Paul Abel, my colleague from the Sky at Night, will be standing in, and I know he’ll do an amazing job. After the incredible display we had last year, I’d give anything to be in Tromso again but sadly it’s not going to happen. If you’d still like to go, you can visit Eclipse of the Century.

In the meantime you have a twitter feed over there…

Chris

The kids from fame may not be your ideal scientific role models, but I’m delighted to be able to blog about the rather wonderful FameLab competition run by NESTA in association with the Cheltenham Science Festival.

I’d always been a bit scared of Famelab, which seeks new talent in science communication by asking anyone involved in science (researchers, teachers and so on) to communicate to an audience in just three minutes. But then I was lucky enough to be a judge at the first UK heat of this year’s competition, and we had a lot of fun, as you can see from their posted video :

Fun though that was (it’s got a frog in it!) it misses the point rather, which is that Famelab is a very serious event. The national prizes include £10,000, a foreign tour courtesy of the British Council and slots on Channel 4. More importantly, it was amazing to watch how the contestants improved between the morning’s heats and the evening’s regional final; a little thought, a little feedback from the judges (the others were much more useful than me – I was just generally impressed) and a masterclass arranged by the organisers made all the difference.

Much to my surprise, I learnt things during the day too. I learnt how precisely to explain that the LHC will not destroy the Earth, and I learnt I have the body of a 15 year old boy thanks to the replacement of my cells.

The next heat is in Bristol this Saturday, and then the roadshow visits London, Oxford and Edinburgh. If you’re at all curious about communicating science, go. If you’re a member of the public, go along to the regional finals and learn something. It’ll be the best use you will ever make of a sequence of three minute periods of your life.

There followed a period for the audience to chat in groups with the speakers. How well this went depended on the luck of the draw; flitting from group to group I heard lots of argument about whether it made any sense to say space and time began at the Big Bang, but I also heard groups dominated by someone with a bee in his bonnet about the LHC.

The most successful part of the evening – much to my surprise – was the reading of a short story by poet and storyteller Ross Sutherland. I’m normally really skeptical about such things, but Ross had an interesting take on how theories develop, all wrapped up in a very human story. He was told he had to put it online – and it’s now available here.

In the beginning, there was Ewan’s Bar and Grill.

Ewan created a huge expanse behind the bar, and then I came into this world..

Now go and read the rest.

BBC Sky at Night magazine in combination with the Royal Observatory Greenwich are proud to announce the launch of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. It’s open to anyone – anywhere in the world – capable of taking a picture of the sky and will be judged by an expert panel, and myself. The shortlisted photographs will be professionally printed and displayed in an exhibition at the Royal Observatory itself – an honour for any astronomer.

We hope this annual competition will grow to become as important an event as the Wildlife photographer of the year, but that can only happen if you submit your images.

To enter (or to view the competition!), go to the official website here. I’m looking forward to sorting through the results in August.

I walk away from these conversations realising how lucky I am. But as I’ve written each column for the Times over the last year, describing a city dweller’s sky, I’ve begun to realise that part of the joy of being an amateur astronomer (and I’m definitely still that, too) lies in simply noticing the sky. How many of London’s 8 million people noticed Venus in the evening sky in the past week, knew what it was and saw how its position changed from night to night? Not many.

I’m transcribing this from a notebook I was scribbling in some 10 km above the Earth’s surface, flying home from my share of the observing run described on the Galaxy Zoo blog. (Don’t ever fly Iberia, by the way – it’s been rather eventful). The observing was conducted almost entirely under cloud, but now, out of the window, my notebook records one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen.

The horizon is a perfect rainbow; red at the bottom, and then passing through the sequence of colours, their boundaries distinct and yet not sharp. At the top, indigo and violet appear as separate colours, and above them, about ten degrees above the horizon, is the deep black of the still-night sky. That will soon vanish, but for now it’s sparkling with jewels, with Antares and the rest of Scorpius hanging there.

I was the only person on the entire flight, as far as I could see, paying any attention to the view from the window. That’s why this year – the International Year of Astronomy (more about which on Monday) – my resolution is to long just a little less to be back under the starlit skies of the Atacama, and to make sure that I – and anyone I talk to – doesn’t miss the glory of the sky above them, wherever they are.

Happy New Year.

1 down is ‘Astronomer sees trail rising over one constellation (7)’ which I got straight away, but 2 down – ‘Rhea spinning, orbiting close to host planet (5)’ took me most of an evening for the penny to drop.

Answers to follow when their competition closes on Saturday; all hail the Guardian for making their excellent crosswords – certainly the most amusing and personable of the major cryptics – free online.

Roll up, roll up etc.

This is serious stuff, and his book covers much of the same territory as the blog and column; a relentless focus on the truth, with much more humour and lightness of touch than that description implies. It’s essential reading for anyone who ever glances at the stories in the paper that talk about which diets to choose, whether vitamin pills have any effect or which new treatments are available for cancer. Not because this book contains the answers, but rather because it will teach you how to find the answers by thinking statistically.

As a result, it should be essential reading for anyone who exists in the modern world, where the single most important thing you could do is develop a healthy respect for the sheer weirdness and counterintuitive nature of the probabilities that affect our judgement of risk. (Simple example: Goldacre points out we find it much easier to judge the significance of a result which says ‘Six instead of three people out of 1000 got cancer when they didn’t exercise than we do a headline that says ‘Chance of getting cancer doubled for the lazy’).

Mostly, then, the point of this post is to tell you to read the book. But as it climbed through the sins and stupidities of the alternative medicine industry, nutritionists, the pharmaceutical industry and the media (no-one gets off very lightly) I couldn’t help wondering where it was going. Goldacre has useful insights, among them the realisation that any science story that becomes big news is almost invariably removed from those most qualified to write about it, but while reading I couldn’t help feeling that having diagnosed our problem Goldacre was about to offer a grand solution.

He doesn’t. Worse that that, what he does say is defeatist and wrong-headed. He argues that science reporting should be reserved for the features section of the paper, where it could be given space to breathe. I get the sense he’d agree that this would reduce the audience for it to those who are already interested, but I’m not ready to give up on everyone else just yet. His clarion call, when it comes, is for scientists to blog more, and find their own audience that way.

It is true that blogs can provide in-depth, detailed coverage of a level that it’s impossible to imagine appearing in the paper. From my field, take Emily’s work at the Planetary Society as your canonical example. The problem is that by communicating only through the medium of the blog, rather than via the book or the column (both of which Goldacre has done brilliantly) or the news we speak almost exclusively to the converted. We do need to be louder and more strident about the need for scientific literacy (or rather, the statistical literacy that it requires), but to stop trying to communicate to a mass audience? That’s just giving up.

Fortunately, here at Oxford Astrophysics we have a solution. Beautiful vintage prints of Palomar Sky Survey plates are available from Operation Skyphoto, set up to raise money to help treat Alexander Thatte, the son of two Oxford Physicists who has leukaemia. All money raised will go toward Alexander’s treatment or to research into leukaemia, so treat the astronomer in your life this Christmas.

For a little extra, you can even have your edition autographed by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, or ‘gift wrapped by real astrophysicists’.