What items in an astronomy observatories could be flammable? And how could a fire be started in one?

Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 6:18 pm

Tani Asked:

I'm doing a story where a man dies of third degree burns from a fire that began in the astronomical observatory where he worked.

Arson is out of the question.

So, is there anything in an astronomical observatory that would be flammable? If so, what does it take to set it on fire, how long would it burn, and would it be dangerous?

Any other details you guys could provide on this kind of thing would be rockin'.

Reply:

how about something simple, these places must have a breakroom with a kitchen, astronomers are there for long hours. There could be a kitchen fire. Or maybe an adjacent storage room with the groundskeeps equipment and the gasoline is ignited by a careless worker or smoker. There must also be a machine room that provides the power for the mechanical movement, maybe hydraulic pumps or something like that. They could overheat and ignite a fluid leak possibly. There would definitely be enough electricity for a believable electrical fire.

Then theres real world too, many fires never have a known cause.

Source(s):

firefighter over 30 years

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Where on the web can I find a good Astronomy program that maps star positions?

Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 5:49 pm

Comments (22)

Talia Asked:

I need to complete some questions for my astronomy class. I need a solid, free program, without spyware.

Reply:

You're going to need coordinates for the area of the sky, in right ascention and declination.

You can start with the Digitized Sky Survey here:
http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_for…
It will give you a picture (be sure to change the file format from FITS to GIF) of that region of the sky.

You can get the coordinates of all the stars and their magnitudes from the USNO catalog here:
http://www.nofs.navy.mil/data/fchpix/

You can find other info about individual stars on SIMBAD:
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

And if you want to combine them all, download a copy of DS9 from the SAO/Harvard website. Just google ds9, the link isn't working right now.

It's a free program that will download the images and catalogs for you for a region of the sky. It's put out by the Harvard astronomy dept. These are the tools astronomers use every day.

Source(s):

astrophysics grad student

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Is there a solar system software model?

Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 5:39 pm

Comments (24)

Tahnee Asked:

I would like to see the current model and add items like astroids to see solutions.

Reply:

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/

This is an online simulator. It doesn't have asteroids.

http://www.shopatsky.com/index.asp?PageA…
This site has a couple of programs. I know there are others, and ones that allow additions (like asteroids), but a quick search revealed only the 2 programs listed on shopatsky.