Space, Science, Technology
ESA’s Planck mission reported results today showing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, see below) in greater detail than ever before.Planck achieves this amazing view of the earliest light in the Universe by combining and cleverly cross-matching data across a combination of 9 different frequencies, ranging from 30-857 GHz. In this way they can remove foreground emissions... Continue Reading →
I was at RAL today, as part of a teacher training event run by the National Space Academy, to talk about the Zooniverse and how our projects can be used to teach astronomy, science and maths. I gave an overview of the Zooniverse, and then highlighted ZooTeach, the dedicated website where teachers and educators can... Continue Reading →
During our Stargazing Oxford event on January 12th we had three sets of mini-lectures. These are short, concise talks about astrophysics that anyone should get something out of. There’s galaxies, planets, cosmology and more. I’ll be blogging links to some of these in the next few days. You can find the current set of talks... Continue Reading →
We’re very pleased to present the Unproceedings of the Fourth .Astronomy Conference (.Astronomy 4), which was held in Heidelberg, Germany, July 9-11 2012. The goal of the .Astronomy conference series is to bring together astronomers, educators, developers and others interested in using the Internet as a medium for astronomy.Unproceedings of .Astronomy 4
Join us at the Physics Department on Keble Road, near St. Giles in Oxford. From 2-10pm we’ll be manning stands, doing craft activities and answering questions. We’ll also be doing some remote observing throughout that time and there will be a planetarium continuously in operation too. In our auditorium there are mini lectures (in groups... Continue Reading →
Last week we launched a brand new Zooniverse site: The Andromeda Project. We’re asking people to spot star clusters in the Andromeda galaxy in data from the Hubble Space Telescope. You might think it sounds like menial work but it’s strangely addictive - and incredibly useful for the researchers behind the data. This project joins... Continue Reading →
Over on this link, you’ll find a data-driven document (D3 FTW!) showing collaboration between the most authorship-intensive institutions in astronomy. The document is a chord diagram showing the strength of collaboration between research centres, based on co-authorship of papers. I’ve included some screenshots here to give you the idea - the one above is for worldwide institutions... Continue Reading →
A couple of weeks ago I began to geocode the database of astronomical research I scraped from NASA ADS during .Astronomy 4. This database consists of all the published astronomical research in five major journals (almost 250,000 papers going back decades, from MNRAS, ApJ, AJ, A&A and PASP) up to July 2012. You can read... Continue Reading →
I (or rather my computer) spent most of this morning geocoding the database of astronomical papers that I scraped from NASA ADS a while back. I’ve got about a quarter of a million papers, covering several of the major astronomical journals (MNRAS, ApJ, A&A, PASP and AJ) back to their first publications. There are 7... Continue Reading →
I have been exploring the terms used in the astronomical literature (see previous post), and have turned my attention to terms that seem to correlate with each other in astronomy publications. I thought it would at least be interesting to see how often one word is mention alongside another. To do this I take terms... Continue Reading →
Orbiting Frog 