You can click on any of the top-twenty words to see a few of the tagged posts. This is a really nice proto-tool (currently it is listed as being version 0.2), and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

I wonder if we will soon see ’spacebuzz’ making its way up the list?

The Universe’s second season is again, excellent. You can think of this second set of documentaries as a more in-depth follow up to the first year. Topics include dark matter, the constellations, gravity and space colonization. (Is it an Americanism or a mistake that lead them to title one episode ‘nebulas’ and not ‘nebulae’?).

The great thing about The Universe is that it targets the age group most disconnected from science. As a group, older teenagers are looking away from science and school isn’t doing enough to keep them interested. Documentaries like this engage people at home and lead them out into museums, lectures and libraries.

You could go and buy this show on Amazon, or directly from The History Channel - or you could win a copy! I have one sealed copy of The Universe Season Two to give away. More than 14 hours of spacey goodness on 5 DVDs in a rather fetching metal case.

How do you win it? Simple really - you have to sign up to Twitter and start following Orbiting Frog. Shameless ploy to get more Twitter followers? Yes… and no. Twitter is becoming quite the hub of astronomy chat and news. At the recent .Astronomy Conference, it became obvious that Twitter, and services like it, were going to be very important in astronomy in the next few years.

So on October 31st, I will pick a random follower on Twitter (no space probes allowed!). They will be sent this great DVD collection, but more importantly they, and possibly many others, will have joined the conversation.

To sign up to Twitter, visit http://twitter.com and once you have start following me (http://twitter.com/orbitingfrog). If you already follow me on Twitter, you are automatically entered - how easy was that?

While you’re on Twitter you might want to take a look at several more users that may be of interest:

• Carnival of Space
• WETI
• Planck
• Astronomy Picture of the Day
• The Jodcast
• International Year of Astronomy
• The Mars Rovers
• Mars Phoenix Lander
• .Astronomy Conference

Also there are many fellow astronomy bloggers on Twitter:

• Space Disco
• Chris Lintott
• The Daily ACK
• Will Gater
• Star Stryder
• Astronomy Blog
• Bad Astronomy

If I’m missing anyone, please comment to add your Twitter feed. Good luck to those entering, and happy Twittering.

To do this yourself, or to expand upon and modify this script, download the workflow file here.

To set this up to run everyday, open it up in Automator. Click ‘Run’ to test that the script works (warning: it could take a minute or two to process, but this ok). You might also want to to change the folder into which the picture files will be saved. Then chose File -> Save As and change the type to iCal Alarm.

When you save the file in this way, Leopard will open up iCal and let you change the usual event options. You can select the time the script should run and the repeat cycle (I’ve set mine to repeat each day at 9 a.m.).

Alternatively, you can save this as an application and run it when you like in the normal fashion. In fact you can do quite a few things with it, I’d be interested to know what people come up with.

Tonight, July 5, look west and you’ll see a temporary “Belt of Three Stars”. Saturn, Mars and the star Regulus are sitting by Leo in a chance alignment that literally will only happen tonight. Very cool.

Thanks to the ‘What’s Up’ blog at Discovery for this tip.

Discovery News: What’s Up?: A Line of Planets

Spectrometers are used, like prisms, to spread light out into the component colours. This enables us to understand the compositions of everything from stars to streetlights. Here I show you how to make your own spectrometer and give you a few examples of what you can see with it.

What You Need:

• A cardboard tube (toilet roll or kitchen roll tubes are just perfect, in the pictures here, I have used more black card to make a tube myself.)
• 2 square pieces of black card (approx 8cm x 8cm)
• Black tape or masking tape (something that blocks out light)
• Razor blades (nothing fancy just cheap blades that are not attached to anything)
• A stanley knife
• An old CD

Make a Diffraction Grating:

Cut a small square hole (approx 1cm across) in the middle of one of your 8cm x 8cm black cards. Break the CD into pieces, just snap it. You’ll need a section of the broken CD that can nicely cover the 1cm hole in your card.

Using a bit of sticky tape, peel away any cover remaining on the piece of CD, so that it is transparent. Use tape to stick it over the hole, creating a sort of window. This will be our diffraction grating.

Make a Very Fine Slit:

Using a stanley knife, cut a slit in the middle of the other piece of 8cm x 8cm black card. This slit should be about 2cm long and just a few millimetres wide. Tape the the two razor blades either side of the slit. They should make an even narrower slit, just 1mm or less if possible!

The aim is create a very fine, narrow slit though which light can travel. Make sure the blades are securely attached with tape for safety.

Make the Spectrometer:

This is the easy bit! You now attach the two square cards to either end of the tube using the dark tape. You have to attach it in such a way that no light is let into the tube accidentally (hence the dark tape). When you look through the diffraction grating, you only want to see light coming from the slit.

Testing Out Your Spectrometer:

The best way to see how this works is to use daylight. Just point the spectrometer toward a window during the day or up at a cloud if you’re outside. You should not ever look directly at the Sun. You should see a nice, smooth spectrum (rainbow) somewhere in your field of view in the tube. Here is a photo of a cloud taken through my own spectrometer. The bright white light is the slit and spectrum is just off to one side.

What’s Happening?

When light enters the tube though the slit it spreads out - all waves do this when passing through small slits. The CD then makes the separate colours visisble to your eye. You see a nice, even spectrum from daylight sources because daylight is made up of all the colours of visible light from the Sun. Once you can see this pattern, you can start trying to find the spectra of other things.

In our physics lab we have lamps of different chemical make-ups. These let us see pure light from different sources. Here are a few I took today, all photos taken by my own camera through my own, homemade spectrometer.

Here is the spectrum for Zinc, which you can see contains some red and blue but very little green.

Cadmium is very distinctive, with short sections of each of the three primary colours and very little between them. It is less spread out than Zinc. There is a big gap between the green and red sections.

Krypton is seen to be fainter than the others here, but the spectrum is still visible. The blue section has become much more violet or indigo here and the green is greener than it was in Cadmium.

The Astronomy Connection:

This is how astronomers know what stars are made of. They use advanced spectrometers to measure the spectrum of stars and pull out the ‘fingerprint’ patterns of colour that you see above. Each element has a unique set of spectral lines (colours) and these can identify the presence of different chemicals in stars, nebulae and just about everything else.

This is the whole spectrum of the Sun. It is so detailed that it had to spread onto multiple lines to see it properly! You’ll see that in fact it is not perfectly evenly spread out as I suggested earlier. This was taken with a very advanced spectrometer that has a greatly increased sensitivity compared to one made here, but its based on the same principles.

Things to Look At With Your Spectrometer:

• Sodium streelights
• Compare daylight to a lightbulb.
• Different light bulbs look different (that’s why energy saving bulbs light up the room in a different way).
• Neon signs.
• TV  and computer screens.
• LEDs from computers or remote controls (these give very pure spectra, often only one colour).

Have fun with your spectrometer and why not try and take a photo through it? It worked fairly well for me. I’d love to see any photos you take with it, or of it. Let me know how you get on. Thanks to the Science Made Simple team for this great idea!

Black Hole Hunter is an online game. This relates to a post of mine from last week about the sounds of gravity waves. If you like listening to white noise and looking at graphs then this is the game for you! If not, I’d give it a miss. I started getting a headache after a couple of minutes.

Black Hole Hunter

You can also buy a similar design on a t-shirt from the Orbiting Frog Shop. Available in sizes for women, men and kids in many colours. Prices start at $18 (£9) for kids and $20 (£10) for adults, international delivery available. There is the design you see above and also a black and white, vertical option.

Thanks to JPSmythe I have been playing with Wordle, a website that creates graphical representations of documents. Above you can see my paper on star formation in the Rho Ophiuchi region as a Wordle cloud. Below is the same document in the original LaTex format. anyone that knows the joys of LaTex will understand what all those odd words are.

I also wordled the recently influential WMAP paper, which studied the cosmic microwave background in great details:

Hubble’s famous paper on the expansion of the Universe and the nature of red shift:

Then I thought to query the astrophysical papers database for the most cited papers to see what names or keywords came up. The results can be seen here:

I also thought it would be interesting to do the popular Bad Astronomy blog (current RSS feed):

Finally here is the current word cloud for Digg Space:

PS: Can you tell I am a little bored today?

August 1st 2008 will see a solar eclipse visible across much of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and some portions of North America. Maximum totality is seen in Siberia, but you can also see the Moon totally obscure the Sun in many parts of China (and the North Pole if you’re about). The eclipse is often being called the 2008 Olympic Eclipse because it comes just days before the commencement of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

In other parts of the Old World, a partial eclipse will be seen. The regions covered by partial eclipse are seen in the above diagram outlined in light blue, with totality in dark blue. If you want to know the details of what can be seen in your area, then I’d use the very handy Google Map provided by NASA.

This map allows you to double-click anywhere and find the start, maximum and end times for the eclipse that is visible in your locality. For example, in Cardiff the eclipse begins at 0930 (BST) and ends an hour and a half later.  You are also told the eclipse magnitude, which is basically a measure of how much of the Sun’s face, the Moon will cover. In Cardiff this will be around 21%.

Check out the site for info on your own area and if you plan to watch the eclipse, don’t forget to either project the Sun’s image onto a piece of paper, or order a set of eclipse viewing glasses.

I found out today that I have annoyed some of my gravity-wave-studying contemporaries with My Beef with Gravity Waves. It got me thinking about gravity waves again and about black holes. I found a website, black-holes.org which has some interesting stuff. One highlight I thought I’d share are the sounds of black holes and other gravitational events.

Gravity waves, like any wave, can be interpreted as sounds and when they are, you get some interesting combinations of clicks and tones. Here are a few of the most interesting ones. Apparently they were all created by Teviet Creighton.

To begin we have the sound of a nice, steady object: a pulsar. These rapidly spinning, neutron stars produce gravity waves with a nice, regular tone. One day, I hope someone creates a gravity-wave telescope/instrument combination using pulsars as the keys.

Download audio file (periodic.mp3)

Two black holes that meet will merge and coalesce into a single, larger black hole. Here’s the sound of just such an event, where each black hole is about ten times as massive as the Sun.

Download audio file (inspiral.mp3)

An extreme mass-ratio binary is a system where two objects orbit each other, but one is far bigger than the other. This type of system is very well understood and takes a long time to evolve and infall. This next sound is that of an extreme mass-ratio black hole binary as it collapses…

Download audio file (extremebh.mp3)

and here is the same kind of event, but with more lead in time. This lets you hear the gradual change of the pitch and the ‘knocking’, as the black holes are drawn slowly closer together.

Download audio file (extremebh2.mp3)

The brightest events in the universe are supernovae: the death of giant stars. This cosmic flash is very different when observed through the microphone of gravity waves. Here is a supernova, blipping out of existence:

Download audio file (supernova.mp3)

Another familar idea seen through an unfamiliar, gravitational lens is that ’sound’ of the early universe. The Big Bang left a kind of echo, which was also represented by a gravtational background noise. If you had been detecting gravity waves during the early life of the universe it would have sounded like white noise.

Download audio file (earlyuniverse.mp3)

Finally, what is actually heard by a gravitational wave detector? They are not yet powerful enough to actually have made any detections because of noise. Like trying to see faint stars with all the street lights on, gravity wave detection suffers the problem of the Earth and its associated tremors. Earthquakes, lorries, even people create quakes and shakes which are confusing to gravity wave detectors. The microphone on a gravity wave detector would actually not hear the crisp tones so far discussed, but would actually hear this:

Download audio file (microphone.mp3)

There’s more to be found on the black holes website, and there will be more here on Orbiting Frog on the matter of gravity waves as soon as I collect my thoughts and actually get some work done!

What you will need:

• A regular drinks can
• A pot of cold water big enough to submerge the can
• A pair of tongs
• A kitchen hob (gas or electric is fine).

What to do:

Now you have to be careful with this one. The tongs have to be good or you’ll burn yourself. If you’re a child reading this, then make sure someone supervises you while doing this experiment. Reading though all the instructions before you start out is vital. I recommend having a couple of attempts, so maybe have two or three cans ready. So let’s begin:

Whilst you are filling up the pot of water why not drink the coke or whatever is in your drinks can. We don’t need any of the contents for this experiment, just an empty can. Once it is empty, rinse it out and place about two tablespoons of water in the can.

Now take your tongs and get a firm hold on the can. Hold it over the kitchen hob. We need to boil the small amount of water we have put in the can. This won’t take long and you’ll know when it’s worked because you’ll see steam coming out of the hole at the top of the can. Let it steam for a minute or two to be sure the water has all boiled.

Now here’s the cool bit. Keeping the can in between the tongs, take the can directly from the hob and dunk it, upside down, into the pot of water. The can will instantly and violently be crushed! It will happen very quickly so be ready. When I did it, it made a loud smacking sound as it went under water. I did it twice because I missed it the first time!

What is happening?

There is some great physics going on in this simple experiment. When you heat up the can and boil the water inside, the can fills with steam and pushes out all the air. Then when you dunk the can into cold water, the steam quickly condenses into water and there is no air pressure inside the can to support it. The can cannot resist the forces pushing on all sides from the water and air above it. Therefore it is crushed instantly!

Balloons:

Air pressure is also at work in balloons. When you blow air into a balloon you are artificially increasing the air pressure inside it and the rubber skin expands outward, forced by the force of the air molecules bounding around inside it.

You can ‘crush’ balloons by dipping them into liquid nitrogen. This condenses the air inside into a liquid and the balloon goes flat as a pancake. Here can see a video of a balloon that has been dunked into liquid nitrogen thawing out. The air boils back into a liquid and the balloon re-inflates. We filmed this last year in our first year undergrad physics lab.

Enjoy playing with air pressure and feel free to send me any images of your crushed cans!

I decided to see what would happen if a 5km asteroid hit the Earth at high speed and landed in water. I’ve been kind and given the asteroid a ‘dense rock’ constitution rather than solid iron.

The above image shows the size of the resulting crater compared to Wales. I’ve centered it on the unfortunate, small town of Builth Wells. Poor buggars. As you can see, the crater is somewhat large!

The crater’s depth is enough to sit several Empire State Buildings inside it. You can also compare the size of the crater to several other famous landmarks.

The site also returns several facts and figures, including the kind of damage that would be caused at different distances from the impact site. As you can see here, the damage would be felt across the UK and Europe. This isn’t even the biggest or densest asteroid that can be simulated.

Go and try it out! Down2Earth can also be used in Spanish and German. It was created by some fellows (not me!) who can often be found lurking in the John Barrowman and David Tennant suites of Cardiff University.

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.

Microwaves, fall on the electromagnetic spectrum, between radio waves and infrared waves. They are usually around the size of a few centimetres and you may well be very familiar with them as they are produced by the microwave oven that might just be sitting in your kitchen.

Microwave ovens use a particular microwave frequency to excite molecules of water. Since water is present in lots of food and drink, this means that microwaves heat up lots of useful stuff - and they do it quickly. The fact that microwaves are now readily available to most of us in the western world and they are only a few centimetres in length, means that you can measure the speed of light in your very own home.

What You Need:

The quickest and tastiest way to perform this little experiment is with marshmallows, but chocolate chips also work. You’ll obviously need a microwave oven as well, and a large, microwaveable dish. You will need a ruler, too.

What to Do:

Get your large, microwaveable dish and place a layer of marshmallows at the bottom of it.Remove the turntable from the bottom of the microwave oven. If you don’t, then this experiment will not work at all. If your microwave doesn’t have a turntable, it means that the turning mechanism is elsewhere and you’ll need to find a regular microwave oven to try this experiment.

Cook the marshmallows on a low heat for a couple of minutes, or until you see parts of the marshmallows starting to bubble. When you do, remove the dish and take a look at the marshmallows.

You ought to see that they have not melted evenly. In fact you should be able to see a regular pattern has formed, drawn out in melted-mallow. It depends on your microwave oven, but you should see a melted/unmelted pattern across the dish in some direction. When I tried it at home, my oven created long melted strips next to long unmelted strips (see above).

This regularity is caused by the same mechanism that heats up the food you place into your microwave oven. The appliance generates microwaves which very quickly form standing waves (see animation above) inside the cavity inside, where you put food. As the food rotates around, it passes through the standing wave nodes and this excites the water molecules, heating the food.

Measure the Microwaves:

Take your ruler and measure the distance between the melted parts of the marshmallows. You should find that there is an even pattern of melting and that the distance between them is something like 5 or 6cm. Why? Because that is the distance between the nodes of the standing waves.

Without the rotating mechanism, the food does not move around and cook evenly, instead it just heats at the nodal points. Using your marshmallows you have created a ‘map’ of the microwaves in your microwave oven!

Find the Frequency:

Finally you need to know the frequency at which your microwave oven operates. It is usually written on the back somewhere in small writing. Most standard microwave ovens operate at 2450 MHz. If you cannot find the value on the back of the oven, you can take it for granted that 2450 MHz is about correct.

Measure the Speed of Light:

Now you have what you need to measure the speed of light. You just need to know a very fundamental equation of physics:

Speed of a Wave (c) = Frequency (f) x Wavelength (L)

The distance between the melted sections of the marshmallow is in fact L/2, because there are two nodes for each wave (see animation). So if you have measured 6cm and your oven operates at 2450 MHz, then your measured speed of light is (0.12 x 2450,000,000) 294,000,000 metres per second.

The agreed value of the speed of light through a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second. See how accurately you can measure it? what could you do to make the experiment better, and thus get a closer answer?

Now You Can Eat the Gooey Melted Marshmallows:

…and make yourself sick. Yay!

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.

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.

• Science Fiction Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show [Amazon]
• Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by The Carpenters [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Space Truckin’ by Deep Purple [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Lost in Space by Fountains of Wayne [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Across the Universe by Rufus Wainwright (superior version IMO) [Amazon]
• Life on Mars? by David Bowie [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Major Tom cover by I Hate Kate [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Universe and U by KT Tunstall [Amazon] [iTunes]
• The Galaxy Song sung by Eric Idle [Amazon] [iTunes]

Any others you particularly like?

Let’s say I have a telescope with a computer attached to it. This telescope always knows exactly where it is pointing in the sky and exactly what time it is. Finally this telescope knows where it is on the Earth in terms of latitude and longitude. Now let’s connect this telescope to the internet and constantly feed the images it produces to a server.

To anyone working in astronomy, this is already true for professional telescopes. In fact Stuart over at Astronomy Blog created his telescope RSS feeds using just this data not too long ago.

Now finally let us do something that isn’t normally the case: let’s connect every telescope to just one server. This central server can use the data to construct an image of any object in all four dimensions using the positions both on the sky and on the Earth from each scope. All you have to do is have enough telescopes looking at the same things.

In the case of Comet Holmes there were a great many telescopes pointed at the object as it flew by, creating a lovely glowing ball that later faded away. The various stages of its evolution were imaged and these images could all be compiled into a kind of virtual space. You ought to be able to fly around inside a computer generated model which is constructed from the images. The projections of those images into virtual space just come from the telescopes own properties and position.

I am trying this technique with another, less exciting dataset. If it works then I may try it with some images from telescopes. However this data is sparse and spread out over the world. I do not have enough of it myself to make a good start. Maybe next time a big event is occuring we, the internet (if there is such a thing) could get organised and try to create a 4D record of an event? Astronomy has eyes everywhere and if these eyes can work together, via Google Earth, AstroGrid or other more novel collaborations, then 21st Century astronomy will be a turning point, and we can all be a part of it.

(This is good timing for the internet, what with the recent YouTube videos of the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn.)

The book also points out that a lot of what we see in images from space is already beyond the human eye’s perception.

By showing these images, we remind readers that most of the universe and its beauty is hidden for all of our eyes unless we use special telescopes - Doris Daou, Co-author

The book contains images of stars, planets, nebulae and some telescopes too. I think this is wonderful and would be very interested to hear what a blind person might have to say about ‘images’ of space. and whether any new insights can be gleaned from them.

If you know any blind astronomers, or are blind yourself, please let me know what I can do to make this sight more easily accessible to the visually impaired.

“Touch the Invisible Sky” was written by astronomy educator and accessibility specialist Noreen Grice of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and the Museum of Science, Boston, with authors Simon Steel, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Doris Daou, an astronomer at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

For more information, visit the NASA site.

[Via the Bad Astronomer]

In response I’ve tried to create Google Sky equivalent KML files. These just read in the STML feeds and put a little icon onto Google Sky with a bit of information from the feeds.

Download the Telescope STML Feeds Google Sky Tracker here

It’s a work in progress and I hope that Stuart will keep expanding the idea. I think it has lots of potential. In fact I’m doing a talk about it tomorrow.

The most sensitive part of your eye is the Macula (dark red splodges). This is the region you use for detailed sight. The centre of the Macula is called the Fovea where the highest density of receptors is located. However at this central point there only exist cones (no rods) and so faint objects are invisible, despite it being the most sensitive part. This is why stars are oftne much easier to see when you look just slightly to one side of them.

The round white region in these images in my optic nerve (as close as we’re all going to get to seeing my brain) and the arteries and veins are clearly marked out. You can also see pigment striations around the rest of the surface. This is just the way my retina is made and is different for everyone (hence retina id scanners).

This image is not processed in any special way. This was taken with a regular Nikon digital camera mounted onto a lens that allowed it to ficus into my eye. The image is true to life.

You can get these images done at Boots (and probably other opticians) for a fee. However if you’re as charming as me, you’ll get it for free.

In case you don’t know, Over Cardiff is one of a collection of Twitter feeds designed to alert users local to an area of upcoming visible passes by the ISS and Hubble. More info found on a previous blog post.

If the weather is deemed either clear, fair or partly cloudy then the Twitter feeds will still report an upcoming transit from that location. They will no longer send alerts when the weather is said to be mostly cloudy, overcast or other inclement conditions such as fog, snow and rain.

Combining SkyView and Google Sky would, in my opinion, be a true archival telescope. Allowing you to point and zoom and spin about the whole sky, choosing the wavelength of your choice as you go from old archived surveys. Thus I have made a single-survey example of such an idea in action, using the IRAS 100 micron survey (infrared).

All of SkyView’s data is public domain and the images grabbed by the script are simply the small ones that SkyView would serve you upon searching their database. This makes the load on both your and their server much lighter than using any other method.

Below is a screen capture of Orion in the IRAS 100 micron band. The colour table has been chosen to show off this particular wavelength. Colour tables for other wavelengths would have to be picked individually to give the best look and feel.

Let me know what you think of this. I would like to do more, but there are a lot of surveys and I’m not sure how to structure the KML. Should it simply be a case of each survey having its own KML file and layer in Google Sky? A better approach might be to combine surveys by wavelength within Google Sky folders.

Your feedback, as always, is much appreciated.

Download the KMZ file for the IRAS 100 micron overlay by clicking here.

An aside: The green hexagons you can see all over this image are for another Google Sky project I am working on. More to follow in a few days.

Having rained on me all day, it finally cleared up and was almost cloudless at both times for the ISS going over. Caught a few crappy photos, one of which is right here. You can see the ISS as a little dot, just above the chimney, about the bump into my TV aerial.

read more | digg story

Don’t believe everything you read in your emails and for the fifth time this week: “no its not true, sorry”.

read more | digg story

I saw the link on Chris Lintott’s blog and then later on Digg, but basically this is an exercise in crowd-sourcing - harnessing the power of the multitude to perform tasks usually only done by specialists. In this case, a group of researchers need to identify about a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Computers have always been a bit rubbish an image recognition so they are asking for the population of the internet to go and do it for them - an excellent idea.

You sign up and log in, then take a test of sorts to see if you’re even remotely good at it (I don’t think you have to excel at this test). Then you are given a series of galaxies to identify. Its all explained in the tutorial on the Galaxy Zoo website and is really very easy so I would say just go give it a go. By letting everyone have a go they are maximizing their chances of getting each identification correct.

This is the sort of thing science needs more of. Projects like the folding@home concept on the PS3 and this are examples of why when we network all the people of the world together, we will be greater than the sum of our population. What a nice way for everyone to contribute to astronomy - go be an astronomer now!

If you are on Facebook, they have a Galaxy Zoo Facebook group.