Archive for the ‘Sun and Stars’ Category
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
What is going on with the sun these days since it has been in an unusually deep and long minimum period? How are astronomers discovering and describing distant stars that are close twins of the sun and what astonishing possibilities are these discoveries telling them about our own star? How ...
Posted in Research, Solar activity cycle, Sun and Climate, Sun and Stars | No Comments »
Friday, August 1st, 2008
After a 7-month hiatus during which we rebuilt our entire spectrograph system downstream of the cameras, we are again operational and observing the long-term behavior of the Sun and its closest stellar cousins.
In January 2008, the old camera electronics on the Solar-Stellar Spectrograph died after 17 years of hard service. ...
Posted in Friends of Lowell, Lowell outreach, Research, Sun and Climate | No Comments »
Friday, April 4th, 2008
We have two special Sunday evening events in April. In both cases, we're open from 5:30 PM - 9:30 PM and the cost is $6 per adult; $5 per senior, college student or AAA member; $3 per youth (ages 5-17). Reservations are not needed.
April 6, Spring Break Star Fest. This ...
Posted in Lowell outreach, Research, Stargazing, Sun and Climate, Sun and Stars | No Comments »
Monday, March 10th, 2008
Or, "Everything you wanted to know about stellar chromospheres but were afraid to ask."
I received an invite about a year ago to write a review article on stellar chromospheres for the online, peer-reviewed journal Living Reviews in Solar Physics. It was published today, and you can find it here. ...
Posted in Research, Sun and Stars | No Comments »
Friday, February 8th, 2008
I'm back in Flagstaff from a thoroughly enjoyable meeting. In the second full day of talks, the speakers concentrated on processes causing solar variability, and the significance of solar variability in forcing terrestrial climate. Here's a rundown of the main topics covered.
There was a nice discussion by Karel ...
Posted in Research, Solar activity cycle, Sun and Climate, Sun and Stars | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
As expected, this is turning out to be a very interesting meeting, and the SORCE principal investigator launched things in his introduction with a very provactive question: "Is the Modern Maximum Over?" He was referring to the period of generally increasingly strong solar cycles that has prevailed since ...
Posted in Solar activity cycle, Sun and Climate | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
Hi everyone,
I'm blogging this morning from the main meeting room at the SORCE (SOlar Radiation and Climate Experiment) Science meeting in Santa Fe, NM. SORCE is a satellite observatory that makes, among other things, measurements of the Sun's total brightness on an ongoing basis. The topic of ...
Posted in Research, Sun and Climate | No Comments »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I posted a few weeks ago that our solar-stellar research grant has just been renewed for three years. One of the proposed components of our new funding cycle is a greatly expanded Web site, and the proposal reviewers strongly encouraged us to follow through with that. So, over the ...
Posted in Research, Solar activity cycle, Sun and Climate, Sun and Stars | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Steele wrote a post about our big snowstorm a few weeks ago. The snow caused a number of power glitches, and one of them appears to have used up the last of our spectrograph's many lives. The charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and their associated electronics have been in use ...
Posted in Research, Sun and Stars | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Part of the point of the Lowell blog is to make some research topics and results available and accessible to all our readers, so here goes. I and my colleagues study the activity of the Sun and Sun-like stars, to better understand how our star varies relative to its ...
Posted in Solar activity cycle | 1 Comment »
