BBC Stargazing at the Spinnaker Tower

It's been a hectic couple of weeks since I got back from the Christmas break, planning our department's involvement in the major BBC Stargazing Event at the Spinnaker Tower (a flagship event for the BBC South region). But it all went well last night and despite the clouds we're all left with a buzz about stargazing in Portsmouth.

I made a Storify collection of tweets about the event.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A mentor of Ada Lovelace - Mary Somerville

Image
This year for Ada Lovelace Day I want to write a little bit about Mary Somerville. I'm delighted to be able to say that a full article I have written on her will appear as a chapter in the  next Women in STEM Anthology  to be published by Finding Ada  - the organisation behind the idea of Ada Lovelace Day. The book is being edited and likely to be available sometime next year. So for this ALD2014 post I want to share a flavour of the fun I had learning about Mary Somerville in order to write that chapter. One coincidence - I happened to be in Edinburgh while I was working on the chapter, and so decided to visit Mary's portrait in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Sadly I couldn't manage a visit her childhood home in  Burntisland , but I got a view of from a boat tour on the Firth of Forth. Me and Mary - her portrait at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Mary is such an accessible character, someone I think many women today could imagine b...
Read more

Visiting Jodrell Bank as part of the UK National Astronomy Meeting

Image
I'm in Manchester this week at the UK National Astronomy Meeting . As part of this, yesterday evening I went on a visit to the Jodrell Bank Observatory, with 120 other astronomers. NAM Astronomers at JBO It was a gorgeous spring evening, and the disk looked lovely as a contrast to the beauty of spring around it. Jodrell Bank and a sheep The Sun through the dish Jodrell Bank and some daffodils Jodell Bank and spring blossom Jodrell Bank and a hedge of forsythia We got to walk under the dish too. Here we are crossing the track which the telescope uses to rotate in azimuth. Jodrell Bank azimuth track And we stood under the dead centre of the dish. Looking up at the base of Jodrell Bank That's me directly under the centre of the dish The sky was clear, and the crescent Moon was prominent, see if you can spot it through the dish below. Required picture of me with the dish We also got a tour of the control room - and the set of BBC Stargazing LIVE of course.  And we're astronomer...
Read more

What is Hoag's Object?

Image
Perhaps one of the most striking looking galaxies I know of is "Hoag's Object" (seen below by the Hubble Space Telescope;  NED information , Wikipedia article ,  lookUP information ). The wikipedia article talks of it as an object which fascinates both amateur and professional astronomers.  I am really curious to know how it might look through an amateur telescope, and I'd love to see it for myself some day (RA=15 17 14, Dec=+21 35 08 in the Serpens constellation), Astrometry.net can help give an idea - see Hoag's Object images on Flickr  found by the service. HST Image of Hoag's Object. Credit: NASA. Through HST as you can see the object appears to be made up of a red spheroidal core, surrounded by a blue ring of star formation (with a gap between the two). The ring shows some spiral structure. In my opinion, one of the most fun things about the object is the more distance ring galaxy which can be seen through the gap (just to the right of 12 o'clock)...
Read more