I’m still in the US, where we’ve been filming pieces for the next few Sky at Nights. I need to write up the amazing two days we spent in mission control for Phoenix, but for now the Discovery blog has details of the Large Binocular Telescope and the alien-hunting Allen Telescope Array.
Having left the Sky [...]
Posts in the "Lectures" Category
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I’m shortly off of my travels again, recording interviews for Sky at Night in California and Arizona. On the way back, I’m visiting Pamela of astronomycast fame to work on a few projects. If anyone lives in or around St Louis, U.S.A., then you might be interested, nay, delighted, to know that you can come [...]
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At any conference there’s one talk that changes the way you think about something, or crystalizes thoughts that you’ve had anyway. In the last few months I’d been thinking carefully about the answer to the question ‘but what happened before the Big Bang’, and a talk by Cosmic Variance blogger Sean Carroll crystalized some of [...]
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This morning has been insanely busy; rewriting my talk which I’m giving tomorrow in the light of the results of the Galaxy Zoo bias study hasn’t helped. (You can see the latest here.) I did manage to sit in on an excellent press conference this morning though; the highlight was the results from the STAGES [...]
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My first AAS post was a nod to the talk I’ve just been to, a review of how astronomers meet their end by Thomas Hockney of the University of Northern Iowa. I was standing at the back having just come from another session, and so didn’t catch the names but here are the highlights:
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Astronomy can sometimes feel like an arms race between observers and theorists. Both groups are often convinced that they’re completely right and – at least over a drink at the end of the day – take great pride in being ahead of the game. The latest battleground is in the field of extrasolar planets, and [...]
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I spent the morning in the science session devoted to galaxy morphologies – shapes- and environments and the lunch break with my press hat on listening to the latest results from Hubble (the telescope, not the astronomer; even a repair mission won’t help him now). There was lots of good stuff at both, but three [...]
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I’ve said again and again that the most exciting area of observational astronomy at the moment is the search for extrasolar planets. It’s incredible to think that in not much more than a decade we’ve moved from finding the first planet in a solar system other than our own to having several hundred in the [...]
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Astronomers do not easily get up for an 8am start. I’m sitting in the main meeting room and they’re can’t be more than 100 of the few thousand attendees here…
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Seven of the Galaxy Zoo team are gathered in Portsmouth today for our first science meeting. The plan is to go through all of the hard work we’ve been doing to analyise the results and see what we agree on – and what we don’t. Sadly we can’t invite the more than 100,000 people who [...]
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