QUESTION:
Have the people on the plane seen anything weird?
If not, tell me about thing they have seen up there.

ANSWER from Ted Chandon on May 5:
We see plenty of weird things, usually each other after staying up all night!
We have seen some really terrific thunderstorms (they look great from above
at night), satellites passing across our TV screens, sometimes other airplanes,
lots of brightly-lit cities.  Sometimes we see our own strobe lights blinking
off thin clouds as we fly through them.  Sunsets and sunrises are also really
pretty seen from a high altitude airplane.  Nobody has seen any UFO's though.

Through the telescope we see places where stars are being formed, comets,
planets, exploding stars, and other galaxies.  We have made some really
interesting discoveries using airborne telescopes.  Did you know that Jupiter
emits more energy than it gets from the sun?  This extra energy comes from 
the fact that Jupiter is very slowly shrinking.  This was discovered with
the Lear Jet Observatory, which was flown before the KAO started flying.  The
rings of Uranus were discovered with the KAO.  KAO observations finally proved
that comets are made up mostly of frozen water.  We are using the KAO to
measure the direction of magnetic fields in the center of our galaxy and in
star forming regions.

We don't see these things as cool pictures like you might see in a comic book.
Mainly we see a few stars on a TV screen.  Often the thing we are really
looking at with the telescope will be invisible to our eyes and TV cameras,
and the only way we know we are looking at the right place is that the infrared
equipment shows a signal.  The astronomers record their information on computer
disks or tapes and take it back home where they analyze it very carefully.
They talk things over with their friends and come up with ideas about what
could make their results turn out the way they do.  This is where pictures
of exploding stars or forming stars begin to appear, but the pictures form
in the imaginations of the astronomers, not on a TV screen.