The ISS orbits overhead at around 350km (about 220 miles) and completes an orbit roughly every 90 minutes. So you can imagine that Soichi gets to see quite a range of places all at different times of day. I’ve posted some of my favourite photos from his Twitpic feed here, but I encourage you to go take a look yourself and if you’re on Twitter, follow him.

Houston, Texas by night

Mahajamba river delta in Madagascar

Patagonia glacier

Paris by night

Astronaut Stevie "Ray" Robinson

Space Shuttle Endeavour making re-entry

Moonrise over Australia

Lake Pukaki, New Zealand

You can download the slides here and what follows are links to various sites that I mentioned during the talk. The talk as a whole was inspired by the .Astronomy conferences, the second of which is taking place in Leiden from November 30th to December 4th this year. You can read more about that on the conference website www.dotastronomy.com and the twitter feed @dotastronomy.

As well as these links, you may want to click around this site itself, as it contains many more examples of online astronomy.

http://www.twitter.com/overcardiff
http://www.twitter.com/lookupastro
http://www.galaxyzoo.org
http://www.slooh.com
http://www.faulkes-telescope.com
http://www.photosynth.net
http://earth.google.com
http://www.newburyas.org.uk
http://www.astrometry.net
http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/

As the time of impact approached on Friday, the web began buzzing with tales of how NASA was going to ‘bomb the moon’ – I even ended up arguing on Twitter about it with a random user. It seems that LCROSS’ end-of-days finale was too much for some to take – with much criticism of ‘littering’ and ‘polluting’ the Moon going on. This all despite the fact that, as Stuart Lowe and Chris North point out, this sort of thing happens to the Moon all the time – albeit with rock and not space probes.

As it happens, the spectacular plume was not visible from Earth as was hoped – disappointingly nor was it terribly visible from the NASA live feed. This led some to say the mission has failed but again this is another case of science being misunderstood. A small plume was seen, even if it wasn’t as big and bright as hoped – and NASa got lots of data. No doubt they will reveal before too long what they have – or have not – uncovered.

They have quick post up showing that a plume was at least ‘just’ visible – the optical image is shown above – and I await further results from the LCROSS team in the coming weeks.

More importantly though – if they do find evidence of water hidden under the Moon’s South Pole – why is this important? Well if we want to send people back to the Moon and then beyond into the Solar System we need to start thinking about actually going and living on the Moon. We need bases in space – and the Moon is a good place – or space travel will just be too expensive. Water is heavy and carting it about with us around the Solar System will be difficult. If we have a supply of it on the Moon that we can mine then we need to know where it is and thus where to start thinking about putting our first base.

If there is water to be found on the Moon then it becomes even more interesting and relevant to mankind’s space travel agenda and to its science agenda in the coming decades. Well done to the LCROSS team for a successful smash-down!

So far the results are interesting and as we have now passed the 500 tweets mark, I thought it would be nice to report on some facts and figures.

Overview

The site is generally working well and I am pleased with it. We current have 516 tweets (and this number has changed several times during my writing of this blog post!) which averages at about 8 tweets a day since it started. This number fluctuates quite a bit though, as the daily tweets graph below indicates.

The site will need to run for several months more before any really hard numbers can be drawn from the data. At the moment the odd popular paper can completely skew all the statistics. However in general, astronomy and general physics papers do best. Those papers which are accessible to a non-expert reader seem to do well, which makes perfects sense.

Usage

The website receives about 200 visitors each day with a lull at the weekends and a peak on Fridays. Conversely, the tweets themselves are predominantly collected on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, inline with statistics recently released about Twitter use in general ^[1].

These two graphs plot the tweets over time. The first shows the cumulative number of tweets over time. The second shows the tweets each day since April 16th. The best fit to the cumulative graph is actually a slow, exponential growth, which is in keeping with the number of tweets being produced in general by Twitter. The daily graph indicates the same, although it is interesting to see the weekend lulls clearly marked out. In the future this chart can have other information overlaid such as news stories – you can see the Iran elections spike at the far right.

Categories

The most-tweeted broad subject areas are Computer Science (29%), Astrophysics (28%) and Physics (14%). This probably to be expected given the way that arXiv is used with different academic fields ^[2].

The two most tweeted sub-topics are ‘Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics’ and ‘Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics’. Together they account for about 35% of the tweets and they each contribute roughly half of that total. After that ‘Physics and Society’ is very popular with 13% of the total tweets. ‘Cryptography and Security’ and ‘Applications’ (of Statistics) make up 11% and 13% respectively but it should be noted that most of those tweets are for only one, very popular, paper in each case.

Word Cloud

A curious sideline I set up is a word cloud of the words found in tweeted paper titles. I would like to know what words hook people in and get them to read a paper.So far this has shown limited effect but should grow more useful with time. A similar same cloud can be created for the abstracts of the papers and for the tweets themselves.

Interesting Papers

A couple of papers have really rocketed through the ranks. Recently a paper described a statistical result suggesting that there was vote rigging in the Iranian elections. ‘Benford’s Law anomalies in the 2009 Iranian presidential election‘ rose from nowhere to become the most tweeted arXiv paper since April in just two days, with 35 tweets at time of writing this post.

‘Hiding Information in Retransmissions‘ is a Computer Science paper that has shown a slower, but steadier climb through the popularity ranks. It has now dropped out of the weekly top-ten but remains in the monthly and all-time charts.

Mavens and Connectors

The twitter users producing the most tweets have stayed roughly constant in the past 2 months. In order, the users contributing more than 10 arXiv tweets since April are currently @CharmQGP (48), @sarahkendrew (25), @heptwit (20), @orbitingfrog (15; me), @astroclif (14), @astrodicticum (11) and @cmetzner (11).

Interestingly of these, @heptwit and @astroclif have only 7 and 2 followers each on Twitter. This leads me to think that I should begin measuring the ‘reach’ of tweets as well as the number of tweets. For example, a paper tweeted by @CharmQGP will be seen by potentially 401 people. If it were then retweeted by @sarahkendrew it could reach up to 653! This would be compared to a paper tweeted by @heptwit, @astroclif that can only be seen by 8 people. The reach of a tweet is a new metric that I can easily begin adding into the site.

In a similar vein, it is curious to measure the retweeting potential of users. We can reorder the top contributors listed above in order of their retweeting power – that is to say that we can place them in order of how many times people retweet the papers that they mention. Now the list looks different: @sarahkendrew (16), @orbitingfrog (13), @CharmQGP (3), @cmetzner (2), @heptwit (1), @astroclif (0) and @astrodicticum (0). This can only be taken as a tentative result since we are only 2 months into this data set and retweeting is far less common than simply tweeting in general. However it points out another metric that may be worth measuring.

@tweprints

As suggested many times by many people there is now a @tweprints twitter feed that announces popular papers as they reach a threshold number of mentions. This threshold is changeable but currently sits at 5 tweets.  I am open to suggestions for the kinds of things this twitter feed should announce. At the moment it is a very sparse feed.

Future Plans

The new metrics I mentioned above will find their way onto the site soon, as will an expanded statistics page. XML feeds for data and hopefully an RSS feed of the current top-ten papers. All of this is of course only going to get done in between real work on my thesis. Sheesh.

There is a large and valuable database building up behind this project and if anyone has any novel uses for it, I would be interested to hear from you. I will update again in the future when there is something worthy of noting. In the meantime: keep tweeting your arXiv papers!

[1 - Sysomos Twitter Report] [2 - SarahAskew] [Link to Tweprints]

I think it is technically now possible and so I am putting out a personal plea for translators! Help! I have so far obtained a first draft version of my tweets in French and Dutch, as I will outline below.

The phrases that needs translation are as follows:

SATELLITE will pass over CITY at mag XX at HH:MM on DD/MM. Moves from XX° elevation COMPASS to XX° elevation COMPASS over X min

Mag XX Iridium flare over CITY at HH:MM on DD/MM. Will appear at XX° elevation, bearing XX° from North

Here is a list of the current feeds that need translating. If you would like to volunteer to help me out when please reply to me @orbitingfrog. The only requirement I have is that you have a Twitter account so that you can stay subscribed to the feed as we get the translation right.

So here’s the list as it stands. Feel free to comment or tweet and I’ll update the list as we go along.

French (Aix, Paris) (with thanks to @sarahkendrew)

• L’SATELLITE passera au-dessus de CITY avec mag XX à HH:MM le DD/MM. Trajectoire de XX° d’élévation COMPASS à XX° d’élévation COMPASS en XX min
• Flash Iridium mag XX au-dessus de CITY à HH:MM le DD/MM. Apparaîtra à XX° d’élévation, XX° d’azimuth

Dutch (Amsterdam) (with thanks to @sarahkendrew)

• SATELLITE vliegt over CITY met helderheid XX om HH:MM op DD/MM. De hoogte gaat van XX° COMPASS naar XX° COMPASS, gedurende XX min
• Iridiumflits met helderheid XX over CITY om HH:MM u op DD/MM. Verschijnt op hoogte van XX° N, XX° azimut

Greek (Athens)

Norwegian (Bergen)

German (Berlin, Munchen, Wien) (with thanks to @drmirror)

• SATELLITE überquert CITY mit Helligkeit XX um HH:MM am DD/MM. Zieht von XX° Höhe COMPASS nach XX° Höhe COMPASS in X min.
• Iridium Flare der Helligkeit XX über CITY um HH:MM am DD/MM. Erscheint in XX° Höhe, Richtung XX° von Nord.

Spanish (Madrid)

Russian (Moscow)

Czech (Prague)

Italian (Rome)

Korean (Seoul)

Swedish (Stockholm)

Arabic (Tehran)

Japanese (Tokyo)

Hebrew (Tel Aviv)

Other languages for possible future feeds:

Poruguese

I find that reading papers outside of my own academic field is quite compelling and often sparks the imagination. The problem of course is knowing which papers one should read if you’re not inside the system. After a few weeks this website should begin to show the emerging favourites in any field.

It’s also interesting to simply see what gets talked about. As the data piles up, it will be possible to filter the papers into different topics or types. It might, for example, be useful to see what astrophysics papers are most discussed in a given month, or which biology paper has risen fastest through the ranks this week.

The engine behind the site periodically looks for tweets that contain both the word ‘arxiv’ and an arXiv.org paper identifier (such as 0102.3456). You can see a list of recently detected tweets on the site itself. In this way it will pick up anyone mentioning an arXiv URL or someone who tags their tweets #arxiv and includes the paper id – two things that I often see. It also therefore keeps the idea global – you don’t have to tweet in English.

The statistics and top-tens are worked out democratically:

• If a paper is tweeted 4 times then it is ranked 4x higher than a paper that is mentioned only once.
• I place no restrictions on multiple mentions by the same user at present.
• One can mention more than one paper in a single tweet. This will give each paper a single vote.
• Mentioning the same id code more than once in a tweet does nothing.

If it continues to look interesting, I have every intention of adding more detailed trends to the site as time goes by. For now, I just need data – and by that I mean tweets! Start tweeting about your favourite papers now! If you have any thoughts on the kind of data you’d like to se displayed, then let me know in the comments.

I’m a bit confused about what to call this new site. ‘twarxiv’ came to mind, but is entirely inaccessible to outsiders! Anyone have ideas? If you can think of a good name, or have any other suggestions about arXiv on Twitter then please leave a comment here or contact me @orbitingfrog.

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’ll also be talking about .Astronomy, Galaxy Zoo and how to view interesting and alternative wavelengths on Google Sky. I’m going to be busy!

Since most of my readers are in the US and Canada, you can download my poster about my own projects rather than fly all the way to Cardiff next week. You can also download this handout explaining these projects and providing links.

If you you are in the Cardiff area, then you’ll need to register to attend our Moonwatch event because it is full up! However, if you have a telescope of your own, I would suggest holding your own smaller Moonwatch event locally. Invite the neighbours round and have some drinks while you show them the Moon!

Walking home, I noticed the sky was clear and so waited until a break in the buildings allowed me to see the Moon and Jupiter. I couldn’t see Venus at all, which meant it was behind the Moon. ‘Rather, cool’, I thought and took some snaps with my iPhone. Cameraphones never work on the Moon, yet I never seem to learn my lesson.

It takes me half an hour to walk home, and when I got there I could just see Venus emerging from the edge of the Moon. It was quite lovely. I grabbed our Digital SLR and set off around the streets near my house. I was running out of time and forgot to take the telescopic zoom so what I ended up with was lots of fairly widefield image sof the triple conjunction.

As you can see, I am no astrophotographer (in fact we’ve been through this before on Orbiting Frog). My tiny tripod required using the roof of whatever cars were nearby to see the triple conjunction but I am pretty pleased with the results.

I also took this bizarre but cool picture of the streetlights around my house. I was playing with the exposure time and accidentally took this 30 second exposure, which is now my desktop wallpaper.

Dave Mosher, over at Discovery Space wants people to send in their images of the event to form part of a Discovery Space Gallery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.