The much anticipated SCUBA-2 instrument has been installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. The question is how did they manage to get one very large and expensive piece of kit inside another? Here are some photos from the JAC website.

This is my second conference poster and it is going up at the UK National Astronomy meeting in a couple of weeks. It will found in the Star Formation section of the conference proceedings. I have taken data from the HARP instrument on the JCMT and processed it as 3D…

For those of you following my adventures around the globe via Twitter, Flickr and the like, you may be aware that I recently suffered quite a blow. During my third night observing at the JCMT I began to experience respiratory distress due to the altitude of 13,500 feet. After ascending a…

Tonight I am at the JCMT on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and wil be trying to liveblog the night as we go. This may prove utterly boring, but may be useful. Only time will tell:

1820: Just got back from a tour of the W.M. Keck Telescopes, which one of the…

A lot of people have been asking me where I am right now. ‘Where is the telescope’? ‘Can I Google it’?. Well it’s the JCMT telescope and although you might not be able to just type ‘JCMT’ into Google Maps and get it right away you can indeed find them…

Soon I will be off on an observing run in Hawaii. I will be using the 15m JCMT telescope on Mauna Kea to take spectral line data using an instrument called HARP.

Since this will be my first professional expedition I will be taking lots of pictures and notes as…

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest…

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii has two new instruments called HARP and ACSIS.They work in conjunction and together they recently took measurements of the Orion Nebula and assocaited Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC). These new instruments, called “revolutionary” by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), record the…