It wasn’t long ago that I was thinking to myself ‘where are all the science podcasts?’, now I have too many! When i first got my iPod a couple of years ago there wasn’t too much in the way of choice for science podcasts about. I am currently listening to…

I had my first day working for SETPOINT Wales yesterday in their mobile planetarium, the Stardome. I went to Crickhowell High School and had a great (if tiring day) giving a space talk and showing, what felt like hundreds of children, the constellations.

The reason I like talking about space is that…

If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built…

Amazing picture here of the Northern Lights from space. Spotted on Digg (link here). The Aurorae are created by the interaction between outflows of energetic material from the Sun and the Earth’s ionosphere. I have never seen any, but very much would like to.

So what’s caught my eye this week? Well let’s see shall we.

A night on the (not-so-bare) mountain, from Chris Lintott. Chris went observing in Hawaii and let everyone in on his actions by blogging it as he went along. Cool idea, I’d be interested to see more astronomers do this…

Wednesday’s seminar speaker was Robert Kennicutt, the principal investigator of the SINGS project (Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey). They have been using the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched 2003, to observe the dust content of the nearest galaxies.

Spitzer detects at a wide range of wavelengths in the infrared and submillimeter regimes.…

The other day we were driving along and I found out that a friend of mine’s father is a commercial airline pilot. We chatted about it for a while - apparently his mother was an air hostess and that’s how they met - and I mentioned that he must have…

This image appeared on APOD the other day. It shows a solar eclipse as viewed from space. Very cool.

This image was taken from the old MIR station during the August 11th 1999 eclipse which was, if you can remember, visible from the UK. In fact if you look very closely…

Following last week’s open letter to the AQA, Wellington Grey has posted on his blog to thank everyone for their support. It seems he had quite a response, being linked from digg, reddit and boingboing. He has followed it up with two things.

The first is an online petition, which Wellington himself…

There is a new podcast called Living Space in the world of astronomy which is, according to the website,

…a collaboration between Chris Lintott (Oxford University and BBC Sky at Night) and Harriet Scott (Heart FM) to bring you the latest news from the worlds of astronomy and spaceflight.

and as far I…

New idea for a weekly blog post detailing the week’s interesting blog entries. So here we go…

Latest Declamations about the Arrow of Time, from Cosmic Variance. This blogger is a deep thinker with some really great articles. The reason I point out this post is that it contains a presentation…

Attention Cardiff citizens - I know you’re out there - the ISS is coming to our city. Well honestly, the ISS passes over us all the time but there are two nice upcoming passes that are worth keeping an eye our for because they are bright, conveniently timed and easy…

What follows is my submitted entry for the Wellcome Trust’s New Scientist Essay Competition 2007. There are prizes involved and the top one is publication of the essay in New Scientist. I am very inexperienced with such things, but thought I’d enter anyway, so just in case I don’t win,…

Wellington Grey is a guy I just read about on BoingBoing. He is a physics teacher in the UK who is currently very irked by the teaching of his subject (I agree) and on the side he makes fun diagrams, including the recent WiFi will kill yours babies one.

Not incidentally,…

This is a lovely long-exposure photo where the telescope dome has been rotated to allow the shot to appear to show the whole scope. The 0.8m telescope is the Haute-Provence Observatory built in 1937 near the current site of St.Michel l’Observatoire. I once went to see…

I have been listeing to the audiobook version of J. Surowiecki’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. Its a really intetresting book that looks at the way group decision making and decentralised organisations can produce results better and more intelligently that the members of those groups individually. Its a look at the…

So I’m still musing about the reasons for studying star formation and so I have begun trying to think in a more positive way. This is what I came up with earlier today…

Star formation is a science at a turning point. It will not be long now before astronomers have…

“Why is my subject of research worthy of study?” This is a question I am going to try and answer in the next week. The science of star formation is something which involves money, time and great effort. Is that expenditure by the taxpayer, the telescope operators and even the scientists and themselves worthwhile?