Happy Carl Sagan Day 2014!

Happy, happy Sixth Annual Carl Sagan Day!

This year's theme is,unshockingly, "COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey," and once again, Florida's Broward College has planned awesome lectures, planetarium shows, children's activities, educator workshops, COSMOS episodes, telescope instruction, and star-gazing.  The celebration includes a fundraiser dinner to honor what would have been Sagan's 80th birthday.

Most folks recognize Carl from COSMOS in the 1980s, the most widely watched program in PBS history! No surprise, the reboot this past year with Neil deGasse Tyson was also incredibly popular! I've blogged numerous times about my idolization of his highly-quotable written material, my great love for his part in the Voyager Golden Records and their longevity, and last year, I was so pleased to visit a major bucket list item, the Carl Sagan Planet Walk scale solar system!

Carl taught at Cornell and Harvard universities, and worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Other titles included technology officer of the Icarus planetary research journal, Planetary Science Chair at the Astronomical Society, Astronomy Chairman at the Advancement of Science Association, and Co-Founder of the Planetary Society, the Earth's largest space-interest group.

Carl Sagan passed away in December 1996 at the age of 62, and was buried in New York (Lakeview Cemetery, Ithaca) right beside his parents.

An astronomer, philosopher, professor and NASA consultant, Carl Sagan won 30 public awards, published over 600 scientific articles and authored or co-authored 20 books. I’ll never weary of recommending Pale Blue Dot to anyone who will listen!  The unmanned Mars Pathfinder spacecraft was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station in 1997. Asteroid 2709 Sagan is also named in his honor.

Sagan was instrumental in the early Mariner missions to Venus, determined landing sites on Mars for the Viking Lander probes, and also assembled the first physical messages sent into space.  He was instrumental in establishing the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence(SETI), urging the use of radio telescopes to detect signals from other intelligent life. Along with Frank Drake, he also composed the Arecibo message, beamed once into space in 1974.

He's one of those people who makes you scratch your head and think, "What the heck have I been DOING with my time?!"

Carl had the ability to make space "knowable" to audiences of all ages. He was known for popularizing  science in a way that inspired people to understand both our insignificance in the larger universe, but also, paradoxically, the absolutely precious nature of our enormously unlikely existence.

Follow me on Twitter today for #TriviaThursday, all day today, which is all about Carl Sagan's life, works, activism, and scientific accomplisments!  Speaking for space geeks everywhere... thanks a billion, Carl.

Free COSMOS and FIREFLY Shirts Giveaway!

7/17
CONTEST HAS CONCLUDED AND WINNERS HAVE BEEN CONTACTED.
THANKS TO ALL THE AWESOME BROWNCOATS WHO PARTICIPATED! 

Browncoats! Spacetweeps!  To celebrate the Cosmos television series DVD release, GeekChicTees is offering free shirts to lucky winners who help us sing the gospel of Carl Sagan's science series remake, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson! 

Click to Order COSMOS

All original and new COSMOS episodes are now available on DVD and Blu-Ray from National Geographic. And since Captain Mal's Wisdom always helps us get the word out to space cadets of all stripes, we're also giving away one free Firefly shirt!

 The contest will run for one week, today through next Thursday (July 10th - 17th).

Click to enter T-shirt Giveaway!

At the end, we will let the [slightly confused]cat pick two names at random (SRSLY!).  he winners, upon sending clothing size and address confidentially, get to pick their favorite products from the GeekChic Tees catalogue!

To enter the contest for either free T-shirt, pop over to our Rafflecopter Giveaway Page and choose ways to enter on Twitter and Facebook.

Or, make up one of your own tweets, but be sure to include, AT MINIMUM: the link to the contest, both Twitter handles, the hashtag #COSMOS.

Click on picture to enter contest!

If you are not on Twitter or Facebook, you can also share this page to Tumblr, Pinterest, and/or Google+ and comment on this blog post to say you have done so. We'll be watching all new messages!

Enter as many times as you like, on as many platforms as you like. We'll go check them out! Every follow, share, and tweet counts as an entry

DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: Midnight PST, July 16th!
Winner will be announced on the morning of July 17, 2014.
 

Pillownaut Hiatus

With my heartfelt love and thanks to all of my wonderful long time readers, I'm sorry to announce Pillow Astronaut is being put on hiatus while I contend with some elderly family members with medical issues.

I hope you will remain a follower until I am able to resume writing again!
I hope you will keep me in your favorites or your feed.
I hope to return, soon!

~ Heather

The Henrietta Telescope

I wish I could stop finding stories about amazing women who made incredible discoveries, only to find certain men took credit for their work and dismissively assigned them to obscurity, until an era where people were comfortable (though still not entirely happy) about giving women proper credit.

While I do love getting to the truth of these stories, I just wish there weren't so many of them.

Silent Sky - Theatreworks, Mountain View performance

This past weekend, NASA Kepler scientist Natalie Batalha spoke at the "Leading Ladies" program for Theatreworks in Mountain View, discussing the roles of women in science history, the precious few in astronomy fields, and how far we have come in encouraging girls to trust their obvious abilities in STEM areas -- before society trains them to believe they "shouldn't" have any.

Following her spirited presentation was a performance of "Silent Sky" by Lauren Gunderson, a powerful play based on the life of Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921). I cried for the beauty and wonder of science at the end. (I think the last time I cried in a theatre, Spock had just died at the end of Star Trek II.)

After earning her bachelor's at Radcliffe, Henrietta Leavitt was one of the early women "computers" hired by Harvard, to document stars. With the largest "Great Refractor" telescope of the day, Edward C. Pickering captured star fields on glass photographic plates, which were then turned over to the women for measurements and exhaustive, meticulous records.

The so-called "Pickering's Harem" in the 1890s.
In reality? ASTRONOMERS.

Enduring indignities of being called "Pickering's Harem" or simply being denied use of telescopes to sit in the "girl's area" to work on men's research projects instead of their own, Henrietta and her co-workers nonetheless made their share of crucial contributions and discoveries.

Three characters are craftily brought to life against the historical backdrop of turn-of-the-century astronomical technology, Einstein's famed 1905 publishing of special relativity, and the first ringing telephone:

Williamina Fleming catalogued more than 10,000 stars, and her discoveries included 10 novae, 59 nebulae (including the famed Horsehead Nebula), 310 variable stars, and White Dwarfs.

Annie Jump Cannon catalogued 230,000+ stars, designed the stellar classification system in the Draper catalog (still used today!), and remains the only single female to win the Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.

Henrietta Leavitt, holding at arm's length all the pressures to be married and bear children instead of earn a living, was known for staying up all hours to study the finer points of the Magellanic Cloud, comparing the brightness of 2,000+ stars.  Resulting from this work, Henrietta's most prominent triumph was discovering a relationship between the period and luminosity of classical Cepheid stars (published in 1908, and again with further evidence in 1912).

Her discovery would change all of astronomy.

These women were paid less than the Harvard secretaries of the era, and a mere fraction of what the male astronomers made.

Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt
Harvard College Observatory (HCO), 1918

The enduring friendship of all the women through the years came alive on stage, with some poetic license, but artfully illustrating both their blatant and subtle struggles in the male-dominated workplace, at a time when women were also aiming at the right to vote.  The humorous highlight of the play for me was when a suffragette capitalized on a line callback about bloomers by passing that fashion entirely, and being bold enough to wear (gasp!) PANTS. 

Today, Leavitt's accomplishments can hardly be over-stated, and the message of the play was clear: no amount of gender bias can quell natural passion and curiosity. They will shine through. Natalie Batalha's words rang in my ears again and again through this riveting theatrical portrayal of women who had paved the way for us: "The spirit of exploration has no gender."

Leavitt's discovery, now simply referred to as the "Period-Luminosity Relation," would prove repeatedly to be the foundation for our modern understanding of cosmological distances.

Silent Sky - Credit to Theatreworks

Edwin Hubble acknowledged his use of Henrietta Leavitt's work, though in his own paper, credited not the woman who had actually done all the precision work, but one of the advisers at Harvard (who insisted "his interpretation" of Leavitt's discovery was more important than her decades of actual findings). And of course, you'll notice whose house is a National Historic Landmark and who has a namesake space telescope.  Hint: Not Henrietta Leavitt.

Hubble later claimed Leavitt indeed deserved a Nobel Prize, and she may very well have received one, had she not perished from cancer before this could be accomplished. Of her own 35 academic papers, most were published posthumously.  And while Henrietta does have Asteroid 5383 named for her, I think it's time for an observatory named after a woman astronomer.

Also, Lauren Gunderson deserves a comet.