The Official Publication of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton Director John Miller (609) 252-1223 jmiller@princetonastronomy.org Assistant Director John Church (609) 799-0723 j.church@mindspring.com Treasurer Program Chairman Michael Mitrano Ludy D'Angelo 609-737-6518 (609) 882-9336 ... Remember to mark each Friday starting April 4th as our Simpson Observatory Open House event. ... John Miller asked if Jeff could send out the call for event participants to the entire membership. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Mad Science . ... Hey, it's either this or one of those really irritating PayPal donation buttons here. ... By "biggest", you could mean brightest seen here at the Earth, or possibly the most energetic one ever seen (which does not necessarily mean brightest!) ... One star that blew up in the year 1066 didn't get very bright at all, even though it was pretty close by as those things go. ... One more thing: the typical supernova is bright for a couple of months or so. ...

... I ) = Prior в Likelihood inference Pr( | ... Atomic priors One useful way of breaking down the complexity of a problem is to construct the ob ject as some number of a-priori-equivalent "atoms", which are scattered randomly over the domain of interest. ... As it happens, the number of attributes (dimensions) ascribed to an atom is often small, so the mere fact of using an atomic prior much reduces the difficulty: we seek to control only one or two atoms at a time, not the entire ob ject. ...