WillGater.com

I blogged a few months ago about an art exhibit, which I saw here in Bristol, about the Sun and magnetic fields. You can see what I thought of them here. Well (via Phil Plait) it seems they have now uploaded those films onto the web, so I urge you to pop over and have a watch of them. The two films are both innovative, interesting and most of all educating. They’re called Brilliant Noise and Magnetic Movie and they are really worth watching.

Chandra found the youngest supernova remnant in our Galaxy recently, but where did you hear it first?

I’m working on my presentation for the .Astronomy conference in September and I was wondering how many of you get (most of) your astronomy news direct from the source. I’m interested because it seems (to me at least) that more people nowadays go straight to the actual press release, for a given news story, than they use to. Is a press release really a press release anymore? So my questions are then…do you read the actual press releases when the news comes out? If you do, how much to you read about that story in ‘new’ media like blogs, Twitter etc. as well? Drop your answers in the comments for this post, I’ll be interested to see the feedback. Meanwhile you can visit the conference website here.

Image Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.); Infrared (2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF/CfA/E.Bressert)

Today I began work on the final chapter of the book. It’ll probably take about 4 weeks of writing to complete as I’ve also got to write the captions for the images too - but the point is that I am nearly finished! The chapter I’m currently working on isn’t actually the last chapter, it’s an earlier one. It’s also one of my favourite subjects so that should make this last bit quite fun to write. I’ll keep the blog updated with how it’s going but if I don’t post for a while you’ll know what I’m doing!

I will be giving a talk on the Hubble Space Telescope to the Bristol Astronomical Society this Friday at 7:15pm. It’s being held at Bristol Grammar School and members of the public are welcome to come along. For more information please visit the BAS website.