October snow in Pennsylvania!

It's a very snowy morning in October here in State College, Pennsylvania. They tell me it is the earliest snowfall in record in State College.

I am looking forward to meeting several astronomers in Pennsylvania State University, after some walking through snow. I walked around the snowy campus yesterday and it is a beautiful campus. I have to decide whether to walk to campus from the motel or pay $6 for parking today, if the parking isn't taken early. They tell me it will be busy today since it is Homecoming today.

New York to Pennsylvania: Autumn to early Winter

Had a beautiful autumn to winter drive from Syracuse, New York, to State College, Pennsylvania, where I will meet, speak with, and give a talk to astronomers tomorrow. The drive through New York and Pennsylvania was gorgeous with all of the fall colors brightening the rolling valleys of this largely rural drive. The drive was generally moderately up and down through shallow valleys, winding between thickly wooded hills in peak colors of red, yellow, and green. The weather went from mysterious and gloomy, to a little rainy and then very rainy, with finally very wet snow as I approached State College. It was the earliest snow in the records of State College, people at Penn State and at Steven's Motel told me.

The moderate sized towns and the little town buildings along the highway had a lot of character. Many corn fields made me wonder how competitive is corn grown in New England versus the superfarms elsewhere. The whole drive had many picturesque places, with winding streams at the bottom of lush green valleys.

Fall colors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont

Taking one day to see a new part of the country. I went from Connecticut through Massachusetts and into Vermont (plus a little of northeastern New York) to see the colors of the autumn leaves. I have heard so much about how beautiful Vermont is, and it is indeed beautiful and welcoming, with pleasant small towns between the rolling hills. The best leaves, though, were in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where they were more at peak but in Vermont many of the leaves have already fallen.

I am looking to add one or two stops to my astronomy visits, since the visits I have done have been so productive. It has been wonderful talking with people regarding all they have done in exoplanet science!

Harvard, Day 2: Talk and visits

I gave my falling planets talk at Harvard today. It was well received, with good questions. There is interest in what will happen when these planets are destroyed. Many fascinating issues of where might this energy go and how fast is it released, how does the tidal friction come about, and how does planet destruction happen in general. I like how at least the transfer of angular momentum and how the star is made to speed up is at least one part of the problem that is relatively easy for us to understand. But we still don't know how much of the angular momentum is shed, which makes a difference for how stable is the "synchronous" situation when the star's rotation is sped up to the same rate as the planets orbit.

I had good discussions with several Harvard astronomers. Some have had long experience with planet transits. They've perfected their abilities to screen out likely transits from imposter eclipsing binary signals. Willy Torres estimated that 90% of apparent planet transits are one of the eclipsing binary "vermin." I should have asked when that percentage is, since it is knocked down in more than one step: a medium telescope radial velocity measurement to exclude stellar companions, and a large telescope radial velocity measurement to actually detect a small radial velocity characteristic of a planet.

There was also some comment that while the Kepler project can be expected to find many planets, it is too easy for people to forget that it only finds planetary candidates that will need to be confirmed by radial velocity measurements that will mostly be done from the ground by large telescopes, and this will take time. No one knows how the screening of unprecedentedly small planets will proceed -- especially since being confined to a small part of the sky, these will not be all of the brightest star candidates. There is talk that we will not have a quick harvest of many, many planets, but that it may take many years to vet the process.

Harvard, Day 1

Met with several people at Harvard even though most of the senior people I had hoped to meet are in California for a Kepler meeting. But I got some great feedback on my falling planets projects. I will give a talk tomorrow.

Cambridge is a beautiful city, and the fall colors are out in force here now. The Harvard astronomy building is very nice -- new and pleasant. The people are also pleasant.

Now I need to get out a 2 page handout on my talk.

Car Trouble

The bright side: the car trouble happened at a good time and place. I was intending to go from the DC suburb of "Upper Marlboro" in Maryland to Connecticut tonight, and then on to Boston tomorrow night so that I could go to Harvard on Monday. My nightly stays are in part determined by where I can bid a low hotel price on priceline.com. I thought since I've never been to New York City, and since today's drive was only going to be less than 6 hours, that I would "drive through" NYC. I am staying longer than intended: my car is losing its oil through a bad oil pan gasket. I was actually in the tunnel coming into NYC when the oil light flashed just briefly. Just outside the tunnel, it flashed again. I knew it was a problem because yesterday I had put two quarts of oil in after the car had run out of oil. Losing two quarts in one day is bad! So I entered "Auto service" into the GPS that Emily lent me and on the 2nd try it took me to a service place that will actually be open on Saturday and Sunday. So I am staying in a NYC hostel, in a dorm with 10 people, tonight. I am having to do this on the cheap. Good that the hostel is within walking distance of the car shop.

Hope that the rest of my trip has no more misadventures.

NASA Headquarters

Talked with several people at NASA Headquarters on Friday about being connected with NASA exoplanet science. I had long sought to be a part of the Kepler transiting planets project, and seek to be a part of the (still being proposed) TESS follow-on transiting planet project.

The proposal deadline for Kepler was at a very unfortunate time: 2007 May. Since this was just two months after Rosing cut me off my projects triggered by his disapproval of my personal activities having nothing to do with work, it was not the time that I was able to pay attention to the science deadlines that I now carefully watch. I am doing what I can to not be kept out of these historic projects. What a shame if when the earths are discovered if I have not returned to being a part of the effort.

Hence the trip!