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.

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!

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

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”

I’m currently sitting in the Young Astronomers’ Session at NAM, coming to terms once again with the fact that I’m not really a young astronomer any more. Although PhD students present their work throughout the week, this is an extra opportunity to hear about the best work from a wide range of people.  As an example, the current speaker is Iraklis Konstantopoulous from UCL; it was inevitable I’d write about this topic because M82 is one of my favourite objects in the entire sky.  

 
M82 from HST (colour) and WIYN H-alpha showing galactic wind (pink)

As you can see, it’s an edge on spiral with lots of star formation, which is driving in turn the dramatic wind you can see. Iraklis & co have been studying star clusters in the galaxy; while they’re interesting in themselves they also contain information about the galaxy itself. For example, a large region of the galaxy appears to have fewer clusters than it should do.To understand this, you have to think about how M82 would look from elsewhere in the Universe. In fact, we have to consider what M82 would look like when viewed edge on. We need a galaxy with two prominent spiral arms, and a dominant bar. Rather like this one

NGC 1365 as seen by the Very Large Telescope

Now imagine viewing this galaxy from the bottom of the picture. On the right, you’ll see material ‘behind’ the spiral arm blocked by dust contained within the arm; hence the lack of clusters here. On the left, we see directly to the spiral arm, and this is where many clusters are found lurking. The best bit is that we can check this hypothesis by looking at the relative velocity of the clusters; and Iraklis does indeed find that clusters on the left are moving at a different speed to those on the right.The conclusion? Maybe M82 isn’t so weird after all…

NAM isn’t just attended by professional astronomers. At the Education & Outreach session a talk was given by Jacquie Milligan and pupils from a school south of Belfast - Glenlola Collegiate School. Jacquie is a biology teacher but has been using astronomy for various out-of-hours activities. The pupils have been using the Faulkes Telescope for various research projects and impressed all the professional astronomers and outreach people in the audience with their work. They were an inspiring group and at lunch I caught up with them to get an interview.

MP3: Interview with Jacquie Milligan and Pupils.

I have a strong feeling the first lecture I ever heard on gamma-ray bursts was by Nial Tanvir, now at the University of Leicester. I remember him explaining how in the early days of the field, astronomers studying GRBs were among the first people to get mobile phones as they needed to be told when a burst was detected. In the last few years, the advent of Swift has revolutionized the field, and I caught up with Nial in a rather echoing corridor to find out the latest news.

Working out how to extract observations from many different telescope’s archives can be a big pain in the neck. Once you’ve tracked down the appropriate archive you then have to work out how the data are stored. Over the years there have probably been as many ways to store and access archive data as there have been archives. Even if you worked out how to get into the archives you still needed to check conventions and units. Something had to be done.

Thankfully, there has been a big push by the global astronomical community to build software and standards that make it easy to exchange archival observations and information in a way that is straight-forward and doesn’t require detailed knowledge of hundreds of different databases and server software packages. This is the astronomical equivalent to the web applications and services that form the much acclaimed Web 2.0.

The Virtual Observatory (VO) session on Tuesday covered large astronomical archives and some of the software tools that are being developed to use them and other astronomy web-services. The archives discussed during the session included existing data for ISO, XMM-Newton and Integral as well as archives for exciting future projects. Amongst those projects is PanSTARRS which will have several 1.4 Gigapixel cameras and survey the entire sky four times per year.

The second aspect of the session was to demonstrate some of the software and toolkits under development. Andy Lawrence described the Astrogrid software that forms part of the UK contribution to the VO. Astrogrid started in 2002 and with user feedback from various prototypes over the years there have been many improvements. The software includes VODesktop, Topcat, and Astrogrid Python. Amongst the other tools Andy mentioned was VOSpace which he described as “a bit like Flickr for astronomy data”.

The Astrogrid tools were officially launched yesterday (as long as that wasn’t some kind of April Fools joke) and they can be downloaded from the website. Astrogrid contains lots of resources - “something you can do something with” - which consist of libraries of images, tables, catalogues, invokeable applications or even a set of information pages. You can search registries, bookmark resources, load data into applications, analyse tables, automate things with scripts, and cross-match catalogues.

At the end of his talk Andy bravely decided to give us a live demo over the conference wireless network. The tool does look very nice and perhaps that it because the interface is partly inspired by iTunes. Andy searched for his favourite galaxy - NGC 4395 - and the program returned a list of catalogues in which observations were found. At the same time , because these services all talk a common language, it returned the coordinates of the galaxy which it had acquired from the excellent Simbad. He then selected some of the data and was given the option to send the data to Aladin - another piece of virtual observatory software that displays FITS images. To be honest, the Astrogrid software actually looks far better than iTunes. It is incredibly extensible and open and has the ability to send data to other applications as necessary. I’ll have to download it and have a play with it next week when I have more time.

Gratuitous image of NGC 4395 from the SDSS.

The National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) is organised by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). Nick caught up with the current President of the Royal Astronomical Society - Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson - to find out about NAM, the RAS and how Michael first got interested in astronomy.

MP3: Interview with the RAS President.

Bianchi models and why you don’t need to know about them. 

By Andrew Pontzen from the IoA in Cambridge.  

Gravitational lensing is one of nature’s more useful gifts to astronomers. At a very simple level (the kind I can reach given what time I got up this morning) the path of light is bent by the presence of mass, as best seen in galaxy clusters like this one.  The arcs are distant galaxies whose image has been distorted.

Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Of course, this is an extreme example, but by studying the shear - a small distortion of the shape of many galaxies - it’s possible to reconstruct the distribution of the mass by which the light has passed. In recent years, this has been done for large chunks of the Universe, producing a rather blobby map of the distribution of dark matter.  

To improve on these results, Rachel McInnes of the University of Edinburgh reckons we need to take advantage of new surveys like Pan-Starrs (more on which later in the week). To do that and include many many more galaxies in the analysis she needs to automate lots of the tasks currently carried out by humans, such as cleaning up the images to avoid confusing the program; work’s underway, and the techniques are being tested on another, smaller survey while we build up to Pan-Starrs at the end of the year.

Yesterday at coffee time I caught up with Emily Baldwin who is the Society for Popular Astronomy’s “Chief Stargazer”. I asked her what that involved.

MP3: Emily Baldwin Interview.

Cosmologists have done lots of excellent work over the past few decades creating more and more precise instruments and telescopes that study the large-scale structure of the universe. Many questions have been answered but many more questions have arisen. To explain galaxy rotation curves we gained dark matter. To explain observations of supernovae and the cosmic microwave background we have introduced dark energy. I’m sat in the “Dark matter, dark energy and cosmological parameters” session at NAM as are a few of the other NAM Bloggers.

The first talk is by Carlos Frenk of Durham University. He has done lots of work on the Millennium Simulation - a huge computer simulation of a large fraction of the universe which attempted to work out how matter and dark matter would form structures over the lifetime of the Universe. Most people will have heard of dark matter but may not be aware that there are different types of dark matter that have been proposed. These now fall into three categories; cold, warm and hot dark matter. The temperature label indicates the amount of energy carried by the potential candidate particles.

One of the ‘hot’ dark matter candidates is neutrinos. However, theorists have calculated that neutrinos cannot be a significant part of the dark matter content of the universe as that would leave the universe with only large scale structure - on the scale of galaxy super-clusters - and we don’t see that in real life. Using data from the 2dFGRS and WMAP, cosmologists see that lambda-CDM (cold dark matter) seems to be the best solution on large scales. But is lambda-CDM also consistent with the data on small scales? To answer that question we need to work out some statistics about the small-scale dark matter and that is where simulations such as the Millennium Simulation and observations come in. The Millenium Simulation has some great images and movies some of which are available on the web.