…for those who haven’t heard, Hubble today lost the use of one of its most important instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. There seems to be little hope of more than minimal repair, and at present there is no plan to extend what is already an extremely complicated shuttle repair mission to fix ACS.
On [...]
Posts made in January, 2007
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I’m so looking forward to the next couple of months of working on Sky at Night. We spent the weekend putting the finishing touches to our Mars special, to go out next weekend. This is 40 minutes long on BBC2, and a full hour on BBC4 and well worth it! It contains all of the [...]
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Via the Annals of Improbable Research (everyone’s favourite journal), and the Guardian comes news about a interesting project to establish what ‘understanding’ a theory means. Can you claim to understand an area of science where the maths is beyond you?
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Researching a column on Gravity probe B for the magazine, I came across the following quotation which I suspect I’ll be using in lectures from now on.
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Ptolomy invented a Universe and it lasted two thousand years. Newton invented a Universe and it lasted two hundred years. Now Dr Einstein has invented a new Universe, and [...] -
A short announcement to say that, contrary to advertising, Brian, Patrick and I will not be appearing at Astrofest this year. We hope to arrange some public appearances shortly, however.
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Update : We have managed to reach an agreement with the organisers. There will be a short presentation, a chance to ask questions and a book [...] -
Just a quick plug for the RAS meeting tomorrow afternoon. The open meeting is, well, open to all and the program tomorrow should be excellent. Talks are at a general level (usually!) – the program is here and includes galaxies, planet-hunting, manned spaceflight and Titan. It starts at 16:00 and is well worth a couple [...]
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Althought I was clouded out last night, I’ve been enjoying the many pictures which arrived in my inbox overnight. Here are some sent to BBC News, and very lovely they are too.
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Or at least, they are until we click through to picture 5, where we’re told that
Comet McNaught is passing close to the Sun, whose [...] -
One of the biggest problems in filming the Sky at Night is deciding what to put in and when. Normally, we film in the week before transmission and in the past have even managed to insert news breaking early on the Sunday morning.
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This time, we filmed early because of Christmas and were caught out. I [...] -
I know it’s the 2nd, but it seems like a good time to have a look around and try and predict what might happen in the next year (which will all be wrong).
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From a local perspective, it’s going to be a busy year for the Sky at Night. On April 24th 1957 the first [...] -
You may have noticed the lack of comments recently. I’m afraid I’ve been absolutely swamped with comment spam – if anyone knows of a good wordpress plugin, please let me know via email. Thanks…
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