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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...

M101 is becoming one of my favourite galaxies - not least because the post I did about it when a Supernova was discovered in it last August is the 3rd most read here. So I was pleased to notice on the Twitter #bbcstargazing stream a link to a beautiful wide field shot of the galaxy. And here's the image in its full glory from the Flickr stream: M101 Widefield by Mike Hyde on Flickr. So why do I like this image so much.... well I was just talking about it with my office mate Chris and he put it well. You can see the galaxy, and you can tell it's a galaxy made of billions of stars and unimaginably immense on human scales, but you can also get a sense of how tiny this galaxy is compared to the Universe, and even how tiny it appears on the sky from Earth. Check out the other galaxies in the image - an edge on disc towards the bottom, and a fuzzy patch at the upper right.  And Chris (who works on supernova projects) tells me the supernova in it is still quite bright. It's curre...

Well the first eviction in the zones was yesterday - and it was me. I'm not going to lie - it's not nice loosing, whatever it is, but intellectually at least I know it doesn't really matter. I took part in I'm a Scientist to engage and talk about science with lots of kids - and I did that whatever the outcome of a bunch of pre-teen and teenagers voting in a popularity contest. I look forward to getting the numbers of kids we engaged with later in the week, and I look forward to giving my typing hands a bit of a rest! ;) So that's me gone, and oddly two of the other scientists have grown mustaches. They may regret those photos later in life! ;)

Just over half way through I'm a Scientist, and my fingers hurt from typing. It's been interesting, and the moderators keep reassuring us the kids get a lot out of the Live Chats, so I'm keeping at it!  Live chats are a bit like being shouted at by a room full of 13 year olds (actually they are exactly like that in electronic form). There are some idiots, some who shout loud (CAPS!) to get attention, and some great questions if you can find them. It's not for the faint at heart, and I decided that the best policy was to ignore my fellow scientists (sorry guys) and focus only on answering interesting questions. I've had some fantastic interactions that way - even if they are all becoming a bit of a blur. I think I've done 11 of them so far. That's 5 1/2 hours in the last week. Right! ;) I've taken a similar tack with the offline questions. I mostly answer those that interest me (although I have gone through others just to get them off my list of unanswere...

There's been another bright supernova in a galaxy on the Messier list - this time M95 ( which is currently near Mars on the sky , so fun for amateur astronomer to try - visit that link to see a finding chart of where it should be). M95 is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy - one of my favourite kinds of galaxy at the moment. The below image of it was taken by astronomers using the William Herschel telescope, and shows the bar across the centre, with a ring of star formation surrounding it. Barred galaxies quite commonly will have rings around the outer edges of the bar, and M95 has been called a "typical ringed galaxy" (by the famous astronomer Alan Sandage). M95. Credit: Johan Knapen (ING) and Nik Szymanek. Here's M95 in the SDSS three colour images we use in Galaxy Zoo. M95. Credit: SDSS There is a stunning image of M95 taken by the Spitzer IR telescope as part of the SINGS survey of nearby galaxies (below). This image in red shows the interstellar dust around regi...

On Monday I will start my (up to) two week tenure on " I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of here! ". I agreed to do this as it seems like an excellent public engagement program. It's an opportunity for me to interact with many more school children than I could by doing my own visits, and it sort of sounded fun. For those of you who haven't heard of this, it's a Wellcome Trust funded programme (and in addition my zone is sponsored by the Institute of Physics). We sign up for 2 weeks, and answer questions and do live chats with the students in our zone. They can then vote for us, and during the second week the scientist with the least votes will be eliminated - one each day. The last scientist remaining gets £500 to spend on science outreach (I propose to buy a telescope for our Astronomy in the City events, and some solar system models to give out on school visits). Anyway right now I'm a bit terrified about what's coming! So far we've had in our zone, 20...

For international women's day a quick post about women in science (well  mostly astronomy, but then I will admit to being biased!). Thanks to @AnneOsterreider  for an already excellent post. I'm not going to go on about the statistics or anything like that. I've done that before - for example in the series I ran on the Galaxy Zoo blog about the Women of Galaxy Zoo . Alice Roberts does make a good point though.... I also totally agree with Anne that the Royal Society publication Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it All  is a good one to remember. So what am I adding to the conversation. Well a couple of pictures and quotes. Here's Cecilia-Payne Gaposhkin with her husband and two of her children. Prof. Payne-Gaposhkin had an incredibly difficult career path and was a real early pioneer for women in science. My favourite quote of hers is "I simply went on plodding, rewarded by the beauty of the scenery towards an unexpected goal." Vera Rubin is another persona...

For the second part of my school visit a couple of weeks ago I spoke with the Springfield School Junior Cafe Scientifique group (an after school club) about "End of the World" myths surrounding 21st December 2012. I've previously written about my involvement with debunking 2012 myths online ( 2012 tag on this blog ). Image from the Movie 2012 which imagines what would happen if the myths were true.  I started by showing a clip of the 2012 movie trailer. Then I talked through the myths, the science behind them. This allowed me to cover basic things like the motion of the Sun across the sky, the solstices, precession, what the Milky Way looks like, but also talk about the life cycle of the Sun and other stars, the solar activity cycle, what the other planets look like in the sky (ie. if there were a massive planet about to hit Earth you'd be able to see it) and of course comets. You can use this theme to get a lot of astronomy in! I used a couple more movies in my talk...

The information I submitted to This is What a Scientist Looks Like appeared last week. My post.