Here it is almost the end of March, and none of us has blogged about the International Year of Astronomy 2009. There are a whole bunch of cool events of various sorts around the world. Ray Jayawardhana at Toronto started the year off with a great ad campaign on Toronto busses and elsewhere called Cool Cosmos. Here are a couple of examples:
Pretty cool to see that while you're standing on a bus. Later this week starts 100 hours of Astronomy, running April 2--5. The focus is a worldwide marathon of amateur astronomers watching the sky, culminating in a star party during the final 24 hours, which coincides with the 3rd annual International Sidewalk Astronomy night. If you have a telescope and know how to use it, get out there! And if you don't, now's your chance to find one! Astronomical observatories will be participating via Around the World in 80 Telescopes, which will be a live webcast starting on Mauna Kea (with Gemini, Subaru, UKIRT, Keck, CFHT, SMA, CSO all participating) and then heading west until it gets back around to Lick and Palomar 24 hours later. In addition to the webcast, you can also follow 100 Hours on twitter Impressively, in New York City, they managed to get the park lights turned off at 8pm this friday for their star party -- great opportunity to see a dark(er) night in NYC! In case 100 days isn't enough, there is also a podcast called 365 days of astronomy, which has a daily podcast from a variety of sources and on a wide range of astronomy related topics. Of course, there is also a blog, Cosmic Diary which includes bloggers from ESA, ESO, JAXA, and NASA, so you can hear about the life of professional astronomers all over. Check em out! I'm sure I've missed some of the most interesting events, so feel free to leave them in the comments.
