I finally got around to watching the first episode new Cosmos. Coincidently, I’d been chatting to Jill Tarter from the SETI Institute the previous day so Carl Sagan was on my mind. We were chatting about pointing the Allen Telescope Array at some interesting Kepler planets. More about this another time, but just to say this: it almost certainly won’t see anything interesting but… but… if it does this will be the single most important discovery in history.

On the whole I enjoyed Cosmos. I was reminded my how prescient Giordano Bruno had been. I’m using this post to just paste a quote of Bruno’s from 1584. It sends shivers down my spine.

There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating round their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth. For it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that those teeming worlds which are as magnificent as our own, perhaps more so, and which enjoy the fructifying rays of a sun just as we do, should be uninhabited and should not bear similar or even more perfect inhabitants than our earth. The unnumbered worlds in the universe are all similar in form and rank and subject to the same forces and the same laws. Impart to us the knowledge of the universality of terrestrial laws throughout all worlds and of the similarity of all substances in the cosmos! Destroy the theories that the earth is the centre of the universe! Crush the supernatural powers said to animate the world, along with the so-called crystalline spheres! Open the door through which we can look out into the limitless, unified firmament composed of similar elements and show us that the other worlds float in an ethereal ocean like our own! Make it plain to us that the motions of all the worlds proceed from inner forces and teach us in the light of such attitudes to go forward with surer tread in the investigation and discovery of nature! Take comfort, the time will come when all men will see as I do.

Quote taken from Wikiquote who reference The Discovery of Nature (1965), by Albert W. Bettex

The target list for K2 Campaign 0 (C0) was released earlier today. C0 is an engineering test primarily to learn about pointing over en entire campaign, but we hope to do some amazing science. The test will begin next week and is designed to last around 75 days. We will target over 7500 stars and galaxies, with targets including cool stars, bright stars, nearby galaxies, a pulsar, red giants, cataclysmic variables, and many more.

However, the most exciting thing to me is that we are going to put a giant pixel mask over the open cluster M35. There are so many stars of interest in this cluster we decided to get the whole thing. What will be learn? Firstly I hope we will find some planets orbiting the (relatively) young stars in this cluster. Do planets form in clusters, what sizes are they? Do they look different from planets in the Kepler field? Additionally, we can learn about how fast every star rotates helping us to understand how to measure a star’s age from its spin rate.

The green regions are the pixels that are going to downlinked to Earth for one of K2′s 76 functional CCD channels. As you can see, there is a giant continuous region – this is the open cluster M35.

Link to C0 information: http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/K2/Fields.shtml