A Day at Wadi Elhitan

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Alaa Ibrahim Nov 2009

 For several years, Prof. Alaa Ibrahim (Observatory Director at the Zewail City of Science and Technology) has been taking his students out of the teeming metropolis of Giza and into the deep desert.  Their destination, Wadi Al-Hitan National Park, is best known for its amazing fossils of ancient whales that roamed this area some 40 million years ago, when much of Egypt was completely under water.  The remoteness of this site also endows the place with night skies that are essentially free of light pollution.  For many of Prof. Ibrahim’s students, this venture into the desert was their first opportunity to view planets, constellations, and the Milky Way in a pristine dark sky.  With the aid of large portable telescopes that were deployed on-site, they also got to view star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies.  These combined experiences were in many ways transformative to the students.  I hope that you will find their personal reflections (below) as heartwarming and inspiring as I do. – William H. Waller

How the Earth Got its Water

William H. Waller Ph.D.

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 Water has been identified in the most uncanny of places – as vapors in the nebulae that roam our Milky Way Galaxy, as ices in the protoplanetary disks that surround many protostars, and as liquids below the icy crusts of the Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft imaged geysers of liquid water erupting from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The liquid form of water is especially important to biotic processes, as it provides an essential solvent for making the sundry hookups and energy transfers that are necessary to life.

Our Elusive Milky Way

William H. Waller Ph.D.

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 For 25 years as an astronomy educator, I have informally polled hundreds of students, teachers, and the general public regarding their awareness of the night sky. Invariably, no more than 25 percent have ever seen the Milky Way with their own eyes.

Naked-eye Exoplanet Host Stars

Michael Deneen Ph.D. & William H. Waller Ph.D.

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 Reports of new exoplanets are an almost daily occurrence. But how many can you point to in the night sky? The authors have put together a table of a few dozen naked-eye host stars for you to share.

Galactic and Extragalactic Astronomy: an Introduction

William H. Waller Ph.D.

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 Amateur telescopes can reveal thousands of other galaxies in those sections of the sky that are sufficiently far from the Milky Way’s congested disk. The digital images of elliptical, spiral, irregular, and interacting galaxies that these “citizen scientists” can now obtain surpass the best images obtained professionally just 25 years ago.