I’ve been learning about UNAWE (Universe Awareness for young Children) recently. You should too. Here’s a great little film they have put online, from Kenya. It shows the fun kids can have with astronomy when they are given a way to really engage with it. You can also follow Twitter updates for UNAWE.

Universe Awareness for Young Children - Kenya

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 Mars lander, Phoenix will be touching down near the North Pole of the red planet on May 25th. It is an exciting mission, which is setting out to explore the notion of life on Mars as well as looking into the planet’s water history.

There’s no point in me regurgitating a load of facts here; The Planetary Society has a great lowdown on the Phoenix lander and recent news regarding the mission.

I just wanted to mention that there is a great Twitter feed for the Phoenix mission which will keep you up to date if you’re that way inclined.

May 22nd and 23rd will be providing some excellent opportunities for seeing the International Space Station from Europe and North America. The details of each sighting vary from place to place, but it is safe to say that the two days and nights will be offering some of the best sightings for a long time.

From Cardiff where I live, you can expect no less than 10 great opportunities over the course of 48 hours! Even as far north as Edinburgh there will be 9 chances. Across North America the frequency of visible transits will also be very high. So if you live in northern Europe or North America, put May 22nd and 23rd in your diary as a good time to look up!

To keep track of these sightings there are many websites to help. Heaven’s Above is a great website that details visible sightings from any location. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you can use my own web app, LookUp to do much the same thing. If you use Twitter there are several feeds for cities around the world which are useful even if you live up to 100 miles away.

I have also created Google Earth files for tracking the ISS in real time around the Earth. This doesn’t provide viewing predictions, but it is fun to watch it come up to your location and then dash outside to see it pass overhead!

Times vary for all locations but if you’ve never tried to spot the space station then next week would be the time. It’ll be bright, it’ll be obvious and if you miss it, just go outside again an hour or so later and will probably be reappearing.

If anyone has specific requests for parts of the world not yet covered by the Twitter feeds, please email me. I have been looking to add some more to the list, and this seems like a good time.

Okay this gets a bit tenuous, but what the hell? If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and live in any of my Over Twitter feed cities (Aix, Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Honolulu, Mauna Kea, Manchester, Milton Keynes, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney) then you might want to add this next item to your device.

I wanted to make an iPhone app and so used the same database that is used for my Over… feeds. It works pretty nicely and I even have a lovely icon that will place itself on your home page properly. Consider it beta, of course. Basically you can browse by city and this will tell you all the transits that are going on in the next 10 days.

http://orbitingfrog.com/iphone

I am still working on a way to add any city to these services but to do so properly will require some hefty calculations, which I’m not sure I have time for right now. Anyway, all comments welcome on this iPhone/iPod web app.

The Over Cardiff and related Twitter feeds should now only issue warnings when the weather is fine. This has been achieved using Yahoo! Weather’s RSS API, which returns the weather for each location when the script checks for visible ISS passes.

In case you don’t know, Over Cardiff is one of a collection of Twitter feeds designed to alert users local to an area of upcoming visible passes by the ISS and Hubble. More info found on a previous blog post.

If the weather is deemed either clear, fair or partly cloudy then the Twitter feeds will still report an upcoming transit from that location. They will no longer send alerts when the weather is said to be mostly cloudy, overcast or other inclement conditions such as fog, snow and rain.

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.