Emily and I ran over to ESS at SUNY Stony Brook last night to see a lecture given by an Astronomy professor there. The topic was the results of the initial investigation of the data from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field which constitutes the farthest look back in time to date. While lectures of this type are not standard fare for my four year old, we have spent several evenings “looking up” outside and investigating stars and galaxies online and she seemed interested when I mentioned it.Emily brought her star shaped notebook and a light-up pen to take notes. We arrived a little early and found seats on the end at the back of the lecture hall. She liked the hinged desk tops, and I didn’t notice till just now that they were left-handed! I’m a righty, but I remember my lefty friends complaining about the lack of lefty desks way back when. Professor Lanzetta ran his presentation on a sweet powerbook running OSX (though I noted he was using Microsoft Powerpoint and not KeyNote.

It was a good talk, though he spent a lot of time showing slides from the Science Live exhibit that they ran at the American Museum of Natural History in the city when I would rather have heard more of the science. The Hubble Deep Field in 1995 (10 day exposure) and the Hubble Deep Field South in 1998 provided the world with the longest exposure images ever taken of any region of the sky at the time. More data on those historic observations here (N) and here (S).

The Ultra Deep Field was planned to attempt to peer as deeply as possible into the past by ’staring’ at a single spot in the sky for a longer time (11.3 days) than either previous project. The area of the sky in the images is really small (3 arc minutes square). The chosen spot for the observation in the constellation Fornax (below Orion) is shown here. What is really interesting about the Ultra Deep Field, besides the extraorinarily long time of the exposure is that the observations are “temporally sequenced”. This means that the exposures were taken at intervals (separated by about 45 days) which will allow scientists to look for signs of supernovae or quasars in the distant (ancient) galaxies in the field. I remember from Astronomy class that Supernovae and Quasars can be used as standard candles to help pinpoint the distance to a galaxy. Taking timed observations will also help calibrate red shift measurements and the lecture included some refreshers on the red shift equations. Emily didn’t pay too much attention to the formulae, but she did have alot of fun coloring in the line drawings I made for her at critical times.