Posted by mattusmaximus on March 7, 2011
A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to do some really awesome educational outreach work with Dr. Pamela Gay: skeptic, astronomer and co-host of the popular Astronomy Cast podcast (and one of the most awesome people I know). During the outreach event, Pamela made use of a wonderful online tool called Galaxy Zoo to emphasize that in today’s age of the Internet, ordinary people can engage in “citizen astronomy” quite easily. Since there are a limited number of professional astronomers in the world, and there is far too much astronomical data for them to comb through easily, what is needed is fresh eyes… lots of fresh eyes.
By allowing everyday citizens – teachers, students, and just plain old curious folks – to have access to the vast databases of galactic imagery (from the Hubble Space Telescope) and some simple protocols for classification, people can have a great impact on the science of astronomy. In fact, sometimes this leads to some pretty amazing discoveries, such as the anomaly called Hanny’s Voorwerp…
The object, now referred to as a “voorwerp”, is about the size of our Milky Way galaxy and has a huge central hole over 16,000 light years across. The voorwerp is false colored green, a standard color to represent the presence of several luminous emission lines of glowing oxygen. It has been shown to be at the same distance from Earth as the adjacent galaxy, both about 650 million light-years away. Image source: Wikipedia
If you’re interested, check out Galaxy Zoo or any of the related “citizen astronomy” tools available at the Zooniverse Project, and pass it along! 🙂
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Posted in education, space | Tagged: anomaly, astronomer, astronomy, Astronomy Cast, galaxies, galaxy, Galaxy Zoo, Hanny, HST, Hubble Space Telescope, images, Pamela Gay, podcast, space, voorverp, voorwerp, vorverp, Zooniverse | 1 Comment »
Posted by mattusmaximus on March 8, 2010
All I can say is… WOW!!!
I’m still coming down from the high of the first ever Skepchicamp, and there is so much that went on that it will take quite some time to assimilate it all. In fact, Skepchicamp kicked soooooo much ass that not even Chuck Norris will be able to sit down for a month 🙂
Stay tuned for more updates and post-camp thoughts from me. But for now I want to share some photos taken by our official event photographer, Ivan Phillips… Enjoy!
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Posted in skeptical community | Tagged: images, photos, pictures, Skepchicamp, Skepchick, SkeptiCamp | Leave a Comment »
Posted by mattusmaximus on March 4, 2010
In keeping with the melding of modern technology with good ol’ fashioned skepticism, I’ve found out about a few neat iPhone/Touch apps that are, in my opinion, a must-have for any skeptic. These apps allow one to take photos and manipulate them into giving the appearance of having captured images of ghosts and/or UFOs & aliens. And while such photo manipulation is not proof positive that ghosts & aliens do not exist, when such manipulation is so easy to accomplish it should give one cause to pull out their Occam’s Razor in an effort to slice away the b.s.
Using these apps, take a look at how I added a ghostly spirit and alien UFO to a couple of my photos…
So what sort of goodies are available at the iTunes store for such skeptical fun? Read on…
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in aliens & UFOs, ghosts & paranormal, humor | Tagged: alien, camera, faked photos, fun, ghost hunting, ghosts, I-Phone, I-Touch, I-Tunes, images, iPhone, iTouch, iTunes, manipulation, orbs, photography, photos, photoshop, pictures, skepticism, spacecraft, spirits, technology, UFO | 1 Comment »
The Skeptical Teacher 
