Aussie Tree Fern - Fractals in motion

Just thought I'd share this with you.

The Aussie Tree Fern is an amazing......thing....is it a tree? I guess so. In the Australian Bush they regularly get burned to a cinder by raging bush fires and then after the next shower, away they go again.

To buy one from a nursery, you have to check that they have an enviro sticker to make sure they are authorized for safe removal from a permitted area. They are amazing, you just bury the stump in the ground, no roots, nothing, then you just pour water over the top of it until it sprouts into life.

It is the most amazing transition to watch the beautiful green leaves shoot out of it, in one of the finest displays of fractals in Nature.

I had a lot of fun taking images every half hour for nearly two days. The hardest part was the focus drifted a little due to the sun light changing from shot to shot, as the camera was on auto focus. In hindsight I guess I should have manually focused the shots. I would love to have kept it going all week - but some of us have jobs ;-)

Enjoy 2 days in 8 seconds.

Paradigm shifts and Astronomy

Paradigms shift from the edge, not from the middle! It wasn't the hot-air balloonists that invented powered flight it was two bicycle makers that wanted to take the exhilaration of the wind in their face to the next level.

Amidst the raw emotion of the terrible things we have seen this week, and yet the strengthened hope created by people coming together around a common cause, and sense of community - we see education funding and budgetary pressure conspiring against the things that can also bring us together: understanding and expanded knowledge.

All across the world we are seeing external issues of sovereign risk, budget deficits, GFC cutbacks, the currency wars, fluctuating commodity prices pushing in on the Education Sector. The "do more with less" principle of the 2=20 mantras (cut 20% over 2 years) of old world consultants can no longer wring any moisture from the dry rag. Productivity is the key, and crowd-sourcing turns the entire equation on its head - DOING MORE WITH MORE!

Whilst many disagreed with Paul Zane Pilzer's 1990 "abundant wealth" approach that stated Technology was the ultimate multiplier that could finally over come Keynes' scarcity of resources, it is exactly this abundance principle that is driving Planetary Resources to reach out and mine asteroids, as presumably asteroids are outside the "closed system" of earths scarce resources and abundantly plentiful. So lets stop right there, before we take it to the ultimate end point of creating gravity tractors filled with anti-mining protestors, unwittingly towing asteroids around while they complain about all the new worlds that won't be seeded. (Come on....we need a little light-hearted material in such a difficult week - my 18 year old, budding science fiction author son, thought that was hilarious)

This is starting to sound dangerously like an opinion piece (and we know how dangerous it can be to have an opinion with all this freedom of speech around) so lets get back to the facts! ;-)

This week Dr Pamela Gay, someone who is one of the greatest thought-leaders in "getting more from more", made an impassioned plea to not lump all her funding for "new paradigm" astronomy education and science research in with "old world" budgetary consolidation and cutbacks. As seen in the diagram above we know the University Model is under extraordinary pressure, so why would you kill the goose who is laying the golden egg of a new era of crowd-engaged science research and education.

Go with me on this:
* Universities are under pressure
* Money is scarce
* Math and Science literacy standards are declining

And yet

* The STEM curriculum has been put in place
* Social media and online collaboration are driving new communities of interest
* There are torrents of data "left over" from many science projects
* People are enjoying engaging with good communicators who can explain the wonders around us
* The good communicators are plugging energetic citizen scientists into quality projects
* Citizen scientists are being rewarded with the richest of gifts - a sense of community and belonging

Much of this activity in time will be self-sustaining. Uwingu was set up for exactly this purpose, to use social media and crowd-sourcing to raise money for science research. They have been running a naming competition for exo-planet Alpha Centauri Bb where people can spend $1 to vote for their favourite planet name. They have exercised their due diligence and pointed out there is no guarantee the names will ever stick and have made it a "fun thing" and of course people's competitive spirit has kicked in.

The result has been a modest success, but still a great boundary pushing exercise, that has produced some fantastic potential names and raised over $6000 USD that will go towards science research.

The competition closes on April 22nd and there is still time to participate in the fun and help fund science research. Each planet carries a Citation that details the thinking behind the nomination and these are well worth a read, as many are well thought out and significant to science, sci-fi authors, and famous scientists and astronauts. I have nominated Citizen Science as my contribution, although I was tempted to nomiate "The Australian Labor Party" as they seem to be on a very different planet, also cutting another $2.3 BILLION (Aud) out of University education funding this week.

My citation for Citizen Science Reads:

Citizen Science is a term for leveraging the power of "the crowd" to process torrents of scientific data by leveraging the extra effort of "science aware" citizens through social media. Citizen Scientists are engaged to tap their enthusiasm for science and provide a faster and more innovative path to science goals by sorting and categorizing data and highlighting points of interest that professional scientists can explore with greater depth.

Citizen Science is currently coming 6th behind the first three placeholders of Rakhat, Caleo and Amara.

Rakhat is the planet at the center of Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow", a first contact novel about a Jesuit mission to the first identified inhabited planet. Caleo (pronounced ka.le.o) is Latin for "I am warm or hot" also figuratively "I am warm, new or fresh", again a very suitable name for a planet that is clearly not in the Goldilocks Zone.

All this of course has been predictably poo-hoo-ed by the IAU who this week issued a press release assuring people they are doing their money.

Once again they miss the point, people who band together around a community of interest and put their money on the table for the common good, are creating new business models, and new methods are getting "more done with more". Once upon a time, we called these types of organizations co-ops. The Dairy Co-Ops of 30-40 years ago have been monstered by market economics, but the community spirit and sense of belonging that under pins much of our human need lives on.

Dr Pamela Gay has the most marketable commodity of all in her skillset - the ability to answer endless questions that are never treated as silly, and communicate science in a way that makes you want to be part of it. After 30 years of corporate life, my interest in Astronomy and in particular exo-planets was re-engaged by a seemly silly statement - "we will find a water world just waiting for a B Grade movie to be filmed on it". That statement was made by Pamela on a podcast - new media - reaching fresh faces through the new economic platform of the iTunes store.

What an impact that one "silly" statement has had: My telescope now does over 60 hours of science every month, it is a vital part of H06 the "Top 30" asteroid hunting Observatory run by iTelescope.net, is used by Universities from Seoul to our friends in Boston, and I have been graciously included as a co-author on two science papers, due to my own observations.

LESSON: People WILL engage and contribute for the greater good, enabling science and education to do "more with more". Resources are abundant if you know how to gather people, leverage the crowd, and keep their strengths aligned to the goals of a community. Dr Pamela Gay and her amazing staff will prevail! The real question is will NASA be the beneficiaries or the spectators as this happens.

Astronomy's Paradigm is shifting - FAST! Are you going to make it happen, watch it happen, or wonder what happened!

Please support them at Cosmoquest.

Vote for Citizen Science at uwingu.com

Further reading: Astroswanny's great article on Astronomy 3.0 in the December 2012 newsletter of Variable Stars South.

Surfs Up for Burrunan Dolphins!

Today, a break from our usual Astronomy fare with a great video that is still somewhat related to science.

Having a short breather for our hard working students, we found ourselves on a deserted beach watching one of natures most exhilarating spectacles - Dolphins surfing!

The Pod of common bottlenose dolphins look positively pedestrian compared to the pod of Burrunan Dolphins (Tursiops Australis) that crashed the party and livened things up - A LOT!

Burrunan Dolphins were only identified as a separate species by Dr Kate Charlton-Robb as recently as 2011. They are found only in Port Phillip Bay and the Gippsland Lakes and are very rare with a known population of only 150, and only 50 of those in the Gippsland Lakes area. Little did we know whilst watching the free show, that these were very special dolphins.

On one very spectacular breach, I caught the sight of the white sides and tummy, thinking at the time that maybe there was a small Orca/Killer Whale out the back of the pack - I took a closer look at the footage when I got home, and thought - Hmmm I haven't seen any "black and white" dolphins before. So I started having a look around to see how many species of dolphins there were in Victoria, and found that this sounded like the new species that had been identified recently.

I took a couple of freeze frames off the video and sent them to Dr Kate and voila - some very special video footage indeed.

Burrunan Dolphins have a white side and underneath that comes up over the eye. In the video you can clearly see a number of them upside down under the wave crest, flashing their white tummies in the water like torpedoes. They are also known for their spectacular aerials which is clearly evident in the video.

We watched them for over 30 minutes, taking 10-20 mins to fish followed by catching a couple of waves then moving out to the fishing grounds again. We observed 2-3 full cycles of this behavior. It was a stunning day, on the outgoing tide in mild conditions.

So it was very far cry from "So long and thanks for all the fish" - these dolphins were having a ball and weren't going anywhere.

Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) Update

I will be following this fairly closely now, as most of the northern scopes are out of action as its too low to the horizon in the northern hemisphere now, but still high in the southern hemisphere.

Where else would you go but to Siding Spring itself and the 0.5m planewave at iTelescope.net.

This image was taken last night and shows a 3-4 arc-sec tail, still not much more than a fuzzy dot.