It is Springtime, and it is not unheard of for me to have pictures of flowers, often from my garden, up on the blog (see here). This time, I have a picture of a flower from a different garden. It is the one you can see by looking up. If you look up with the right equipment, you can even see new growth (just like you can in Springtime gardens). In this case, the equipment is WISE (the spacecraft launched in December, recall) with its ability to survey the sky in the infrared part of the spectrum, and the new growth is a cluster of new stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster. Looks a bit like a rosebud, doesn’t it? Phil over at Bad Astronomy gives an excellent breakdown of what you’re seeing here.
Don’t forget that you can catch up with some of the behind the scenes of what scientists are up to in finding these new objects by following Amy Mainzer’s blog. In one recent post she describes the collaborative efforts involved in finding and identifying the thousands of objects they’ve already found with the new spacecraft, and in another, she talks about the serendipitous data analysis strategies she gets up to while sitting on the sofa with laptop surrounded by cups of tea (definitely a familiar setting to many of us, I bet – it is one of the best home office configurations ever, isn’t it?)
Also, don’t forget to check in at the WISE site for the image of the week feature (the flower on the left is this week’s).
-cvj
