MUSIC IS MY SOUL

The Carnival of Space #91 is hosted this week by Brian Wang at the Next Big Future blog.


Nextbigfuture is the Lifeboat Foundation Technology Research News Website. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.

The Carnival is back on track after the train wreck of last week.

Fortunately, this week's host, Emily Lakdawalla, at the Planetary Society Blog, was able to step up at the last minute and host the affair.

She's done a great job of organizing all the submissions into one cohesive page of entertaining and enlightening articles on space and astronomy.

So head on over to the Carnival of Space for this week, and be sure to come back next week when the Carnival will be hosted here on Simostronomy.

Next week is a conference I have been excited about attending for a long time. It's an entire week devoted to my specialty, cataclysmic variables. The list of attendees is a literal who's who of CV research.

The conference is called Wild Stars in the Old West II. This special get together doesn't come around that often. I wouldn't miss it for the world.


From the website:

"It has been ten years since the last North American Workshop on Cataclysmic Variables and nearly five years since the last international meeting on cataclysmic variables and their kin. Of particular interest since these last meetings are new results based on observational platforms such as GALEX, Spitzer, Chandra, XMM INTEGRAL and Swift/BAT, large surveys such as SDSS and planned Pan-STARRS and LSST, smaller but equally important surveys such as All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS), Catalina Sky Survey, �Pi of the Sky�, ROTSE, results from large aperture ground-based telescopes, theoretical advances, and evolutionary relationships of CVs to other binary stars."

I plan to blog about the proceedings and talks, and I'm taking a digital audio recorder to do some one on one interviews with some of the leaders in CV research. These will be turned into podcasts for Slacker Astronomy and Restless Universe.

Sunday is a travel day, and the welcome get together in Tucson. Monday, the real stuff begins. Check back for updates next week.

Yeehaw!

Carnival of Space #97 has been done on a shoestring budget over at the Cheap Astronomy blog site.

Cheap Astronomy is a site all about exploring the universe with your eyes, a pair of binoculars or one of those out-of-the box department store telescopes. Everything on the site is aimed at people who want to do real astronomy for $300 or less.


The contributions to this week's carnival feature Mars quite a bit. There are also some fascinating pieces on space telescopes, Titan, the space station and space shuttle. The Simostronomy contribution this week is the interview with Martin Ratcliffe.

Enjoy the ride. Admission is free. It doesn't get any cheaper than that!

Ian O'Neill of Astroengine.com has put together a monster of a Carnival, Carnival of Space #96. This may be an all time record for number of posts in a single Carnival of Space.

He seems to be in good spirits in spite of the extra work he had to do to piece this large ensemble of blogs together for the Carnival this week. I give him credit for his creative approach to this week's collection. Each blog is introduced as a question. The answers you'll find if you dig a little deeper and read each piece.

As I hear it, he plans to feature this carnival and the excellent articles in it on his radio show Astroengine LIVE on Wednesday.

There is no Simostronomy article in the carnival this week. I've been busy with the Martin Ratcliffe Interview piece, blogs on Wild Stars in the Old West, launching a new Cataclysmic Variable Star section for the AAVSO and recording podcasts for Slacker Astronomy and 365 Days of Astronomy. So, no apologies here.

More on the Slacker Astronomy podcast later. For now, check out Carnival of Space #96.

The Carnival of Space, brought to you by Fraser Cain of Universe Today, has reached a milestone. Today's carnival is the 100th weekly collection of astronomy and space science blogs.

This week's host is the One Minute Astronomer. The philosophy behind One-Minute Astronomer is simple: to help you build your knowledge and appreciation of astronomy, one small step at a time. The One Minute Astronomer blog features short articles on all aspects of astronomy.

Simostronomy will be back on a regular basis soon. The storms that keep knocking us back into the Stone Age should stop any day now. We've got some interesting stars to talk about and will be blogging from the SAS/AAVSO joint meeting in Big Bear, CA in May.