![[NAAPO Logo]](../../Images/NAAPOsm.jpg) North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO)
|
|
Letters:
By: Editors Letters are always welcome but owing to the volume it is not possible to acknowledge all of them. Also due to space limitations we reserve the right where necessary to condense or edit the contents. Letters may be addressed to: Editorial Dept., COSMIC SEARCH, P.O. Box 293, Delaware, Ohio 43015.
I have thoroughly enjoyed COSMIC SEARCH as an efficient means of keeping tabs on a developing field. It makes a very good supplementary reference for exobiology courses.
I am a subscriber of your beautiful magazine since its beginning and want you to know that COSMIC SEARCH isn't only a good journal for astronomers and other people who are interested in this topic. It can also be used as a valuable source material about SETI.
I am an educator at the Bochum Planetarium and have gotten many good ideas from the articles for my planetarium shows. COSMIC SEARCH is first class information for astronomy teachers. Keep going on!
I find COSMIC SEARCH to be a superb magazine. The articles are just right. In most magazines you either have to be a CBer to read them while in others you need to be an Einstein.
COSMIC SEARCH is possibly the most significant magazine in the English language.
Keep up the good work. I cancelled another journal to continue my subscription to COSMIC SEARCH.
I have received the first 4 issues of COSMIC SEARCH and I have enjoyed reading them all very much. Enclosed is payment for a 2-year renewal subscription.
I am very interested in the cosmic searches going on nowadays so I was extremely delighted to find out about COSMIC SEARCH. Please start my 2-year subscription with the very first issue. Good luck in your search from all of us here.
I want to commend you on the very fine quality of COSMIC SEARCH. I particularly like your inclusion of a glossary with each issue to help those unacquainted with the terminology through the "buzz words." You are a teacher par excellence.
I would like to congratulate you on COSMIC SEARCH. It's a nitty-gritty magazine that's a lot of fun to read. You're now getting in a wider range of material and presenting it in a reasonably good-looking format. And it's exciting.
Thank you for the excellent "ABCs of Space" in the Winter 1980 issue. COSMIC SEARCH is a superb magazine.
I have very much enjoyed the past year's issues and am looking forward to the coming issues.
Also, I am interested in contacting any radio amateurs who are also interested in SETI for discussions, projects or whatever. It seems to me that ham radio operators may be able to contribute in various ways. Thanks again.
If you are truly cosmic, you already know that we are on the same wavelength. But just for the sake of politeness, let me tell you something about us:
News from Rural American Women is a news journal published bimonthly by Rural American Women, representing 25,000 women throughout rural America. The news journal aims to share essentially four kinds of information: news of interesting projects working in one part of rural America which might also work somewhere else; stories of experiences of rural women which tell us something important, encouraging, delightful or useful about each other; reports of developments in Washington that might be of interest to rural women — pending legislation, new sources of federal money, recently
available publications, guides, manuals; and perhaps most interesting to you, news of economic, social, political and demographic trends which suggest the shape of things to come — in rural
America, our nation and our world.
In a larger sense, we believe in the presence of universal energy, and we are trying to understand how we all can tap into that force and share it with each other. We are trying to communicate with each other in ways that are natural and vital and positive. And we believe that, to do all this, we must start with our individual selves, drawing on the inner strengths we all have, however suppressed they may be. And we as a society must go back where we started from — back to the
self-sufficient freedom and stability of rural America — and begin to see it in a new way.
News from Rural American Women is published six times a year. Subscriptions are $8 payable to Rural American Women,
Enjoyed the Winter, 1980 issue — as usual. May I point out an error in Trudy Bell's delightful "The Great Analogy?"
Cosmotheoros, the title of Huygen's work, is not Latin, but Greek, and it does not mean "Theory of the Universe," but "Spectator of the Universe."
Keep up the good work you guys.
Perhaps your readers could suggest some project that calls for a great number of monitoring stations but not requiring the super sophisticated equipment usually associated with SETI. Listening to frequencies well in excess of 21 centimeters is not beyond the capability of most hams. In addition, many of us have the equipment to record large amounts of data onto hardcopy or magnetic medium for post processing.
Think about it. We would love to help!
I enjoy COSMIC SEARCH very much. I would be interested to know if there is an active group on the amateur bands interested in SETI study, possibly a SETI net (network).
We have heard that there is a SETI net run by Nick Marshall, W6OLO. It meets the first Sunday of every month on 14,280 MHz at 1900 UT. [sic; "14,280 MHz" should be "14.280 MHz"; (notation for the United States of America).] COSMIC SEARCH Co-Editor Bob Dixon, W8ERD, tries to check in occasionally and we encourage all interested radio amateurs to do so.
I have just recently become interested in SETI and would like to thank all of the persons involved with COSMIC SEARCH for producing a publication of its caliber.
I have found the "ABCs of Space" sections of great interest primarily because my technical background is not directly related to radio astronomy or other subjects involved with space. Therefore, this section is helping me to understand more of the basic ideas and theories. I am presently attending Graduate School and plan to take as many courses involving related topics as possible.
I am sure many people, like myself, have a great interest in this topic and would someday like to help in this search but who are not yet technically qualified. In the meantime, to supplement the
ABCs section are there some books or articles you would recommend?
Let me encourage all of you at COSMIC SEARCH to keep up the good work. I personally feel that a major key to the survival of the human race may someday depend on the knowledge gained from space.
Whether there is intelligent life out there somewhere is an unanswerable question but we cannot stop trying and learning from our efforts.
I definitely plan to extend my subscription indefinitely.
RADIO ASTRONOMY by John Kraus (McGraw-Hill, 1966) covers the basics with worked examples and problem sets so it is well suited for self-study.
May I express my appreciation for the way in which COSMIC SEARCH presents such lofty subjects in an entertaining and understandable way. There must be hundreds of other laymen like me who want to learn more about the search for intelligent life beyond the earth. The lead article in the Winter 1980 issue by Trudy E. Bell is an outstanding example of such an exposition.
COSMIC SEARCH has been a delight to many of us here in northern Colorado. I have told many of my friends about it.
I enjoy your magazine a great deal. It is extremely well written and very provocative.
A Happy First Birthday and best wishes for many happy returns. The enclosed donation is my birthday present.
In the table in SEnTInel for the Winter 1980 issue could the 1/4 and 1/10 meter telescope entries be typographical errors? The dimensions seem very small.
We believe that the entries are correct as listed. The Russian radio astronomers are using very small and, hence, very wide beam antennas for rapid, low-sensitivity surveys looking for pulse signals.
Congratulations for a marvelous scientific but lovable magazine! You open a new way of scientific and philosophical thinking for both lay and scientific people. Thanks a lot!
I want to express my appreciation for a truly splendid magazine. I liked Richard Berendzen's magnificent editorial in the first issue, written with both deep insight and rare eloquence.
I have been following your magazine with great interest! SETI is finally getting serious consideraton from NASA! Your interview with John Billingham (Winter 1980) was most gratifying! Keep
up the good work!
Could you give me any information on up-coming SETI conferences?
You might check on the listings of College Courses on "Life in the Universe" for course offerings in your area (see page 38 of the Spring 1980 COSMIC SEARCH).
In recent issues COSMIC SEARCH has included reports of meetings in Mountain View, California, at the NASA-Ames Research Center (see report in the SEnTInel for the Winter, 1980, issue of COSMIC SEARCH); in Montreal (International Astronomical Union, see Winter 1980 issue); College Park, Maryland (see Spring 1980 issue) and Paris, France (see Spring, 1980 issue).
These were "one shot" conferences and not on any regular basis.
The only regularly scheduled SETI or CETI meetings of which we are aware are those held annually by the International Astronautical Federation. Many of the papers presented at the 1978 meeting in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, have been reported in the columns of SEnTlnel (see, for example, the Summer 1979 issue). The 1979 meeting in Munich, Germany, was reported in the Spring 1980 issue. The next meeting is scheduled to be held in Tokyo, Japan, September 21-28, 1980. (See COSMIC SEARCH for Winter 1980, page 33).
COSMIC SEARCH is near the top of my magazine ratings. Keep up the fine production. All of the articles are well written and informative.
I know that Jesco von Puttkamer's article in the Fall 1979 issue involves a lot of assumptions and speculations but I think he underestimates substantially the number of stars in a 1000 light-year radius around the sun which are main-sequence stars. Texts like Abell's state that about 90 percent of the stars which have been classified in our galaxy are on the main-sequence compared to von Puttkamer's 33 percent. If our neighborhood is "typical," this would be a better estimate and would increase the number he arrives at for stars with at least one planet.
An estimate should consider not just main-sequence stars but that sub-group of them which are most like the sun, since the sun is the only star we know of with planets. See ABCs of Space in the Summer 1979 issue.
I enjoy COSMIC SEARCH very much.
Keep up the good work.
I am delighted with COSMIC SEARCH.
Yes, there is something exceeding the speed of light!
Einstein has said that "we cannot exceed the speed of light." True, but for 40 years I have been watching the diameter of the universe increase many times faster than the speed of light. In a well-known reference book the diameter of our universe was given at 12 million light-years in 1941.
It has been steadily increasing so that by 1977 it had reached about 12 billion light-years and a current figure now is 20 billion light-years.
I have enjoyed the past issues of COSMIC SEARCH and look forward to each new issue.
Values for the size and/or age of the universe depend on the Hubble constant, a quantity whose value is a bit uncertain. See "Is the Universe 10 or 20 Billion Years Old?" in ABCs of Space in the Spring 1980 issue of COSMIC SEARCH.
Although COSMIC SEARCH has had some excellent articles, I was somewhat indifferent to it up to now. However, when you said it is a kitchen table venture, that's good: I like to read COSMIC SEARCH at the kitchen table in the early hours.
An amateur forum on radio astronomy would be welcome. I had been looking for a source for audio cassette recordings of radio astronomy sounds for some time (see Bob's Electronics ad). I would also be interested in audio cassettes on the meetings such as reported by Jill Tarter and Virginia Trimble; something on the order of what the American Chemical Society does very effectively.
The article by Bruce Fleury is especially good, I think we are very naive about what is around us.
Your magazine is one of my favorites. Thank you for some superlative reading.
I was very excited to receive my issues of your magazine. I enjoy it very much and wish you good luck for the future.
COSMIC SEARCH is a great magazine.
Your COSMIC SEARCH is the answer to my prayer. Thanks and best of luck in filling a void in understanding that is so badly needed.
I like your magazine very much and am much interested in the search for life beyond the solar system.
I really enjoy COSMIC SEARCH. It must be quite a job to put it out.
I shall certainly want to continue subscribing to COSMIC SEARCH as long as it is published.
The search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is so important an endeavor that I believe in redesignating the year in which the first contact is made as the Year Zero.
Omission
In connection with Virginia Trimble's Symposium Report in the Spring 1980 issue of COSMIC SEARCH, we inadvertently omitted a note to the effect that the photographs accompanying the article were by the author.
[However, the above text of the Omission has been included at the end of the aforementioned article on this web browser version of COSMIC SEARCH.]
|
