Great idea Sheena, just one caveat with astronomy going public- Most of the time, astronomical events are either total duds, or visible only to a very specific geographical location on earth. Utah and the Intermountain west especially, seem to get far less than our fair share of the "biggies", when you take cloud-cover into account. As amateur astronomers, we get excited over a few meteors per hour, for example, but to the general public, it's a non-event. An unusually huge full moon is one thing, Venus & Jupiter low in the western sky at sunset is another. A club member with a telescope at a star party to take someone by the hand and give a personalized, guided tour is often needed for many of these admittedly esoteric "events". It will put a huge burden on you as writer and astronomy popularizer to not "cry wolf" too often. That said, I wish you good luck; I'm sure all of us will help feed you leads when we can. On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 10:10 AM, Sheena McFarland <smcfarland@sltrib.com>wrote:
Hi Utah Astronomers,
This is Sheena over at The Trib. I'm writing you to let you know that I've just gotten permission to start an astronomy blog on The Trib's Web site. I'm super excited about it because now I should be able to get more astronomy news out to our readers.
Apparently, after the story I wrote about a big full moon hit No. 1 on our Web site, one of the top editors here made the comment "astronomy sells." So, I'm capitalizing on that while fulfilling my desire to write more about astronomy.
The best thing is, the news doesn't have to be super local or huge in scope. I'm planning to kick off the blog when I write about the Quarantids meteor shower coming up on Jan. 4. And yes, blog readers absolutely can make comments on each and every blog post, something I highly encourage!
I am also looking for name ideas for the blog, and any ideas about where I can cull information about astronomical happenings. Obviously, this is a great forum, and I've signed up for NASA's mailings, but any other suggestions would be great.
I plan to blog as regularly as possible, meaning whenever a cool star/ planet alignment, meteor shower, star party, etc. is happening, I want to know. And if you guys run across cool articles in other publications, let me know, and I can link to it and guide our readers there. Of course, I'll still pitch bigger stories for the paper, so the blog won't steal the thunder from The Trib's astronomy coverage.
Anyway, I can't wait to get this going, and I want to thank you in advance for your help (and readership!!)