This paper presents a " man on the street " view of the current status of the spectral cross calibration between the XMM-Newton EPIC, Chandra ACIS-S3, ASCA SIS and GIS, and ROSAT PSPC instruments. Using publicly released software for the extraction of spectra and the production of spectral redistribution response matrices and effective areas, the spectral fits of data from three astronomical ob...

An important innovation in the geosciences is the astronomical time scale. The astronomical time scale is based on the Milankovitch-forced stratigraphy that has been calibrated to astronomical models of paleoclimate forcing; it is defined for much of Cenozoic-Mesozoic. For the Palaeozoic era, however, astronomical forcing has not been widely explored because of lack of high-precision geochronol...

In this paper we report an experiment that investigated the question of whether elementary school children have metaconceptual awareness of theory revision processes. Fiftytwo elementary school children (grades, 1, 3 and 5) were asked to select between phenomenological and scientific depictions of different astronomical phenomena and indicate which of these depictions were closer to “Reality” a...

Until recently, high-resolution global modeling of tides has been done separately from the atmospherically-forced oceanic general circulation. Here we review emerging class models that are simultaneously forced by both atmospheric fields and astronomical tidal potential. Such simulate barotropic (surface) tides, internal near-inertial motions, eddying circulation, a partially resolved gravity w...

Reconstructing the spectrum of the pregalactic density field from astronomical data. Received ; accepted – 2 – ABSTRACT In this paper we evaluate the spectrum of the pregalactic density field on scales 1h −1 Mpc < r < 100h −1 Mpc from a variety of astronomical data. We start with the APM data on the projected angular correlation function, w(θ), in six narrow magnitude bins and check whether int...

Solar-type prestellar cores and protostars display large amounts of deuterated organic molecules. Recent findings on CHD$_2$OH CD$_3$OH toward IRAS 16293-2422 suggest that even fully methanol, CD$_3$OD, may be detectable as well. However, searches for CD$_3$OD are hampered in particular by the lack intensity information from a spectroscopic model. The objective present investigation is to devel...

The Moon is the closest astronomical object to the Earth, and the only one on which we can see significant surface features with our naked eyes (the Sun is too bright, and everything else is pointlike or, like the Andromeda galaxy, too dim). As a result, it has from time immemorial inspired many fanciful notions, including that the Moon is inhabited. In fact, life on the Moon was the subject of...

Cross correlation of an RFI reference signal with the corrupted radio astronomy data channels permits construction of the adaptive correction that is suitable for radio spectroscopy where time-averages are recorded. The reference signal is constructed from the cross power spectrum of the signals from the two polarizations of a reference horn pointed at the source of the RFI signal. The method i...