshop: Day 5
Brenda Clough – Liveblogging Launch Pad
Jamie Todd Rubin – Launch Pad Days 4 and 5 (Catching Up)
Doug Farren – Launchpad 13 Day 7 & 8
Andrew Penn Romie – Launch Pad 2013: Space is Big. Really Big.
Liz Argall – Launch Pad Video Blog burbling summary
Jamie Todd Rubin – Launch Pad Days 6 and 7
Jamie Todd Rubin – Going Paperless: The Paperless Classroom: A Case Study at Launch Pad
Jamie todd Rubin – The Amazing Friends I Made at Launch Pad
Caren Gussoff – Not to scale
Anna Leahy & Doug Dechow – Launch Pad: Facts about the Moon
Anna Leahy & Doug Dechow – Launch Pad: The people
UPDATE June 11, 2013: Due to the predicted severe weather in the Reading, PA area, tomorrow night’s talk has been postponed to September 12 (right in the middle of hurricane season!)
Hot off the heels of my guest lecture on the Solar System at the Community College of Baltimore County, I’ve been invited back to the Berks County Amateur Astronomical Society in Reading, PA to discuss the same thing, which is a good thing as I’ll probably be teaching it in greater depth at the upcoming Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in July. From their website:
Our Solar System – Exploring Strange New Worlds in our Cosmic Back Yard
Our understanding of our Solar neighborhood has fundamentally changed over the last few decades. What used to be just the Sun and 9 planets is now a celestial city of gas giants, rocky planets, ice giants, dwarf planets, asteroids, water worlds, and primordial comets all in orbit around a single star, our Sun. In this talk, astronomer Christian Ready will discuss the similarities and differences of these worlds and what they can tell us about the formation and history of our Solar System.
There really is a lot going on in our Solar System nowadays, with active missions to Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Saturn, and spacecraft on their way to Jupiter and Pluto. So what used to be considered an elementary topic in astronomy is being updated at a pretty remarkable rate. And of course there’s the whole Pluto controversy that will probably need to be discussed.
I enjoy giving these talks and if you’re in the Reading area, please feel free to drop by the Reading Public Museum on Thursday, June 13 September 12 2013 at 7:30 pm.
And since we’re still talking about Pluto, here’s a video I made explaining the whole mess: