Chris Lintott’s Universe

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 at Night team crowing about their upgrade to first class on the way home and have headed off to visit Pamela. I’m giving a public talk tomorrow (Monday) night about Galaxy Zoo and citizen science more generally, and for those who can’t join us we’ll be broadcasting the event online.

The link is here, although you should be able to watch and chat below. The talk starts at 7pm Central, 1am Tuesday morning BST and midnight GMT.

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A nice piece of observation in this week’s Science sent me off on a tangent. You can see the results over at the Discovery Blog.

With the successful landing of Discovery a few minutes ago, the next mission on the schedule is a trip to the Hubble Space Telescope, a mission which ranks as one of the most ambitious ever planned, and one which I’m extremely excited about.

Welcome home Discovery, and fingers crossed for the crew of Atlantis in October.

Welcome to St Louis! Streaming from Astronomy Cast Live.

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Distracted this morning by driving past the St Louis arch, I’ve made it into the convention centre for the first full day of the American Astronomical Society meeting. Currently, I’m sitting in the press room next to a rapidly diminishing plate of delicious local breakfast food trying to work out what on Earth we’re going to be doing today.

The first of the press conferences is on galaxies in ten minutes or so, and the day includes announcements on extrasolar planets, talks about everyone’s favourite use of the Spitzer Space Telescope, the GOODS survey and much other good stuff. I’ll be writing here, but also keep an eye on the Astronomy Cast Live site where we’re compiling all of our coverage.

More shortly…

The 56th Carnival of Space is up, over at the Lifeboat foundation blog.

My post of the week is this explanation of the infamous polygons Phoenix has travelled so far to find.

I hope those of you who joined us on the < ahref="http://www.marslive.co.uk">Mars Live broadcasts enjoyed yourselves; we certainly appreciated your comments and chatter and celebrations. I will be trying to produce edited highlights over the next few days, and then eventually higher quality recordings. For now, here’s our discussion of the first images - I’m proud to say we got most of it right.

Part 2

If the technology holds up, then you should see below the ustream feed, or try Mars Live

Our first show is ‘Red planet blues’, just after 1900 BST (1400 EDT)

Webcast powered by Ustream.TV P.S. You can go and chat at our ustream channel.

This week’s Carnival of Space is up over here. Post of the week is Stuart’s at Cumbrian Sky. Go and read him - and everyone else.

Chris

It may seem too early to be thinking about it, but across the world eclipse chasers are getting ready for the best eclipse of the 21st century which takes place on July 22nd next year. With total solar eclipses like this one, it’s all about the length of totality and - if you’re in the right place - this one lasts more than six minutes. Getting to the right place is the challenge, and for this eclipse the place to be is in the middle of the sea, just south of Japan.

I’m going to be on board the Superstar Libra which will be on a specially organised eclipse cruise. If you’d like to join me, Terry Pratchett and a whole host of other amateur astronomers on board, I’d suggesting booking your tickets as soon as possible via Eclipse of the Century.