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 🙂

One Week

Yesterday marked 5 years since I joined the Zooniverse team in Oxford, straight out of my PhD at Cardiff. It’s weird to say it but this week will be my final week here before I start a new role at Google, in London. When I arrived at Zooniverse there were only two people here: Arfon […]

A New Paper All About #yellowballs

Originally posted on The Milky Way Project Blog:
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…

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 […]

Help Count the Stars

Here’s a fun thing to do this January: help count the stars to see how dark the sky is near you. While you’re looking for Comet Lovejoy, take a moment to count some stars for a school project. Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping A-Level student, and fellow Witney resident, Jesse Lawrence with […]

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 […]

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 […]

Electrolysis of Water: with Pencils and a 9V Battery

H₂O might be the most familiar chemical compound on the planet. Many people know that water is H₂O, but most wouldn’t think about what that means in a chemical sense. Water is a remarkable molecule made of two Hydrogen atoms bound to a single Oxygen atom: H, H, and O. Water’s special properties give us life […]

Taking .Astronomy into New Fields

Since 2008 I have been running .Astronomy, which is a meeting/hackathon/unconference that aims to be better than normal meetings and to foster new ideas and collaborations. It’s a playground for astro geeks that is more specific than a general hack day, but way more freeform that a normal astronomy meeting. At .Astronomy we have developed […]

Mazda Makes My Year by Calling Me a ‘Rebel’

I’ve been called a lot of things but ‘rebel’ hasn’t come up too often. Not that I mind. As part of a Mazda campaign, I’m being highlighted as one of four TED Fellows* who are ‘Mazda Rebels’. The other three are thoroughly impressive and I recommend you take a look. There’s an online vote where […]