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.

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

While we heard about the great successes of SuperWASP in discovering ten new planets by watching for small dips in the star’s light caused by the passage of a planet across our line of site to the star, what everyone wants to see is Earth-sized planets being discovered. A new camera installed on the “Liverpool Telescope” hopes to take advantage of a very clever idea to discover these smaller planets around stars where a larger, eclipsing planet has already been discovered.The Liverpool Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands : see person to the left for scale.The RISE camera will carefully measure the timings of transits of the large planets in front of their parent stars. These transits should be completely regular, occurring once per orbit. Any small deviations from this regular pattern could be due to the pull of smaller planets on their larger neighbours, allowing the RISE team to indirectly direct the presence of these smaller planets. Watching the pull of one planet on another is, of course, how Neptune was discovered so this is an old tradition combined with state of the art technology. Let’s hope the RISE team get lucky.

It is strange sometimes what you can do on Facebook. Aside from battling endless zombie/vampire/pirate invitations, I quite enjoy the social networking site. I recently found out that you can become a ‘fan’ of ESO on Facebook. They have a page up (this a new thing Facebook have started) with lots of information and you can declare yourself a fan,

If you would like to be a fan of ESO (or if you already are and think more people should know about it ) then visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/ESO-Astronomy/10867667494. If you are a UK national then you really should be a fan since we are a member of ESO and it produces some of the best images of space and astronomy that are out there.

If you are overwhelmed by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image then you could join the Facebook group ‘The Hubble Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field Has Made Me Completely Apathetic‘ or you can join almost 200 hundred others who really like the Mars Rovers (its a rock!).

With almost 1.3 million members, one of the most popular Facebook groups is ‘When I Was Your Age, Pluto was a Planet‘, which tickled me.

There are also some amazing images to be seen in the ‘Astrophotography / Amateur Astronomy Entusiasts Group‘ if you have some time.

Finally, and with particular NAM relevance, if you’re still studying in astronomy in the UK then a nice group to join would be the ‘UK Astronomy Students‘ (UKAS) group. It has some general chat and a few handy links. Worth taking the time to click.

If you find anymore you’d like to share, posts some links in the comments.