Dear Colleagues,

Because it is so marvelously done and so informative, I am adding a 
link to your Sco X-1 Annotated Guide (and associated movie) at
   http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/pr/scox1/scox100.htm
I certainly hope that it remains available for a long time for our 
astronomy students to view and study. This is a superb teaching 
resource on neutron star binaries and their emissions.

However, one thing about your graphics and text stunned me. You used 
"billions of miles" as the scaling units for the graphics and in your 
discussion! Why on Earth (or elsewhere) did you not use terameters? 
(Or, as accepted by the IAU but less universally well known among 
non-astronomers, astronomical units--or even parsecs?) I realize that 
at these scales, the size of the field of view is outside human 
experience, but "miles" must seem now to be almost as anachronistic to 
95% of the people of the world as do "leagues". We science educators in 
the United States work hard to teach our students that scientists use 
the SI and this makes our task a bit more difficult.

If the site weren't so tremendously valuable and unique, your unit 
choice would have kept me from posting a link to it. Except for that 
oddity, well done and thank you for making this resource available.

regards,
James R. Frysinger

-- 
James R. Frysinger                  University/College of Charleston
10 Captiva Row                      Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
Charleston, SC 29407                66 George Street
843.225.0805                        Charleston, SC 29424
http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj       [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist   843.953.7644

Reply via email to