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

Links

• Main Spitzer Space Telescope website (public site)
• Where is Spitzer and what is it doing RIGHT NOW?
• Spitzer archive (real data, e.g. FITS images. Many software packages can read this format; also see Adobe Photoshop Plugin for FITS format.)
• Archive documentation, including videos. Also see the first 2 chapters of this.
• Spitzer images from the public affairs group.

• WISE public website
• WISE archive
• WISE tutorial on accessing WISE images
• WISE tutorial on making color images

• Herschel web page in Europe
• Herschel web page in US

• 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
• NITARP, the NASA IPAC Teacher Archive Research Project
• Lots of other programs using real data, including citizen science programs.

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)

• SDAA Kepler circumbinary planet: There are THREE of these systems known. Here is the information on the most recent two released (34b and 35b) and here is the information on the one from last fall (16b). See also 16b page and 34b page, and 35b page. The animations on some of those pages are IMHO a little misleading! For 16, the stars are 0.69 and 0.20 solar masses, and is "probably about 200 light years" away - the distance to it is not well-known. For 34, the stars are 1.05 and 1.02 solar masses, and is 4887 light years away. For 35, the stars are 0.89 and 0.81 solar masses, and is 5,363 light years away.
• SDAA question on cost to reactivate WISE - the critical components not relating to EPO or any science that need funding to continue the mission would be the command and control of the spacecraft from Capitol College in Maryland (they'd volunteered), and the data processing pipeline at IPAC which combine for an estimated cost of 'only' $5 million per year.
• 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.