A few links related to Spitzer, infrared, ...

The Talk Itself

• Santa Monica College Drescher Planetarium, 9 May 08
• Santa Clarita, 19 Apr 08
• Santa Monica, 14 Mar 08
• Palomar Observatory, 9 June 07
• Griffith Observatory - Astro 101 class on stars, 6-7 June 07. The star formation movies are linked below under "press releases and movies"; the other movies are included as part of other press releases in the archive. The interactive HRD is here.
• Pierce College, 13 Apr 07
• Older talks have been removed due to space considerations.

Links

• Main Spitzer Space Telescope website (public site)
• What is Spitzer Observing RIGHT NOW?
• Spitzer site for scientists (documentation on the observatory, etc)

• Spitzer archive (real data, e.g. FITS images. many software packages can read this format; also see Adobe Photoshop Plugin for FITS format.)

• Spitzer press release archive for all released images. For movies that go with any press release, select "visuals" on the page and then find the movie you want and select your preferred format. The series of movies I used for visualizing low-mass star formation are from the following releases:
  • The first two movies I showed come from the bottom of the page here (2004-08v2, then 2004-08v3)
  • The third movie comes from the very bottom of the page here (2004-22v2)
  • The fourth and fifth come from the bottom of the page here (2004-17v1 then 2004-17v2)
  • Then the last is from here again, this time 2004-22v1.
• my own personal "thumbnail" style summaries of all of the released images. (sorry, this is increasingly out of date!)

• Infrared World - pictures of the world around us in optical and IR.
• my own images from the IR/optical cameras
• The infrared zoo - ever wonder what an alligator looks like in the IR?
• IR astronomy tutorial.
• Also see Cool Cosmos, the rest of the extensive IPAC/Spitzer Education and Public Outreach pages.

Education and Outreach

• my own page of educational links
• Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students
• Hands-On Universe. Software and lesson plans enabling students to request and/or analyse real astronomical data from real astronomical telescopes. (You can request Spitzer images through our archive and analyze them using HOU software.)

• Kennedy Space Center Multimedia archive - search on SIRTF for our launch images. A 3 minute video on Lyman Spitzer the man is linked in here too.
• Rocketcam stills from Spitzer launch
• Official SIRTF Launch press kit - see especially initial launch phases

• Spitzer press release
• Bio page on Spitzer (the man) from Sonoma State University
• Information on the naming contest (most popular name submitted etc.)
• Also see "3 minute video" mentioned above.

More technical information, past IR missions

• IR astronomy timeline, with listing of missions in the past.
• The Infrared Compendium - infrared astronomy for professional astronomers.
• Spitzer archive (real data, e.g. FITS images. many software packages can read this format; also see Adobe Photoshop Plugin for FITS format.)
• 2MASS near-IR all-sky survey. Note that you can access the real 2MASS data, e.g. FITS images.
• ISO science gallery (mid and far-ir wavelengths)

Astronomy as a career

Also, I seem to be getting a lot of questions about the time allocation process, e.g. how do we decide what we observe?

• "The search for fresh data", by Sten Odenwald. Also see his archive of questions specifically on astronomy as a career, from which this link is taken. There are even pages there on how a research paper is written.
• More technical - article for professional astronomers on HST's Time Allocation process

Links in response to specific questions I've been asked at the talk(s)

• Santa Monica question on clusters I've worked on: Well, my CV includes a very formal listing of all my publications, refereed (in journals) and not (from conferences). But here is a brief listing of the clusters/complexes I have attempted to reconstruct. It is probably not complete:
  • Orion
  • NGC 2264
  • NGC 1333, IC 348, and the Perseus molecular cloud
  • rho Ophiuchus and the Ophiuchus molecular cloud
  • TW Hydra Association
  • Chamaeleon
  • Lupus
  • Eta Cha Association
  • Lynds 1228 (south)
  • DR 21
  • M47 (NGC 2422)
  • IC 1396
  • Henize 206 (in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the most distant thing I've worked on)
  • Taurus Molecular Cloud, Taurus-Auriga
  • Pleiades
  • Beta Pictoris Moving Group
  • IC 2118 (conference pubs only, still working on refereed version)
  • North American and Pelican Nebulae (NGC 7000) (conference pubs only, still working on refereed version)
  • 30 Doradus (also in the Large Magellanic Cloud) (conference pubs only, still working on refereed version)
  • Blanco-1 (conference pubs only, still working on refereed version)
  • IC 1805 (data on my desktop, still working on refereed version)
  • M16 (data on my desktop, still working on refereed version)
  • NGC 1893 (conference pubs only, still working on refereed version)
  • I'm also part of two large teams working on big surveys of many star-forming regions: Cores to Disks (c2d) and Gould's Belt. Finally, I'm also part of the MIPSGAL team, which catches lots of star-forming regions "by accident" in the process of surveying the Galaxy.
• MWOA question on Fomalhaut: Fomalhaut is an A3, so more massive than I thought it was at about two and a half times the mass of the Sun.
• VCAS question on Cepheids:
  • infrared photmetry group at the AAVSO
  • journal article on near ir cepheid variations (note that near-ir can be done from the ground
  • An observing program by Nancy Evans (principal investigator) was approved for Spitzer for this year to specifically study mass loss from classical cepheids. I don't know what she has learned yet! (her data might not have been taken yet.)
• Wikipedia entry for Jocelyn Bell
• links on stellar fusion:
  • from UWaterloo, CA
  • from UCO Lick
  • from UOregon
  • from Cornell
  • more resources as i have time to find them...
• initial launch phases (when do air-lit solids get, well, lit?). This comes from the official SIRTF Launch press kit.
• What temperature do the Spitzer bandpasses roughly correspond to (for thermal radiation)?
• JPL Open House information
• The Hubble UDF was obtained by a group coordinating observations of the same region with Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer; they are the GOODS team.
• Detector technology. For a quick overview, see the instrument webpages - IRAC, IRS, MIPS. For more information than you probably really wanted to know, see the first part of each of the instrument chapters in the Spitzer Observer's Manual.
• Number of women in astronomy vs. engineering: see page 5 of this document
• Mike Brown's Sedna page
• Chandra's press office; also see press releases by category. See especially galactic center.

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Last substantially modified 12 Mar 04 by rebull
Any opinions expressed here are well-reasoned and insightful, but in no way reflect those of NASA/JPL or Caltech. No electrons were harmed in the creation of these pages.

The research described here was partially carried out at IPAC, which is part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by the California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.