Tweprints Update
Back in April I launched a new project called arXiv on Twitter, or just ‘Tweprints’. So far the results are interesting and as we have now passed the 500 tweets mark, I thought it would be nice to report on some facts and figures.
Archive by Author
.Astronomy 2009 Poster
The posters for the 2009 .Astronomy Conference are being delivered to several places around the world and should be appearing in a department near you soon. If you don’t see one, then why not print one out and put it up? Or maybe you’d like to support the conference by mentioning it on your own [...]
Open Science
The Internet represents an opportunity to change the 300-year-old system of scientific endeavour. Yesterday I gave the final departmental astrolunch of the semester, which reviewed Michael Neilsen’s excellent Physics World article ‘Doing Science in the Open’, which tackles how we might change it and why.
The Galileoscope
400 years ago Galileo Galilei made himself a telescope and looked up at the stars only to find that Saturn was not quite circular, Jupiter had moons and the Moon was covered in creaters. To celebrate the anniversary of this event, the year 2009 was deemed the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
As part of IYA2009, a team [...]
How I Got Into Astronomy
How did I get into astronomy? I was born in 1981 so my formative years were the late 80s and early 90s. I am an astronomer forged from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Hubble Space Telescope and of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. I would say that those were the things that got me into astronomy? [...]
Herschel and Planck Launch Minute-by-Minute
On Thursday (at 13:12 UT) Arianespace will send into orbit two scientific satellites for the European Space Agency: the Herschel space telescope and the Planck scientific observatory. The launch process which will take these amazing new instruments from the ground into space takes less than an hour! I will be watching the event live from [...]
Eyes on the Skies
I have just found myself in possession of a DVD called Eyes on the Skies. I watched a few minutes of it just now and it looks very interesting. It seems that anyone can get a copy. Eyes on the Skies is a book and a movie that is freely available for public events carried out by [...]
Bienvenue OverTwitter
I have been working on a way to internationalize (is that a word?) my OverTwitter feeds, which predict visible passes of satellites as well as Iridium flares. It started to become embarrassing that the @overparis, @overmadrid and @overberlin feeds were not in French, Spanish and German, for example.
I think it is technically now possible and so I am putting [...]
Networking Meteors
I don’t normally talk about the daily APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) images from NASA becasue they are so popular and well annotated. Today’s has really caught my eye though.
Between 2007 and 2009, a group of amateur meteor enthusiasts in Japan got together to create a national network of over 100 connected video cameras. [...]
Lifestream
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Off to the swimming pool. http://flic.kr/p/6BQDKb [#]
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Shared Off to the swimming pool.
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Shared New World Ordered
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Swine flu parties? Are you fucking kidding me? Morons. [#]
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According to @cardiffuni PhD students are not technically people. This is how they are allowed to squish 6 of us into our tiny office! #fb [#]
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Thanks for all the tweets. The #overtwitter feeds remain! Am just gutted that someone was able to do something I'd wanted to do a year ago! [#]
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Methinks @twisst spells the end for the #overtwitter project - I just didn't have the CPU to do it like that :( [#]
