Play

Podcaster: Nicole Gugliucci, Georgia Bracey,  Jonathan RobertsTitle: Learning Space  Ep. 15: Space Apps Challenge

Organization: CosmoQuest : Space App Challenge

Link : You can watch the video in: http://youtu.be/4qgwPP94coQ

Space App Challenge: http://spaceappschallenge.org/
SpaceCal App: http://spacecalnyc.com/
Intro video for SpaceCalNYC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ACQqKDbQMQ
(Voting for the international challenge starts this week!)
NYC Big Apps: http://nycbigapps.com/
“Brian Cox Builds a Cloud Chamber” (via Guido Bibra): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWxfliNAI3U
Lands of Ice and Fire: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lands-Fire-Game-Thrones/dp/0345538544

Description:

Bio: Georgia Bracey is an Education, Instruction, & Public Outreach Team leader in Cosmoquest

Nicole Gugliucci is a postdoctoral astronomer and educator with CosmoQuest. Now at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, she did her PhD in astronomy at the University of Virginia and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and hugs just about every radio telescope she can find.

Jonathan Roberts is a postdoc physicist at NYU, researching the origin of cosmic rays. He used to make predictions for how we would find dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider when he was a postdoc over in Warsaw. I’ve been doing more and more data visualisation recently after getting frustrated with how hard it is to get a feeling for lots of science data.

He went along to the NASA space apps challenge and was amazed by the number of people willing to put their time in to create tools to open up access to science results. He spent 36 hours coding with people he’d only just met, had a great time, and created a functioning tool that’s useful for scientists and the public. He was pretty amazed.

They created a site that aggregates data on what telescopes are looking at, and when they’re looking. The site plots the observations on the sky so you can see not only where the telescope is looking, but click to find out more, and explore historical images of the target – whether it’s a distant galaxy or a supernova remnant in our own Milky Way. You can filter by date, or by target, and you can export the data as plain text – making it useful for scientists as well as the public. And there’s a twitter account that will tweet to you when telescopes turn to look at new targets, so you can get tweets from space!

Oh, and he also draw maps professionally…”

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. In the new year the 365 Days of Astronomy project will be something different than before….Until then…goodbye