If you’d like to join in, then please send me an audio file explaining how you got into astronomy. I’ll edit them together and create a ten minute podcast for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. I’m after between 30 and 60 seconds of audio in any regular format (MP3 or AAC preferable). Record your audio in any way you like, and then email me (mystory@orbitingfrog.com) the audio file.

I need the audio in the next two weeks (by Monday 20th July) in order to edit it together and get it up in time. I’m interested to hear what influenced you to explore space - was it a TV show, a book, a relative, something else? What was your first telescope, if you had one? What did you first look at in the night sky?  Is astronomy some small part of what do you do now, or a very big part?

Try to include a brief mention of who you are, and where you live in your audio, and try to keep it to a minute or less. Any questions? Comment here, or email mystory@orbitingfrog.com.

[Photo from Flickr user mag3737]

So far the results are interesting and as we have now passed the 500 tweets mark, I thought it would be nice to report on some facts and figures.

Overview

The site is generally working well and I am pleased with it. We current have 516 tweets (and this number has changed several times during my writing of this blog post!) which averages at about 8 tweets a day since it started. This number fluctuates quite a bit though, as the daily tweets graph below indicates.

The site will need to run for several months more before any really hard numbers can be drawn from the data. At the moment the odd popular paper can completely skew all the statistics. However in general, astronomy and general physics papers do best. Those papers which are accessible to a non-expert reader seem to do well, which makes perfects sense.

Usage

The website receives about 200 visitors each day with a lull at the weekends and a peak on Fridays. Conversely, the tweets themselves are predominantly collected on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, inline with statistics recently released about Twitter use in general ^[1].

These two graphs plot the tweets over time. The first shows the cumulative number of tweets over time. The second shows the tweets each day since April 16th. The best fit to the cumulative graph is actually a slow, exponential growth, which is in keeping with the number of tweets being produced in general by Twitter. The daily graph indicates the same, although it is interesting to see the weekend lulls clearly marked out. In the future this chart can have other information overlaid such as news stories - you can see the Iran elections spike at the far right.

Categories

The most-tweeted broad subject areas are Computer Science (29%), Astrophysics (28%) and Physics (14%). This probably to be expected given the way that arXiv is used with different academic fields ^[2].

The two most tweeted sub-topics are ‘Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics’ and ‘Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics’. Together they account for about 35% of the tweets and they each contribute roughly half of that total. After that ‘Physics and Society’ is very popular with 13% of the total tweets. ‘Cryptography and Security’ and ‘Applications’ (of Statistics) make up 11% and 13% respectively but it should be noted that most of those tweets are for only one, very popular, paper in each case.

Word Cloud

A curious sideline I set up is a word cloud of the words found in tweeted paper titles. I would like to know what words hook people in and get them to read a paper.So far this has shown limited effect but should grow more useful with time. A similar same cloud can be created for the abstracts of the papers and for the tweets themselves.

Interesting Papers

A couple of papers have really rocketed through the ranks. Recently a paper described a statistical result suggesting that there was vote rigging in the Iranian elections. ‘Benford’s Law anomalies in the 2009 Iranian presidential election‘ rose from nowhere to become the most tweeted arXiv paper since April in just two days, with 35 tweets at time of writing this post.

‘Hiding Information in Retransmissions‘ is a Computer Science paper that has shown a slower, but steadier climb through the popularity ranks. It has now dropped out of the weekly top-ten but remains in the monthly and all-time charts.

Mavens and Connectors

The twitter users producing the most tweets have stayed roughly constant in the past 2 months. In order, the users contributing more than 10 arXiv tweets since April are currently @CharmQGP (48), @sarahkendrew (25), @heptwit (20), @orbitingfrog (15; me), @astroclif (14), @astrodicticum (11) and @cmetzner (11).

Interestingly of these, @heptwit and @astroclif have only 7 and 2 followers each on Twitter. This leads me to think that I should begin measuring the ‘reach’ of tweets as well as the number of tweets. For example, a paper tweeted by @CharmQGP will be seen by potentially 401 people. If it were then retweeted by @sarahkendrew it could reach up to 653! This would be compared to a paper tweeted by @heptwit, @astroclif that can only be seen by 8 people. The reach of a tweet is a new metric that I can easily begin adding into the site.

In a similar vein, it is curious to measure the retweeting potential of users. We can reorder the top contributors listed above in order of their retweeting power - that is to say that we can place them in order of how many times people retweet the papers that they mention. Now the list looks different: @sarahkendrew (16), @orbitingfrog (13), @CharmQGP (3), @cmetzner (2), @heptwit (1), @astroclif (0) and @astrodicticum (0). This can only be taken as a tentative result since we are only 2 months into this data set and retweeting is far less common than simply tweeting in general. However it points out another metric that may be worth measuring.

@tweprints

As suggested many times by many people there is now a @tweprints twitter feed that announces popular papers as they reach a threshold number of mentions. This threshold is changeable but currently sits at 5 tweets.  I am open to suggestions for the kinds of things this twitter feed should announce. At the moment it is a very sparse feed.

Future Plans

The new metrics I mentioned above will find their way onto the site soon, as will an expanded statistics page. XML feeds for data and hopefully an RSS feed of the current top-ten papers. All of this is of course only going to get done in between real work on my thesis. Sheesh.

There is a large and valuable database building up behind this project and if anyone has any novel uses for it, I would be interested to hear from you. I will update again in the future when there is something worthy of noting. In the meantime: keep tweeting your arXiv papers!

[1 - Sysomos Twitter Report] [2 - SarahAskew] [Link to Tweprints]

Neilsen describes the current situation, in which scientists must publish refereed papers in selective journals in order to progress science. In fact publishing has become a part of the scientific process, and has been for almost 300 years. The history of this situation is explored in the article, so I will not go into it here.

The Internet represents an opportunity to change this system, one which has created a 300-year-old, collective long-term memory, into something new and more efficient, perhaps adding in a current, collective short-term working memory at the same time. With new online tools, scientists could begin to share techniques, data and ideas online to the benefit of all parties, and the public at large.

Online tools for commenting, sharing and distributing information are now established but many scientists remain reticent to put their ideas - their hard work - into this free-for-all. Fear of wasted time, intellectual property theft and reprisals from the community have made scientists stay behind their desk, filling up their hard drives and filing cabinets, rather than share en-masse.

I probably don’t need to explain to someone reading a blog that online tools are changing many other aspects of society. During my astrolunch talk I presented a slide showing some of the online tools I have used in the past year to benefit my own work. (I realised when writing the talk that there were too many to fit on one slide!)

In the end, Neilsen’s article concludes that for scientists to engage and share ideas online, and thus become more efficient in their work, they would need to do so in a very different online infrastructure to that which we usually see in so-called Web 2.0. Scientists would need a way to track any one person’s activity within this infrastructure so that proper credit and attribution could be given to the origin of ideas. This, along with some metric of contribution would be vital for scientists to consider putting time and effort into any online activity regarding their work.

At present only your refereed publications count toward anything in your future as a scientist. Without publication, you likely won’t won’t progress in research and likely won’t advance in your career. If you spend time online; writing, sharing and contributing, then it will not help you in your academic life. This is a situation that has to change, and that almost inevitably will change in the coming years.

Neilsen thinks that the system will be transformed in the next couple of decades, far more than it has been in 300 years! This will involve a huge shift in the culture of scientists. However with the proper tools and the right amount of ‘evangelizing’ by techy science types, it could all happen more easily.

The talk generated a lot of discussion, and in fact still is via email. People seemed to think I was advocating the abolishment of the current system or suggesting everyone put every idea they’ve ever had onto Facebook. I am not. What I do know is that there are a huge number of small tips, tools, scripts, techniques, spreadsheets, templates and other bits and bobs lying on every academic’s hard drive in every university in the world! If those little pieces of knowledge were searchable, filterable and accessible to everyone else in the field then it might be easier for people to progress in their work and find the right people to collaborate with on the right jobs.

Michael Neilsen is an invited speaker for the .Astronomy 2009 conference in Leiden this winter. For more information on that conference visit the new website www.dotastronomy.com. You can also find Neilsen’s blog at michaelnielsen.org/blog/.

[Link to original article] [PDF of my Slides] [Header image taken from original article, Credit: Photolibrary]

As part of IYA2009, a team has created a high-quality, low-cost telescope that you can build and then use just as Galielo did. The Galileoscope is a kit developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators. The Galileoscope costs just US$15 each plus shipping for 1 to 99 units, or US$12.50 each plus shipping for 100 or more.

No matter where you live, with this easy-to-assemble, 50-mm (2-inch) diameter, 25- to 50-power achromatic refractor, you can see the celestial wonders that Galileo Galilei first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today.

Here in the UK, shipping costs just a little more than the telescope itself bringing the whole package to a total of around $32 which is currently about £20 - not bad at all. It is far cheaper than any equivalent telescope you can buy in the UK, mainly because the Galieloscope is designed exactly to NOT be a piece of crap that you can pick up at Tesco for £40.

If you are affiliated with an astronomy group, school or cyborg collective, you can group together and order in bulk. This could save you money on shipping charges.

The Galileoscope observing guide [download PDF] has tips for observing the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and other interesting objects using your Galileoscope.

Don’t forget as well though, that you also get to actually build the telescope using the kit - something most astronomers wouldn’t dare to try. This should be a lot of fun and if you know an astronomer, I would suggest challenging them to  a Galieloscope-building contest.

Go and get one! they start shipping any day now!

How did I get into astronomy? I was born in 1981 so my formative years were the late 80s and early 90s. I am an astronomer forged from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Hubble Space Telescope and of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. I would say that those were the things that got me into astronomy? What got you into astronomy? I’d be interested to know. In the spirit of sharing, here’s my story.

I always liked space, most kids do. I had a litle Osborne book called ‘Space Facts’ (or something) which was filled with child-sized facts perfect for memorising. It was probably given to me to shut me up, as I was a ‘why?’ child. I can still picture some of the illustrations that helped me learn all about space. Saturn sitting in a giant bucket is one I can vividly recall.

I got a telescope when I was 11. It was a small, wobbly refractor that I used to look at Jupiter’s moons and the Orion Nebula. Around the same time we had our loft converted  at home. Thus the first bedroom that I didn’t have to share with my brother was south-facing and had a large, retractable skylight that was just right for looking out at the Moon and planets. Suddenly I was obsessed.

A couple of years later, with the recent repair of Hubble firmly in my mind, I got my first real telescope. It was a 114mm Newtonian refractor and it was heavy! It was bulky and obtrusive in my sloped-roofed bedroom but it worked like a charm. I had to teach myself about Right-Ascension and Declination, the rotation of the Earth under a ‘celestial sphere’. I taught myself about the life-cycle of stars, with Orion and Patrick Moore’s ‘Atlas of the Universe’ as my guide.

I was hooked on the TV coverage of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it impacted Jupiter and it propelled me into learning about comets, asteroids and the origins of the Solar System.

In the late 90s we got an Internet connection and that changed everything! I began programming and coding little Visual Basic programs that would rotate little solar systems on the screen. I could grab images and information via our CompuServe browser and use Mosaic to see the latest images from NASA. It was very exciting.

University soon loomed over the horizon and I was amazed to see that Astrophysics was an option - the rest is probably self-evident. I’m now trying to wrap up my PhD and create a thesis from the papers I’ve written. I have now been to a professional telescope and taken real, original data.

I have just seen astronauts repair Hubble for the final time, almost 20 years after it was first launched. Yesterday the first British astronaut was selected by ESA. A whole group of European astronauts was revealed after a lengthy selection process. I assume (or perhaps hope) that there are legions of 10 year old children around Europe watching this and thinking ‘I want to do that’. Because for what seems to me like the first time: they really could!

I hope that you have heard of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, which I play a small part in organising. As part of this I am creating an episode about how people get into astronomy. If you would like to share your story then please leave a comment explaining how you got into astronomy.

Make sure you use your correct email so I can contact you (emails not published here). I’ll be blogging about this upcoming podcast episode again, but since I was sharing I thought you might like to as well.

[Image from Flickr user turbojoe used under CC]

This post features some interactive charts that show the altitude, velocity and acceleration of the Ariane rocket as it progress through the air into space. You can click and drag to zoom in on a section of these charts. Move your mouse around inside them to get more information.

7 seconds after ignition of the main stage cryogenic engine, two solid-propellant boosters are ignited, and we have liftoff. The launch begins with a 6 second vertical climb. The onboard computers optimize the motion of the rocket in real time, in order to minimise fuel consumption. The main stage engine takes the launcher into an intermediate orbit before the end stage takes the payload into the final orbit. You can clearly see the change between the two stages on the velocity and acceleration graphs at about 9 minutes.

The main stage of the launcher will apparently fall back, just off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The launcher will remain at an altitude of about 852 kilometers travelling at about 10,000 meters/second! The fairing protecting the Herschel, Planck spacecraft is jettisoned shortly after the boosters.

By the end of the process, Herschel and Planck will be on their way to a placed called ‘L2′, a point in space where objects sit ‘behind’ the Earth with respect to the Sun (see diagram below). L2 is a good spot for space-based observatories because they are effectively ‘towed’ around in orbit with the Earth but remain roughly stationary with respect to it.

Herschel and Planck will not be alone at L2. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe is already there and the Gaia mission and James Webb Space Telescope will also be placed at L2.

The Herschel space telescope has two main objectives: observation of the “cold” Universe, in particular the formation of stars and galaxies; and studying the chemical composition of celestial bodies and the molecular chemistry of the Universe. Herschel’s mirror, at 3.5 meters in diameter, will be the largest ever deployed in space. It will wiegh over 3,400 kg at launch. For more info visit the ESA Herschel page.

Planck is designed to analyze the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang, which we observe today as the cosmic microwave background. Planck will provide vital information concerning the creation of the Universe and the origins of the cosmic structure. It will weigh 1,920 kg at launch. For more info visit the ESA Planck page.

[More info in Ariancespace press release. Launch image: ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE, L2 diagram: ESA/NASA]

It explores the many facets of the telescope — the historical development, the scientific importance, the technological breakthroughs, and also the people behind this ground-breaking invention, their triumphs and failures.

Dr. Joe Liske, an astronomer from the European Southern Observatory hosts the 60 minute movie. He can also be seen on the Hubblecast video podcast. The DVD contains subtitles in several languages. If you would like to get hold of a copy for your local astronomical group, school, museum or other public event then visit the website or simply email ESO and ask.

The Eyes on the Skies book is available in English, German, Finnish and Korean.

[Eyes of the Skies Trailer]

I think it is technically now possible and so I am putting out a personal plea for translators! Help! I have so far obtained a first draft version of my tweets in French and Dutch, as I will outline below.

The phrases that needs translation are as follows:

SATELLITE will pass over CITY at mag XX at HH:MM on DD/MM. Moves from XX° elevation COMPASS to XX° elevation COMPASS over X min

Mag XX Iridium flare over CITY at HH:MM on DD/MM. Will appear at XX° elevation, bearing XX° from North

Here is a list of the current feeds that need translating. If you would like to volunteer to help me out when please reply to me @orbitingfrog. The only requirement I have is that you have a Twitter account so that you can stay subscribed to the feed as we get the translation right.

So here’s the list as it stands. Feel free to comment or tweet and I’ll update the list as we go along.

French (Aix, Paris) (with thanks to @sarahkendrew)

• L’SATELLITE passera au-dessus de CITY avec mag XX à HH:MM le DD/MM. Trajectoire de XX° d’élévation COMPASS à XX° d’élévation COMPASS en XX min
• Flash Iridium mag XX au-dessus de CITY à HH:MM le DD/MM. Apparaîtra à XX° d’élévation, XX° d’azimuth

Dutch (Amsterdam) (with thanks to @sarahkendrew)

• SATELLITE vliegt over CITY met helderheid XX om HH:MM op DD/MM. De hoogte gaat van XX° COMPASS naar XX° COMPASS, gedurende XX min
• Iridiumflits met helderheid XX over CITY om HH:MM u op DD/MM. Verschijnt op hoogte van XX° N, XX° azimut

Greek (Athens)

Norwegian (Bergen)

German (Berlin, Munchen, Wien) (with thanks to @drmirror)

• SATELLITE überquert CITY mit Helligkeit XX um HH:MM am DD/MM. Zieht von XX° Höhe COMPASS nach XX° Höhe COMPASS in X min.
• Iridium Flare der Helligkeit XX über CITY um HH:MM am DD/MM. Erscheint in XX° Höhe, Richtung XX° von Nord.

Spanish (Madrid)

Russian (Moscow)

Czech (Prague)

Italian (Rome)

Korean (Seoul)

Swedish (Stockholm)

Arabic (Tehran)

Japanese (Tokyo)

Hebrew (Tel Aviv)

Other languages for possible future feeds:

Poruguese

Between 2007 and 2009, a group of amateur meteor enthusiasts in Japan got together to create a national network of over 100 connected video cameras. They used a piece of motion-detection software called UFOCapture (by a company called SonotaCo) which allows video recording from a few seconds before the trigger. This unprecedented network recorded not only 240,000 optically bright meteors over two years, but almost 40,000 meteors seen by more than one station.

The multiple-station events are particularly interesting because they enabled observers to trace the motion of the meteors back into the Solar System and say where they came from. Using this data they created the above radiant map. The map labels several known, seasonal meteor showers. This itself is kind of cool but the really interesting part is that they’re map revealed eleven further seasonal meteor shows that had not been known about before!

The eleven new showers were identified by new radiants on the sky from which meteors appear to flow. Research like this could potentially indicate some comets or asteroids that was hitherto unknown, but that as APOD says: ’that might one day pass close to the Earth’.

These kinds of data excessive projects really spark my imagination. they can only be achieved in this modern age of modest home-technological excess. By networking together their video cameras, these guys created something that was more than the sum of its parts.

The southern half of the sky is obviously still somewhat sparsely plotted. If there is an amateur group out there in South America, Australia, New Zealand or some such other antipodean location - then get on the case. You could be making discoveries of an entirely digital kind in the near future.

[Ongoing Meteor Work PDF from The Journal of the IMO, APOD on Twitter]

Servicing mission 4 (SM4) will launch on Monday from Cape Canaveral (2pm EST) this coming Monday (May 11th). The shuttle Atlantis is performing the mission. There will be another shuttle on standby, acting as a lifeboat because the astronauts have no other means of escape.

The team will be giving Hubble quite an overhaul. They will be replacing a unit the controls Hubble’s communications with the onboard science instruments. Several spacewalks will replace all six gyroscopes and install new batteries. This life-extending repair mission also involves new guidance sensors, thermal insulation and a new de-orbit mechanism for when Hubble is moved at the end of its life. It is hoped that the whole exercise will give Hubble another 5-10 years delivering science.

The astronauts will also try to repair Hubble’s out-of-commission instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). STIS stopped working in 2004 and ACS failed in 2007. Brand new intsruments Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) will be installed. WFC3, is a visible, infrared and ultraviolet light camera. It should improved the sensitivity of Hubble some 10-30 times.

It is perhaps most interesting to note that if the mission is a total success then Hubble will literally be better than it has ever been! It would have six functioning scientific instruments as well as brand new stabilisation and operational components. Not bad for an observatory that is now older than the undergraduates coming into our astrophysics degree programme.

Fingers crossed for Monday!

[Hubblesite SM4 page, NASA SM4 page]

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory  has the largest single mirror ever built for a space telescope. Herschel’s mission is to collect long-wavelength radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. In addition, Herschel will be the only space observatory to cover a spectral range from the far infrared to sub-millimetre - an ideal regime for my own area of study: star formation.

Herschel will be launched along with Planck, ESA’s microwave observatory which will study the Cosmic Microwave Background. Planck is designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic Background Radiation Field over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution.

Cardiff University is heavily involved and will be holding launch events on the day, including a live video feed (with nibbles). Both Herschel and Planck can be found on Twitter. I will attempt to liveblog from Cardiff on the day, and I’m sure that many others will do the same around Europe.

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the BBC in Birmingham to help edit The Sky at Night as an astronomy researcher. The episode was about near-Earth objects, specifically 2008TC3, which crash landed in the Sudan last year, after being tracked from space. You can currently catch the episode on the BBC iPlayer.

The BBC was very nice and friendly and the whole thing was really interesting to someone who knows nothing about it. In fact the experience of sitting, editing in a darkened room in close-quarters with two other people and twenty computer monitors is not unlike operating a large telescope. Happily, no altitude sickness though.

This is just one step away from fulfilling my childhood dream of meeting Sir Patrick! Maybe one day. In honour of this event, I found the old B3ta video ‘Patrick Moore plays the xylophone’ - an homage to the man himself.

I find that reading papers outside of my own academic field is quite compelling and often sparks the imagination. The problem of course is knowing which papers one should read if you’re not inside the system. After a few weeks this website should begin to show the emerging favourites in any field.

It’s also interesting to simply see what gets talked about. As the data piles up, it will be possible to filter the papers into different topics or types. It might, for example, be useful to see what astrophysics papers are most discussed in a given month, or which biology paper has risen fastest through the ranks this week.

The engine behind the site periodically looks for tweets that contain both the word ‘arxiv’ and an arXiv.org paper identifier (such as 0102.3456). You can see a list of recently detected tweets on the site itself. In this way it will pick up anyone mentioning an arXiv URL or someone who tags their tweets #arxiv and includes the paper id - two things that I often see. It also therefore keeps the idea global - you don’t have to tweet in English.

The statistics and top-tens are worked out democratically:

• If a paper is tweeted 4 times then it is ranked 4x higher than a paper that is mentioned only once.
• I place no restrictions on multiple mentions by the same user at present.
• One can mention more than one paper in a single tweet. This will give each paper a single vote.
• Mentioning the same id code more than once in a tweet does nothing.

If it continues to look interesting, I have every intention of adding more detailed trends to the site as time goes by. For now, I just need data - and by that I mean tweets! Start tweeting about your favourite papers now! If you have any thoughts on the kind of data you’d like to se displayed, then let me know in the comments.

I’m a bit confused about what to call this new site. ‘twarxiv’ came to mind, but is entirely inaccessible to outsiders! Anyone have ideas? If you can think of a good name, or have any other suggestions about arXiv on Twitter then please leave a comment here or contact me @orbitingfrog.

The primary research goal of PAMeLA (Payload for Anti-Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is to study the antimatter component of cosmic ray radiation. Antiparticles account for a small fraction of cosmic rays. Where the bulk of them originated is not known. It could be that they are produced in interactions between cosmic rays and atoms in the interstellar medium, (this is called a secondary source). They could also be produced in some sort of astrophysical phenomena like in pulsars, microquasars or through dark matter annihilation, which would all be primary sources.

This report outlines a measurement of the positron fraction in the energy range 1.5–100 GeV. In this range they find numbers of positrons that are inconsistent with secondary sources. So could it be that positrons are really being created in an astrophysical object (.e.g  a pulsar or microquasar) or by dark matter annihilation?

Download the PDF of this talk. Read original article on Nature.

During next week’s Moonwatch event at Cardiff University, I’ll be manning a stand showing people how to use Twitter, Google Earth and the Internet to find satellites in the night sky. As well as showing them how to use Heaven’s Above, I’ll also be outlining my own projects OverTwitter, LookUp and Satellite KML.

I’ll also be talking about .Astronomy, Galaxy Zoo and how to view interesting and alternative wavelengths on Google Sky. I’m going to be busy!

Since most of my readers are in the US and Canada, you can download my poster about my own projects rather than fly all the way to Cardiff next week. You can also download this handout explaining these projects and providing links.

If you you are in the Cardiff area, then you’ll need to register to attend our Moonwatch event because it is full up! However, if you have a telescope of your own, I would suggest holding your own smaller Moonwatch event locally. Invite the neighbours round and have some drinks while you show them the Moon!

Next week is Moonwatch week here in the UK (28th of March to 5th of April). This is frankly our way of making up time on the 100 hours of astronomy, because of our rubbish weather. At my home institution, Cardiff University we are holding public events each evening when it is clear, inviting anyone to come and look through our new half-metre telescope.

Elsewhere in the UK many other museums, community centres and schools are also holding Moonwatch events. A pal of mine, Dr. Nutter (no joke), is holding his own tiny Moonwatch on his street in Magor. What a good idea! He wondered if there was a specific Moonwatch poster he could download to advertise the event. We could not find one and so Twitter came into use. Soon enough we had two posters available to us.

One pointed out by @cosmosboy covers any IYA2009 event. The other was created specially by @Space_Jockey and Ewan has created a special minisite about Moonwatch, where you can download the poster (shown above).

The crash, which happened over 400 miles above Siberia, destroyed the derelict Russian satellite and one of the 66 objects that make up the Iridium mesh, or constellation. The constellation provides voice and data connections for satellite phones as well as other services. It has around 300,000 clients across the globe, including the US Department of Defense and scientists at the South Pole. Iridium services have now been restored and company was in fact prepared for this scenario, even if they were not expecting it.

You can see from these screenshots, taken this morning, that the two sets of debris (Iridium in white, Russian in red) are still more-or-less following their original orbits. Celestrak is providing data for the radar-trackable particles, and smaller fragments do not show up here. The pieces of debris have begun to drift apart and will eventually begin to spread out and move more eccentrically as the weeks go by.

I had been meaning to organise my ‘Satellites on Google Earth‘ code, and have been prompted by these events to create a summary page which you can find linked at the top of the page or by clicking here.

The new initiative is a follow-up to the highly successful Galaxy Zoo project that enabled members of the public to take part in astronomy research online. But whereas the original site only asked members of the public to say whether a galaxy was spiral or elliptical, and which way it was rotating, Galaxy Zoo 2 asks them to delve deeper into 250,000 of the brightest and best galaxies to search for the strange and unusual.

The best way to learn about Galaxy Zoo is to go and have a go! You can also follow them on Twitter  - where you might even catch the news in advance of the general public.

You can get the low down on these transit-predicting feeds on my Over Twitter page, which also now features a map showing the list of current feeds and the next expected transit information. Requests for new feeds can either sent sent via email, or by contacting me on Twitter (@orbitingfrog).

Does the sun leave an ecliptic path through any other constellations or just the zodiac constellations? - Blossom

The answer is interesting and is also a good way to begin revealing astrology for the money-grabbing scam that it really is.

The Sun passes through thirteen constellations on its path through the sky (called the ecliptic). In traditional astrology the heavens are divided into twelve even sections of a circle. In reality the Sun spends different periods of time in each constellation. The boundaries of these constellations are entirely artificial of course. They were standardised by the International Astronomical Union around 1930, as one of the group’s first official acts.

At present, the Sun resides in the following constellations (or star signs) during the following periods of the year:

Aries: April 19th - May 13th

Taurus: May 14th - June 19th

Gemini: June 20th - July 20th

Cancer: July 21st - August 9th

Leo: August 10th - September 15th

Virgo: September 16th - October 30th

Libra: October 31st - November 22nd

Scorpius: November 23rd - November 29th

Ophiuchus: November 30th - December 17th

Sagittarius: December 18th - January 18th

Capricornus: January 19th - February 15th

Aquarius: February 16th - March 11th

Pisces: March 12th - April 18th

But it is more complicated than that! Traditional astrology is all about the relative locations of the various planets within the twelve signs. Problem is, the planets do not follow the ecliptic exactly. Each planet is inclined at an angle to the Sun in the Solar System and so they draw out slightly different paths.

In addition to the 13 constellations listed above, the planets pass through 8 more. So in a sense Cetus, Corvus, Crater, Hydra, Orion, Pegasus, Scutum and Sextans are also astrological signs. This means that there are 21 astrological signs of the zodiac. You might want to ask an astrologer how they interpret a planet in one of these ‘extra’ constellations. What does it mean if Uranus is in Scutum? Sounds painful.

Astrology is an ancient tradition that sprang up in many cultures because the stars’ apparent ability to predict certain events (crops, weather, etc). In the modern era, astrology is a con. It not something that one might believe in through tentative evidence or testimony, it is simply a fiction perpetrated by those who are able to make money from it. It is based on the principles of cold reading, gullibility  and wishful thinking. It may well be that there are things out there in the universe influencing our lives on Earth. However, the geometric happenstance that one star might look to be in a particular place at some point during your life is not going to affect your mood, your luck or your love life.

You might as well try to gain insight into your existence from the way you parked your car.

In Science or Fiction we are not out to debunk the science in sci-fi, but rather to have fun exploring the ideas used and talk about how realistic - or not - we think these ideas are. If the plot involves shrinking a man to miniscule sizes, then we’ll try to think how that could be done. If it involves a black hole that leads to hell, then we’ll give that a go too! Everything we discuss is ultimately given a ’science quotient’, which is a percentage rating on how scientific we find it.

There have been four episodes so far, with more being recording this week. To date we have discussed Minority Report, InnerSpace, Event Horizon and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog. Star Trek, BSG, Independence Day, Alien and various other classic movies, books and TV shows are scheduled for recording in the next few months.

Science or Fiction can be found on iTunes, Twitter and Facebook. The Channelzine website will gradually grow over the course of 2009 into a new online media channel/magazine.

Several folks here at Cardiff were on the team, so I’m sure you’ll see them flitting about in the background twiddling knobs and such. I know one team member who was interviewed but was too rude to make the final edit.

The BLAST page on the BBC website tells you the various dates it will be broadcast, and of of course if you’re in the UK you can catch it for some time on the amazing iPlayer.

[Official BLAST movie website]

Many products in the shops use scientific language to promote their products. At this time of year, following a period of festive excess, many detox products are popular. Detoxing herbal teas, shampoos, facial washes, foot pads and more can be purchased at a premium in Boots, Superdrug and miscellany other shops and pharmacies. Do they work? Well no, not really. It turns out that many of the companies producing these products don’t even agree on exactly what detox means!

33 scientists involved with the Voice of Young Science (part of the Sense about Science charitable group) set out to investigate the idea of detox.

We all agreed that detox being used to sell everything from tea to hair straighteners was implausible and decided to dig deeper to find out what the product manufacturers meant by detox…

Some of the claims they set out to tackle included:

• Garnier Clean Detox Anti-Dullness Foaming Gel, which “detoxifies by cleansing the skin’s surface”.
• Innocent Natural Detox Smoothie that “helps neutralise nasty free radicals which can cause damage to your body’s cells”.
• V-Water Detox, which can “cleanse your system and whisk away the polluting nasties”.
• My favourite is the Fushi Holistic and Health Solutions Total Detox Patch that “acts as a toxin sink and absorbs impurities through your feet”.

[Full Dossier] [PDF of Handout]

Using X-Ray images, and infrared data, the team led by Dr Tracey DeLaney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the visualisation of the supernova to get a more complete understanding of how the explosion happened.

The group of researchers unveiled some interesting features in Cassiopeia A, particularly high velocity plumes and jets leading out and shown in yellow in the above image.

[Cardiff press release] [Chandra press release with video]

This year is the International Year of Astronomy. January 15th and 16th will see the official opening in Paris, but the accompanying podcast, 365 Days of Astronomy, has kicked off with an introductory episode in which several of the team behind the podcast speak a little about themselves. I was late handing in my entry (typical) and so do not feature, which is a shame. However I intend to contribute later on in the year.

2009 will also see the publication of the proceedings from my conference, .Astronomy. Our publishers say they can have a proof ready very soon and so the book should be available this month - hurrah!

This year I will be leading my first project as principal investigator. That means I am in charge - if my PhD supervisor lets me! We have secured 40 hours of time on the JCMT on Mauna Kea (the same place where I had an unfortunate incident). If all goes well ,this project could lead to a PhD thesis for me and then 2009 would be very significant!

More importantly though, 2009 will be the year I become a father. We are expecting our first child in early March and we are very excited. The house is not yet ready, we have no money and in many ways I am terrified. I am told that this is reasonably normal.

Happy New Year to one and all and I hope that 2009 will be prosperous for you all.

Walking home, I noticed the sky was clear and so waited until a break in the buildings allowed me to see the Moon and Jupiter. I couldn’t see Venus at all, which meant it was behind the Moon. ‘Rather, cool’, I thought and took some snaps with my iPhone. Cameraphones never work on the Moon, yet I never seem to learn my lesson.

It takes me half an hour to walk home, and when I got there I could just see Venus emerging from the edge of the Moon. It was quite lovely. I grabbed our Digital SLR and set off around the streets near my house. I was running out of time and forgot to take the telescopic zoom so what I ended up with was lots of fairly widefield image sof the triple conjunction.

As you can see, I am no astrophotographer (in fact we’ve been through this before on Orbiting Frog). My tiny tripod required using the roof of whatever cars were nearby to see the triple conjunction but I am pretty pleased with the results.

I also took this bizarre but cool picture of the streetlights around my house. I was playing with the exposure time and accidentally took this 30 second exposure, which is now my desktop wallpaper.

Dave Mosher, over at Discovery Space wants people to send in their images of the event to form part of a Discovery Space Gallery.

Of course, since this object has not cleared its orbit, I suppose it must actually be an exodwarfplanet.

Dark Matter & Dark Energy - [Read More about Dark Matter and Dark Energy]

Dark matter is hypothetical matter that feels no effect from electromagnetism, so we cannot see it. Its presence can only be inferred by the gravitational influence it exerts. Galaxies do not rotate as expected by Newtonian dynamics. The Coma cluster of galaxies also has properties that gravity cannot explain.

Dark energy is similarly mysterious, but even less easy to understand. It is a kind of energy that permeates the whole universe, driving it apart and causing it to expand. These two things together purportedly make up 96% of the content of the Universe.

Physical cosmologists study dark matter and dark energy with great interest. Change their names to ‘gravity not doing it what it should’ and things can look slightly different. A branch of physics labelled MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) tries to explain the observational evidence without adding in unknown forms of matter and energy. There are also many scientists who feel that ‘dark energy’ gives the wrong impression and that this stuff might be normal matter that we simply don’t see for some reason.

So either gravity is wrong or matter is. That is quite a dilemma for astrophysicists to resolve.

Gravitational Waves - [Read More about Gravitational Waves]

Now, I’ve gotten in trouble before for having a beef with gravitational waves, so I’ll try to be kinder here. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which transmit the energy of gravity and propagate its effects through the universe. Light’s energy is transmitted to us by fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, this would be an alternative spectrum of waves, detectable by completely different means.

The study of gravitational waves has received a nobel prize (1993, I think?) when they were indirectly detected in a binary system containing a pulsar. The orbital energy in the binary system was seen to decay in exact accordance with the theories of gravitational wave physics.

Einstein’s general relativity explains gravitational waves very well  - in fact if gravitational waves don’t exist there is a big problem. The problem comes along when you find out that no one has ever detected a gravitational wave. People have been trying for quite some time.

I often see graphs which explain this lack of detection. Basically gravity waves may just be too subtle to be detected by current methods. The answer is to build larger, more complicated observatories (in space preferably). The plans are already made. If they don’t find them then, either a new idea gets floated, or a new graph gets drawn and an even bigger detector is created.

I hope they find them before too much money gets spent!

The Higgs Boson - [Read More about the Higgs Boson]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had to be shut down for a little while and so its main target: the Higgs Boson remains an unknown and unverifiable character.

Imagine you had a really nice cake. You studied this cake for a long time and you managed to figure out exactly how it was made. You could tell me the proportions and nature of the original ingredients, the length of time for which it was baked even the exact colourings used in the icing. What you don’t know though, is the type of spoon that the cook used. Without knowing this you will never truly have understood how the cake was made - and you will never managed to recreate it. If it turns out that there was no spoon then your whole theory falls apart!

The Higgs Boson is that spoon.

Without the Higgs Boson the whole framework of our understanding of particle physics is incomplete. The LHC should be able to detect it. If it can’t, then there may be a problem and the standard model of patricles will need to be reconsidered. If it is found, then we would have a complete understanding of the particles that make up the Universe. That would be profound and powerful. We may find out one way or the other in 2009.

Panspermia - [Read More about Panspermia]

How did life on Earth begin? Well one idea is that it came to our little rock from space. This notion is called Panspermia and it is actually as old as modern science. Early musings on evolution in the 18th Century considered that the original germs came from space.

Fred Hoyle (who died in 2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (who is now based in Cardiff’s astrobiology centre) were early proponents of Panspermia in its modern form. They also suggested that lifeforms continue to enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and that they might still cause epidemics and provide new genetic material for the planet.

The problem with Panspermia is that it solves a complicated problem (how did life spontaneously begin on Earth) with an even more complicated solutiom (how did life spontaneously begin elsewhere and then travel across billions of miles of interstellar space). For this reason, many need a lot of convincing about the idea.

String Theory - [Read More about String Theory]

String Theory is the name given to a branch of physics and maths that aims to describe the Universe in terms of multi-dimensional vibrating strings. No this isn’t Pratchett. It would be a way to combine the as-yet irreconcilable theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity - this is something of a holy grail in modern physics.

String theory is a broad name for a collection of theories - some of which disagree with each other - but all of which boil down to the principle described above. The trick is, you cannot disprove string theory. You would need an experiment so large and powerful that it would require orders of scale larger than our Solar System. We are a very, very long way from achieving this.

The strings themselves would be so fantastically small as to be possibly prohibited from measurement by nature itself. Lengths and timescales so minute that we could never measure them.

One hope for string theory is that we may see evidence of hidden dimensions when the LHC begins operations. However this could also be evidence of other things, and not necessarily a win for string theory.

For these reasons, many consider string theory not to be science, but rather mathematics. One day in the distant future we build the right apparatus and experimentally test this outlandishly cool idea. It may be right - or it may just be a mathematically self-consistent way to explain particle physics and gravity.

Summary

Popular ideas are not always good ones, nor are they necessarily bad. The work being done to advanced science in the five areas above is extremely important. However so is the work being done to provide alternative ideas and theories. Nothing in science is proven until it is proven.

Sometimes the thrill of uncovering the true nature of the Universe doesn’t quite last all day. Today… well it’s really boring and slow. I tried to work - I really did. I stared at a paper I am writing for at least an hour but nothing came out of my head and into the document. Wait, I lied; there was a spelling correction I think.

So why am I telling you this? You came here for astronomy news, right? Well sometimes my PhD is really very slow and for some reason, I need you to know that. Currently my university projects are:

• Editing conference proceedings for .Astronomy
• Pestering speakers to hand in conference proceedings for .Astronomy
• Writing a paper dealing with emission from infalling protostars
• Organising the Star Formation Christmas Dinner (a Mexican for some reason)
• Waiting for the response from a telescope proposal (I’ve managed to do this one all day!)
• Creating the new Observatory website
• Writing a cool web app that simulates an aspect of star formation

As you can see, there is plenty to do. I just can’t do it today. I can’t focus, I can’t think and nor can I write a decent blog post either.

Is anyone else out there having a witless day? If you are - may I suggest going home? It’ll be more productive. I have a meeting at 4 so am obliged to sit and wait. Maybe I’ll get so bored, I’ll actually do some work.

Update: Maybe not.