Bringing the universe to the community, a Western News article by Jesse Tahirali.

My Magic Room video.

A remarkable video, full of whimsy, landscapes, colour, and music.  By the end of the video, both the door and room have taken on personalities of their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jukJsH5L-Ss#t=13

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the open house of Thursday, Feb. 27, 2014 has been cancelled.

The Physics and Astronomy department has been staging a small “Canada House” for viewing of some of the Olympic events.

Here, some of the fans are seen cheering for the Canadian women’s hockey gold medal victory.

Jimmy Walker, of San Antonio, Texas, has won three tournaments on the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) tour this year. He sits first atop the FedEx Cup standings for 2014.

Jimmy took up astrophotography about 5 years ago, and has his own web site, ‘Jimmy Walker AstroImaging’ which has a great URL of ‘darkskywalker.com‘

He has a setup in which he can remotely take astrophotographs via his smart phone, and thus can keep up his hobby as he travels the world playing golf.

This week he has teamed with Celestron at the Northern Trust Open in California.

On Sunday, 9 February 2014, Professor Peter Brown gave a talk to the Royal Canadian Institute (RCI) for the Advancement of Science entitled “The Chelyabinsk Airburst Decoded: Impact Hazards from Small Asteroids”. This talk was co-sponsored by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Toronto Centre.

The abstract of Peter’s talk is as follows;

“The impact hazard from small asteroids is uncertain because of many poorly understood factors. These include how asteroids vapourize in the atmosphere together with the associated impact effects at the ground. The Chelyabinsk event gave scientists their first detailed instrumental data on a well observed, damage-producing airburst. I will describe what we have learned about the Chelyabinsk airburst in the year since it occurred and what it may tell us about future impacts at the Earth.”

A webcast is available on the RCI Lectures for Winter-2014 web page. [unfortunately, it requires a potentially non-functional plugin for the Firefox browser]

However, a list of slides from the talk are available to view individually by clicking the ‘right’ arrow that is found on the top toolbar of the webcast page.

Beginning on Feb 14, 2014, NASA will run a four week seminar series on near-earth asteroids.

http://sservi.nasa.gov/agc-seminar-series/

Thanks to Jen Heidenheim for this info.

“Why the Earth is Flat” – a video, by Don Moorcroft.

Thanks to Tony Martinez for this information.

NASA now has the ISS live video feed available to the public.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/9408562