My new ventures.

[M16]

I don't post much about my personal life here, and I figure this will probably be one of the very rare exceptions to that.

I've recently begun to do research alongside a professor at my school with the Hubble Space Telescope. We're taking images of certain areas of interest, and attempting to locate any galaxies that may be host to a gamma-ray burst. Using the information we receive, we are going to catalog our findings and publish them for the astronomical world to see.

Gamma-ray bursts are the results of the explosions of very large stars. Locating these helps us locate other star-forming regions elsewhere in the universe. And that's just super badass.

[Alpha]

Where exactly is the room for discussion here?

And... do you.. have access to the Hubble Space Telescope... from your school?

[M16]

Well the people that have the immediate access to the HST are located at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. My school sends a request to them, asking them to take a certain exposure at a certain location. They then forward the images to us to reduce and decipher. It's pretty rad stuff.

And the discussion could arise if people were interested or curious as to the implications of certain findings.

[Che]

Have you found any evidence of intelligent life?

[Govinda]

Can I have your babies? Or was there another reason for flaunting it?

[RagnaToad]

Can I have your babies? Or was there another reason for flaunting it?

My thoughts exactly.

Except for the baby.

Cause I don't want to have his.

And I can't.

Anyways, I think we've established that the purpose of this thread is somewhat hard to figure out.

[M16]

Of course I wanted to flaunt it. There's something wrong with that?

[Jin]

I once won a staring contest with a fish. Discuss.

[Jeordam]

Have you found out anything of note yet? Any un-discovered star clusters or anything? I often wonder that if we (as humans) last that long, will we be able to travel the stars like in "Star Trek"? And then when/if we finally do...will these stars have the same names that we are giving them now?

When you are looking at stuff from Hubble, is it mostly pictures, or is it mostly...digital?...data (as in numbers/code/binary)? I've seen data from powerful telescopes before, and it can be in both. Learning to interprate it is often a difficult thing to learn.

If you find out anything cool, let me now. I love space stuff....

~Jeordam