I'm on "This is What a Scientist Looks Like"

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

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Visiting Jodrell Bank as part of the UK National Astronomy Meeting

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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...
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My DotAstronomy4

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Its been well over a week since I got back from dotastronomy 4 , and the time has really flown by (both at the conference and since). This blog post is mostly a collection of links and reminders for myself about what I did at dotastronomy. If you also find it interesting that's great, but it is not a comprehensive review of dotastronomy so if you want that go somewhere else.  Other people at the conference have written blog articles about their experiences ( Sarah Kendrew , Astronomyblogger , OrbitingFrog , Astropixie ). In years to come I suspect what I will remember most about dotastronomy is the journey up to the Haus de Astronomie on the furnicular railway. The second of the two trains.  View down the track from near the top. I enjoyed this blurry effect as we travelled through a tunnel. We all had to remember (and exert willpower) to not "get off at the Schloss" (beautiful castle overlooking Heidelberg).  The food was also interesting - I didn't realise there was...
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What is Hoag's Object?

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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)...
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