The CfA is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Cepheid period-luminosity relation on Nov 6, 2008. See http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/events/2008/leavitt/ for details.

[Update 10/03] For a nice introduction to the story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, listen to this Perimeter Institute talk by George Johnson: http://pirsa.org/06050003/

[Update 11/06] The full program is now available. The symposium begins at Noon today.

XMM-Newton talks again loud and clear

23 October 2008
XMM-Newton, ESA’s X-ray observatory, has re-established communication contact with Earth, showing that the spacecraft is safe and fully under control. The news was confirmed this morning by the mission control team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Radio contact was re-established on Wednesday 22 October around 18:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST). This followed an unexpected radio silence from the spacecraft which started on Saturday 18 October 2008 when XMM-Newton, coming out of a nominal period of non-radio visibility along its orbit around Earth, did not succeed in sending the expected signal to Earth.

Invitation to SLAC Summer Institute 2008

Dear Colleague,
We are writing to you about the 36th SLAC Summer Institute to be held Aug 4-15 this year on “Cosmic Accelerators”. This school was planned largely in anticipation of the GLAST mission, a highly successful collaboration involving astronomers and physicists from all around the world. (The proposal of its primary instrument, the Large Area Telescope or LAT, came from an international team led by Stanford, LAT integration and initial testing took place at SLAC, and LAT data are received at the Instrument Science Operation Center at SLAC for processing.) As you may have heard, GLAST was launched on June 11 and has been operating very well. It is planned to release the first-light information while the Institute is in session, and we anticipate the first important new science results over the next year, so this year’s Institute is very well timed. With its large leap in capabilities, GLAST will make breakthrough observations of many classes of high-energy cosmic sources and has a very large discovery window for signals of new phenomena, including indirect detection of dark matter.

As two of the co-Directors of the Institute we believe that this will be an unusually timely opportunity for students, postdocs and seasoned researchers who wish to expand their research area (no background in astrophysics is required) and learn about the exciting science of GLAST as well as recent advances in X-ray and TeV astronomy and cosmic-ray physics. Accordingly we have extended the deadline for early registration till July 31.

Please pass on information about the Institute, which can be found at
http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/ssi/2008/default.asp
Sincerely,
Roger Blandford
Tune Kamae

1. Hunting for Needles in Massive Astronomical Data Streams
   Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 4pm
   Room 330, 60 Oxford St.
   Ryan Scranton, Google Sky Team
2. Inside Google Sky
   Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 8pm
   Room 105, Emerson Hall
   Andrew Connolly, Google Sky Team
3. Sky in Google Earth
   Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 1pm
   Phillips Auditorium, 60 Garden
   Alberto Conti & Carol Christian, STScI

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Center for Astrostatistics, Pennsylvania State University (USA) are jointly organising an 8-day school in fundamental statistical inference as applicable to astrophysical problems during 9-16 July, 2008 (www.iiap.res.in/astrostat). The school is intended for practising astrophysics researchers at all levels. Details may be found on the website of the school.

For details, email astrostat at iiap.res.in

You will have to get there on your own steam, but local expenses will be taken care of by IIAp. Deadline for applications is April 10.

The meeting website is at: http://www.confcon.com/head2008/.The abstract submission deadline is January 25, 2008 (now past, but late abstracts are not unheard of among astronomers).

If you are attending the meeting, and plan to present posters or talks that deal with astrostatistical methods or techniques, we welcome you to participate in this session. When you submit an abstract, be sure to indicate a category of “Other” and in the comments field state that it belongs with the AstroStatistics special session.If you have questions, please contact Aneta or me. There is also a page for this session on the astrostat google groups site.

Update (1/22): The abstract submission page currently says that only one abstract is allowed per person. We have been informed that this is incorrect, and that people can submit two abstracts, one for the special session and one as a regular contribution. Note that posters will be up only one day, and those associated with a special session will be put up the day of the session.

Update (1/26): A detailed program is not yet available, but here is a description of the session:

Astrostatistics: Methods and Techniques

This session will provide a forum for the discussion and presentation of statistical challenges in high energy astrophysics, highlighting the great deal of progress that has been made in methods and techniques over the past decade. The one hour session will cover the current and future directions in Astrostatistics, and will include a discussion of MCMC methods in the context of specific applications (such as propagating calibration errors, defining the significance of image features, etc.); a discussion of standardized methods for computing detection limits, upper limits, and confidence intervals for weak sources; and hypothesis testing and its limitations (including the significance testing of emission lines).

Update (2/19): We have been allocated the mid-day slot of March 31. The session will run from 12:30pm till 1:30pm2pm. The tentative program is as follows:

• Remarks on current and future trends in AstroStatistics, by Eric Feigelson
• Poster haiku
• F-Test theory and usage, by David van Dyk
• Discussion on MCMC techniques, led by Andy Ptak

Update (2/26): The final program is out, and the AstroStat session is scheduled for 12:30pm-2pm at the Museum/Bunker Hill Room.

Update (4/1): The talks and posters associated with the AstroStat special session are now online at
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/HEAD2008/. Additional comments and descriptions will be archived there.