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.

This is my first poster for a conference and it is going up at the UK National Astronomy meeting in a couple of weeks. Based on my SCUBA layer for Google Sky, it will found in the Education and Outreach section during the conference.

Well what do you know, as soon as I make myself a wavelength slider for Google Sky, Google go ahead and pass me by by releasing the much anticipated web version of Google Sky complete with wavelength sliders. I still like my little mashup but I look forward to playing with (and taking apart) their new application as well.

Check it out: http://www.google.com/sky/

I’ve been wishing there was a wavelength slider in Google Sky ever since it launched and so I have tried to make one. Well I’ve started to make one and thought I’d share. In place of an actual wavelength slider, I have hijacked the time slider and so each wavelength included gets a month on the time slider.

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.

Orbiting Frog has been a busy place in 2008! We are only a small way into the year but already Orbiting Frog seems to have overspilled to the extent to which I feel the need to recap and regroup. So just in case you missed anything, here is a quick overview of what’s been going on here in the past couple of months.

My experimentation with Google Earth and Google Sky has led to several items being created. In Google Earth, the ISS Locator, 100 Brightest Satellites Tracker and the Advanced Any Satellite Tracker have all been very popular and downloaded a combined 5,600 times already. In Google Sky my SCUBA data layer has now been access over 1,500 times and for some reason has inspired several emails - thanks for those! There is also last year’s IRAS 100 Micron all sky coverage for Google Sky which I had forgotten all about.

The LookUp iPhone and iPod Touch app has also been popular. Apple featured it as a Staff Pick and it hung around in the Top 10 for some time. It is now accessed about 2,000 times a day and a recent TUAW bump has kept it visible on the Apple web apps site.

The week of the lunar eclipse led me to post a video on what would be seen. I hosted the video on YouTube to reduce server load and was quite surprised however when it became one of the top videos of the week. You can have quite laugh reading the comments on the YouTube page. No one seemed to grasp that it was made on a computer and several accuse me of tricking them.

The Orbiting Frog Shop launched not too long ago and has been selling lots of t-shirts. More designs will appear all the time so keep your eyes peeled, and if anyone spots one in the wild, I’d love to hear about it.
I have now joined the crew at the Carnival of Space by hosting the 40th edition. The Carnival is a great place to pick up new RSS feeds and bloggers.

Finally I’d just like to thank everyone for taking such an interest. Thanks for all the emails and for actually reading the blog. Now I’m off to create a real blog post (i.e. not about myself) before having some lovely Swiss lunch. Yum.

Over the summer I created a Google Sky layer that enabled anyone to access the entire SCUBA submm catalogue of maps and objects in a dynamic fashion. Google Sky was released in August and the open file format means anyone can create data for display. This layer is now publicly available thanks to help from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC), the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) and my colleagues at Cardiff University.

All you have to do is install the latest version of Google Earth and then download this KML file.

Once initialized for the first time, the file will make a download of a 9MB catalogue. This takes a minute or two and once complete you can roam the sky, viewing any regions of it covered by SCUBA in submillimetre wavelengths.

As well as the data points (which appear in green) you can also view images taken by the SCUBA camera. These will only load when you are close enough on the sky to see them, to save on time and disk space.

The best thing about this Google Sky layer is that it will enable you to place side-by-side things which you can’t see with things that you can. The image below of the Horsehead Nebula is a perfect example.

In the top, in purple you can see the optical light. This is the outline of the classic Horsehead, which is located in Orion. In orange below it, you can see the dusty, SCUBA-mapped material. It slots almost perfectly into the dark region of the Horse’s head. That’s because the reason the Horse’s head exists is that the dust obscures he light and creates the shape.

If you look carefully you’ll see the ‘lozenge’ of dust in the horse’s throat. This is a clump of cold material, with a submillimetre source at the centre (the green hexagon). This is thought to be a pre-stellar core - an object which may go on to form a star.

This ‘dust’, as it is called by astronomers has the consistency of smoke and accounts for huge amount of the material in our galaxy. Many of the shapes of the nebula you will have seen arise from dark, dusty material in between the light and your point of view.

You will possibly be familiar with dust from images such as he Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula. This shown below with the SCUBA map layered on top, semi-transparently.

Included with the SCUBA Google Sky layer is a set of interesting features, which will take you to certain objects or regions of the sky, to get you started. All the green hexagons come with a popup of scientific data from the CADC catalogue.

For more screenshots, see my Flickr photo set about this project.

SCUBA was a camera on the James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. It was a submillimetre continuum array receiver, with a field of view 2.3 arcmin in diameter. It had two hexagonal arrays of detectors, which mapped a fair chunk of the sky in 850 microns and 450 microns.

The device was made to study regions of the universe normally dark in optical frequencies. The things you’ll see in the SCUBA data are dusty areas of our galaxy and of more distant galaxies. These are the areas where stars are born and they are being studied all the time by researchers like myself and my colleagues.

This layer adds to a growing collection of ways to look at Google Sky. there are already layers for

• XMM-Newton [Link]
• SDSS [Link]
• IRAS [Link]

Download the SCUBA Google Sky KML file here (approx 1.0kB) This will officially launch later in the week, so if you have trouble try forcing Google Earth to refresh the KML file by right-clicking and selecting ‘Revert’ or ‘Refresh’.