Galaxy Zoo has put up a sort of thank you poster to all its volunteers. The names listed are those people who, when signing up to Galaxy Zoo, gave permission for their names to be published. There are a lot of names, including some funny ones. It’s worth taking a look.
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.
The BBC is running a video of Yves Rossy, a Swiss man who jumped from a plane and then flew using his homemade jet-propelled glider. The image above shows a previous version of the glider, which only has two jet engines. The model flown this week used four. Mr. Rossy, has been gathering fame on the web for some time, and this stunt will no doubt be circulating for some time. Once he produces a commercial product, I will stop whinging that the future is not here yet.
Trailers seem to be the ‘in thing’ these days. There is a (very long) trailer for the BLAST experiment’s movie somewhere out on the internet. Today, this very nice trailer popped up in my Twitter feed from Stuart at Astronomy Blog. It’s for the International Year of Astronomy, also known as 2009. This is going be lots of fun and will with any luck also be when I graduate my PhD. The video is below, or via this link for other formats.
Here are some of my personal favourite wallpapers for your desktop (and iPhone). Sizes 1900×1200, 1024×768, 1280×800 and 800×600 are all here to fill your eyes with spacey goodness. Let your own scattering of icons sit amongst glorious nebula and spectacular scenes!
I usually have a nice space picture as my computer’s desktop wallpaper. Today someone asked me where I find them. Well I find them all over the place. In the spirit of sharing, here are ten of the best. I have credited where possible. As far as I know, all images are Creative Commons licensed (but feel free to correct me).
Orion’s Belt (Credit: Digital Sky Survey)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Galactic Centre (Credit: Susan Stolovy, Caltech)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Helix (Credit: NASA, JPL)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Rover Shadow (Credit: NASA)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Pleiades (Credit: J. Stauffer, Caltech)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
ISS (Credit: STS-117 Shuttle Crew)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Four Suns (Credit: T. Pyle, SSC)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Sepia Moon (Credit: Stefan Seip)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
Aurora (Credit: Joshua Strang, USAF)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
NGC1977 (Credit: Martin Pugh)
800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1900×1200 | iPhone
The recent pass of Comet Holmes and today’s close approach of Asteroid 2007 TU24 (shown below, image from space.com) have gotten me thinking again about open source astronomy. I have always been fascinated by the internet and how modern networking technologies bring things into one big mesh, and astronomy fits right into this. All we have to do is synchronise our watches.
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.
The Internet group Anonymous has declared war on Scientology and has begun by attacking the cult’s website with a denial of service attack. Usually content to mess with fanatical or disturbing online groups, Anonymous has said that it believes Scientology to be a threat to mankind and stated that they were doing this for the good of its followers as well as for its own amusement. They have posted a YouTube video and issued a statement.
Maybe Astronomy can declare war on Scientology, that would be awesome!
Stuart (Astronomy Blog) has been busy working on the telescope XML that has been discussed before. Well he has actually posted some working feeds in what he called STML (see post title).
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.
My Ten Strangest Things in Space was picked up by fark.com yesterday and thus another 10,000 hits have battered my Site5 servers. Amongst the comment section of the fark entry was a picture that really made me laugh. A user called Lamune_Baba has modified the solar spectrum to create this:
Hilarious!
Stuart over at Astronomy Blog is trying to organise the creation of an XML structure for astronomical observations. He proposed the idea a short while ago but has recently posted anew with regard to getting some help in creating an XML schema for this new kind of feed. This sort of thing could one day be linked into, say, Google Earth, to allow people to follow where the telescopes of the world are pointing.
The implications are possibly very important. Future, large-scale astronomical events could be easily organised via such feeds to allow fuller coverage and better public communication.
So if you have any knowledge or input, Stuart would like to hear it. Read more on Astronomy Blog.
Incidentally I recently found a link for Google Earth that allows you to follow planes (on a 30 minutes delay) in real-time through the air. This is very cool and shows what can be accomplished with standardised data schemas. Click for the openATC website.
If you haven’t already then now is the time to subscribe to the Twitter feeds I made for many cities around the world. As of about the 4th of October it will once again become dark enough that the International Space Station (ISS) will become visible in the evenings over much of northern Europe.
In case you haven’t seen the previous post on the matter you can subscribe to Twitter feeds which let you know half an hour before the ISS goes over your home town. The feeds can be found for the following cities:
Over Aix-en-Provence
Over Birmingham
Over Belfast
Over Cardiff
Over Dublin
Over Edinburgh
Over Hong Kong
Over Indianapolis
Over Milton Keynes
Over Manchester
Over New York
Over Paris
Over San Francisco
Over Sydney
Much of September offered only very early morning chances to see the station going by but October will give us much more opportunities in civilized hours as the length of darkness grows.
Enjoy your station-spotting.
I read a while ago on Astronomy Blog that there was a Twitter feed called About London (developers’ blog) for International Space Station (ISS) passes overhead, as well as some other things. Basically every time the ISS was due to pass over London a Tweet would appear saying when it was due and where to find it in the sky. Nice idea. But we don’t all live in London and I wanted to make one for my own fair Cardiff.
So here is the Twitter address for Over Cardiff which will currently tell you when the ISS or Hubble are going to be visible: http://www.twitter.com/overcardiff
Twitter is great because its simple. You can receive notifications either by text or IM - or just online by RSS or the Twitter website. I have been wanting to learn a bit more PHP recently so this seemed perfect. While I was at it it seemed easy enough to make some for other cities as well. They are all listed below.
Name changed to Over Somewhere to distinguish this from Above London and associated projects.
This is all new to me so I welcome comments and thoughts from people. Also this is all on the proviso that it may break for a little bit. I think I’ve tested it but in my own experience these things are never tested until they’re used.
Over Aix-en-Provence
Over Birmingham
Over Belfast
Over Cardiff
Over Dublin
Over Edinburgh
Over Hong Kong
Over Indianapolis
Over Milton Keynes
Over Manchester
Over New York
Over Paris
Over San Francisco
Over Sydney
If you any other city requests, then leave the comments here and I’ll see what I can do. The current cities are based more of where I have family and friends than anything else.
I will post an explanation eventually including the PHP for how this was done. Basically I scrape Heaven’s over and then run a separate script for check for upcoming transits.
Enjoy your Twittering.
So my name is now on a (soon-to-be) published paper. How and why this happened is a little over my head, but I shall try to explain. One thing you should know however, is that I haven’t really done anything so far to help get this paper out. I haven’t written anything for it. I have never attended a meeting about it or even met most of the people I have co-authored it with. So how am I now a published scientist?
You’ll find ‘my’ first paper here on the astro-ph preprint server (Link), and you can download a PDF version here (Link). It is 60 pages, but about 20 are references and figures. It is titled ‘The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey of Nearby Star-Formiung Regions in the Gould Belt’.
Science is often done in groups these days. It takes a lot of combined effort and time to get the kudos and the know-how that gets money and recognition. This isn’t always the case but it is more true now than it was a decade ago.
The other day, on the blog, I was talking about how science could be more open. This is one area where, as Stuart pointed out in the comments, astronomy is very much open already. Of the 62 authors on the paper, I would imagine only a few have had a strong, guiding hand in the paper’s creation. A good bulk of them, lets say 80%, will have been involved at least in some significant way. The remaining handful - like myself - will have none nothing or a least very little. Those numbers are guesses since I’m new at this.
In this way, trams of scientists benefit from distributed expertise - each individual contributing their own unique talents and knowledge.
I am however signed up to help execute this survey. I am scheduled to man the telescope if needed for observations of the following areas Serpens, Cepheus, Pipe Nebula, CrA. I signed for it much like you would register for a website or something. A most unusual experience I felt.
The purpose of the survey as the title suggests is to look at the Gould Belt, which is an area in the sky that forms a ring around our position, roughly. It is shown in the image above along with some of the survey’s target areas. This ring, or belt, is home to many of the most active star forming regions in our neighbourhood and some of the brightest O-type stars in the sky as well. It is about 350pc in radius.
It was first seen by John Herschel, observing from the Southern Hemisphere in 1847 and later completed into a ring by a guy named Gould in 1879, hence the name.
By mapping the whole region we will achieve an impressive and broad catalogue of protostars and prestellar sources which will enable us to determine some key information about these young objects as they become stars.
So why am I on the paper? Well the whole team gets credit for each paper in the survey. If and when I go observing and reduce data on the Gould Belt, I will have the help and expertise, as well as the background papers published, by a team of incredible experts. We collaborate to achieve good science by sharing both the workload and the results.
So I’m chuffed with this incredibly low-effort publication and hope to actually have some involvement and maybe a paper ‘of my own’ in the next couple of years.
If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.
Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built on the Moon in the near(ish) future. The eagle-eyed among you may recalled I blogged the same story back in May, thanks to a link from Wired.
This isn’t me trying to say ‘I got the scoop’, because clearly I didn’t, but it got me thinking about the effect the internet can have on science. I think about the internet quite a bit, and its possible long-term influence on our culture. In fact my friend writes a blog about the internet and its effect on literature and fiction. Also, I found myself an almost-expert on blogs in recent years. So I would say I was a knowledgeable person on the matter.
The Wired article, so far as I can tell, was an original piece (compared to my own which was a link to it). They had interviewed this guy, Roger Angel, and created a journalistic piece on his research for NASA. Digg found the story, as did a host of other astronomy and science blogs (I can’t be bothered to link to all of them) and it did the rounds in the blogosphere. That was all back at the end of May. now, one month later an official NASA news release describes how the technical article for a giant liquid mirror telescope has been made public etc etc. The article is to appear in Nature.
So what happened? Clearly the internet knew about this before Nature could publish it. So this concept had reached the public domain before the journals had processed it. I rather like this fact and it was the first thing that occurred to me when I realised the echoed story had occurred.
The other thing that came back to me today was a book called ‘The Long Tail’, by Chris Anderson the editor of Wired magazine (a coincidence!). I found out it is out in paperback, but I listened to in on audiobook a while ago. The book outlines how massive niche markets have been shaping the economy in recent years thanks to the internet and sites such as eBay, iTunes and Amazon. It turns out that millions of highly selective minor purchases (such as niche music on iTunes) actually make up most of the sales compared with the more popular, mass marketed items (i.e. hit songs). Once the restriction of shelf space is removed, retailers no longer have to only stock certain items and the internet provides a forum for distributing digital media on an unlimited scale. No shelves required. Well its a great book - read it.
Anyway, my point is that science could easily go the way of entertainment because it is now digital. Papers no longer need to be published by journals to be read, they are instead deposited on vast pre-print archives online. Good ideas that capture minds can be distributed via the niche interest blogs, email, and within university department - all instantaneously and without the restriction of paper, time and money.
I am finishing my first year of an astronomy PhD and have never, not once so far, picked up and read any edition of any journal. Weird, huh? Not really, I get an automatic daily email from the astro-ph pre-print server and I browse a daily list of new articles and papers related to my subject. I can also just as easily read a Canadian or Japanese paper as a UK one.
So what about the liquid telescope? Well it seems that in this case, Wired beat Nature to the scoop. In fact there is very little about astronomy which Nature picks up, that I do not hear about first from some other source. Now maybe at this point we still need Nature to tell us, retrospectively, what was important and notable. Perhaps they have the skill as mavens of interestingness.
Imagine if the ocean of scientific ideas was truly democratic, in the internet sense of the word. I don’t know what it would mean for science long-term but I have a feeling that if it could be kept free of the corrupting influence of marketing, then an open source science community could be the future of many discplines.
Digg.com’s science categories are - on the whole - reflective of current interests and may act as an experiment of sorts. The question is whether the old boy’s club of astronomy will be open to the idea of the internet in their lives. I shall be watching very closely.
So what’s caught my eye this week? Well let’s see shall we.
A night on the (not-so-bare) mountain, from Chris Lintott. Chris went observing in Hawaii and let everyone in on his actions by blogging it as he went along. Cool idea, I’d be interested to see more astronomers do this at other observatories and maybe we can build a catalogue of experiences. Also, Chris, try it with Twitter next time and we can follow you even more rabidly.
European Space Jet Unveiled, from Universe Today. Nicve article about the Astrium shuttle to the skies! I like Universe Today’s style.
All Hail Eris, queen of the Dwarf Planets, from AstroBlog. So it turns out that Eris is also more massive than Pluto which really consigns Pluto to the dwarf club. Poor thing.
Bounced from the Moon, from Astronomy Blog. This is a cool article about something called a Moon Bounce. I had never heard of such a thing before but they do it at JB and that’s fine by me. i’m going to figure out how to be at one myself someday.
If you can think of anyone with a great blog post you think should be included then drop me a line, or comment here.
Following last week’s open letter to the AQA, Wellington Grey has posted on his blog to thank everyone for their support. It seems he had quite a response, being linked from digg, reddit and boingboing. He has followed it up with two things.
The first is an online petition, which Wellington himself says is most probably futile, but there it is none the less. At this time, the link to the petition from Wellington’s site was not working and I couldn’t find any trace of it via the government site’s search.
Secondly though, and back to form perhaps, Wellington Grey presents a new cartoon, this one outlining ‘The New Physics Exam‘. Note that question 3 is a real one from an AQA textbook.
The BBC has an interesting article on how as NASA’s money is redirected into other endeavours (say into manned travel to Mars and the like) its existing capabilities (say its extensive Earth observation capabilities). Basically they’re saying that we all benefit from NASA’s ability to observe the Earth and to observe the symptoms of climate change. If NASA has to cut funding on these projects for other missions, such as returning to the Moon, then where does that leave us at a time when more than ever we need to see the Earth more clearly.
Check it out here: Link
You may recall I blogged about The Jodcast. There are some podcasts I find I listen to on my iPod and there others I listen to on my Mac. The former is easy but the latter can be annoying - you have to open iTunes and open it there etc etc - how tiresome(!). So i like to go and get the dashboard widget of these podcasts and have them close to hand.
I couldn’t find one on the Jodcast website so I thought I’d spend a half hour making them one, so here it is. Easy enough to use, it gives you a drop down list of the latest Jodcasts and lets you listen by pressing play. It’ll even remember the playback position for you and also allow to subscribe via iTunes if you so wish. If anyone wants to port it, or recreate it for the Yahoo! Widgets Engine then feel free.
Just a quick one before I finally go to bed. Check out Wikisky (Link). It basically Google Maps but for space. It only covers data from IRAS and the Sloane Digital Sky Survey so far but its a lot of fun to look at the sky so easily in these wavelengths if you haven’t before.
What do you call a podcast from Jodrell Bank? Well duh, its a Jodcast (Link). Running since early 2006, the Jodcast from Manchester’s world-class, historical radio scope is quite good fun. I’ve listened to the latest episode and also the special NAM episodes so far and have to say I rather like it.
It does have, you’ll be glad to know, a good amount of astronomy content. In fact it would be ideal for the astronomy enthusiast who doesn’t have access to journals etc. It is long and runs to just over an hour an episode (excluding the NAM specials) but since it’s only once a month this seems just about right. The guys who make it clearly have a sense of humour and they also give a crap - which you’d be surprised but can seem a novelty sometimes in academia.
I am now subscribed and will keep listening for at least a couple more episodes to see how it fits into my iPod’s busy life. I wish them the best of luck - not that they need it since their subscription base is in the thousands after just over a year. Well done them.
I should have guessed that the one story the BBC would show on their site about NAM would be the one on the ‘Star Trek’ shields. How marvellously predictable of both me and them! (Link)
I don’t know how they found out about it but someone at Uni today showed me this rather funny Google Maps result. Ask for directions from somewhere in the USA to somewhere in Europe and you are told how to do it, without flying. I searched for Cardiff to New York and if you check our point 34 on the image above or this link then you’ll see why I found it funny.
The video above is the live feed from justin.tv an experiment in web video created by Justin, the star of the ’show’ and three of his friends.
In an effort to start up a video streaming company they decided to prove how easy it was to broadcast live video to the web. To do this, Justin decided to broadcast his life, edTV-style, on the web 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He wears a camera on his head sometimes and at other points cameras all around him record his every move.
