Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 1, 2014

BUY, SELL, WIN, WIN 
HOMES & PROPERTY Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 1, 2014 
14 
BUY, SELL, WIN, WIN 
HOMES & PROPERTY Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 1, 2014 
14 
Buyers, sellers, the time for hesitation is over for both of you. Home sales are rising, inventories are 
shrinking, and even though home values fell dramatically in the last few years, the good news is that 
houses are now more affordable than they have been at any time during the last twenty years.
If you are buying, now is the time to make your move, literally. As the market recovers, the scales are 
still tipped in your favor. There are still many "distressed properties" (foreclosures and short sales) 
on the market, and other homeowners are entering the selling field as improving conditions increase 
their confidence. 

You can still expect competition for lower end, entry-level homes, but demand is softer in the middle 
to upper end property market, so you could be in a stronger bargaining position in those two tiers.
If you're a seller, don't be alarmed by the good news for buyers. Buyer confidence and strength makes 
it more likely that you'll enjoy a sale. Don't try to compete against short sales and foreclosures when 
you're pricing, though, because that's a tough game to win. 
Just complete any needed repairs, get your home into great showing condition, and emphasize your 
home's strengths and features. We're in an interesting transitional phase where both buyers and sellers 
can be winners with the right attitude and representation.


GAIA SPACE TELESCOPE PRE[ARES TO SURVEY A BILLION STARS 
THE WORLD AROUND US 
Europe’s billion-star surveyor Gaia is slowly being brought into focus. 
Once this space telescope starts making routine measurements, it will 
generate truly enormous amounts of data. To maximize the key science 
of the mission, only small ‘cut-outs’ centered on each of the stars it 
detects will be sent back to Earth for analysis.

 Professor Gerry Gilmore, from the University of Cambridge and UK 
Principal Investigator for Gaia, said: “Seeing the first magnificent images 
from Gaia’s UK-built billion pixel camera first of all generates a huge vote 
of thanks to all those scientists and engineers who have worked so hard 
to make this happen. Second, it provides just a tiny taste of the excellence 
and challenges ahead, to turn Gaia data into human understanding of 
the Milky Way’s origins. One substantial step for astronomy, one huge 
leap still to come.”

 Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013, and is orbiting around a 
virtual point in space called L2, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

 Gaia’s goal is to create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way. It 
will make precise measurements of the positions and motions of about 
1% of the total population of roughly 100 billion stars in our home galaxy 
to help answer questions about its origin and evolution.

 UK participation in the mission is funded by the UK Space Agency 
and scientists and engineers from around the UK have played key roles 
in the design and build of Gaia.

 Dr. Chris Castelli, Acting Director of Technology, Science and 
Exploration at the UK Space Agency, said: “Gaia is an important space 
mission for the UK; we’ve won around €80 million of contracts from the 
European Space Agency to build the spacecraft and are providing a state 
of the art data center that will turn the mission’s raw data into the largest 
stellar catalogue ever made.”

 Repeatedly scanning the sky, Gaia will observe each of its billion 
stars an average of 70 times each over five years. In addition to positions 
and motions, Gaia will also measure key physical properties of each star, 
including its brightness, temperature and chemical composition.

 To achieve its goal, Gaia will spin slowly, sweeping its two telescopes 
across the entire sky and focusing the light from their separate fields 
simultaneously onto a single digital camera—the largest ever flown in 
space, with nearly a billion pixels.

 While all one billion of Gaia’s target stars will have been observed 
during the first six months of operations, repeated observations over 
five years will be needed to measure their tiny movements to allow 
astronomers to determine their distances and motions through space.

 As a result, Gaia’s final catalogue will not be released until three 
years after the end of the nominal five-year mission. Intermediate data 
releases will be made, however, and if rapidly changing objects such as 
supernovae are detected, alerts will be released within hours of data 
processing.

 Eventually, the Gaia data archive will exceed a million Gigabytes, 
equivalent to about 200,000 DVDs of data. The task of producing this 
colossal treasure trove of data for the scientific community lies with the 
Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, comprising more than 
400 individuals at institutes across Europe.

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@MtnViewsNews.com 

Gaia test image of the star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.