Space, Science, Technology
The latest issue of Astronomy & Geophysics includes an article by your truly about the GitHub/.Astronomy Hack Day at the UK's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth earlier this year. The projects resulting from hack days are often prototypes, or proof-of-concept ideas that are meant to grow and expand later. Often they are simply written up... Continue Reading →
Executable papers are a cool idea in research [1]. You take a study, write it up as a paper and bundle together all your code, scripts and analysis in such a way that other people can take the ‘paper’ and run in themselves. This has three main attractive features, as I see it: It provides transparency... Continue Reading →
Today is the start of the UK National Meeting in Portsmouth. I’ll be there tomorrow, and running the NAM Hack Day on Wednesday with Arfon Smith - which is going to be awesome. Today at NAM, the nation's astronomers will discuss the case for UK involvement in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project - the LSST. The... Continue Reading →
A new Milky Way Project paper was published to the arXiv last week. The paper presents Brut, an algorithm trained to identify bubbles in infrared images of the Galaxy. Brut uses the catalogue of bubbles identified by more 35,000 citizen scientists from the original Milky Way Project. These bubbles are used as a training set to allow... Continue Reading →
Just over three years the Zooniverse launched the Milky Way Project (MWP), my first citizen science project. I have been leading the development and science of the MWP ever since. 50,000 volunteers have taken part from all over the world, and they've helped us do real science, including creating astronomy's largest catalogue of infrared bubbles - which... Continue Reading →
I’m happy to announce that I am one of the 2014 TED Fellows. It’s a fantastic opportunity and an awesome group to be a part of - you can see everyone else in the class on the TED Fellow blog. It an exciting time to join the TED crowd as TED is celebrating its 30th year,... Continue Reading →
We recently posted news of a Planet Hunters planet discovered as part of a seven-planet system. Like all the Planet Hunters stars this is one seen in data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Dubbed Kepler-90 this system is a peculiar microcosm of our own Solar System, with small (probably rocky) worlds in the middle, and larger (probably... Continue Reading →
This is a poster from CAP2013, which am attending in Warsaw. Love the idea and the design. Follow @UNAWE on Twitter and find them online at http://unawe.org/.
I've just hit 'publish' on the latest episode of Recycled Electrons, my (almost) weekly podcast with friend and Zooniverse colleague Chris Lintott. We started podcasting to 'The Listener' in September 2011. This was episode 87 - 'Very Nice Equipment' - and since it's now two years that Chris and I have been producing this weekly... Continue Reading →
A new journal begins today, Astronomy and Computing, covering the intersection of astronomy, computer science and information technology. This journal is desperately needed in my view and I wish it every success. The timing is interesting as many people at the intersection of these research areas are skeptical of old-style journals and the current state... Continue Reading →