It’s the beginning of a new school year for a lot of folks around the world, and for academics like us, that means it’s time to come up from our summer, laissez-faire research work, and return to the more structured patterns of meetings, teaching, and committee work. This also means it is time to get back to conference travel, podcasting, and Google Hangouts-on-Air. In trying to get everything straight, I realized there is just way too much going on to try and write a separate blog post for everything, so here is a quick round up from around CosmoQuest!

Summer of Science Winding Down

On September 4, when the day ends at the international date line, we’re going to call an end to our Summer of Science. The 7(!!) individuals who have done the most science by that time will get sent awesome binoculars from Celestron. Specifically, we’ll be sending out Cometron 7×50 binoculars (x4) and SkyMaster 15×70 binoculars (x3). (Or more to the point, we’ll send the awesome folks at Celestron the addresses of the science doers, and they’ll directly mail the binoculars. This means, no waiting for me to make it to the Post Office).  Looking at the numbers, it is totally possible to make your way into one of those last couple spots if you chain watch Netflix while marking craters for a couple seasons of your favorite show. I, for one, like to do science to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” (background photo by © Josep Maria Truñó | Dreamstime.com)

Return of the Hangouts!

Over the summer (or at least over August) we put all of our Hangout-on-Air programs on hiatus so people could get some vacation time. With the flip in from northern summer to fall, we’re working to get all our programs up and running again. Due to the ever evolving chaos of how Google links G+ pages and YouTube channels, you need to subscribe to a few different channels to catch all our content. We have links to everything below, and on our Calendar page (link in the footer of every page).

Don’t forget to subscribe!

Want to Get Together Sometime?

If you take a look at our Calendar page (link in the footer of every page), you’ll see we have a bunch of real-world events coming up. We’d love for you to join us. We’re also probably going to be planning some sort of an event related to the AGU meeting in San Fransisco in December. Stay tuned for details in early October (we’re waiting to hear on some grants before we finalize our plans). (background image credit: Onpuichunsen)

And a bit of random Earth Science on Fire …

When I went to find a good image to highlight this message, I went straight to the NASA Earth Science pages, looking for some awesome images of our own blue planet. Earlier this summer, I’d been really impressed by the images coming from DSCOVR and Terra Earth observing satellites.  Heading over today, I found, quite literally, a world on fire. Spacecraft are systematically tracking fires that sweep across acre after acre of land, from Canada to Siberia, and ever where in between. Learn more from NASA. Our hearts go out to everyone effected directly by the fires and indirectly by the smoke and other side effects.

Smoke over the Canadian Maritimes. (credit: NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner)