1. Discovery of two new moons of Pluto (www.boulder.swri.edu/plutonews)
2. Tobias Owen described Saturn's big moon Titan as a Peter Pan world, which won't grow up. It is a fiercely frozen flammable analog of the early Earth, and very different from Mars now (fully oxidized).
1. The Milky Way galaxy is swallowing (merging with) a small galaxy. Its stars were discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data (skyserver.sdss.org) statistically by their common motions. There have been several other small galaxies found previously merging with our galaxy.
2. Jim Gunn (Princeton) was the Russell Lecturer (highest honor from the AAS) He spoke on his half-century in cosmology, and the big gains in our understanding (galaxies to quasars to dark matter). He also warned that we were not training and nurturing high quality instrument builders.
3. Nergis Mavalvala told how LIGO, GEO (Germany), and TAMA (Japan) are searching for gravitational waves in space. (www.ligo.caltech.edu)
4. James Cronin described a huge project being built in Argentina to detect the highest energy cosmic rays. They use fly's eyes, Tyvek, photomultiplier tubes, Cherenkov light from air shower cascades, and pure water. (www.auger.org)
1. Mike Griffin (new head of NASA) spoke on the plan to send humans to the Moon and then on to Mars. There is not enough benefit/cost to put astronomical telescopes on the Moon unless you are already committed to going there for some other reason. Well, now we are. So, someone should submit plans to build optical and radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon.
2. His boyhood book, A Child's Guide to Stars by Barlow, was taken on a space shuttle mission.
3. Robotic repair of the Hubble Space Telescope is NOT possible in the time available.
1. National Virtual Observatory (us-vo.org), lots of data, now available via a common query format
2. Sloan Digital Sky Survey data (skyserver.sdss.org), lots of data now
3. Small telescopes are workhorses in monitoring variability of stars, quasars, and asteroids
4. Frank Melsheimer, DFM, had good ideas on observatory design (www.dfmengineering.com)
5. Join a listserv for small observatories and equipment repair advice (chestnut.conncoll.edu/mailman/listinfo/smobseng) organized by Leslie Brown of Connecticut College.
6. Carl Wieman's group has written some nice animations for teaching physics. (phet.colorado.edu)
1. Einstein's field equations without tensors by Emory Ted Bunn and John Baez (math.ucr.edu/home/baez/einstein)
2. One of the most interesting talks was Cheri Morrow's Astrojazz (www.astrojazz.org) which she has presented at the Fiske planetarium in Denver.
3. A nanosecond ruler is 30 cm long (almost 1 foot).
4. The smallest mass extrasolar planet is only 6-8 times the mass of the Earth (exoplanets.org)
5. Planetary nebulae have organized magnetic fields inside, tangled ones at the edge.