Well 2008 was a very interesting National Astronomy Meeting, as is evident from all the press releases, blog posts and more that are still spawning from the event. Belfast did a great job hosting everybody, and the baton passes to Hatfield for next year’s marathon of astronomy. We all look forward to it.

The NAM Blog too, did pretty well for its first run. We are currently about to hit 10,000 visitors and more Tweets than I care to count! We’d like to thank Will Gater for his contributions and everybody who commented, added photos, let us interview them and so on.

Currently the NAM Blog looks set to return in 2009. Meanwhile you can keep up with astronomy news from the world and beyond by reading our other blogs:

Astronomy Blog

Chris Lintott’s Universe

Orbiting Frog

and by listening to The Jodcast, where you will also find the interviews mentioned and featured on this blog. Thanks for reading, and check back every now and again or subscribe to our RSS feed for updates.

It may be brief, it may be pointless but one way or the other I wanted to use the NAM YouTube channel. So here it is, a video of two esteemed Cardiff Professors ‘observing’ a poster about 3D HARP Data

You’ll find the poster they are looking at here. Thanks to Dr. Jason Kirk for this footage.

NAM may have finished last week but we still have a couple of interviews to upload. At the start of the National Astronomy Meeting the latest version of the AstroGrid software was released. Jonathan Tedds of the University of Leicester tells us all about AstroGrid - part of the UK involvement in International Virtual Observatory - which acts like iTunes for astronomers.

You can now listen to the full audio from the NAM STFC session, which has generated many comments and views from everybody.

MP3: STFC NAM Session

I’m in the last science session of NAM 2008, but there’s just time to warn observers in Scotland and Northern Ireland of an important and unusual astronomical event. Asteroid 1886 Lowell will occult (pass in front of) the naked eye star HIP 63355, otherwise known as 36 Comae Bernices. The star is magnitude 4.8, so this won’t be spectacular, but it will be visible and observations with accurate timings are extremely useful in constraining the size and shape of the asteroid.  There’s a map of the predicted track here  but do take this with a pinch of salt - such predictions aren’t always accurate and anyone within 100 miles or so should try and observe; negative results are also useful.The BAA have issued the following call for observations :

Observers wishing to make serious visual timings (to better than 1second) will need a multi-lap stopwatch or a voice recorder linked to an accurate time signal. Those with sensitive enough video cameras,camcorders or webcams may also be able to record the events, but will need an accurate method of time-stamping the video. This is ared star (Mr=4.0) which CCD video cameras are more sensitive to. Serious timings of positive occultations would be welcomed, as would definite negative events from within thepredicted shadow track. It is normal practice to observe or record for 2 minutes either side of the predicted central occultation timeabove. A specimen report form can be found here and the section website is here.Good luck!

Using radio observatories in the UK and US and computer simulations, a team of astronomers have identified the youngest forming planet yet seen. Team leader Dr Jane Greaves of the University of St Andrews tells us about it.

MP3: Dr Jane Greaves Interview

We talked to Dr Douglas Pierce-Price of the European Southern Observatory about the telescopes they operate in Chile and the recent involvement in the Quantum of Solace James Bond movie.

MP3: Dr Douglas Pierce-Price Interview

Guest report from Tim Horbury of Imperial, who  is also (quick plug) one of the guests on this month’s Sky at Night.

I’m sitting in a session called “Solar and Solar-Terrestrial Physics Mission Forum” – it’s full of talks about current and future spacecraft from around the world, as well as instruments on the ground. There are lots of PhD students and young post-docs here: spacecraft often take more than 10 years to plan and build so it’s these future missions that the young people will be using when they’re well established academics.Despite STFC’s current funding problems, there are a wide array of missions out there. We’ve heard about the fantastic results from the Japanese Hinode spacecraft which is taking stunning movies of the Sun’s surface, using a telescope built in the UK (there’s more about some Hinode results here. I talked about my favourite, Solar Orbiter, which will go closer to the Sun than we’ve ever been before, much closer than Mercury. It won’t launch until 2015 though: you’ve got to be patient in this business!

Nick caught up with another of the plenary speakers - Professor Brian Schmidt - who led a team studying Type Ia supernova at huge distances. Brian tells us about those observations and how they required the introduction of the cosmological constant into our understanding of cosmology.

MP3: Prof Brian Schmidt Interview

The UK infrared telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii has been doing great work recently thanks to its brand new camera, the cannon shaped object in the picture below.  The camera is responsible for the UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey, which includes the deepest ever look at the infrared sky known as the Ultra Deep Survey (so that’s the UKIRT UKIDSS UDS, acronym fans). Highlights from this survey were presented at NAM today, and here’s a close up of just one object among the many thousands contained in the field. It is, of course, relatively nearby, but the red objects in the background are likely to be galaxies which are at least 10 billion light years away.   

Professor Richard Ellis gave a plenary talk on galaxy evolution on Tuesday morning. We caught up with him to find out more.

MP3: Prof Richard Ellis Interview

Updated: listen to the MP3 of this session.

We’re about half an hour away from the ‘town meeting’ that forms the one chance in the year for the whole of the UK astronomical community to ‘discuss’ issues and progress in our field. I put ‘discuss’ in inverted comments deliberately, because in such a large group (I’m sitting in the overflow lecture theatre as I type as there’s already no room in the main one) there’s little change for proper discussion. This event is attracting more attention, coming as it does in the wake of some very nasty cuts for UK astronomy, totaling at least £80 million. I’m going to try and give as full a blog as possible, primarily for those who are interested but who can’t be here. There have already been three months or so of discussion, so if you need a recap I thoroughly recommend Paul Crowther’s excellent page.

Below the jump, live reportage from the back row (where all the trouble makers traditionally sit!).

Updates : My headlines : e-MERLIN (and therefore Jodrell) safe, Keith Mason claims Gemini Board to blame for ‘confusion’ over the intention to withdraw, RAS accepts invitation to inspect detailed financial data. (more…)

We found out about the Armagh Planetarium from its Director - Dr Tom Mason.

MP3: Armagh Planetarium Interview

The eternal dilemma of the conference speaker was nicely encapsulated by Rita Tojeiro from the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh.  “Writing this code was a year and a half of my life. I’m going to explain it to you in about a minute”

Presented by David Nutter, the poster for the ‘JCMT Gould Belt Legacy Survey’ is listed as part of the ‘Star Formation: The First Three Million Years’ session.

Abstract: With the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Legacy Survey, we will map almost all of the well-known star-formation regions within 0.5 kpc, with the Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA2). Most of these regions are associated with a ring of star formation, known as the Gould Belt. We will produce a flux-limited snapshot of nearby star formation over almost 700 square degrees of sky. The resulting images will yield the first catalogue of prestellar and protostellar sources selected by submillimetre continuum emission. We will also obtain maps of a large sample of prestellar and protostellar sources in three CO isotopologues using the Heterodyne Array Receiver Program (HARP). Finally, we will map the brightest hundred sources with the SCUBA2 polarimeter (POL-2), producing the first statistically significant set of polarization maps in the submillimetre.

If you would like to see your NAM poster on the NAM Blog then email either a picture file or a link to namblog@orbitingfrog.com.