Space, Science, Technology
As the fifth .Astronomy came to a close on Wednesday, I felt as I always do at the end of these meetings: tired, emotional and super-excited. It's hard to explain the energy at these events. There is something almost magical in the air as the participants 'click' (usually about an hour in) and then begin... Continue Reading →
The periodic mention of a 'supermoon' in the news cycle is starting to annoy me. A supermoon is simply not that much bigger than any other Moon! It's apparently just perceptible but by no means would you call it 'super'. Annoyingly though, observation of the so-called supermoon is wrapped up in another effect: the Moon Illusion. This means that... Continue Reading →
The response my previous blog post about gender bias took me by surprise. Apparently if you talk about this stuff openly, people have a lot to say. More than 500 people have read the post on this site and more over at the Women in Astronomy blog. After posting it, I also emailed the upcoming... 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
New direct image of a massive planet around another star (arXiv 1211.3744)
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 →
The Apollo astronauts narrowly avoided serious health problems, and even death due to exposure to radiation from the Sun. Here’s a plot of the approximate Solar proton flux during the Apollo era: Here’s the same but with the missions and health warnings labelled: Scary stuff! I made these images for a talk I gave a while... Continue Reading →
Orbiting Frog 