If you are seeing a lot of annoying markings on this web page (black diamonds containing question marks), please go to the “view” menu of your browser, select “character/text encoding,” and then chose “Western (Windows)” and this page miraculously will look nice and neat.  If you do not have “Western (Windows)” as an option, any other “Western” setting will be much better than the default “Unicode” (although you might want to switch back to “Unicode” after leaving my web pages-- since leaving it in a “Western” setting supposedly weakens the security of your browser).

 

 

Claia Bryja’s Web Page

 

(under construction-- pretty boring and been that way perpetually, sorry) 

 

If you’re interested in my general ASTR-1 ONLINE class, click here.

 

If you’re interested in ASTR-18, a more specialized course on stars, click here.

 

If you’re interested in my ASTR-16 lab class, click here.

 

A few biographical facts about me:

 

I’m originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, but I came to the U.S. as a college student.  I double majored in physics and theatre at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and then went on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  After that, I lived and worked in Mankato Minnesota and Springfield Missouri before arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001.

 

I live in a cohousing community in Pleasant Hill, in central Contra Costa County, with my husband Rich, our teenaged daughter Melissa, my girlfriend Jen, and 31 other households that hold 46 other grown-ups with 27 kids between them.  All of these people are our “village” neighbors.  For more about this cohousing thing, including photos, etc., go to http://www.phch.org.

 

My original passion in astronomy was for the stars:  especially the smallest, meekest, and the dimmest stars that can be found.  (Just ask me about red dwarfs, white dwarfs, and brown dwarfs sometime.)  Of late, however, my main focus has been theoretical work on the problem of what the mysterious “dark energy” is that presently appears to dominate our universe and is blamed for causing the expansion of space in the universe to speed up.

 

Finally, just to have something fun, personal, and educational in here:  Here’s an astronomy adventure I had many years ago that I still need to finish writing about some day.  At least it’s readable.  I’ll try to update it during some rare moment when I have nothing else to do and I get the urge, since I do have some meaningful results to add in conclusion.  I also did some follow-up work during the more recent 2012 Venus transit that Californians did get to see a part of (and which will have to be a wrap for this project of mine, because the next Venus transit isn’t until 2117!); so, yes, I really do need to update this:  The Story of How I Went to Egypt to Observe the Transit of Venus on June 8th, 2004