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.

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

On a night when Man Utd won in Rome, all astronomers’ eyes were on Belfast for the NAM 5-a-side football tournament. And what a nail-biting, cliche-ridden, game of three halves it was! In a cliff-hanger of a final Edinburgh narrowly defeated the home team 2-1. Local conference organiser and lightning-quick centre forward Tomaldo Miller reported that he was ’sick as a parrot’ at the final whistle.

The group stages had provided great excitement along the way. Edinburgh topped Group A on goal difference only. Group B was an exciting 3-way contest between Belfast, Liverpool and Cardiff, who fought out some close games, including a 2-2 draw between Cardiff and Liverpool, with Cardiff’s ace striker Nathan Rory’s equaliser with the last kick of the game.

Many players excelled themselves in both skill and entertainment value. Leicester’s ‘golden Gordon’ provided lively goal-hanging antics, including trying to score instead of waiting for a goal kick to be taken. Cardiff’s ‘rolly goalie’ demonstrated the Welsh abilities at rugby when he took out ball and man in one goalmouth scramble.

But in the end football was the winner, Brian.

Report courtesy of Cardiff University’s Prof. Derek Ward-Thompson

If you’re out and about in Belfast at the NAM meeting and you take any pictures you think look good them send them to namphotos@orbitingfrog.com and they will be added to our Flickr photo stream and will be available from the NAM blog.

Obviously we reserve the right to delete any photos that are out of place on the blog, but anything from the five-a-side, social events, the pub, lectures and just around Belfast are much appreciated. Any text in the email will be added as  a description to the photo on Flickr.

If you have any questions email namblog@orbitingfrog.com.

If you have a poster up at NAM and want to share then send us an email via namblog@orbitingfrog.com with either an image file or a link to an image file online. We can either link to your poster via the blog or add it to our Flickr feed with a description you can provide.

We can take posters via email as JPEG, JPG, PNG, PS or PDF files. We will also need a quick text description (one paragraph ideally).

We look forward to seeing your posters on the blog.

Updates to this blog will start on Monday 31st March when the opening talks of the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting 2008 begin. There are many facets to this blog, which is aimed at covering the ins and outs of the astronomy news generated during the week of NAM. This blog utilises Flickr, YouTube and Twitter to keep the information flowing. You can directly access these via the links below,

Flickr Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/namblog

YouTube Channel: http://uk.youtube.com/user/namblog

Twitter: http://twitter.com/namblog

On the blog’s front page you will also find a list of upcoming events. If you are attending the conference these will show you useful dates and times for keynotes and social events during the week in Belfast.

If you want to email us, or have anything you think we should add to the blog then plese feel free to email us on namblog@orbitingfrog.com.

Enjoy NAM if you are attending, or just enjoy reading about it if you’re not. We’ll be updating soon.