Finally my paper studying the Ophiuchus star-forming region is done and dusted and has been accepted for publication. Thanks to one of my intrepid co-authors, that paper appeared today on astro-ph, the preprint paper listing for astronomy and astrophysical theses.

We re-analyse all of the archive observations of the Ophiuchus dark cloud L1688 that were carried out with the submillimetre common-user bolometer array (SCUBA) at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). For the first time we put together all of the data that were taken of this cloud at different times to make a deeper map at 850 microns than has ever previously been published. Using this new, deeper map we extract the pre-stellar cores from the data. We use updated values for the distance to the cloud complex, and also for the internal temperatures of the pre-stellar cores to generate an updated core mass function (CMF). This updated CMF is consistent with previous results in so far as they went, but our deeper map gives an improved completeness limit of 0.1 Mo (0.16 Jy), which enables us to show that a turnover exists in the low-mass regime of the CMF. The L1688 CMF shows the same form as the stellar IMF and can be mapped onto the stellar IMF, showing that the IMF is determined at the prestellar core stage. We compare L1688 with the Orion star-forming region and find that the turnover in the L1688 CMF occurs at a mass roughly a factor of two lower than the CMF turnover in Orion. This suggests that the position of the CMF turnover may be a function of environment.

It is a study of star formation and prestellar cores, the objects that precede protostars. You can access the online abstract and get more information at arXiv.org or simply download the PDF from Orbiting Frog.

“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 form in clouds on Venus and blew to Earth on a wind. Why it isn’t simply to postulate it formed here and just stayed, I don’t know.

I once had a lecture from Chandra Wickramasinghe in which he drew scatterplot with two points on it and then joined them with a straight line. This, he said, was evidence of a trend. That was it for him and me.

BBC NEWS | Wales | South East Wales | Life from Venus blown to Earth?

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 Perseids look amazing. Getting the telescope out later for some real sightseeing.

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.

I am part of the Gould Belt Survey team working with Spitzer legacy data. Currently I am sat in a meeting but I thought I would post an entry explaining my absence from the web, which will actually continue for the next couple of weeks.

I may still posts the odd cool Digg story and the Abram’s Skynotes will continue. In the meantime, keep the emails coming in and watch out for the space station in the next few days. there are some more good sighting awaiting all of us.

SCUBA-2, the next generation submillimetre camera on the JCMT, has suffered another set back. After being installed at the site in April (photos) the team have been busy testing out the kit to prepare it for first light in the very near future.

The problem is that the detector arrays for the device are currently at the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) lab in Boulder, Colorado where a ‘radiation incident’ has taken place. Contamination from plutonium means that no one can enter the lab and the detectors are currently inside.

The incident is described on the NIST website, which says that “a small plutonium spill occurred on June 9″. The sample that is thought to have caused the leak would have contained just one-quarter of a gram of plutonium. This seemingly tiny portion of radioactive material was accidentally spread around by a lab worker who also used a sink to wash his hands while contaminated.

The lab has since been inspected and many surfaces are contaminated including “the floor [and] various tabletops and surfaces, consistent with a spread of material by hands and shoes”. NIST are working with experts and hope to have the situation resolved soon.

Meanwhile, SCUBA-2 has to wait. It has now been two weeks and as soon as the science team can get their hands on the arrays they hope to begin the next phase of work and try to bring to life a device which many have been waiting for with anticipation.

SCUBA-2, and its orbital cousin Herschel, will begin a new era for the science of star formation and submillimetre observing. You’ll hopefully be hearing a lot more about both these instruments right here in the weeks and months to come.

What is this jibberish I’m spouting now? Well LFI and HFI are two instruments flying on ESA’s new Planck spacecraft, which will be launching in a few months time. Planck will measure, and map in exquisite detail, radiation from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The spacecraft is a sort of cylinder about 4 metres high with a diameter also of 4 metres. you can see what I mean in the image on the embedded poster from ESA.

You learn more about Planck and the LFI and HFI instruments via this link and you can also follow the craft’s Twitter feed. I like this whole Twittering spacecraft thing - its so accessible and easy for anyone. Brilliant.

Oh and did I mention that Cardiff University is heavily involved in Planck, particularly with the HFI instrument which was built here.

Follow the link below to a PDF file showing higher-tier maths examination questions across many years ranging from 1951 to 2006. Surely this is evidence enough that GCSE exams (and their equivalents) are getting easier as time goes by?

Imperial College, London is piloting entrance exams because A-Levels do not do their job and I can testify that even in the almost-10-years since I started university, standards for starting the physics course in Cardiff have dropped. Why can’t we convince people that maths and science are interesting, exciting and fun? Worse still, why has it become a badge of honour to be bad at mathematics?

I sound like my mother! Which is a good thing because we need more people like her if we’re going to fix the mess we’ve slowly slid into. She currently lectures in maths education, teaching the teachers of the future.

This PDF is taken from a recent report on maths education in the UK, which claims that GCSEs have become ’shallow’ in that they cover more topics but to less depth. BBC NEWS | Education | Maths exams ‘have become easier’

Here is a great astronomy website for some fun this weekend called Down2Earth. You input some parameters and then simulate an asteroid impact (onto Wales no less). You can select the asteroid’s size, speed, density and target material (water or two types of land).

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.

Well it finally happened: SCUBA’s successor, SCUBA-2 has been installed on the JCMT in Hawaii. SCUBA stands for Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array and the original was a ground breaking instrument that finally allowed astronomers to probe the depths of star-forming regions and distant galaxies. SCUBA-2 will more of the same and then some.

SCUBA-2 can scan the sky much faster than SCUBA and will allow researchers to measure the properties of protoplanetary disks around young stars, amongst other things. Exciting stuff. It is however very big.

Whereas SCUBA was comparable to a hefty water-heater, SCUBA-2 is more like a minivan. Mostly this is because of the cryostat that is required to keep the technology inside SCUBA-2 at a very low temperature. This technology has been developed principally in Edinburgh but also in Cardiff as well a few other places.

I saw SCUBA-2 in Edinburgh in 2006 and noted its large size at the time. When I observed at the JCMT last November (2007) I asked how on Earth they intended to get the the very expensive SCUBA-2 inside the very expensive JCMT without damaging either. The answer gave was that it would be tricky, and now thanks to a series of photos from April 2nd and 3rd I know what they meant.

The full gallery of 600 photos can be found on the Joint Astronomy Centre’s JCMT pages. There is also a fairly large animated GIF file (22MB) if you would like to see the installation in action.

I finally caught the Space Station in Cardiff last night.

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.

If you’ve ever wondered what it is that I do (this one’s for all you family and friend types), then worry no more. Today I’m giving a talk to the incoming PhD students as part of our Postgraduate Conference. All the 2nd years give talks to all the 1st years and simultaneously bore all the 3rd years.

Fun! So my talk, as a flash animation, is shown over at this link if you’re interested.

Any questions? Send them my way.

Attention Cardiff citizens - I know you’re out there - the ISS is coming to our city. Well honestly, the ISS passes over us all the time but there are two nice upcoming passes that are worth keeping an eye our for because they are bright, conveniently timed and easy to spot. There is also the slight chance it will be clear and you will actually see it happen.

Tonight on Monday June 11th the ISS will rise at 11:21pm almost due West and pass directly overhead until it vanishes into the Earth’s shadow in the East at 11:29pm. It will move very quickly overhead at a magnitude of -1.0 which is about as bright as the brightest stars you can see. It will of course fly across the whole sky, compared to those stars, in just 8 minutes and that is what gives it away.

If you miss that pass for any reason, on Wednesday June 13th almost exactly the same thing will happen again. This time it will start and finish at 10:27pm and 10:35pm respectively and will be just fractionally dimmer at magnitude -0.9. That still puts it among the bright objects up there at the time.

All of this is made extra cool by knowing that the shuttle Atlantis and its crew are currently up there working on the space station, installing solar panels and making space walks.

Thanks to Heaven’s Above for the great service they provide. You can finid out when and where to spy the ISS and an array of other objects over at their website.

My NAM 2007 photos are up on Flickr. not very astronomy related, more the social side. Will put up a scientific version soon…

two

Originally uploaded by late night movie.

So I think we just had Winter. Thursday and Friday’s snow fell hard and fast but was gone just as quickly in the end. Which was a bit sad. Although I have heard reports that in the Brecon Beacons the sledging was excellent over the weekend.

I found this photo on Flickr of the snow in Alexandra Gardens in Cardiff. The two yellow flowers poking through show how slightly confused the plants seem to have been by the recent weather but also how pretty the brief blizzard was.

St. Davids Sunset at Cardiff Bay

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

This was one of those ‘thank god for cameraphones’ moments. I just happened to see this sunset and just happened to be at a great spot to take this picture of the St. David’s Hotel on Cardiff Bay.

We had just been for a tasty lunch at the Waterguard pub and were walking back to the car when I saw it - lovely! I am very lucky to live in a place as pretty as Cardiff and sometimes I need a picture like this one to get me through the rainy times.

So I got my PhD in Cardiff and formally accepted it today. good news, yay etc. I am very excited and have made myself a little something to get me more excited still about one day being an astronomer man.

In the end I received offers from both Cardiff and Exeter and deciding between them was tricky but in the end it had to be Cardiff for so many reasons that i shan’t bore this blog with. It was win win though in reality since both departments seem to be fantastic and filled with very nice people.

So I may end up gazing to the stars for a living one day, maybe even a proper astronomer. In the meantime though I’m looking forward to doing a good PhD and learning lots about the world above me.