Can you name the galaxy featured on the AMBB's drum kit?
One of the reasons I attended the annual conference of the Astronomical League last month was to catch the performance of the Astronomy Magazine Blues Band at the League’s awards banquet on the final day of the event. The band, led by drummer and Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher, was a lot of fun, playing a first set that was rock oriented and a second focused on more bluesy numbers. I gave the sets thumbs up in my dispatch from ALCon.
Now for those of you who weren’t fortunate enough to see it in person, the AMBB now has a video site on YouTube. The first two tracks are posted: covers of the CCR standard “Green River” and the Tom Petty tune “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” As noted on Eicher’s blog, Dave’s Universe, the videos were shot and edited by his son Chris Eicher, who is 19 and a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Chris is studying chemistry (not astronomy, journalism, music, or film!) We wonder if the band got any product-placement revenue for the Pepsi that appears in the “Green River” video—especially given that the conference was near Chicago, home of Green River soda!
I share the videos below for your viewing pleasure.
In what is arguably the nation’s greatest engineering achievement in space, NASA‘s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed safely on Mars a little after 10:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time Sunday. Because of the distance from Earth to Mars and the time it takes communication to travel between the two, we didn’t know until 14 minutes after it happened that a complicated landing plan worked.
Alice Enevoldsen of Alice’s Astro Info, a NASA Solar System Ambassador, hosted a gathering at the Kenney in West Seattle to watch NASA TV coverage of the landing. “This has already happened,” Enevoldsen said of the time delay. “It’s just like the NBC Olympics!” she quipped.
More than 50 people attended the event, and the tension was palpable in the viewing room. Here’s Seattle Astronomy video from the landing:
“Shake hands with the person next to you,” Enevoldsen said after the landing was confirmed. “That crazy landing maneuver worked!”
The Curiosity landing has at least one big Washington state connection. Rob Manning, flight system chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, attended high school in Burlington and is a 1980 graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla. Coincidentally, Enevoldsen also is a Whitman alum.
Mars fans gather after the successful landing of "Curiosity" to check out model rovers and Mars maps to learn more about the science mission. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
It’s interesting and encouraging that the landing drew such a crowd late on a warm summer Sunday evening. While a number of those who attended are residents of the Kenney, a retirement community in West Seattle, local media such as the West Seattle Blog and Seattle Astronomy spread the word, and many visitors attended as well. After the excitement of the landing many of the attendees gathered around a table set up with model rovers—including some made from Lego blocks—and looked at maps of Mars with the various spacecraft landing sites marked. Enevoldsen fielded questions from many of those in attendance.
We understand there was a good crowd at the Mars Fest at the Museum of Flight as well.
It’s encouraging to see the interest in the mission and the excitement about the successful landing. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was clearly both relieved and elated with the successful landing. The mission is a pricey one, at $2.5 billion, and a crash landing would have been demoralizing to say the least. Afterwards Bolden, speaking to the NASA TV audience, called it “a huge day for the American people.” National pride aside, it has to be good for NASA to pull off a big success in these days of shrinking budgets. Energizing the public and impressing the folks with the purse strings can only help.
Getting to Mars was the hard part; now Curiosity and its arsenal of scientific instruments can go about the business of poking around Mars for evidence that our neighbor planet has supported or could support life.
