AAS DPS 2008: Standing on the shoulders of rubbish
Laura Venner, presenting a poster yesterday, wasn't doing much to dispel stereotypes about New Jersey. Venner is an astronomy educator at the Meadowlands Environment Center in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. She has a new 20-inch telescope that she uses to show schoolchildren binary star systems and all the usual solar system attractions, when the light pollution from New York City isn't too bad. The telescope sits high on a hill -- one that happens to be a rehabilitated sanitary landfill. Of all the rolling hills around her in the Lyndhurst area, she says that only one, called Snake Hill, is real. “All the rest of them are dumps,” she says. “It is very cliché, I know.”
