These pages will talk about Astronomy and Astronautics. Please be patient: this page is still under construction and I use to add new information in my limited free time.
As I have mentioned in my homepage all the events, books and objects that have to do with Astronomy and Astronautics are strongly interesting for me. I don't have a telescope (Barcelona is not a good place to observe stars and stellar objects). However I use to buy astronomy books and magazines. I use to browse some Astronomy WWW Pages, too. (I'll soon add some more links to all this pages).
....AND SOON IN THIS PAGE:
He's gone. Last December 20th scientific world get sorrowful at the news: Carl Sagan was dead. This great astrophysicist and exceptional science communicator, one of the upholders of non-frontier universal citizenship and convinced pacifist lost finally his own war, long year lasting, against a pre-leucemia he has won a lot of battles before.
Carl Edward Sagan was born and raised in New York, at Brooklin. Since his early years he was very interested in firmament and its wonders. As he told us in Cosmos (the TV series I'll talk about later) he asked himself in his teenyears about those lights in the nightsky... 'till the day he got into a library and read several titles over the subject. They answered lot of his primary questions, but created at meanwhile a lot of new, more interesting and complex ones. His family gave support to his permanent interest about Astronomy, so the next step was fairly clear: he began his university studies of Astrophysics.
Shortly after the achievement of his doctor's degree became an outstanding expert in planets, known in the last 50's scientific community. In the following years he continued his planetary observations with the aid of different radiotelescopes. This daily task with radio signals "listening to the stars" gave place to another working area: the research of extraterrestrial life. What would happen if someone receiving and cataloguing outerspace radiosignals intercept a message from an alien civilization? In 1961 Sagan got into the Orden of the Dolphin, a group of experts that discussed about the probability of extraterrestrial life and established the appropriated method to study it (one of them, Frank D. Drake, was the author of the equation used for the calculus of the probability of intelligent life in our Galaxy). The Project Ozma arose from these meetings. It was one of the pioneers of the study of non-terrestrial origin signals, and was later continued by projects like the current META I, META II and SETI.
However Sagan was not only a skilled astrophysicist in Planetary Evolution who defended the probability of life in another planet, but also a man with a great ability for science popularizing, by means of article's for scientific community and the public readership about the mysteries of the universe. London BBC invited him to carry out several astronomy documentaries. Sagan was there always capable to explain all the phenomena, even the more complex ones, in plain words available to all kind of audiences (included ten year old kids).
In 1982 Cosmos, the series that made him famous all over the world, was born, and its 13 episodes were filmed during a sabbatical year. In Cosmos, Sagan not only explained the last knowledge about astronomy but also described the most important moments and places of the scientific development (the ancient Greece, the Library of Alexandria, the Reinassance...) and the saddest moments of science recession. He achieved to transmit to audience his fear about the possibility of self-destruction of the human race, this will "fade away the only voice known at this time in the cosmic chorus that plays the symphony of life" in our universe. He taught we all "were made of the material of the stars" and he tried to point out the Science as a way to avoid the errors of the past to get the future when human being will explore the Cosmos.
This series arrived to a lot of people, in different countries and different languages; in all of them Sagan raised in their minds the interest for Science and Astronomy. I'm one of them. When I began to made the same questions about stars Carl Sagan made himself at childhood, he answered them, and he gave me also a strongly human vision about Science. I also looked up the books in order to answer the new questions that every new knowledge brought to me, and I also got supported by my family to develop this interest. Although I finally chose Computer Engineering besides Physics, I consider myself a "science man" and I still keep in my mind the more of the science conception that Sagan communicated and defended.
It is nearly sure this web page about astronomy would not exist without the answers that Sagan gave to my questions. So I want, in this modest page, dedicate to him this farewell that is another way to say him just one thing: THANK YOU.
Here there are some interesting links to other pages you should prove while this page is built....
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Last updated by Profesor-X on 30/12/97