Space, Science, Technology
NGC 281 is more fondly known as the Pacman Nebula. In normal wavelengths this image resembles(ish) the ghost-gobbling Pacman, but here I'm using narrowband SHO data so things are slightly different. SHO Pacman Nebula (NGC 281) The centre of this bright emission region glows blue and green because of the dominant Oxygen and Hydrogen respectively.... Continue Reading →
The Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula 1,300 light years away, illuminated by a partially embedded star (SAO 19158) which is 10X the size of our Sun. The region is 6 light years across in total. Iris Nebula / Caldwell 4 You can really see how the light from the central cluster illuminates the dust... Continue Reading →
I've been enjoying learning Tensorflow, and this awesome Colab lets us invent new creatures and crossbreeds from nothing but code.
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.
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 →
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 🙂
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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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 →
Really pleased to make my Milkman app available for all MWP users 🙂
I’ve been building a new app for the Milky Way Project called Milkman. It goes alongside Talk and allows you to see where everyone’s clicks go, and what the results of crowdsourcing look like. It’s open source, and a good step toward open science. I’d love feedback from citizen scientists and science users alike.
Milkman is so called because it delivers data for the Milky Way Project, and maybe eventually some other Zooniverse projects too. You can access Milkman directly at explore.milkywayproject.org (where you can input a Zooniverse subject ID or search using galactic coordinates), or more usefully, you can get to Milkman via Talk – using the new ‘Explore’ button that now appears for logged-in users.
Clicking ‘Explore’ will show you the core view of Milkman: a display of all the clicks from all the volunteers who have seen that image and the current, combined results.
Milkman is a live, near-realtime view of…
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This Month's edition of Wired (UK) includes a feature article about citizen science and crowdsourcing research. It has interviews with yours truly, as well as many lovely people from the citizen science crowd, including buddies Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, and Amy Robinson. It also has notes about my new collaboration with fellow TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous and our... Continue Reading →
Orbiting Frog 