Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

Posting from the National Radio Quiet Zone, thanks to the miracle of Ethernet cable.

I arrived at Green Bank on Sunday afternoon for the SETI workshop. Met extremely interesting people. This was followed by a fabulous day which included a visit to the Green Bank Telescope.



Here is Hannah House, where I am staying. The GBT is on the horizon, near the center of the photo. Its dish is over two acres in area.

(Webcast of Tuesday and Wednesday's SETI sessions will be readily decoded by any civilization in the galaxy which has developed Windows Media Player. See here for details of the sessions and attendees.)

brotherguy passed along a reminder that tonight is the 400th anniversary of the date Galileo first turned his telescope upon a crescent Moon, beginning the observations that made his name famous in astronomy.

(Yes, I do actually have an Egoboo File. It's in the basement.)

Gary Westfahl of the University of California at Riverside, a science fiction critic whose work I have often admired, quoted our 1977 filksong "Home on Lagrange" in his 1996 book Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction Literature. This I learned because there is a new paperback edition, which has been swallowed by Google Books.

Our parody is offered as evidence that stories of space stations often invoke the American frontier. Read the relevant passage here.

We originally wrote it to poke fun at the grandiose proclamations of prophets advocating space colonies. The title pun (about Lagrange points in celestial mechanics) motivated us more than the connection between a cowboy song and the space-type frontier. But the song does express a manifest-destiny approach to the wide-open spaces, so I can't disagree that it's relevant...

Turning to another bit of egoboo, yesterday at North Central College's Oesterle Library I participated in an event celebrating 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens; you can read about it in today's Daily Herald. A new NASA image combining views of the Milky Way's center from three different space telescopes was unveiled.


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Photos by Thomas Gill, courtesy of North Central College.

The affair was a great success. About 70 people showed up to hear about astronomy on a Tuesday afternoon. The Oesterle's Emily Prather-Rodgers was mistress of ceremonies. Three faculty members, Richard Wilders, Michael de Brauw, and John Zenchak, gave fine talks about Galileo and his work. Visitors examined the library's first edition of Galileo's Dialogo and peered through a modern copy of his first telescope. My job was to give context to the Milky Way picture and explain a little about the objects it reveals. I had a grand time.

The NASA administrator is unwilling to launch the previously-scheduled repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. But he did ask a blue-ribbon committee to look at it, and also evaluate a possible robotic repair mission.

Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope is a brief 10-page letter offering the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences committee that studied the problem.

A thicker report will be along in the fall.