Well I can hardly believe it but the second .Astronomy conference is nearly here. Next week (Monday to Friday) 50 astronomers gather in the Lorentz Centre in Leiden to discuss all things digitally astronomical. I created and organised the first .Astronomy conference last year in Cardiff and was approached by Sarah Kendrew and Carolina Ödman [...]
During next week’s Moonwatch event at Cardiff University, I’ll be manning a stand showing people how to use Twitter, Google Earth and the Internet to find satellites in the night sky. As well as showing them how to use Heaven’s Above, I’ll also be outlining my own projects OverTwitter, LookUp and Satellite KML.
I took some images of the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Venus and the Moon. It was a very pretty event, and I’ve hardly done it justice, but I thought I’d add my photos into the mix.
The Cardiff HAlf metre Newise Telescope (CHaNT) officially opens today with a public event. The new, half-metre telescope is big enough to see Andromeda’s companion galaxies, to study the red spot on Jupiter and to see stars which, frankly, I never thought I’d see from Cardiff!
Finally my paper studying the Ophiuchus star-forming region is done and dusted and has been accepted for publication. Today it appeared on the online research paper service, astro-ph and it be published properly by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in (hopefully) the near future.
“Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe claim Venus’s clouds contain chemicals that are consistent with the presence of micro organisms.”
These two are from Cardiff’s centre for Astrobiology and the elder of the two has singlehandedly given the field a bad name over the past twenty years.
The whole concept of this idea is that life [...]
Ah here I am in ever-so sunny Aix in the south of France. I’m blogging from my iPhone right now because I’m by the pool and too comfy to go and find my laptop. I’m also testing out the Wordpress app from the App Store.
The skies here are big and clear and even these early [...]
You may have noticed that I have ‘fallen off the internet’ this week, as a friend of mine recently said in a text message. Well the reason is that I have been attending a meeting about star formation and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
A radiation incident has stalled work on SCUBA2, meaning the high-tech submillimetre camera is once again delayed.
Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog
