I wasn't doing any blogging these past few days because I was a guest a Philcon in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Most of my time at the con was spent doing panels -- I was at a total of eight events over the course of two nights and two days.
On Sunday I did manage to attend a panel as part of the audience -- I went to Dr. Patricia Boyd's presentation on the upcoming Kepler mission, and it sounds very exciting. The Kepler telescope will use very sensitive optics and massive computer processing to examine the light curves of some 150,000 stars in the sky near the Summer Triangle of Deneb, Altair, and Vega. What Kepler's looking for are regular, periodic dips in the light output of those stars. The slight variations in luminosity will indicate the presence of planets orbiting those stars. Kepler should be sensitive enough to detect worlds the size of Earth or even smaller. The goal is to see how common Earthlike planets are, and possibly identify some candidates for life.
Dr. Boyd's talk was interesting enough in itself for a space buff like me, but she enlivened the proceedings with some musical numbers. She is a member of the a capella singing group The Chromatics. As one might expect from a singing group founded by NASA employees, many of the Chromatics' original numbers have science and space exploration themes. They performed a couple of songs during the talk, bringing the audience musically up to speed on concepts like the Doppler Effect or the Life Zone of a star system.
Patricia Boyd and the Chromatics aren't the only connection between Kepler and music. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (who is of course the person after whom the mission is named) had his own theories about the harmonies of planetary motion. He even wrote out in musical notation what the "music of the spheres" might sound like if each planet had its own characteristic note. You can listen to it here.
I don't know if Dr. Boyd and the Chromatics have ever tried performing Kepler's music of the spheres themselves, but it would certainly be appropriate.
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