Coverage of the 2013 AAS Conference in Long Beach

Posted by Casey Dreier

2013/01/07 01:40 CST

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The American Astronomical Society's (AAS) 221st meeting is happening this week in Long Beach, California, and the Planetary Society will be there.

I (Casey Dreier) will be in attendance on Monday and Wednesday. Intrepid Planetary Radio producer and host Mat Kaplan will be there on Tuesday, and our Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist Emily Lakdawalla will attend throughout the week.

The AAS represents all of astronomy, from quasars to galaxies to supernovae to exoplanets. They are also working to ensure that the successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, is completed and functional by 2018. This mission survived the budget ax a few years ago, and represents the next step in space-based astronomy.

Follow our blogs for stories about the conference, as well as Planetary Radio and our Thursday G+ Hangout.

You can also follow news from the Planetary Society's official Twitter account, @exploreplanets, or Emily Lakdawalla's account, at @elakdawalla.

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF)

The eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) is the result of millions of seconds of Hubble exposures of a tiny slice of the sky. The thousands of galaxies it reveals stretch from nearly the present day back more than 13 billion years--to just a half billion years after the Big Bang.