Guest Scientist at the Royal Greenwich Observatory

I had a great day yesterday, traveling to London to participate in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich's "Meet a Scientist" program.

I spoke about my work with the Galaxy Zoo project to two groups of around 25 gifted year 9 students (13 and 14 year olds who are already taking their GCSE in science).

I also (finally) got to see the "We are Astronomers" planetarium show (which is as good as I had heard!), as well as get a tour of the night sky presented by my fellow AstroTweeter "skyponderer".

And I got to take the boat along the Thames from Waterloo to Greenwich.

All in all a fun day in the life of an Astronomer. :)

Do Bars Kill Galaxies at the Royal Astronomical Society

On Friday I went up to London and spoke at the Royal Astronomical Society "Ordinary Meeting". The title of my talk was "Do Bars Kill Galaxies" - it was based on my recent Galaxy Zoo paper on the dependence of the fraction of bars on other properties of galaxies (described on the Galaxy Zoo blog in these articles).

After the meeting I met two of the Galaxy Zoo volunteers who had contributed classifications ("John F", and "Geoff"). They were very nice, and John wrote a review of the event (my talk and the other two which were given) on the Galaxy Zoo Forum.

It was a fun day out in London.