Archive for the 'astronomy outreach' Category

Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks to Google

Published Thursday, 16 April, 2009 astronomy outreach , media 1 Comment
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In February the folks at Google invited astrophysicist Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson to their New York offices to speak about his latest book The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Tyson is the Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and a wonderfully engaging and humorous public speaker. Last week Google uploaded the video of his talk, which I’ve embedded below.

In the video Tyson explores the historical context of Pluto’s re-classification, the controversy surrounding the ‘demotion’ of Pluto and what it means to be a planet today. The Q&As after, not necessarily relating to the book, are interesting too; his description of the smoothness of the Earth for example, towards the end of the video, is just brilliant.

Whatever your views on Pluto’s status today, Tyson’s ability to eloquently and enthusiastically communicate science, in particular astronomy, is something we can all really enjoy.

Video courtesy AtGoogleTalks YouTube channel. Hat tip to my colleague Kerry.

It’s back and it’s better than ever

Published Tuesday, 17 February, 2009 astronomy outreach , galaxies Leave a Comment
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No it’s not the return of Red Dwarf to our TV screens*, it’s the new Galaxy Zoo that has got the blogosphere (and indeed the TV) buzzing. To refresh your memory, Galaxy Zoo is the online citizen science project, headed by Dr Chris Lintott, that gives members of the public the chance to help do real science in classifying literally thousands of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

This morning the GZ team launched the follow-up (Galaxy Zoo 2), which will study a quarter of a million galaxies to “search for the strange and unusual.” This evening I had a go at the new classifying routine and interface and quickly remembered how addictive the site is. So why not head on over and have a go — as the team say “even five minutes’ work will provide a valuable contribution.” And if you’re sceptical that this isn’t a real zoo (as it doesn’t appear to have any animals), well…you just have to look very carefully!

(*although that is very cool)

Building ALMA

Published Saturday, 31 January, 2009 ALMA , ESO , astronomy outreach 3 Comments
almaHow the real ALMA will look. Credit: ESO/Calcada/Heyer/Zodet

ALMA is the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a huge arrangement of 80 astronomical antennae currently being built by several organisations on the high arid plains of the Atacama Desert, Chile. It will observe the sky to explore in detail the origins of the Universe, stars and extrasolar planets. This morning I had somewhat smaller ambitions. I started building my own little piece of ALMA on the dry and desolate plains of, er, my kitchen table. Stuart mentioned on Wednesday about the paper instructions/plans for a model ALMA antenna that the team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (who are involved in building ALMA) have on their website. So today I thought I’d have a go at making one. I printed the plans out and had them photocopied onto 300gsm A4 card at the local stationary place. A few hours of work later I had something that, remarkably for me, actually looked like the antenna in the instructions. Here are a few pictures I took during the making.

makingalmaMy attempt at making the NOAJ’s ALMA model. Credit: WillGater.com

In (1) the main dish and part of the fork arms are done; in (2) you can see the base taking shape (I substituted a small piece of dowel to support the weight of the main dish) and (3) shows the finished model. If you want the plans to build your own ALMA antenna then they are on the NOAJ website here and you can find out more about the project itself on the new ALMA website here. Now though, I’ve got to find the time to build the other 79!

IYA interviews and BLAST!

Published Sunday, 11 January, 2009 astronomy outreach , media Leave a Comment
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Well telescope night has been and gone and now the documentary BLAST! is up on iPlayer, for any UK readers. Having now seen it I can definitely recommend it. The way the film both generates and conveys the genuine drama and excitement, of carrying out a mission like BLAST, was particularly good. Worth watching right to the end to see what happens! You’ve got until 11:19pm on Wednesday 14th January to watch it, so log on here.

Lastly then, I’ll be doing several interviews over the coming weeks with BBC radio stations up and down the country about the International Year of Astronomy 2009. We’ll be talking about all aspects of the IYA, I imagine, so listen in if you’re interested. The first interview kicks off with a chat with BBC Radio Jersey’s Sara Palmer and Carrie Cooper at 11:15am on Monday morning. I won’t post any more about these interviews but if you want to keep up-to-date you can follow my Twitter feed here.

Doug Ellison’s Open University Mars talk

Published Saturday, 20 December, 2008 Mars , astronomy outreach , media , space missions Leave a Comment
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I’ve just started ‘following’ unmanned spaceflight expert Doug Ellison on Twitter and, out of curiosity, I went back and had a look at a few of his most recent tweets. I’m glad I did, because I spotted a mention from him about a talk he recently gave to the Open University about Mars. Entitled “Exploring Mars – A crash course on the Red Planet”, the talk is a comprehensive run down on the exploration of Mars from Schiaparelli’s ‘canali’ and ground based images of Mars to the up close exploration of the MERs.

Doug is the founder of the Unmanned Spaceflight forum and his expertise and enthusiasm really comes through in this talk. He uses images and animations from the recent Mars missions, to illustrate the talk, which he sews together with his commentary. If you want a summary of humankind’s recent robotic exploration of Mars, this video is a great way to spend an hour on a wintry Saturday afternoon. The video is available in an high quality version as well, so you can read the notes that Doug occasionally puts up on the screen. The video is below (wide-screen & high quality version on the YouTube site) and a link to Doug’s Twitter feed is here.


“Exploring Mars”. Credit: Doug Ellison/The Open University

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