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This week I've been in Llandudno, Wales for the UK National Astronomy Meeting. One of the things I've been doing here is representing LOFAR-UK with an exhibit stand (and giving several interviews). I blogged about it earlier on the LOFAR-UK blog - link . I also gave a talk about my recent work with SDSS3. More on that soon I hope when the paper is in press.  It's been a great meeting, with just tomorrow morning left. Lots of really interesting talks and discussions. 

One of the outputs from  dotAstronomy  this year was the below music video by Amanda Bauer ( @astropixie ). Pluto the Previous Planet .  Pluto, the previous planet from carolune on Vimeo . Amanda describes where she got the idea for this song in her blog post about it: Pluto, the Previous Planet: A Song.   She's very clear, that she saw this song as a bit of fun, and has no interest in changing the IAU definition of what a planet is. I got involved as one of the "Trans Neptunian Objectors" (looking a bit lost in the chorus line), and expressed my concern over the interpretation of the second to last verse by refusing to "boo" (I really don't care if Pluto is defined as a planet or not). :)  Actually I think Amanda and Carolina did a very nice job anyway, making a website: " Pluto the Previous Planet " to go along with the video. It gives Pluto a voice (summary - we don't need to worry, he's happy enough as a dwarf planet) and includes som...

Another quick snippet from the dotAstronomy conference. On the first day we all had a lot of trouble with the wifi network at New College. Very frustrating for a group of people who came to a conference about using the internet to learn about, do, and communicate astronomy! Anyway on hack day (Tuesday afternoon when we were all working on various projects), Boris Haeussler went around photographing us with all our internet connected devices, and produced the below video. His final census - 40 astronomers, 86 internet devices! Comprising 38 Macbooks, 6 other laptops, 5 iPads, 2 other tablets, 22 iPhones, 9 smart phones, and 4 other phones. That's a lot of Apple products! And I was about average - with a Macbook and an iPhone. So why do I like Apple so much..... well I find they just work, and because the OS is based on Unix I can run a lot of the astronomy related programmes I started using on a Unix desktop when I was a new graduate student natively on my laptop. No dual booting (...

As any of you who are on Twitter (or elsewhere on the web) may have noticed, for most of this week I was at the dotAstronomy conference in Oxford. If you're not on Twitter yet see #dotastro and you might as well get started on Twitter by following everyone who was at the conference . That would really be a great starting point if you're interested in astronomy! (I was actually quite alarmed given the company there to be the 4th most often Tweeter at the conference .) Anyway,  dotAstronomy was an amazing conference, full of amazing people, and I've returned to Portsmouth on an awesome high, but a bit overwhelmed over where to start blogging about it. So I decided rather than try to review the whole conference, I would instead just review snippets which I thought were interesting. I started this on the Galaxy Zoo blog , by writing (a version) of this post about pencasting. Pencasting was a totally new idea for me, and I have to say I immediately loved it and wanted to join...