A Small Neighborhood in Fornax

My last post was about an image I created using FITS data I got from SkyView. Here's an image from NASA showing a larger view of the same region in space. This is a small area in the celestial sphere, spanning only one minute of arc. It's located in the constellation Fornax, which occupies an area of 398 square degrees. The name Fornax comes from the French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, who first formed this constellation and called it Fornax Chimiae ("chemical furnace").

The constellation Fornax can be seen from the southern sky, but the stars and galaxies shown in the image above cannot be seen with the naked eye. They are in what's known as a "dark field," a region where there is not much background radiation. By surveying such regions with the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are able to detect and study faint galaxies in the early universe to learn more about how galaxies evolve.

FITS Liberator Image from 03h32m29.3s, -27d44m10.0s (J2000)

This is an image I created today using the FITS Liberator with data obtained from SkyView. What you're seeing is an area of deep space that was surveyed by the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (HST ACS). I got the FITS data by giving SkyView the coordinates 03h32m29.3s, -27d44m10.0s (J2000 co-ordinate system) and specifying regions .02 degrees in size.

To get a color image, I downloaded three sets of FITS data, each covering the same area of space, but with different filters for wavelength. Using the FITS Liberator, I converted each data set into a TIFF image. I then loaded the TIFF images in to Adobe Photoshop to make a stack of three layers and gave a different color (i.e. red, green, blue) to each layer. After making some curves adjustments, I got the image you see above.

Making this image involved a series of subjective judgements, first in managing the dynamic ranges of images with the FITS Liberator, and then in tweaking curves in Photoshop. So the image you see should be considered an artistic rendering of astronomical data rather than a "snapshot" of outer space. I did, however, try to keep the colors basically "natural" by assigning blue to the shortest frequency filter, red to the highest frequency, and green to the one in the middle.

When looking at my image, you may be wondering if there's a way to describe the part of space it shows other than by the coordinates I've provided. I was wondering that too, at first!  I've never taken a class in astronomy, and I understand less than half of what I read on the subject. However, I'm fascinated by astrophotography. So my approach to learning about astronomy has been to find interesting images and then try to understand what they show. If you're an astronomy buff, you may know what my image shows. Otherwise, you're going to have to wait for me to post more information.

The Asymmetric Internet

As the Internet was opened to commercial use in the 1990s, access became available to people outside of academic and research organizations. Various companies -- large and small, local and national -- began to offer dial-up access to the Internet for people who wanted to exchange information by such methods as email, newsgroups, file sharing and online chat. This information sharing typically involved a mix of "upstream" and "downstream" data transfer between users and ISPs. For example, when user A sent user B an email message, information went upstream to A's ISP (X), across the Internet to B's ISP (Y), and then downstream to B. When user B sent an email reply, information was sent in the opposite direction.

The dial-up connections that people used to share information across the Internet in this way were symmetric, in that they were able to transmit data between the user and their ISP both upstream and downstream with equal facility. The same was true for the higher-speed telecom connections between IPSs. In the early days of the Internet, these symmetric connections were intended to facilitate long-distance collaborations in which the various participants all had information and ideas to share.

As the Internet grew and evolved, people began to feel constrained by the data transfer speeds of dial-up connections. As DSL and cable connections became available, they were rapidly adopted by those seeking greater bandwidth. These new technologies were deployed, in most cases, to provide higher data rates downstream than upstream, making them different from the telecom connections that had previously been used for Internet connections.

Today we have an Internet over which a small number of "content providers" send large amounts of data downstream to end users. Is this a natural evolution to which technology has adapted, or has the technology itself produced this result?

I understand that certain kinds of content are easier to consume than to produce, leading to a natural asymmetry in the proportion of writers to readers, performers to audience, etc. However, the skills and talents required to produce good content are, I believe, distributed around the globe. Furthermore, the kind of data that can be carried by the Internet can be used for many purposes. So my questions are these: If we had an Internet that gave us all a high-speed connection both upstream and downstream, would the way we use the Internet change? Would the Internet be used for two-way communication and collaboration more than it is today? Would more good writing, good photography, good music, good video, good ideas be available to us? Would innovators be stimulated to create new technologies and new applications?

Why do we have an asymmetric Internet? Is what we get based on what we want, or is what we seem to want based on what we get?

From Citizen to Consumer

The chart above, which I produced using the Google Ngram Viewer, shows how use of the term "citizen" has declined, while use of the term "consumer" has increased.

In the context of discussions about public policy, I prefer being referred to as a "citizen" rather than a "consumer." To me, the word "citizen" connotes an agent who acts and makes decisions within a matrix of rights, responsibilities and ethical values that's greater in scope than the economic decision matrix implied by the word "consumer." This is not to claim that people make consumer choices based on economic calculus alone, but rather to suggest that deviations from this calculus tend to be seen as just that -- deviations -- when the agents making choices are thought of as "consumers" rather than as "citizens."

However, the nuanced meaning of words and the cloud of associations they evoke change over time. In her book A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, Lizbeth Cohen discusses how the identification of American citizens as "consumers" shifted during the 20th century from a grounding in ideas of civic responsibility and democratic values to an insular emphasis on personal benefit. Such shifts in meaning can not only reflect change but also create it, as words have the ability to shape perceptions. (Cohen also has written a short article summarizing the main points of her book.)

In their book Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation, Justin Lewis, Sanna Inthorn and Karin Walh-Jorgenson describe the results of their research based on empirical data from 5,658 news stories that were published in Britain and in the United States. Stuart Allen, series editor, describes the book as follows:

"This book enters squarely into the current controversy about the declining number of people engaged in the conventional political process. Based on the first comprehensive study of the way citizens are represented in the news, it provides powerful evidence that while the news media may not be responsible for this decline, they are doing little to help remedy it. Although many people do have clear ideas about politics and matters of public policy, the authors argue, the news media are much more likely to present citizens as passive, incoherent or or disengaged. Their research into news reporting suggests that the idea of the citizen has been more or less eclipsed by the figure of the consumer. So while we hear a great deal about the 'consumer confidence' on which economies depend, we hear very little about the 'citizen confidence' on which democracies depend."

Perhaps it's time to reverse the trend and bring the word "citizen" back into our daily discourse.

Orion Nebula

Photo Credit:  Jim de Lillo and the ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator

Jim de Lillo created this stunning image of the Orion Nebula from three 120-second exposures he took using the Lightbucks Remote Telescope Network LB-0004 in Pingelly, Australia.

The Pink Planet

Artist's conception of GJ 504b
Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

Planets are hard to "see" because they orbit around stars that are much bigger and brighter. For this reason, most of the planets we know of outside our own solar system have been detected and studied using measurements and mathematics.

In recent years, though, it's become increasingly possible to detect certain kinds of planets from the direct observations of scientific telescopes, which can use filters to capture infrared radiation and turn it into visible images.

The planet GJ 504b, dubbed the "pink planet" was recently imaged in this way using infrared observations from the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Most of the planets observed so far by direct imaging have been large and relatively far away from the sun they orbit. The pink planet fits that description, but it currently holds the record for being the least massive planet observed in this way. Even so, it's a large planet like Jupiter.  It's that similarity to Jupiter together with its distance from its sun that makes GJ 504b interesting to astronomers.

If planets like Jupiter form within the gas disc of a young star, as many astronomers have believed, then you'd expect to find such planets no farther away from their sun that the planet Neptune is from our sun -- a distance of 30 AU (astronomical units). Contrary to this prediction, GJ 504b is estimated to be 43.5 AU from its sun. That's difficult to explain with any of the current theories about how planets are formed.

What's easier to explain is why GJ 504b is pink. It's part of a relatively new solar system that was formed only ~160 million years ago, making it 30 times younger than our earth, so the planet is still cooling down. It's lost some of its heat, making it cooler than other planets that have been directly imaged, but it's still hot enough to have a magenta glow.

The Blue Planet

Artist's conception of HD 189733b.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Kornmesser

If you are in a good stargazing location near the 40th parallel north on a summer night, you may be able to see a faint constellation known as Vulpecula located within the triangle formed by the stars Deneb, Vega and Altair. If you have a telescope or a good set of binoculars, you might be able to see a binary star system that astronomers refer to as HD 189733.

One of the stars in this binary system, which is a mere 63 light-years or so from earth, has a planet designated as HD 189733b. This planet, which was discovered in 2005, is a gas giant that orbits close to it's sun. Planets of this type are sometimes called "hot Jupiters," and HD 189733b has been an object of study because it's the closest planet of this type that we know.

According to NASA & ESA, the sun-facing side of this planet is a furnace, with surface temperatures reaching nearly 2000°F and glass "rain" blowing sideways in up to 4,500-mph winds. It seems unlikely that life could exist under these conditions, yet this planet has provided information that's relevant to the question of whether life may exist on outside our solar system. HD 189733b was the first exoplanet on which water was detected (see NASA JLP article "Steaming Hot Planet" for details), and water is deemed essential for the survival of lifeforms as we know them. In addition to having significant amounts of water vapor, the atmosphere of HD 189733b has been found to contain oxygen, carbon dioxide and the organic compound methane (see NASA/ESA article "Hubble finds carbon dioxide on an extrasolar planet" . If these substances are common on planets outside our solar system, we may someday find them on planets similar to our earth in size and distance from their sun.

HD 189733b has recently been in the news because of it's color. What's special about the color of this planet is that we now know it. Planets are difficult to "see" in the usual sense, so scientists discovered the color in this case from careful measurements and logical inference. If you're interested in knowing more about how this was done, you can read the details in the new release "Hubble spots azure blue planet."