Yay! I’ve just confirmed that I’m off to try and see the Northern Lights next month, around Norway. I’ll be the Trip Scholar on a trip run by the Oxford Alumni Travel Programme.
I’d be lucky to see anything like this picture - but here’s hoping. Vicki may have to give me some camera tips…
We discuss the recent solar storm and associated aurora. Chris has tips for how to get drunk in Norway. We wonder just who Norman Pogson was and if spacecraft should be renamed quite so easily.
[MP3 Link]
Episode #18. If you have anything you’d like us to look at, or any questions you’d like us to answer - use the links at the top of the web page at http://bit.ly/uQP71x. Follow us on Twitter @recycledelec.
Links:
Credits:
Audio content Copyright 2011 Chris Lintott and Robert Simpson. Special thanks to the Oxford University Press Office for recording space. Podcast Image courtesy of Flickr user bazik (http://bit.ly/u0SDHh).
“WhaleFM already has produced the equivalent of years of cataloguing work by scientists in just a couple of months.”
Citizen Scientists Study Whale Songs: Years of Work Done in Months | @ScientificAmerican
WhaleFM rolls on and the pairings keep coming in. I’ve been building up a cool map of the emerging call categories as the project continues. I hope to share it later this year when it starts to be statistically significant.
Some fab photos of our recent Stargazing Oxford event, from Joseph Caruana. The full set is well worth a look.
“Few physical scientists use blogs, Twitter, Open Notebook Science, social networks, public wikis or other “public-facing” technologies to share research information, the report finds, although some particle physicists and astrophysicists use internal, private wikis. Most physical scientists view these services as “distractions” from their communications with key colleagues – the only exception being researchers involved in “citizen-science” projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which rely on close collaboration with members of the public. Indeed, three-quarters of particle physicists still use e-mail lists to find new information.”
Online tools are ‘distraction’ for science - physicsworld.com
I believe I was one of those interviewed for this study and sort of assumed that this would be the main finding. I think that it is hard to change the way people do their work. I also think that this shows that meetings like .Astronomy are essential to help foster collaborations between those of us who do blog, tweet, etc.
Rob has been to the Royal Society to meet real life jounralists, while Chris has been on the telly (again) for BBC Stargazing Live. Planet Hunters had a really big week and the Fermi paradox is back on our minds.
[MP3 Link]
Episode #17. If you have anything you’d like us to look at, or any questions you’d like us to answer - use the links at the top of the web page at http://bit.ly/uQP71x. Follow us on Twitter @recycledelec.
Links:
Credits:
Audio content Copyright 2011 Chris Lintott and Robert Simpson. Special thanks to the Oxford University Press Office for recording space. Podcast Image courtesy of Flickr user bazik (http://bit.ly/u0SDHh).
If you live here in Oxford you can now explore the Solar System amongst the spires!
Originally created for Tal’s Good Feet, this walk turns Oxford into a scale model of the Solar System. It takes 60-90 minutes to walk out to Neptune and back. You can download the walking tour as a PDF leaflet, or use the embedded map below.
We will be doing some of these walks tomorrow. as guided tours accompanied by an astronomer from the University, as part of Oxford University’s Stargazing Oxford event. If you’re interested in coming along (at 2pm or 4pm tomorrow) then let me know either through Twitter or here. UPDATE: You can register yourself, or a group, for the walk tomorrow at this link: http://tinyurl.com/oxfordsswsignup.
I’ve created a permanent link to this on the blog at http://orbitingfrog.com/solarsystemwalk. There are some interesting expansion plans for this idea - which I’ll blog about in due course.
View Oxford Solar System Walk in a larger map
This past week has been busy thanks to some great media coverage for the Zooniverse, both online, on TV and at the big astronomy meeting in the USA last week (AAS in Austin, Texas).
You can read about the specific AAS science highlights on Chris’ Zooniverse blog post, and about the meeting itself from various other sources. It features the most exciting pixel that Kevin Schawinksi has seen. Thanks to AAS, we also had a very positive write-up on the BBC News website about the Milky Way Project thanks to Eli Bressert, one of our MWP science team.
As part of the (hopefully) annual BBC Stargazing Live - three consecutive nights of live astronomy coverage on primetime UK telly - our Planet Hunters project has been getting a great deal of exposure.
Since its launch in December 2010, Planet Hunters has been very successful and has discovered planets!. It has also enthused tens of thousands of people about science and astronomy - and kept every at the Zoo very busy.
Planet Hunters uses public data from the NASA Kepler spacecraft, and this comes along in batches of ‘quarters’ of data. We were due to get access to a large chuck of several quarters of Kepler data at the beginning of the year and this coincided with the BBC Stargazing producers talking to us about ways to link in with their show. So the idea was born: tell LOTS of people to go hunt for planets just after we get a huge bundle of fresh new data - and maybe we could find a planet in real time.
I’m sure there there will soon be much analysis here at the Zooniverse after what has been our busiest few days ever. Swarms of new Planet Hunters have joined the site, analysing nearly 1,000,000 (at time of writing) stellar light curves from Kepler.
With every light curve volunteers are looking for the telltale ‘dip’ of a planet passing in front of the star. More than 100,000 people appear to have taken part - from all over the Uk and the world. They have cumulatively spent more than 2.5 years, in the past 48 hours, crunching through the numbers. Critically they use the human eye to look for the transits, which is highly complementary to the NASA Kepler team’s automated efforts.
Our sites are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and at Zooniverse Engineering (our Chicago HQ) the team have been on the ball, preventing the collapse of our servers and keeping the warp core on track. In fact we’ve only had a couple of minutes downtime during all this madness. This prompted the fantastic proclamation by Stuart Lynn, our resident Scot, that “she just canny do it, Captain!” when I called to see how things were. Perfect.
In our Oxford HQ, the the crew have been trying to find signs of exoplanets in all the hundreds of thousands of clicks, as they come in. Planet Hunters science team member Meg Schwamb has been over to keep an eye on progress and try to find the collection of clicks that signal the appearance of a new exoplanet in database that is growing faster than we can process it. A combination of jet lag and TV appearances have made this a heady couple of days.
So did we find any exoplanets? Well if you tune in to Stargazing Live tonight (BBC2, 8pm) then you’ll find out… in the meantime go an check out Planet Hunters.
After his stellar (ahem) appearance on #BBCStargazing last night, here is a video called ‘this is a galaxy’ by @apontzen
Hubble’s famous ‘Pillars of Creation’ in the Eagle Nebula, seen by the far-infrared Herschel telescope.
“The result reported in the new paper: 5,106 bubbles - suggesting that our galaxy, as Mr Bressert put it, “is basically like champagne, there are so many bubbles”.”
Source 
Chris is in Texas for AAS, whilst Rob (and Milton) stay home in Oxford. Janskys, the Zooniverse and the Journal of Urology all feature in an episode that includes a performance of the shortest physics paper ever and a big fat cluster.
[MP3 Link]
Episode #16. If you have anything you’d like us to look at, or any questions you’d like us to answer - use the links at the top of the web page at http://recycledelectrons.tumblr.com. Follow us on Twitter @recycledelec.
Links:
Credits:
Audio content Copyright 2011 Chris Lintott and Robert Simpson. Special thanks to the Oxford University Press Office for recording space. Podcast Image courtesy of Flickr user bazik (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bazik/395792175/).
“We used to think that the Earth might be unique in our galaxy. But now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way”
On Saturday 21st January, we’re having a massive #BBCStargazing event in the department. There will be telescopes, talks, crafts and even modern art. It will also feature ‘Universe-ity Challenge’, a familiarly formatted quiz, with teams of astronomers from different backgrounds.
