Outreach

When living in Chicago I was a regular speaker for KICP Saturdays at Adler Planetarium’s Space Visualization Lab.  If you’re in the area Adler is worth the trip. Come visit and be sure to bring lots of questions!  There are a lot of great speakers: check out this link to see who will be speaking at Adler soon.

There’s also a fantastic (and free) desktop planetarium software package I generate content for called WorldWide Telescope (WWT) (http://worldwidetelescope.org/), presented by the American Astronomical Society.  It offers a huge selection of real astronomical data in various observing bands across much of the night sky.  

WWT also has a web-based client that works right in your internet browser: http://worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/.  While exploring all the great astronomical data available to the public through WWT, you can also use the client to study the SPTpol data set, a series of maps of the microwave sky taken with the South Pole Telescope between 2013 and 2015.  Not only did we map how bright the microwave sky is (its temperature), but we also mapped the direction the microwave light was waving (its polarization). To access the data in WWT, click on "Explore," "Open," "Collection...," then paste in the URLs from the following links to go straight to the SPTpol maps.  (You can right-click and "copy link address" to obtain the URLs.) . Once the data are loaded, click on the thumbnail in the upper left corner, and then navigate the sky by clicking and dragging. The SPT data are centered at coordinates RA0Hr, Dec-57.5 (check out the bottom right of the screen for a mini-map of where you’re currently pointing).

1. SPTpol 150 GHz Temperature map (color)

2. SPTpol 150 GHz Temperature map (B/W)

3. SPTpol 150 GHz E-mode polarization map (color)

4. SPTpol 150 GHz E-mode polarization map (B/W)

5. SPTpol 150 GHz Stokes Q polarization map (color)

6. SPTpol 150 GHz Stokes Q polarization map (B/W)

7. SPTpol 150 GHz Stokes U polarization map (color)

8. SPTpol 150 GHz Stokes U polarization map (B/W)

You can compare an SPTpol map to other astronomical data by setting it as a "foreground image."  Just right-click on the SPTpol map thumbnail in the top-left and then click on "Set as foreground image."  Then open up any other set of data (for example, try one of the Planck all-sky maps), right-click on its thumbnail, and click "Set as background image."  There will be a cross-fade slider on the bottom of the screen that lets you fade back and forth between the data sets.  Can you find similar features and/or objects between SPTpol and other astronomical data? Do SPTpol and Planck see the same features? The video below is a pre-recorded tour of the SPTpol data in WWT, comparing it directly to the Planck survey in the same patch of sky. SPTpol has ~ 7 times the angular resolution of Planck, so much smaller structures are resolved. Many of the small bright points of light are actually active galactic nuclei (black holes!) in faraway galaxies. And the small dark spots are galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally-bound objects in the universe!