I've been enjoying learning Tensorflow, and this awesome Colab lets us invent new creatures and crossbreeds from nothing but code.
Creating Creatures with AI
Sky Silhouette: Barnard 7
The night sky is full of thousands of silhouettes of all many shapes and sizes. In 1919 an astronomer called Edward Barnard created a catalogue of more than 300 of these dark nebula.
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula
Elephant's Trunk Nebula SHO 20 light years long, and 2,400 light years away, this dark, dense nebula is part of a star-forming region (IC 1396). The Elephant’s Trunk itself is thought to contain several very young protostars. At the very top of the trunk you can see a tiny star that has ignited fusion and... Continue Reading →
Some of the Milky Way in Cygnus
Deneb-Sadr and (some of) the Milky Way in Cygnus. Taken from Provence, France. Thought I would look back at one of my first attempts at imaging one of my favourite parts of the sky. Sadr is nearly dead centre, and Deneb is up and to the left of it. You can start to see the... Continue Reading →
The North America Nebula & Pelican Nebula
The North America Nebula (NGC 7000) and neighbouring Pelican Nebula (IC5070 and IC5067) in Cygnus, near Deneb. A bright emission nebula, partially obscured by dust along the line-of-sight. These combine to create the distinctive shapes, which resemble the Southeastern coastline of the USA, and Gulf of Mexico; and Pelican - hence the names. This LRGB... Continue Reading →
UK Eclipse 2015 Photos
Today's partial Solar eclipse is off to a great start here in Witney, where the cloud cover is working as a perfect solar filter. The eclipse culminated here as a smiling, Cheshire cat-style grin 🙂
A New Paper All About #yellowballs
Another paper for the Milky Way Project. The Yellowballs began on the very first day of the Milky Way Project when a user asked me ‘what is this?’ and I wasn’t sure so jokingly called it a ‘#yellowball’, since that’s what is looked like. We use hashtags on talk.milkywayprojct.org, and that user, and a few others, went off and tagged hundreds of the things over the next few months. Before we knew it there was a catalogue of them. However, we still didn’t know what they really were, and so Grace Wolf-Chase, Charles Kerton, and other MWP collaborators have put a lot of effort into figuring it out. The result is this new paper.
There is a new Milky Way Project paper in the news today, concerning the #yellowballs that were found by Milky Way Project volunteers.
The Yellowballs appeared on the very first day of the Milky Way Project when user kirbyfood asked ‘what is this?’ and I wasn’t sure so jokingly called it a ‘#yellowball’, since that’s what is looked like. We use hashtags on talk.milkywayprojct.org, and that user, and many others, went off and tagged hundreds of the things over the next few months. Before we knew it there was a catalogue of nearly 1,000 of them. However, we still didn’t know what they really were, and so Grace Wolf-Chase, Charles Kerton, and other MWP collaborators have put a lot of effort into figuring it out. From the JPL press release:
So far, the volunteers have identified more than 900 of these compact yellow features. The next step for the researchers…
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A Tour: From You to the Largest Structure in the Universe
Line 1. Let’s start with 'typical' humans. The average human adult male is 1.75 metres tall - that's 3.83 cubits or 5.74 feet. The average female is 1.62 metres - that's 5.4 light-nanoseconds or 0.008 furlongs. You live on Earth (Sol d, perhaps?). This is an Earth-like planet in a Sun-like star system. The third planet of eight... Continue Reading →
An Open Chatbot for Astronomy: @botastro
Hubot is an open source chatbot created by GitHub. It's used by various companies, groups, and other techie types, to control systems, gather information, and put moustaches on things - all via chat interfaces. Hubot can be adapted to work via IM, GTalk, Twitter, IRC, and other platforms. 'Chat Ops' is a growing trends, and because... Continue Reading →
Going the Distance: Philae and Taliesin
This was an amazing week. On Wednesday the Rosetta spacecraft launched the tiny Philae lander on a 10km journey to the surface of a comet: a mountain-sized rock, millions of miles from Earth. This was a first that touched many around the world, millions of whom who followed the event online. It took ten years to... Continue Reading →
Orbiting Frog 