If you’re attending the event and would like to contribute to this blog, then please get in touch! Email us with a short (1/2 paragraph) bio describing why you are attending the meeting and what areas of astronomy you are interested in hearing about during the conference.

We will update a few more times before the conference. In the meantime you can currently pre-register for NAM (or this time I think it is actually JENAM) on their website (http://www.jenam2009.eu/).

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

MP3: STFC NAM Session

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!

MP3: Dr Jane Greaves Interview

MP3: Dr Douglas Pierce-Price Interview

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!

MP3: Prof Brian Schmidt Interview

MP3: Prof Richard Ellis Interview

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. In short, the STFC (the body which distributes money from the government to astronomers and physicists as well as funding the UK’s large laboratories) has had its budget cut in real terms by the government. As far as astronomers go, this means a cut of about 20% across all grants and the possible closure of many much loved facilities or projects. Michael Rowan-Robinson, president of the Royal Astronomical Society, is in the chair. He’s summarizing the situation; although the amount of money available was increased, a change in how it was distributed meant an effective cut. There’s also some question as to whether the cuts are being distributed fairly between different communities (astronomy, particle physics etc). Consultation is now under way about cuts to projects, with the whole astronomical community involved. However, the RAS would like to see as much transparency as possible. Finally, as well as the cuts to projects, cuts to grants are important and there seems no willingness to try and change the situation.

Michael Rowan-Robinson has just handed over to Keith Mason, head of STFC and either a brave defender of astronomers or the villain of the piece, depending on who you listen to. He’s starting by invoking the Haldane principle - the government decides how much money to give us, but scientists themselves should decide on how to use that funding. Keith says this means we can’t pitch specific projects to government. Worse, STFC are apparently forbidden from talking to the rest of us during much of the communication with government. Much of the increase is in the form of ‘non-cash’ to cover deprication and other technical accounting things (which are very important, else the Treasury takes your real money away to cover it). Without FEC (changes to payments to university departments) we have flat cash - the same amount of money, but we lose out over time because of inflation. This is the same situation as other research councils, and it would have been the same if we’d stayed in PPARC (the old research council that only took account of astronomy and particle physics). There will be a cut in jobs - but it will only return the number of postdocs (including me!) to where it was in 2000. What happens after that? That depends on the next spending review which ‘depends on the case you and I and everyone makes for astronomy’ (although this doesn’t seem to tie with the fact that this spending review was confidential and couldn’t be shared with the community). There are no cuts in studentships.

Next up is John Womersley, Director for Science Strategy. Taking the ’speak softly and carry a big stick’ approach to things, he points out that criticising either the peer review process or the management of STFC in the media is likely to lead to the government funding less rather than more funding to the council. However, they have tried to respond to the request for more consultation, setting up 10 ad hoc panels and now discussing what can be made public. 1400 comments have already been received via the formal web-based consultation. His final quote sums up his position, I think:“I have good ideas about how to spend money that falls from the sky, and you should continuing praying for that to happen, but I have to plan a program with what I’ve got”. Walter Gear, in charge of the committee ranking projects came next. The meat of his presentation is that everything on the list has already passed peer review, and represent good science, but as there isn’t enough money some things had to go. He also mentions (for the first time, I think) that they considered saving money for grants by cutting project further, but decided the pain would be too great. He’s also making the point that commenting anonymously to the press makes scientists looks bad.

Andy Fabian in the first question points out that there are some contradictions. Is this plain sailing with a dip (as he characterized Keith’s talk), or is this panic and a crisis? That gets him the largest round of applause to date, but the answer is that this isn’t a deliberate attack and we should be careful ‘not to paint a target on our chest’ (Keith, who also reassuringly claims that there isn’t a desire in government to cut pure science). In response to another question, John points out that we need a strategy for the whole of the STFC - not just separate ones for astronomy and particle physics. Someone in the audience who was shaking their head gets pretty short shift; he seems to be the ‘attack dog’ of the day. Making the same point more gently is Monica Grady from the OU, who is pointing out that STFC hasn’t just inherited PPARC’s aims - all researchers in the country including chemists, material scientists and biologists use STFC’s facilities. John Peacock from Edinburgh asks for more details, not necessarily being convinced that ex-PPARC types aren’t covering for costs inherited from CCLRC or for projects like Aurora. He closes by saying he doesn’t believe that cuts would have been necessary under flat cash under PPARC; Keith’s response is to invite him to Swindon (That’s where STFC is based, it’s not a bizarre threat) and then to go on to explain that they’d been very ‘bullish’ in assuming they’d be more money than there is. John asked him to put the information on the web, calling for STFC to be proactive in releasing information. Keith says it’s a very complex situation - ‘pages’ of spreadsheets that can only be understood after ‘a week’s tutorial’. Michael Rowan-Robinson says the RAS will take up the offer (!).

Keith Mason - in response to a question - claims that the ambition to move to full survey mode in UKIRT by 1st April was ‘a typo’ and that e-MERLIN was never under threat (MRR pointed out it had moved from the under threat list to the ok one). It was rated as lower priority by science board (apparently because it’s late and costing money while being late, but the council of STFC added a rider pointing out that this is part of the strategic move to lead the Square Kilometre Array project. On Gemini he says that ‘you were all had by the Gemini board’; we’ve been concerned about future funding for the instrumentation programme, producing instruments for 2014 when our commitment runs out in 2012. Discussions to resolve this were leaked by someone on the Gemini Board - at no point did they even draft the formal document that meant withdrawal. Lawyers were apparently involved before ‘everybody saw sense’.

There’s a new holder of the loudest applause award - a student who studies solar physics - who wanted to know why he should ‘take the risk’ of studying this area. Answers from the panel - Solar Orbiter is coming in ten years or so, and was given a high priority. Oh, and work overseas. John again - ‘If you cared about money you wouldn’t be a scientist’ (this is almost certainly true, but came very close to being booed); he then pointed out that if we didn’t train people for other things then each professor could only have one student who would replace them when they die.

And that’s it. This could be the biggest blog post I’ve ever written. Thanks for reading if you’ve got this far. I’ll write a reaction post tonight or tomorrow morning which might be a little more accessible to everyone. And now - back to your regular programming!

MP3: Armagh Planetarium Interview

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.

 
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…

MP3: Interview with Jacquie Milligan and Pupils.

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.

MP3: Interview with the RAS President.

By Andrew Pontzen from the IoA in Cambridge.  

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

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.

MP3: Emily Baldwin Interview.

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.

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.

Abstract: The submillimetre maps produced by the SCUBA instrument on the JCMT have been made available on Google Sky. Using the complete SCUBA catalogue (Di Francesco et al 2006) and Google Earth’s new ‘Sky’ feature (Christian et al 2007), SCUBA data can now be easily accessed by the public, worldwide (Simpson 2008). Complete 850µm and 450µm autoreduced maps, along with the point source catalogue, have been made available. A short list of ‘interesting features’ is also included Some examples and uses are presented here, along with instructions on how to access the data.

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.