The ISS orbits overhead at around 350km (about 220 miles) and completes an orbit roughly every 90 minutes. So you can imagine that Soichi gets to see quite a range of places all at different times of day. I’ve posted some of my favourite photos from his Twitpic feed here, but I encourage you to go take a look yourself and if you’re on Twitter, follow him.

Houston, Texas by night

Mahajamba river delta in Madagascar

Patagonia glacier

Paris by night

Astronaut Stevie "Ray" Robinson

Space Shuttle Endeavour making re-entry

Moonrise over Australia

Lake Pukaki, New Zealand

Whilst I have been trapped in the thesiverse, I have been diligently attempting to ignore all my other projects – but they keep moving along. Whilst Avalon sits behind me in a playpen saying “ba ba” to several bears – and offering the dog a squeeky toy – I thought I would try and write a quick update on some of the projects I intend to resume with whatever free time I find myself with after submission.

.Astronomy

Earlier this week, we had a meeting of the .Astronomy team to discuss the third .Astronomy workshop. It was very exciting with lots of possibilities for locations and dates discussed. We also caught up on some of the projects created and advanced at the Leiden meeting.

A big question that came up – and one I am still mulling over – is that of the nature of .Astronomy. What exactly is it, and how do I know it when i see it? I tend to use it as a descriptive term now (e.g. “ah yes, that is very .astronomy”) but I think it is time to figure out why. This question being raised, and serious discussions of sponsors and venues for a 2010/2011 event leave me feeling very proud. .Astronomy has clearly demonstrated that it is worthy of continuation and expansion.

I can’t wait to get back into a more fully-engaged mode with the whole project. I am extremely glad to have the whole team working with me, and letting me focus on my thesis in recent months. Thanks guys and gals!

365 Days of Astronomy

365 (as people seem to call it) is expanding into 2010 and the days are filling up fast. More sponsorships are needed and I fully intend to dive headlong into comment moderation and posting when I finish the thesis. Another thing that I want to do – and any of you could also do this – is create some backup podcast episodes for 365. When scheduled contributors don’t appear or cancel it is useful to have a bank of backup episodes ready to go.

Chromoscope

Exploring the universe in multiple wavelengths is a lot of fun but I’ve had so litle time to offer this project recently, I’m starting to feel very guilty. We’ve recently added Gamma Ray to the site, from Fermi, and I am slowly compiling a massive UV map, using GALEX. Stuart has been chipping away at new Chromoscope features (such as language support, and making Chromoscope embeddable) and there is talk of an iPhone app in the near future.

Everything Else

There are also my Tweprints and OverTwitter projects which both have potential, large-scale alterations to be made. I shan’t go into details here but maybe these are things I could work on at the next .Astronomy meeting. There is also a cool new project that came out of .Astronomy (I’m currently calling it Zombie) which I really want to get my hands dirty with. Like all the others though, it will have to wait.

The Thesiverse is a large and expanding, multi-dimensional reality. Time is quite variable there too. Next week I am relieved of childcare duties to make a final push at finishing the beast, so wish me luck. Hopefully I shall find my way to a singularity and pop out into your realm once more. Oh dear, Avalon is now trying to get the dog into the playpen so I must go. See you on the other side!

Pluto is so small and distant that the task of resolving the surface is as challenging as trying to see the markings on a soccer ball 40 miles away.

Plans are now being made to use Hubble’s new Wide Field Camera 3 to make further Pluto observations prior to the arrival of New Horizons in 2015. Advanced Hubble images will help the New Horizons team to take better shots of the dwarf planet when the probe arrives, and to make the most efficient use of time as it explores the Pluto-Charon system.

The new images have also been combined into a great video showing the current surface of Pluto rotating. You can find a small (iPhone-friendly) version right here or you can grab the HD one from the NASA site by clicking here. Read the full NASA press release here.

Thanks to Mike Brown (@plutokiller) for pointing this out via Twitter.

What is Your Favourite Planet?

Shaheer, Esme and Thea all want to know what my favourite planet is. It’s an important question. At first I want to say that the Earth is my favourite planet but that’s cheating, isn’t it? In which case, I think it has to be Jupiter.

Jupiter was one of the first planets I looked at through a telescope (I was 12) and when you do that you can see that it has four very bright moons. These moons are called the Galilean Moons because they were observed by Galileo, the first man to look at the sky with a telescope – and that was 400 years ago! You can also sometimes see that Jupiter is stripy and that it has a big, red spot. Saturn is also good to look at  - with its bright rings – but Jupiter changes every night, which is very cool and interesting. The moons move and the stripes and spot rotate around the planet.

Why are There Craters on the Moon?

Sean asks why there are craters on the Moon. The answer is that that space is not empty. The Solar System is a very busy place. As well as planets and moons and the Sun, there are also other objects in the Solar System. yoiu might remember I talked about comets and asteroids. These are rocky bodies, smaller than planets, that also go around the Sun. There are also even smaller rocks out there, flying around. Quite often these rocks hit the larger planets and moons. The craters on the Moon are the left over pock-marks from rocks hitting the surface of the Moon.

We see craters all over the Solar System. Mercury and Mars are covered in them, and so is any other object that is rocky and not covered in clouds. Even the Earth is hit by rocks sometimes. We can see some craters here on Earth! They are harder to find because of all the grass and volcanoes and glaciers and rivers covering them up – but sometimes they are found. They can be very big!

There is a very big crater in Arizona in the USA called Barringer Crater – I have put a picture of it here for you. It is 1,200 metres across (nearly a mile) and it was formed 40,000 years ago when a 50-metre wide rock crashed into the Earth from space.

You can play with a fun Earth-smashing, asteroid simulator called Down2Earth. It lets you try and smash all sorts of different sizes of rock into the Earth and see what damage they would do.

Living on Other Planets

Thea asks whether people live on other planets. Currently no, they don’t. People do live in space now. There is always a crew onboard the International Space Station. New astronauts arrive to change-over roughly once every six months.

A lot of people think we should go back to the Moon one day and set up a Moon base so that we can learn how to live on other planets and maybe mine the Moon for minerals – like we mine the Earth. Living on the Moon might mean that we can figure out how to go and live on Mars one day too.

I’ll leave it there for now. I have more questions to answer but I’ll leave that for part 2. A lot of you said how much you liked the images of the nebulae that I showed you. At the top of this post you’ll see a lovely picture of the Orion Nebula from the Seeing in the Dark website.

The image below shows how it looks in the far-infrared using IRAS data from Chromoscope. I have drawn on the stars of Ursa Minor as a guide and also placed a green box around the footprint of the Herschel data. You can see the ‘flare’ as the arch of material streaming up and way from the central ‘blob’ where Polaris lies. Being an astronomer requires so much technical jargon!

The Polaris Flare was discovered in 1990 by Heithausen and Thaddeus who mapped the region in CO. It is a molecular cloud complex at a distance of 110 parsec. The flare appears to surround the star Polaris – the North Star – but in reality the two may not be related. Herschel mapped it as part of the science demonstration phase of operations and the images were shown at the Herschel meeting held in Madrid before Christmas. This was the same meeting that showed off the amazing Herschel data of the Rosette region.

The black-and-white image at the top (RSS readers click here), available as part of Alain Abergel’s talk, shows a chunk of the Polaris flare and reveals its delicate, cirrus structure. This image is from the SPIRE instrument and shows data at 250 microns. What you’re seeing is fairly cold dust in the interstellar medium (the material that lies between stars and is involved in their evolution).

A portion of the flare was mapped as a taster for one of the Herschel key projects: Evolution of Interstellar Dust (the footprint of the Herschel data is shown above as a green box). This is a group researching the structure and properties of the interstellar medium in different environments. One interesting thing to note is that this image – which is actually generated from a very high resolution set of data – contains a whole lot of something very different to cirrus nebulosity.

If you were to zoom in to a small portion of the image and change the contrast so that the background was revealed, as is done in the image below, then you would see a lot of small speckly dots. There are hundreds of thousands of them speckling the background of the whole molecular complex. These objects are galaxies. Lying far beyond the nebula itself, but ever-present in this far-infrared data, such a backdrop is rather confusing when you are trying to measure the properties of the nebula itself. This is a problem that star-formers will have to overcome in order to make detailed analyses of images like this.

Conversely of course, astronomers studying galaxies will wish the nebula was the thing that was removed. Astronomy is a very murky business indeed.

I don’t intend to do too many blog posts about the shop, but once in a while I’ll put one up – one has to pay the bills. To start things off here are some of my favourites: the constellations. T-shirts, bags, baby-grows and other items with different star constellation on it. I’m adding more constellations as and when I get the chance, but to start we have all the zodiac signs, as well as a smattering of my favourites such as Orion, Perseus and Cygnus.

Click here to visit the Orbiting Frog Shop on Spreadshirt.

The swirl of cloud heading in from the southeast is bringing more snow tonight and tomorrow for much of the country as the big freeze continues. You can keep track of the snow via the user-generated #uksnow map from Ben Marsh.

2010 is going to be a big year for me and my family. I will be submitting my PhD thesis in February and am currently applying for jobs – something made far more daunting by all the recent STFC funding news. However, my CV is in the works right now all the same!. Between all that and the baby I am thoroughly occupied.

Luckily blogging is the perfect thesis procrastination activity, so I leave you with wishes for a very happy new year and a productive 2010.

Tonight is also a blue moon. This merely means it is the second full moon of the month. This happens just about once in three years and simply caused by the lunar cycle being slightly off from the monthly calendar cycle.

Maximum eclipse is at 19:22 UT and the Moon is in the East, in Gemini. The eclipse is visible from Asia (all the way down to Malaysia), Europe, Africa and most of the North Pole (if that is useful to you). North America and most of South America will be missing out. The map above outlines this better than my explanation.

So why not go out tonight and take a look if it is clear where you are? You can toast the new year under a red, blue moon.

[Post image of partial lunar eclipse from Flickr user JP.G]

The image was taken as part of the oddly-named HOBYS (Herschel imaging survey of OB Young Stellar objects) program studying young, massive stars. Giant OB stars are an important part of the dynamics of galaxies. They die in massive explosions, live extremely energetic lives and shape the evolution of nearby regions with their powerful radiation. Understanding where they come from and how they form is a big deal in star-formation research. It also appears to be a process quite different to that which seems to form the kind of low-mass object I look at in my own resesarch.

Herschel allows us to look deeper and farther, such that we can can see lots of the precursors of these giant stars – enough to begin to make statistical samples and maps. HOBYS will use all five Herschel imaging bands for 126 hours to make images of up to 13 different massive-star-forming regions.

The Rosette Nebula is situated just over 5,000 light years away and is 100 light years across. It is shown here in an optical image by Robert Gendler. You can see it through a small telescope in the constellation of Monoceros. Inside the nebula lies NGC 2244, a cluster of bright, young O stars. You can see them sweeping out a hole in the centre of the nebula. Ultraviolet radiation from these stars makes the surrounding nebula to glow.

At the bottom of this post is a image showing how the optical and Herschel far-infrared images correlate. You can see how Herschel is seeing the much cooler material, farther out from the centre than you see in the optical image. The Herschel image is made up of three of the five Herschel wavebands (70, 160, 250 microns) making up the blue, green and red colour-channels.  It has the look of a gathering storm, or perhaps crashing waves. It is a spectacular image and I’m surprise that more has not been made of it.

You can download Sylvain Bontemp’s HOBYS talk as a PDF, which features many more images. Including a great set of RCW120, a sampling is shown here. If you’re into the science stuff, I’d suggest taking a look at lots of the talks, which can all be found here.

If you’re new to the idea of the celestial sphere then you have to imagine the sky depicted as a really big sphere, with us sitting inside it. The sky stays stationary as the Earth rotates inside it. So the North pole of the sky, Polaris, lines up with the Earth’s North Pole and so on. If you are sitting at the North Pole then Polaris appears directly overhead all the time. If you’re sat at the equator then Polaris is at the horizon and the celestial equator rolls more or less overhead.

Over the course of a year, the Sun will appear to oscillate just above and below the celestial equator (by about 23 degrees), because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis (see above). However, on any given day it will seem to stay in same place, circling the sky following an approximate line of latitude. This is what is depicted below. The path of the Sun at each solstice is drawn and the celestial sphere. In each case the longest path is the Summer solstice and the shortest is the Winter solstice. As you move from the equator to the pole, the difference between the paths drawn by the Sun gets larger until near the pole (at about 70 degrees latitude) there is no Winter track because the Sun is below the horizon all the time. You are now inside the arctic/antarctic circle.

There are a couple of interesting points raised by these images. Note that at the equator, the Sun does not always go directly overhead. In fact this only happens at the equinoxes (the time in the middle of the two plotted tracks). In the 50 degree latitude diagram, there are little faint circles depicting the Sun below the horizon – these indicate that it is still contributing to some sort of twilight – which above 50 degrees lasts all night during the Summer solstice! This is why astronomy can be so difficult in midsummer here in the UK, for example, but not in Southern France.

The diagram showing the solstice at the pole lets you imagine the Sun spiralling closer and closer to the horizon as the year goes by. Six months from perpetual midday comes perpetual midnight, each day the Sun creeping lower and lower before skirting the horizon and then disappearing at the equinox.

Something I had never though of, but which is pointed out in the Wikipedia article, is that until 20 degrees latitude, the Sun is either in the North or the South depending on the time of the year. This is counterintuitive to most of us who are used to the Sun always being in the South (for the Northern Hemisphere) or the North (for the Southern Hemisphere). For example, in the UK, south-facing views are sunny ones. However below 20 degrees latitude in the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun can arc through the sky in the North, not the South, because of its oscillating position around the celestial equator. This becomes obvious in these diagrams but I had never thought about it before.

All of this is as much geometry as it is astronomy but I think it is interesting. These excellent diagrams do a great job of giving you feel for the why the seasons are so different and why the solstice happens (they also have added detail in the types of tree shown).

The 2009 Winter Solstice occurs at 17:47 on December 21st (the exact publication time of his blog post), the 2010 Summer solstice will be June 21st at 11:28.

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”

Can you spot the peculiar error? The Magi came from the east, yet they saw the star in the east. Yes that’s right – either the text is confused or the Magi travelled all the way around the globe, the wrong way, until they reached Bethlehem some two oceans and many thousands of miles later.

In other versions of the Bible (why oh why does it even have versions?!) they don’t specify the star being in the east. They sometimes say it rose and then settled in the right location, over Bethlehem. I grant you, if you want to quibble about specifics in the Bible then there are much better places to start but come on, God! Sort it out! Matthew is the only gospel to mention the Magi – where Mark doesn’t mention the nativity at all.

So assuming that there even was one, what might the biblical ‘Star of Bethlehem’ actually have been?

Possible options include

• novae and supernovae (stars being explosive somehow)
• a planetary conjunction (bright alignments of planets from the perspective of the observer on Earth)
• a comet.

No known supernovae match with the date (assuming it to have been between 10 B.C. to 10 A.D.). Planetary conjunctions pose a problem: namely there are lots of conjunctions between Jupiter, the Moon, various stars, other planets etc etc. Picking the one that would have meant that a king was being born is difficult. Halley’s Comet passed by in 12 B.C. but this is surely too early. Halley’s comet would also have moved over a fairly short period of time – which doesn’t match the notion of ‘following’ a star. Not without wandering in circles anyway.

The best bet for a Star of Bethlehem candidate is a “comet or nova” observed by both Chinese and Korean astronomers in 5/4 B.C. Either or both years is possible. This was an object that appeared in March and remained visible for some seventy days – without moving relative to the stars. This object would have made a nice conjunction with the Moon around that time, which might add significance to the mystical Magi.

However if I told you that some significant star was seen in 112 A.D. then I imagine you could find one to within a few years. Or for 560 B.C. or 1999 A.D. – the point is that there are lots of significant astronomical events all the time – that is one reason astronomy is such a popular hobby! Finding a match for a Christmas star is therefore quite likely if you make your criteria loose enough, i.e. it has to be bright, and can happened up to ten years either side of 0 A.D.

I’m afraid that the Star of Bethlehem is widely regarded as fiction. Like the visit of the Magi themselves, the Star of Bethlehem simply didn’t happen. It is also incredibly unlikely that much of the nativity happened, but there you go. Let’s also throw into the mix the fact that Christianity prohibits astrology. Astrology is seen as sorcery and being of the occult. Intertwining it with the birth of Jesus seems bizarre and slightly problematic for the Church.

In researching this blog post I found a nice website, with a related book, all about the Star of Bethlehem. If you’re interested in reading more I’d suggest taking a look. Other than that I’d say ’stop worrying, and live you’re life’! Enjoy Christmas, be with the ones you love.

Today is the Winter Solstice, the Sun is at its lowest point in the sky and the night is as long as it gets in the year. The days get longer now, but Winter sets in for a while. It is time to get gorge yourselves and cuddle up with someone special to keep warm. That is the true origin of Christmas, and of myriad other winter festivals of light. So embrace it – eat drink and be merry – and may I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

[Star if Bethlehem image from Flickr user Ashish T]

The rusty red material you see is dust and it contains within its filaments and structure, some 700 protostars ready to burst into life. The thick dust in this region had, until now, totally obscured all the amazing content. The blue areas are places where stars have already formed and are now illuminating nearby hydrogen gas.

This image has been keeping an officemate of mine busy for quite some time already. Identifying the 700+ protostars and myriad other objects in this image – which is only one of hundreds of images yet to come – is a big challenge for astronomers working with Herschel data. I can’t help but wonder if the answer to this data-rich problem may lie somewhere in the Zooniverse.

You can find more on Herschel on the ESA website, and you can read more about this particular image via this ESA link. This image was released alongside a new website called OSHI (Online Showcase of Herschel Images) which although a bit sparse right now, is worth bookmarking for the future.

I’m not one to engage in STFC politics – I’m far too vulnerable and ignorant as a PhD student. There are much better blogs to read about that sort of thing. However in light of the prospect that I might shortly head into this funding minefield to try and get a job, I figure I may as well make a few observations. It is also worth spreading the word around the blogosphere. Most of my readers are from outside the UK and are likely unaware of the disaster unfolding in UK astronomy.

The funding gap is an astonishing £70 million which itself begs some explanation. How on Earth did it come to this? As I understand it, the STFC is going from around £100 million of annual spending power to just £30 million. That is a massive drop and although I understand where some of it came from (exchange rates and loans, for example), it always seems to hark back to a more general problem of bad management. The merger of PPARC and the CCLRC was clearly a disaster – you cannot merge two financial entities, remove a huge chunk of money and expect everything to be hunky-dory.

The management of the fallout from that merger was also appalling and confusing. The best example was in a town hall meeting at the 2008 National Astronomy Meeting. A student who asked why he should ‘take the risk’ of studying solar physics when there were now going to be no UK jobs in the field was told by the head-honchos of UK astronomy that he could either wait ten years or go and work abroad. Brilliant.

The STFC – like many other organisations and individuals – isn’t standing up and fighting for science enough. With the current economic climate you can see how education and hospitals might get defacto precedent over radio telescopes and PhD grants – but the truth is that there IS money around still – just not as much. If astronomy doesn’t fight for it then someone else will obviously get it – we shouldn’t just willingly roll over and perish. If the STFC won’t argue the case for the benefits to society from astrophysics research then who will?

Finally there is the issue of people vs. facilities. Job security in UK astronomy is rock-bottom right now and not just because of these looming budget cuts. The rolling grants that sustain many researchers in the UK  - including many of my friends at Cardiff University – are reducing dramatically and coming up for review more often. In short many people no longer know if they’ll have a job from one year to the next. This is terrible for recruitment and terrible for morale. I have joked before about the deathly way in which we are sometimes told of colleagues ‘leaving astronomy’ – something that is almost always a one-way shift – but for many UK astronomers at the moment this is likely the sound option if you have a family or a mortgage. It usually pays better too.

The tragedy is that as 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, comes to a close, astronomy in the UK sits under an ironic cloud. Having spent the year trying to inspire the country to become excited by astronomy, many professional astronomers may go into 2010 as financial analysts, software developers or web designers. This country has an incredible astronomical history and, although I’m sure that will continue in the long term, it will be a very sad thing if tomorrow we learn that 70% of UK astronomy is no more. There is surely some other approach to the problem than slashing budgets, culling jobs and pretending that this is the direction we were aiming for all along.

If anyone on the STFC Council is reading – and I doubt they are – how about holding steadfast to the people instead of the facilities? You can always buy back into some telescope down the road but you’ll not get back the postdoc who is forced to leave to go work for a bank. How about making the case for UK astronomy and fighting for more money from the government?

Just a few observations. Like I say, I don’t know enough about all this. I’ve probably oversimplified it and brushed over the details. But it affects me and my family, it affects my country and my future and since I have a voice in this blog, I might as well use it. I hope I’ve got it all wrong and I await the news tomorrow afternoon. But I have a feeling this Christmas will be a crappy one for far too many astronomers.

UPDATE: In view of Amanda’s comments below I’d thought I’d add that if you want to try to help save astronomy you should visit http://www.saveastronomy.org.uk/ and take a look around. You can write to your MP, as I have done, and just tell people about it. They have examples of letters, links to online petitions and general information. You can also read Paul Crowther’s website which explains every part of this disaster in stunning detail.

This means that each year I have spent probably too much time thinking about nice, simple physics demonstrations that vaguely relate the the holiday season. One of my favourites is the one I concocted to try to demonstrate the principles of teleportation using LEGO.

The only way I can think that Santa might be able to deliver so many presents in just 31 hours (think about it) is that he must be able to teleport – unless he can time travel. If he delivered all the presents by parking the sleigh, descending into the house and laying them out then it would take him thousands of years to get the job done.

To demonstrate teleportation in a lecture theatre turns out to be quite easy – and fun. You need some LEGO and a bench with a dividing screen on it. After a brief preamble explaining the basics of teleportation you ask for two volunteers to act as ’supercomputers’. You give one a small LEGO model of Santa and ask them to disassemble the model and put the pieces in a pot. Then the pieces are passed to the second ’supercomputer’ who has to reassemble the model with only the pieces and instructions from the first volunteer. This is done under a time limit for a bit of extra excitement. They will almost undoubtedly not reassemble Santa correctly and this can be very funny by itself.

It illustrates rather nicely how much information storage/transmission would be required to teleport something as they do in Star Trek. There is also the issue of the nature of the LEGO blocks themselves. If you pass the same pieces over then you have to explain how that would be done. Alternatively you can use other identical pieces but then is that really the same Santa that you started with?

Chromoscope, allows anyone to view the Milky Way and the distant Universe more easily than ever before. The site shows the sky – projected in a way that highlights the Milky Way – in a range of wavelengths, from high-energy gamma rays through to the longest radio waves. Chromoscope was launched at the .Astronomy conference in Leiden, Netherlands.

We wanted to create an easy way to let people see and understand the night sky in non-optical light. When you add it all up, astrophysicists spend far more time studying x-rays, gamma-rays, infrared and radio than they do looking at optical images. Why? Because there is a lot of structure that we can see and understand through those non-human filters.

The site came about because of the Royal Society Exhibition last summer as a way to explain why Herschel and Plank saw not in visible light but in infrared and microwave respectively. It is meant to be an easy-to-use tool and one that can be downloaded and run without a web connection if desired.

The project involves data from ROSAT (X-ray), the Digital Sky Survey (optical), IRAS (infrared), WMAP (microwave) and other all-sky astronomical surveys. There are more wavelengths lined up and ready to go in the near future. It will is available at http://www.chromoscope.net – go and play!

The programme for the conference is a wide and varied affair all centred around the notion that the Internet can help astronomical research and outreach. Everyone there will be talking about new and interesting ways to make this happen. Everything from Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope to never-before-seen Python scripts all have their place in .Astronomy.

A full press release for the conference is available on the website. You can follow events on Twitter @dotastronomy and on UStream, where several of the talks will be broadcast. We will try and take questions from the web where possible – although I admit I’ve never tried that before.

If you are interested in how the web can help astronomy – either in research our public outreach – then do try and join us online and if you’re interested in attending a possible third .Astronomy event then please get in touch with me and I’ll make a note of it… wherever it may be.

The image at the top of this post is from the IRAS satellite and it shows our galaxy, the Milky Way, in the far infrared. It is quite beautiful and in fact goes much deeper in detail. What you’re seeing is a sort of heat map of the galaxy. The structures and details shown in the infrared are very different to those seen in optical light. Objects that are invisible to the human eye can shine brightly in infrared, such as warm cores surrounded by think blankets of dust.

So with all this buzzing about in my head you can imagine my delight at borrowing the department’s infrared camera! I was able to take the handheld thermal digital camera out and about in Cardiff for the afternoon and then take it home too. I took shots of just about anything that might be interesting in the infrared and posted them up on Flickr.

You can download the slides here and what follows are links to various sites that I mentioned during the talk. The talk as a whole was inspired by the .Astronomy conferences, the second of which is taking place in Leiden from November 30th to December 4th this year. You can read more about that on the conference website www.dotastronomy.com and the twitter feed @dotastronomy.

As well as these links, you may want to click around this site itself, as it contains many more examples of online astronomy.

http://www.twitter.com/overcardiff
http://www.twitter.com/lookupastro
http://www.galaxyzoo.org
http://www.slooh.com
http://www.faulkes-telescope.com
http://www.photosynth.net
http://earth.google.com
http://www.newburyas.org.uk
http://www.astrometry.net
http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/

Nemesis!

Roughly every 30 million years something very bad seems to happen – life on Earth seems to die in vast quantities and a large percentage of all Earth’s species go extinct. Why do these mass-extinction events occur? Not sure – but it does seem to have happened with a reasonably regular interval for over 250 million years.

One hypothesis for this is that there is something ominous circling around us, at the edge of the Solar System. Some think it could be a large planet, other suggest a dead star – it has been given names like Planet X and Nemesis. Whatever it is, the theory goes that it is orbiting our Sun in a highly elliptical fashion. Once every orbit it plunges very close to the Sun, just scraping the edge of the Solar System: the Oort Cloud.

The Oort cloud is home to countless rocky bodies – it is the home of many comets – and such a massive gravitational nudge would send potentially thousands of these objects hurtling into the inner Solar System – one of which might hit us and cause a catastrophic global disaster. This might what killed the dinosaurs, and it’s possibly what will kill us.

Magnetic Switch

Since the mid-nineteenth century humans have been monitoring the Earth’s magnetic field. The same magnetic field that guides migratory birds and makes a compass work also protects us from harmful radiation from the Sun and gives us the beautiful Northern Lights. But here’s the thing – it is gradually weakening. According to some researchers, this could mean that something is about to change.

We also know – and this where it gets disturbing – that the Earth’s magnetic field has historically flipped over from time to time. In fact this usually happens every 250,000 years. It has been almost 800,000 years since the last flip so perhaps we’re overdue. Of course no one was around to witness the last one and so we don’t know what effect it would have. Things could get very ugly though.

If the magnetic field that protects the Earth did flip it would mean that somewhere along the way we wouldn’t be protected from space for a while! We might be bombarded with harmful radiation or cosmic rays. The lovely aurora would perhaps be slightly more menacing if they gave you cancer. If the flip is sudden then it would wreak havoc on the world’s electric systems – potentially frying them.

The Singularity

We are now able to make ever-smarter machines. What happens when we make a machine that is smarter than us? The answer surely is that it will be able to built an even better, smarter machine and that in turn will build an even better one too. Within a few cycles we will be faced with a machine so clever that we seem puny and irrelevant by comparison. The world could quickly be controlled and organised by such a machine and we will have ended our reign here.

We are also extending the human lifespan faster all the time (in the West) – what happens when we extend it by more than a year each year? We will then live indefinitely. Technological progress advances exponentially. This means that world-changing advancements come along at shorter and shorter intervals – eventually you reach a mathematical singularity, at which point things can no longer be thought of the way they used to.

The theory goes that some singularity is coming in the next century and although it may not be quite as we imagine it, it will possibly end the world as we know it. It may bring an end to our lives as we know them – in the machine case for example – why not download ourselves into super-intelligent machines and go onto bigger and better things? At our current rate of progress we will make more progress in the next century than in the past 10,000 years. The world as we understand it will surely cease to be.

Irradiated

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are distant but gargantuan explosions that take just a few seconds and release more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime! Some are 100s of times more powerful than that. Needless to say, you don’t need to be very close to one of these things to be more than a little singed. It could be almost anywhere in our galaxy and still devastate the planet.

There are other ways to be irradiated: the Sun could go nova, releasing massive quantities of dangerous material and radiation; a stray pulsar could accidentally spin around and fry us like an massive, errant laser pointer.

However it might happen, it remains remotely possible that in a brief instant the Earth could find itself totally irradiated on one side. Every living thing, every molecule of anything would be vapourised and instantly! Half the population – more or less – would be gone in a microsecond. And they’re the lucky ones. If you’re unfortunate enough to live on the other side of the Earth during this high-energy blast then you have the pleasure of gradually rotating around into the radiation – if it is still there. Worse still you could experience the awful, apocalyptic nightmare that is a shockwave of plasma – made up of every living thing from one half of the planet – sweeping across the world, incinerating everything as it goes.

Andromeda

We’ve  all heard the old wives tale about the Sun dying and swallowing up the Earth as it becomes a red giant, right? Well let me tell you you don’t need to worry about it. That will take 6 billion years to happen – that’s ages! Especially whn there’s something much worse heading for us much faster.

The Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s friendly galactic neighbour and virtual twin sister is heading right for us. Pulled in by gravity, Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course and  in 2 or 3 billion years Andromeda will rip our galaxy apart like cotton wool. Shockwaves will ripple through the two galaxies, triggering supernovae and star formation at an incredible rate.

The Solar System will be lucky to survive such an event. Gravitational forces could tear us apart, radiation could fry us to a crisp or if we’re really unfortunate we could be gobbled up by one of two very big black holes as they coalesce and merge.

Snowball Earth

Periodically, many times over the course of the Earth’s history ice has covered the world and then gone again. I’m not talking about ice ages – no this is something even more dramatic. 600 million years ago the Earth was a giant snowball – entirely covered by ice. It also happened 100 million years before that and over two billion years ago. This ‘Snowball Earth‘ is the result of a runaway cooling effect where the ice covering the surface of the planet increases the reflectivity (or albedo) such that a lot of the incident radiation from the Sun bounces back into space, thus cooling the planet further.

As man-made climate change warms up the Earth, key processes may shut down due to changes in the freshwater/salt water balance – the gulf stream, the ocean currents. If this happens and the poles are cut off from sources of warm air or water, then they may refreeze rapidly and the runaway ‘Snowball’ process can begin.

Evolving Out of Style

With all this talk of things that might happen in millions and billion of years it is probably prudent to mention that we almost certainly won’t be around anyway. If by the end of the world, you mean the end of civilization or the end of the human race, then even looking a million years ahead is foolish.

Even the most well-adapted and long-lived species seem to only last a few million years or so before evolving out of style. The ones that do are not exactly like us – crocodiles, sharks, cockroaches. The human race, like any other, is subject to the environment around it and will evolve and adapt with it. It only takes one big volcanic eruption or viral outbreak to change our circumstances dramatically.

In a million years we could have become plankton-eating aquamen or tree-loving, hairy cannibals. We may not even live on Earth anymore…

Big Crunch/Rip/Freeze

Our universe has been around for 13.7 billion years – Earth has been around for just over 4 billion. We’ve been here for a few hundred thousand – depending on what we you call ‘we’. If we do manage to secure our existence indefinitely – perhaps by uploading ourselves into machines or spreading ourselves far and wide enough into the cosmos – then can we really be here forever? Time it seems could be eternal but also it could not.

Following the Big Bang – the beginning of the universe – we can either live in an ever-expanding universe that eventually rips itself apart (the Big Rip), an ever expanding universe that gradually slows down (Big Freeze) or a universe that reaches some extremely large size and then begins to fall back in on itself (Big Crunch). It all depends on how the Universe is made up and how much dark energy there is.

If we’re heading for a Big Rip then eventually there will be no Universe left as we understand it – so we die. If it’s a Big Crunch then everything ultimately smashes back together and time end – so we die. If the Big Freeze happens then sooner or later all the energy in the universe gradually becomes so diluted and spread out that nothing energetically useful can ever happen – everything freezes out – (thoughts, movement, calculations) – so we die.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Nothing is impossible – just highly improbable. As fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide are aware. That is what Heisenberg ended up stating about the Universe thanks to quantum mechanics. It is possible, though not very likely that a giant cat will appear one day and give the Earth a lovely hug and magic up some tea and cake. It is also equally unlikely that one day a giant death ray will appear and destroy our whole planet.

Given enough time – say an infinitely long time – eventually each of these things will happen. The problem is that since we already exist, it doesn’t matter if something good pops into existence alongside us. If something bad randomly blurts out of the vacuum – even for a brief moment – and destroys us then that does matter. The longer we hang around, the more chance there is for something like that to happen.

It isn’t likely, but is worth thinking about.

The Belt (called Gould’s Belt in North America, and named for Benjamin Gould, who identified it in 1879.) is actually a fragmented ring of of star-forming clouds, young stars and nebulae that comes in at around 3000 light years in diameter. Containing lots of bright, young O- and B-type stars, in sits neatly inside the local spiral arm of our own galaxy the Milky Way. The Sun appears to be situated roughly in the middle of it – but it is not know where it came from or what it really is. To study the star-forming regions does not necessitate any understanding of the belt itself, but it is curious to wonder how it came to be.

The image below (from galaxymap.org) shows approximately where in our Milky Way galaxy the Gould Belt lies. You have to image the entire Solar System as an invisible speck near the middle of the white ring, denoting the Gould Belt.

One common theory is that there was some ancient supernova that exploded and sent radiation and material outward. Like a ripple from a stone dropped in a pond, this caused an ever-growing ring of activity in the surrounding interstellar medium. This model works fairly well, since the local bubble – a region of low density in which the Sun and a few other stars sit – fits reasonably well inside the Gould Belt. Perhaps both of these structural features could have resulted from an ancient explosion.

It is also possible that some much larger scale interaction has taken place. A recent paper on arXiv suggests that the belt originated 30 million years ago when a giant dark matter clump collided with a giant molecular cloud in the Milky Way’s spiral arm.

Maybe there is no Gould Belt! It could be that we only think we can see a ring-shaped pattern in the layout of our local region. After all when it comes to detailed structure in the galaxy, we cannot see much further out than our own spiral arm. Maybe these kinds of shapes are merely coincidental from our viewpoint.

The image at the top of this post was created by my office-mate Jason Kirk and it shows the star-forming clouds within the Gould Belt. The belt itself is marked as a blue ring and the local bubble is shown as a shaded area. The size of the star-forming regions is proportional to their mass, assuming a uniform density. This image was created for the Spitzer Gould Belt Survey and I have always found it handy when thinking about the Gould Belt.

Next Big Future is thinking about better superconducting magnets that are making tests of gravitational field propulsion possible. If that theory is correct, it would enable advanced hyperdrive propulsion to be realized with large powerful superconducting magnets.

Cosmic Ray is talking about the ‘unprovoked attack on the moon’ by NASA’s LCROSS mission. There are many people out there who misunderstood LCROSS.

Centauri Dreams describes the surprising early results from the IBEX mission, which is mapping the area where the heliosphere meets the nearby interstellar medium.

Cheap Astronomy presents a podcast on its experiences with one of the world’s great cheap telescopes: the Galileoscope.

The Chandra Blog is meeting an astronomer. Carles Badens is doing some really interesting work on supernovas and their remnants.

Weirdwarp reports on Kepler, discovering exoplanets and how you can adopt a star and see your name on Google Sky.

AARTScope Blog writes about variable stars and how they are discovered, both historically and personally.

Crowlspace relays some cool papers on starships and then speculates about photons bashing into mirrors.

At Universe Today, a post that has a fun way to celebrate the IYA:  Jane Houston Jones works at JPL, but she’s also an amateur astronomer.  For IYA, she is attempting to recreate all of Galileo’s astronomical drawings by sketching her observations through a telescope similar in size to Galileo’s.

Over on Bad Astronomy, Phil has some imagery from Mars that you need to embiggen fully to enjoy. Martian landscape artwork for all to enjoy.

Artsnova has a post that is close to m heart: social networking and robotic space exploration. Lots of linkage a some wallpaper goodies too.

Commercial Space is talking about the conference season and specifically the Canadian Science Policy Conference and Space Summit.

Telescoper, Peter Coles, has a wonderful 17th Century poem about the achievements of humanity, Greatness in Little by Richard Leigh.

Simostronomy has more variable star news in an update on R Coronae Borealis – or R Cor Bor.

The Great KSSSM has a report on how amateur astronomers from all over Cumbria created a scale model of the solar system at a historic, ancient castle in Kendal, the birthplace of the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington.

A Babe in the Universe tells all about a rocket so big you could project movies on the third stage! A showing of movie APOLLO 13 at Johnson Space Center gives us pause to remember the biggest rocket of all.

Kentucky Space has a video about how they and Nanoracks are working to make affordable and repeatable microgravity research on the International Space Station available to many more organizations.

Finally, from this very site, a picture that paints a billion words:  trying to grasp to meaning of one billion thanks to Information is Beautiful.

[Check out the full index of the Carnival of Space at Universe Today. The image in the header of this post comes from the 2009 Wellcome Image Awards for excellence in scientific imagery and art, that were announced this week.]

When you begin to consider such figures in relation to each other then your whole world changes! For example the Iraq War ($3000 billion), worldwide spend on advertising ($320 billion) and the Internet porn industry ($97 billion) are seen in stark contrast to the defense budget of Russia ($11 billion) and the global gift card market ($29 billion).

NASA’s annual budget was just about $17 billion for 2009 and the entire annual UK STFC budget is about $1 billion.

This image comes from Information is Beautiful, which if you’re not reading you should be. It is a fabulous blog collecting together (and creating) some amazing and insightful data-art.

[Information is Beautiful's Billion Dollar Gram]

UPDATE: Max Alexander’s Explorers of the Universe exhibition is now on display at Royal Albert Hall until 2nd November http://bit.ly/UZbOg

[Max Alexander's astronomer's portraits collection]

As the time of impact approached on Friday, the web began buzzing with tales of how NASA was going to ‘bomb the moon’ – I even ended up arguing on Twitter about it with a random user. It seems that LCROSS’ end-of-days finale was too much for some to take – with much criticism of ‘littering’ and ‘polluting’ the Moon going on. This all despite the fact that, as Stuart Lowe and Chris North point out, this sort of thing happens to the Moon all the time – albeit with rock and not space probes.

As it happens, the spectacular plume was not visible from Earth as was hoped – disappointingly nor was it terribly visible from the NASA live feed. This led some to say the mission has failed but again this is another case of science being misunderstood. A small plume was seen, even if it wasn’t as big and bright as hoped – and NASa got lots of data. No doubt they will reveal before too long what they have – or have not – uncovered.

They have quick post up showing that a plume was at least ‘just’ visible – the optical image is shown above – and I await further results from the LCROSS team in the coming weeks.

More importantly though – if they do find evidence of water hidden under the Moon’s South Pole – why is this important? Well if we want to send people back to the Moon and then beyond into the Solar System we need to start thinking about actually going and living on the Moon. We need bases in space – and the Moon is a good place – or space travel will just be too expensive. Water is heavy and carting it about with us around the Solar System will be difficult. If we have a supply of it on the Moon that we can mine then we need to know where it is and thus where to start thinking about putting our first base.

If there is water to be found on the Moon then it becomes even more interesting and relevant to mankind’s space travel agenda and to its science agenda in the coming decades. Well done to the LCROSS team for a successful smash-down!

16 Psyche was the first asteroid to be given a number upon its discovery. Until then asteroids were given symbols like the planets. Psyche is thought to be 253km in diameter and is of iron-nickel composition. It may be the remnant core of a larger body that was at some point blasted apart during the early days of the Solar System.

Psyche is obviously moving through the sky but when I saw it (and at the time of writing) it resided in Capricorn, ideally placed for my location in the late evening. At around magnitude 9.5 it isn’t visible to the naked eye.

The trick the finding asteroids is to look in the same place more than once. Finding the starfield where you expect the asteroid to be, you take a photo or sketch what you see. Then you go back a fews hours later, or the next night and look again at the same spot. If you’re in the right place, you’ll see that one of the stars has moved – that is most-likely your asteroid.

I observed Psyche two nights in a row and indeed could see, even without referring to my sketch of the area around it, that it had moved in the field of view. I thought this was pretty cool but was frustrated by my lack of photography facilities – I have no CCD or other telescope imaging device. Ah! I thought, I know what to do – I’ll go online and use SLOOH, the pay-as-you-go robotic telescope network.

The result is two images from the next two nights showing two more successive motions of Psyche. These are the images seen here.

I’m very pleased with my first asteroid find. I also then went on to spot asteroids 88 Thisbe and 7 Iris, although no pictures I’m afraid. I didn’t manage to find the Comet 22P/Kopff, which was a shame. The weather, and limited nights in the garden, got the better of me in the end.

LookUP works by asking the right databases the right questions. If you ask for a planet, the LookUP will query one astronomy web service. If you ask for a comet, it may ask another. You can read more about this on the LookUP about page.

Before long, an iPhone app was been developed and then several other ways of interfacing with the new service. Now I have thrown my own contribution into the mix:  a Twitter bot that connects you to LookUP in those situations when only Twitter will do.

Tweet ‘@lookupastro Orion Nebula’ and you will get a reply with the data on where to find M42 in the sky.

@lookupastro is a simple Twitter bot that when tweeted with the name of an astronomical object, will reply with its RA and declination and a link to the LookUP page. This is achieved by querying the Twitter stream for @lookupastro mentions and dealing with them in a way that can be parsed through the LookUP JSON outputs. Stuart’s data service is robust enough to reply sensibly to most things thrown at it and so the Twitter bot has been running fairly smoothly.

You don’t need to follow @lookupastro to use it, just tweet it. For example tweet “@lookupastro Orion Nebula” and you will get a reply with the data on where to find M42 in the sky and a ‘more information’ link. It’ll even suggest spelling corrections! Give it a go.

Last time I was here I attempted to observe all the planets and Pluto – in one day. In the end only Mercury evaded me and so I still have that target in mind for another trip. This time, though I have my sights set on the asteroids. Observing asteroids is something I’ve never thought to try really. It occurred to me the other night though that with these excellent dark skies and the trusty Meade ETX-90 Autostar, I could probably bag a few of them.

A quick check with Starry Night shows me that there are a few visible and prominent in the late evening, notably Iris, Psyche and Thisbe (you’ll need to add in your lat/long on those Heaven’s Above links BTW). I think it will be best to try to photograph them at different times and then see if one can spot the motion of the asteroid compared to the background stars in he shot. I’ve not tried it before but I’ll give it a go and let you know – if you have tried and have any advice, let me know. Maybe I’ll try and follow up my observations using an online telescope, such as SLOOH.

Another target for this trip is the comet 22P Kopff, which peaked back in June but is still visible and is very well placed for my location, being not too far from Jupiter and given that today is a new Moon. The above image of Kopff 22P is from July 20th this year and is by Michael Jager. I doubt I’ll see anything like this but what a shot!

I shall report back on my efforts, and I’d be interested to hear from anyone looking at the same things recently.

[Header image from David Darling]