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There's a meme which keeps going round Twitter (and this morning appeared in my Facebook) stream which says: We apart from being depressing, it's not actually true. And I am finally decided today to write why not. All of the stars we see in our night sky are part of our own Galaxy - the Milky Way. This is how the night sky looks from a really dark site (in a beautiful image taken by Stephane Vetter which appears on APOD ). We live inside our galaxy, so we see stars in it in all directions, and along the disc of the galaxy (which is shaped a bit like two fried eggs held back to back) we see lots of stars all close together on the sky. This is a picture of a nearby galaxy - the Andromeda galaxy, which has a similar structure to what we think the Milky Way would look like from the outside (also from APOD ) Andromeda Galaxy: Credit & Copyright:  Jason Ware We can measure distances to stars and other structures in our galaxy, so we know to a good level of confidence that it'...

At the recent dotastronomy, @drphilmarhsall and myself ran an unconference session with the aim of collecting the wisdom of dotastronomy attendees on the reasons we like Twitter (all but 3 of the attendees were signed up), why we think it's useful to our research careers and as a tool for communicating about our science. What follows are the notes I took during that session under various categories. Twitter 101 Twitter signup now easy and guided to find your interests. Predictive follow suggestions will be made when you sign up.  I have an account now what? (Specifically for people who signed up a while ago but have never done anything with it). Some of us use tweetdeck to filter - o thers don’t Some people follow everyone Some people follow only selected/few It’s OK to follow/unfollow as suits your wishes A lot of us use Twitter for work only (Facebook for friends) Who you follow depends on your interests Follow people you know on Twitter and the people they are followin...

I gave a talk on Galaxy Zoo at the Winchester Science Festival last weekend. I think it's the first public talk I've had live tweeted, so I thought it would be interested to record that all here.  Thanks for all the nice comments, and an interesting record of my talk for me. :)

I'm part of the University of Portsmouth Athena SWAN committee . We're working to submit for a Bronze Award in November to this organization which " recognises and celebrates good employment practice for women working in science, engineering and technology (SET) in higher education and research.  " One idea we had to get started was a blog promoting the many women working in STEM fields at our university. So I now have another blog to run! ;)  Here's the first post - pointing out a poster which exists profiling some of the young women researcher in science and enginneering at Portsmouth. Including our very own Heather Campbell from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, pictured helping to install the low band antennas of the LOFAR station in Chilbolton.

(Cross post from Galaxy Zoo blog ) I've given a couple of public talks recently on results on galaxy evolution from Galaxy Zoo (at the Hampshire Astronomical Group , and the Winchester Science Festival ) and one of the things I like to point out is the quantity and variety of science results we're getting out. To illustrate that I made the below wordl of words appearing in the abstracts of all the peer reviewed science papers the Galaxy Zoo science team have put out.      This is based on the 30 papers about astronomical objects submitted up until July 2012. I just missed Brooke's first paper submitted by a day or two, and I love that this was out of date just as soon as I made it. :) I realise I should sort out things like per cent - percent, and galaxy, Galaxy, galaxies technically being the same thing. But still I think it's interesting to look out.

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...

Chris Lintott has written a fantastic article " What we still don't know " in honour of the 5th Birthday of Galaxy Zoo today. It has a preview of the relaunch of Galaxy Zoo we're currently planning. I joined the Galaxy Zoo science team in October 2008, just over a year into the project when the first data was around to play with, and when I moved to Portsmouth. It's been a fantastic ride since then and I can't wait to see what happens in the future. So....

On archivist: dotastro Graph of people recently tweeting dotastro  (not sure this is working). Also will update with the last one (downloading and using TAGSexplorer when/if I get it working). Instructions for doing all this: Fun with Twitter Visualizations .

Cross post from Galaxy Zoo blog The Galaxy Zoo science team is well represented this week at the annual European Week of Astronomy and Space Science , hosted this year at the Pope's University (or more properly Pontifica Universita Laternase) in Rome, Italy. It is a beautiful location for a conference    with the most amazingly decorated lecture theatre I've ever been in    and just up the road from the Colluseum  A session on the first day on the Structure of Galactic Discs perhaps explains the interest of many of us on the Galaxy Zoo team. I spoke in that session on my recent results looking at bars and the atomic gas content of nearby galaxies . Brooke Simmons (now settling in as a new postdoc at Oxford after finishing her PhD at Yale recently) had a poster on some work I'm sure you'll hear about soon about some very interesting totally bulge free disc galaxies which still have actively growing supermassive black holes in their centres.    A...