"The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects. This is the discipline that deals with the universe's divine revolutions, the stars' motions, sizes, distances, risings and settings . . . for what is more beautiful than heaven?" - Nicolas Copernicus
One of the things I participated in at the recent American Astronomical Society Meeting in Boston (held in May) was a session on Remembering John Huchra. The slides from the speakers at that session have recently been made public on the AAS Website: Remembering John Slides (available to non-members).
This reminded me that I took some photos during the session which I wanted to share.
Greg Bothun starts things off talking about John's thesis work on little blue galaxies.
Jeremy Mould talks about John's work on the Hubble Constant.
Pauline Barmby (one of John's relatively few former PhD students) talks about the great diversity of science topics he was interested in.
Pauline Barmby also talked about John's love of observing.
Debra Elmegreen (current AAS President) talks about John's work for the 2010 Decadal Survey where he Chaired the sub-committee on the state of the profession.
Debra talks about how John was quite concerned about the state of the profession especially the large numbers of soft money positions (basically short term contract workers).
Debra also talked about meeting the Pope with John.
Things got quite emotional at this point, as Debra talked about how John so enjoyed their trip to Vatican City.
Craig Wheeler talked about John's contributions to the AAS as the President in 2010.
At this point I gave my talk about John's work on the 2MASS Redshift Survey, and our plans to finish and publish the data - which I have previously blogged about.
After my talk I moved further back in the hall, here's my final shot was of Marc Postman talking about John's influence on his students (official and unofficial) and others he mentored.
I've been at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston this week, and there's been a lot going on here, including a great session on the Science from Galaxy Zoo, which I plan to write about soon, but I wanted today to mention the release of the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) which has been getting some press today.
The 2MRS shown in an all-sky projection with galaxies colour coded by their distance from us (from purple to red as the distance increases). The projection puts the plane of our Galaxy along the middle - and we can't see through that, so there's no galaxies there. Credit: Tom Jarrett (IPAC).
This was a project I worked on during my first postdoctoral position (2005-2008) working with John Huchra. This is really John's survey, and Lucas Macri (another former mentee of John's) and myself have been really delighted to be able to finish it off and release it to the public in memory of John. You can now download the data from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and the paper, Huchra et al. (2011) will be submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Supplements (which publishes catalogues) very soon.
Here in Boston there was a session on remembering the scientific legacy of John Huchra, during which I presented the 2MRS, and also watched for the first time the whole of "John Huchra's Universe" (a world wide telescope tour made by his colleagues at Harvard). A YouTube version of it is below, and I think it really explains why John was so keen to do the 2MRS.
Links to coverage (via Google News search of "2MASS Redshift Survey").
One of the things I've been working on recently is the final publication of the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS). This is the largest complete map of the local universe (ie. it looks at as much of the sky as is possible - about 95% when you consider our Galaxy blocks some of it), and represents the culmination of decades of work on redshift surveys by John Huchra (1948-2010). I worked with John on the 2MRS as a postdoc for 3 years (2005-2008) and myself and Lucas Macri (a former student of John's) have been working on finalizing the 2MRS and publishing it in John's name (based largely on text he wrote in various unpublished descriptions of the survey). We plan to release the data very soon.
As part of this whole effort I'm going to be speaking in a special session at the upcoming American Astronomical Society meeting (#AAS218) in Boston, MA about "John and the 2MRS". For my presentation I've been looking for pictures of John observing to get redshifts, and with some help (particularly from Dan Brocious at the Whipple Observatory, and Boyd Estus at Heliotrope Studies, Ltd) I managed to get my hands on the below clip of John Huchra observing redshifts at FLWO in the 1980s, presumably as part of his famous CfA redshift survey (it's a segment from "So Many Galaxies, So Little Time", narrated by Margaret Geller).
By definition this was exactly what I was looking for!
By the way you can read an article I wrote about John (shortly after his death in October 2010) on the Galaxy Zoo blog.
