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.

A recent BBC News article has prompted a couple of people to mention ‘this thing called SCUBA’ to me. The article is about the new SCUBA-2 submillimetre camera that has been built at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh (with more than a little help from Cardiff University and a couple of…

There is a lot more to the universe than the light you and I can pick up with our eyes and brains. Although its a shame that we can’t see them naturally we can use technology to reveal the wavelengths of light normally invisible to us. Visible light is only part of the electromagnetic spectrum (a very small part) and I thought it would be interesting to see some familiar objects in unfamiliar ways.

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…

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,…

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…