I think I made the lot of the sub-mm astronomer, working extremely hard just to identify blobs, sound pretty thankless earlier today. Strangely, I managed to do so without even complaining that the worst thing about using these short-wavelength radio waves is that most of them are absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere so unless you’re [...]
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It’s difficult, as someone who uses telescopes which work in the sub-mm – effectively short-wave radio – it’s difficult not to be jealous of optical astronomers, many of whom are busy in the exhibit hall giving out beautiful posters of their latest hits. Instead, we end up often with spectra, or at best with a [...]
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I’m on top of a mountain in Spain; if you’d like to join me on my observing run then I’ll be posting updates on the Galaxy Zoo Blog.
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Imagine being in our solar system, standing just where the Earth is now, roughly four and a half billion years ago. Around you would be the detritus of star formation, left over material forming a protoplanetary disk from which the planets are coalescing. Understanding just how this disk of dust and gas became the eight [...]
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The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) : An Observational Legacy for Studying Galaxy Evolution
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Prof Marc Dickinson
The following was written during the final plenary talk of the first day at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in St Louis. I was going to post as we went along, but the wireless connection in the meeting room [...] -
As you probably realised, my trip to Hawaii was more or less a complete washout. Of the four nights we had on the telescope, we made it to the summit for one and a half of them. The last night was the most depressing, when we sat there for hours waiting for fog to clear [...]
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No telescopes open and more snow on the way. We could do some laundry for excitement, but are saving that for tomorrow in case we need more excitement then. Chris needs cheering up – please help!
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And in a rash moment, he gave posting access to his fellow observers, heheh… so
Chris Quote of the day: [...] -
The above image is from the latest release from the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which, Emily reports, has now covered 20% of Mars at a resolution of 6m per pixel. Ironic that this should come out just after I’d written about faces on Mars for the BBC, but it does fit with my [...]
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At about five am this morning, two thirds of the way through my second shift on the telescope, I went outside to watch the dawn. The peak immediately behind the JCMT is called Pu’u Poliahu and I decided that would be the perfect spot to watch the Sun come up. Poliahu is the Hawai’ian snow [...]
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It’s 7.20am. I started my shift when we left the astronomer’s residence at 8pm. It’ll be at least another three, probably more like four hours until I’m back in bed. And then we’ll do it all again tomorrow.
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And yet getting fantastic data with Harp, the new instrument on the JCMT, can make react like this [...]