I went to the meeting of the Orange County Astronomers at Chapman University last night.  The guest speaker was Dr. Luisa Rebull from Caltech.  She gave a great talk about the insights we’ve gathered from infrared astronomy over the last 30 years.  The focus was on four space telescopes, IRAS, WISE, Spitzer, and Herschel.  A very enthusiastic speaker with great material.  I think even my wife enjoyed the talk.

The atmosphere makes ground based infrared astronomy impractical.  Several years ago I saw a blog about a homebrew project where some people launched a weather balloon with a camera attached.  They managed to get pretty high up.  I thought it would be cool to recreate the project but use a digital camera with the IR filter removed.  Maybe someday when I’ve got nothing but time.

Here’s a link with her giving the same lecture to a different group.