I watched Brian Cox's show Wonders of the Universe last night, and following it was an advert for a BBC Radio 4 programme this afternoon with Brian Cox talking about Richard Feynman.
Given the title of my blog I hought I should link it here. It's on at 3pm today, but then also looks like it'll be on iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ts5mm.
Monday, March 21, 2011
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast - Do Bars Kill Spirals?
You can read more about that project in my Galaxy Zoo blog posts about it.
I will also be interviewd about this by Darren Gamblen of Express FM 93.7 (local Portsmouth radio) this morning at 11.30am. You can listen to the segement at this link.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Beautiful Saturn
Just had to put this here. It's so beautiful:
Taken from one of my favourite Astronomy websites - APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). This is their explanation:
Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA, S. Van Vuuren et al.;
Music: Adagio for Strings (NY Philharmonic)
What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spaceship? One doesn't have to just imagine -- the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and thousands more since entering orbit. Recently, some of these images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the above inspiring video which is part of a larger developing IMAX movie project named Outside In. In the last sequence, Saturn looms increasingly large on approach as cloudy Titan swoops below. With Saturn whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over Mimas, with large Herschel Crater clearly visible. Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's thin ring plane. Dark shadows of the ring appear on Saturn itself. Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moon Enceladus appears in the distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends.
Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA, S. Van Vuuren et al.;
Music: Adagio for Strings (NY Philharmonic)
Monday, March 14, 2011
Beautiful Galaxies on the BBC Big Screen
As part of National Science and Engineering Week, 11-20th March 2011 in the UK I was involved in the production of a series of 5 short videos called “From the Earth to the Edge of the Universe” which were made as a collaboration between Creative Technologies and the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. They are going on the BBC Big Screens, apparently right across the UK and continuing up until the 2012 Olympics.
My segment is all about galaxy morphologies. I talk (briefly) about Galaxy Zoo and show the HST image of Hanny’s Voorwerp. I also describe some of the main morphological features of galaxies, and what I like about them.
You can watch all 5 videos here
I also blogged about this for Galaxy Zoo.
My segment is all about galaxy morphologies. I talk (briefly) about Galaxy Zoo and show the HST image of Hanny’s Voorwerp. I also describe some of the main morphological features of galaxies, and what I like about them.
You can watch all 5 videos here
I also blogged about this for Galaxy Zoo.
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.
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.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Jocelyn Bell Burnell wins award
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| Jocelyn Bell Burnell at the LOFAR-UK station in Chilbolton in September 2010. Credit: James West, SEPnet. |
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| Jocelyn Bell with the antennas she built and used to discover pulsars in the 1960s. Not sure of the credit for this image. |
When I first learned the story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovering pulsars, as a young woman interested in astronomy she immediately became a scientific role model for me. Finally someone who looked a bit like me was in the history of astronomy. That was a really powerful moment.
Now that I've met her on several occasions I'm happy to say I still think of her as a role model for professional science. Especially on how to act with humility and treat people with respect - and also on how to be excited about science of course. (That particularly came through I thought when I interviewed her about LOFAR in September - YouTube clip, embedded below.)
I'm delighted every time I hear she's won another award. And I was really delighted when I learned she would be opening the LOFAR-UK station in Chilbolton. I loved the comparison we could make between the LBAs and the antennas she built in the 1960s. In some ways it looks like not much has changed in radio astronomy! Of course in other ways things are significantly different. Jocelyn Bell Burnell had to meticulously search for the signal in reams of traces made with a pen on paper. LOFAR used a massive supercomputer to combine the signal, and is only possible thanks the enormous advances in high speed internet connections and computing which have happened in the last 10 years or so.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Astronomy for young children - colour the solar system model.
As a mother of two young children, and an astronomer I am interested in how to present astronomy to very young children. I have some small amount of experience in this area. As a graduate student I collaborated with a 2nd grade school teacher (that's year 2, or 7 year olds) to develop a 6 week mini-course on "Understanding the Sky". The material we developed can be found here (MS Word Documentation). This experience was very educational for me in terms of what concepts young children can grasp.
A couple of weeks ago I put some of this back into practice when I visited Meon Junior School in Portsmouth (UK), and talked with two groups of 35 Year 5 students (10 year olds). They had recently been learning about the Sun and the Moon, so I decided to talk about the solar system as a way of introducing the idea of the scale of the universe.
I developed a solar system model for this visit. This was inspired by the model described here. And made heavy use of this Solar System Scale Model Calculator.
Here's the version I coloured in and cut out to use to demonstrate in the class. Just to be clear this is an accurate scale model - you can fit the Sun and all the planets on a single sheet of A4 then, cut them out and space them over a bit more than half a mile for the proper orbits. We could only fit the Sun, Mercury, Venus and (with some squeezing) the Earth in the classroom. I think that really impressed the kids.
A couple of weeks ago I put some of this back into practice when I visited Meon Junior School in Portsmouth (UK), and talked with two groups of 35 Year 5 students (10 year olds). They had recently been learning about the Sun and the Moon, so I decided to talk about the solar system as a way of introducing the idea of the scale of the universe.
I developed a solar system model for this visit. This was inspired by the model described here. And made heavy use of this Solar System Scale Model Calculator.
Here's the version I coloured in and cut out to use to demonstrate in the class. Just to be clear this is an accurate scale model - you can fit the Sun and all the planets on a single sheet of A4 then, cut them out and space them over a bit more than half a mile for the proper orbits. We could only fit the Sun, Mercury, Venus and (with some squeezing) the Earth in the classroom. I think that really impressed the kids.
Here's the version you can colour in yourself.
And here are the instructions for placing the planets.
The kids were really impressed that the nearest star would be all the way in California.
All in all though I think the most important moment was when I was being introduced to one of the groups and a little boy said "You're not really a scientist are you?". I said "Yes, I am a scientist." It was also lovely to meet one little girl who in her free time writes reports on astronomy. She showed me her black hole report which was really impressive.
This activity could have been done while I was there, but in the end the kids had so many great questions that I just talked to them for the whole hour (honest!). I couldn't even answer all their questions before having to leave.
My daughter (who's 4) coloured in the planets and cut them out for herself. She demanded to have her own colouring sheet when I showed her what I was doing. We haven't yet placed the planets to scale around our house/neighbourhood, but once the weather warms up we may do that. I may report on how well that goes. I think she's too young to understand the concept.... but we'll see.
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