I am running a conference in September and I’m inviting astronomers and astronomy bloggers from anywhere! If you’re interested in how astronomy and the internet can combine to produce new and interesting tools for research and communication then this conference is for you.

Astronomy is facing a paradigm shift. The huge quantities of data that are being created by a new generation of surveys and instruments will require new ways of thinking. At the same time, an ever-more connected world is bringing astronomy to the masses via a new media, made up of blogs, podcasts, social networks and more.

Google Sky and Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope have taken astronomy into the home with stunning elegance. Data mining, robotic telescopes and virtual observatories will soon take petabytes of data to a global audience of professionals and amateurs.

Communication and networking technologies are changing science, for both researchers and the public alike. The .astronomy conference will discuss the ideas and methods emerging in this new era and the way in which they present interesting and novel opportunities for both conducting and communicating astronomy.

We have invited several notable people to speak at the conference (including fellow bloggers Chris, Stuart, Pamela, Phil and Emily) and I’m pleased to say that the confirmations have begun coming in. I will be blogging once in a while via Orbiting Frog, but mainly the news and updates will be posted on the conference webpage (RSS).

The conference will run from Monday 22nd to Wednesday 24th September 2008. It will take place at Cardiff University. To read more or to pre-register please visit our website or follow the .astronomy Twitter feed.

From Cardiff where I live, you can expect no less than 10 great opportunities over the course of 48 hours! Even as far north as Edinburgh there will be 9 chances. Across North America the frequency of visible transits will also be very high. So if you live in northern Europe or North America, put May 22nd and 23rd in your diary as a good time to look up!

To keep track of these sightings there are many websites to help. Heaven’s Above is a great website that details visible sightings from any location. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you can use my own web app, LookUp to do much the same thing. If you use Twitter there are several feeds for cities around the world which are useful even if you live up to 100 miles away.

I have also created Google Earth files for tracking the ISS in real time around the Earth. This doesn’t provide viewing predictions, but it is fun to watch it come up to your location and then dash outside to see it pass overhead!

Times vary for all locations but if you’ve never tried to spot the space station then next week would be the time. It’ll be bright, it’ll be obvious and if you miss it, just go outside again an hour or so later and will probably be reappearing.

If anyone has specific requests for parts of the world not yet covered by the Twitter feeds, please email me. I have been looking to add some more to the list, and this seems like a good time.

• Swift Gamma Ray Mission (NASA)
• RoSat (NASA, UK, Germany)
• CoRoT (CNES, ESA)
• GalEx (NASA)
• COBE (NASA)
• IRAS (NASA, UK, Netherlands)
• Envisat (ESA)
• Hubble Space Telescope (NASA, ESA)
• International Space Station (Many)

This KMZ file splits down into several separate files so you can chose to select or deselect any and all of the above objects. Clicking on the satellite or telescope’s icon brings up information about that object with links to more information. Screenshots below for those who like that sort of thing.

To see more Google Earth satellite files check out the general Satellites on Google Earth post and the Chinese Space Debris post. As always, suggestions are welcomed in the comments section. For example, I had created a time-slider dependent satellite tracker but it just ended up being really annoying. Would that be something people would want? Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, I am in the process of creating a tracker that uses a Sketchup model instead of an icon. All thoughts welcome, have fun playing with these.

You can see the debris in this screenshot. Each little Chinese flag is a piece of the satellite that remains in orbit.

If you want to track this debris yourself, you can do so in Google Earth using this handy KMZ file that I’ve created. It uses the same code as my previous efforts for tracking the ISS on Google Earth and tracking satellites on Google Earth in general.

Also, if you’re interested in the talk I gave, you can download the PDF of ‘Space Debris‘.

I wonder if this post will be visible through the Great Firewall of China?

UPDATE: The data used for this Google Earth feed comes directly from NORAD, who provide tracking data for most satellites and other orbiting bodies. I should stress that this only shows the trackable debris. This is only  a percentage of what is up there. Some objects are too small to be tracked by radar and so do not appear.

A solar furnace is a structure made up of a parabolic mirror, which reflects light on to a focal point. In the case of the furnace at Font-Romeu in the French Pyrenees, several small mirrors catch light from a hillside and focus it onto the main mirror as well, adding to the power of the construction. The heat produced can be used to generate electricity or to perform experiments in high-temperature physics.

The solar furnace at Odeillo, Font-Romeu in the Pyrenees of France (pictured here) was opened in 1970 and is the largest in the world. According to Wikipedia, the rays are focused on to an area the size of a cooking pot and this means that they can reach a temperature of up to 3,000 degrees Celsius.

The first modern solar furnace is is still in place at Mont Louis, near to Odeillo. It was built in the 1940s. The Pyrenees were chosen as the site because the can recieve 300 sunny days a year.

Take a look at the large Odeillo furnace on Google Earth, via this KMZ file.

Well what do you know, as soon as I make myself a wavelength slider for Google Sky, Google go ahead and pass me by by releasing the much anticipated web version of Google Sky complete with wavelength sliders. I still like my little mashup but I look forward to playing with (and taking apart) their new application as well.

Check it out: http://www.google.com/sky/

The KMZ file updates when you move around on Google Sky and when it has loaded you just slide the time slider to see different frequencies. Now this is where it gets really beta: every time you move to a new spot, this file goes back to the NASA Skyview server and fetches the image URLs for each wavelength. This can take a long time if are on dialup and to be fair, takes time anyway. It’s also liable to get Skyview annoyed if it gets at all popular, but we’ll see. I am also working on caching some images to speed things up and reduce server load.

The wavelengths included could be anything covered by Skyview. However that would be a lot - Skyview is awesome - so I have selfishly only covered my own area of interest. Thus only the following wavelengths are covered (for now):

• H-Alpha (shown above for Orion)
• IRAS 12 microns
• IRAS 25 microns (shown above for Orion)
• IRAS 60 microns
• IRAS 100 microns
• SDF Dust Map
• SDF 100 microns
• 1.4 GHz
• 408 MHz (shown above for Orion)
• 35 MHz
• CO Line Emission (Carbon Monoxide)

So try it out. I’d really like to know what your thoughts would be for improvements in particular. I think the obvious things to do right now are selecting which wavelengths you want to see and only loading those; choosing colour tables; and caching images.

Most importantly though, does anyone know how I can hack the actual slider to say frequency or wavelength instead of a date?

Download the KMZ file for Skyview in Google Sky.

My experimentation with Google Earth and Google Sky has led to several items being created. In Google Earth, the ISS Locator, 100 Brightest Satellites Tracker and the Advanced Any Satellite Tracker have all been very popular and downloaded a combined 5,600 times already. In Google Sky my SCUBA data layer has now been access over 1,500 times and for some reason has inspired several emails - thanks for those! There is also last year’s IRAS 100 Micron all sky coverage for Google Sky which I had forgotten all about.

The LookUp iPhone and iPod Touch app has also been popular. Apple featured it as a Staff Pick and it hung around in the Top 10 for some time. It is now accessed about 2,000 times a day and a recent TUAW bump has kept it visible on the Apple web apps site.

The week of the lunar eclipse led me to post a video on what would be seen. I hosted the video on YouTube to reduce server load and was quite surprised however when it became one of the top videos of the week. You can have quite laugh reading the comments on the YouTube page. No one seemed to grasp that it was made on a computer and several accuse me of tricking them.

The Orbiting Frog Shop launched not too long ago and has been selling lots of t-shirts. More designs will appear all the time so keep your eyes peeled, and if anyone spots one in the wild, I’d love to hear about it.
I have now joined the crew at the Carnival of Space by hosting the 40th edition. The Carnival is a great place to pick up new RSS feeds and bloggers.

Finally I’d just like to thank everyone for taking such an interest. Thanks for all the emails and for actually reading the blog. Now I’m off to create a real blog post (i.e. not about myself) before having some lovely Swiss lunch. Yum.

Hot on the heels of putting all the SCUBA data onto Google Sky, I am now sharing some Google Earth goodies. The KML files below will allow you to view the location of any satellite on Google Earth with latitude, longitude and altitude positions updated every 30 seconds.

These Google Earth overlays use the NORAD two-line element (TLE) datasets that are published via the Celestrak website and are used by satellite enthusiasts the world over. I could not find them for Google Earth so have made them available myself.

There are three files that can be downloaded:

1) ISS Locator - A simple file that just tracks the position of the most popular and asked after satellite, the manned International Space Station. Shows the next 2 hours of flight path and the approximate size of the viewing horizon of the ISS (i.e. the area of the Earth’s surface for which the ISS is potentially visible).

2) 100+ Brightest Objects - This file uses Celestrak’s 100 or so brightest objects TLE file to show the locations on Google Earth of between 100-200 of the better known and easier to spot satellites.

3) Advanced Tracker - By default this KML file tracks the ISS from the 100+ file above. However it allows you to change the source TLE and satellite ID to any that you like, thus making it the first Google Earth addition that allows you to track any satellite at all! Instructions are found in the file by clicking its name in Google Earth. This layer also shows the viewing horizon and 2 hour flight path.

Download ISS Locator, 100+ Brightest Objects and Advanced Tracker.

Download All three files together in a zipped archive.

All you have to do is install the latest version of Google Earth and then download this KML file.

Once initialized for the first time, the file will make a download of a 9MB catalogue. This takes a minute or two and once complete you can roam the sky, viewing any regions of it covered by SCUBA in submillimetre wavelengths.

As well as the data points (which appear in green) you can also view images taken by the SCUBA camera. These will only load when you are close enough on the sky to see them, to save on time and disk space.

The best thing about this Google Sky layer is that it will enable you to place side-by-side things which you can’t see with things that you can. The image below of the Horsehead Nebula is a perfect example.

In the top, in purple you can see the optical light. This is the outline of the classic Horsehead, which is located in Orion. In orange below it, you can see the dusty, SCUBA-mapped material. It slots almost perfectly into the dark region of the Horse’s head. That’s because the reason the Horse’s head exists is that the dust obscures he light and creates the shape.

If you look carefully you’ll see the ‘lozenge’ of dust in the horse’s throat. This is a clump of cold material, with a submillimetre source at the centre (the green hexagon). This is thought to be a pre-stellar core - an object which may go on to form a star.

This ‘dust’, as it is called by astronomers has the consistency of smoke and accounts for huge amount of the material in our galaxy. Many of the shapes of the nebula you will have seen arise from dark, dusty material in between the light and your point of view.

You will possibly be familiar with dust from images such as he Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula. This shown below with the SCUBA map layered on top, semi-transparently.

Included with the SCUBA Google Sky layer is a set of interesting features, which will take you to certain objects or regions of the sky, to get you started. All the green hexagons come with a popup of scientific data from the CADC catalogue.

For more screenshots, see my Flickr photo set about this project.

SCUBA was a camera on the James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. It was a submillimetre continuum array receiver, with a field of view 2.3 arcmin in diameter. It had two hexagonal arrays of detectors, which mapped a fair chunk of the sky in 850 microns and 450 microns.

The device was made to study regions of the universe normally dark in optical frequencies. The things you’ll see in the SCUBA data are dusty areas of our galaxy and of more distant galaxies. These are the areas where stars are born and they are being studied all the time by researchers like myself and my colleagues.

This layer adds to a growing collection of ways to look at Google Sky. there are already layers for

• XMM-Newton [Link]
• SDSS [Link]
• IRAS [Link]

Download the SCUBA Google Sky KML file here (approx 1.0kB) This will officially launch later in the week, so if you have trouble try forcing Google Earth to refresh the KML file by right-clicking and selecting ‘Revert’ or ‘Refresh’.