sandr034

Due to my involvement in the University of Portsmouth Athena SWAN committe , I've recently started a new blog about Women in SET at the University of Portsmouth. Mostly it'll be contributed profiles about women working in SET subjects at the university, but I also posted links to discussions of a recent study demonstrating gender bias is still real in science , and some beautiful posters honouring six amazing women who've changed the world with science . Those posters are so lovely I'll reproduce them again here: Credit: Hydrogene. Please visit his site here . 

Cross posting from Galaxy Zoo blog.  The relaunch of Galaxy Zoo doesn't only include the fantastic  new images from the CANDELS survey on Hubble Space Telescope, but also includes over 200,000 new local galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey . We've had a lot of questions about where these galaxies came from and why they weren't put into earlier versions of Galaxy Zoo, so I thought I'd write a bit about these new images.  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Project (SDSS) is currently in its 3rd phase (SDSS-III). You can read all about the history of SDSS here , and here , but briefly SDSS-I (2000-2005) and SDSS-II (2005-2008) took images of about a quarter of the sky (which we often refer to as the SDSS Legacy Imaging), and then measured redshifts for almost 1 million galaxies (the "Main Galaxy Sample", which was the basis of the original Galaxy Zoo and Galaxy Zoo 2 samples; plus the "Luminous Red Galaxy" sample) as well as 120,000 much more distant q...

Galaxy Zoo relaunches today. The press release from the University of Oxford  was picked up by the BBC . Chris Lintott was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning  (well worth a listen). There is also a press release from the University of Portsmouth .  And I posted a news item on the ICG website . @jen_gupta  (our new Portsmouth Outreach Officer) spotted a story in this morning's Metro: This  article in the Daily Mail was the only one to keep the quote from me I think.

Here are some of the photos I took of stuff (related to astronomy!) at the IAU in China. Here's the giant IAU 2012 sign outside the convention centre. Plus some SKA balloons (and someone's children!). ;) It was a busy meeting with the children accompanying us (my husband is also an astronomer) and attending an UNAWE run workshop during the first week (article about the workshop is online here ) and also in the 8th Edition of the IAU Daily Newspaper . Since my daughter was "quoted" here's the article.  I enjoyed the Daily Newspaper, I admit partly because my talk (and me) were featured on the front page of the first one: But also because I had been given the task to collect a newspaper for every day to share with someone special who has a collection of all such newspapers from every IAU GA since the meetings began. The 2012 addition to the collection I admit is still sitting on my desk, but will get sent off very soon.  This was the Newspaper stand where you could ...

For the last two weeks I have been in China, attending the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union . I was invited to give one of four "Invited Discourses" at that meeting, on the topic of "A Zoo of Galaxies". The powerpoint slides of my talk are available online . The talk was recorded and I'm told will be made available online, but I don't think that's happened yet.  An abstract of my talk (and a picture of me and one of my favourite galaxies) appeared on the front page of the first edition of "Inquiries of Heaven" (the IAU Daily Newspaper for the meeting). (PS. The image caption should say "Former winner of IAU Fellowship" since I won it in 2008, and there have been 4 more winners since me!).  The talk also attracted some coverage in the Chinese press. Xinhua (sort of the Chinese version of Reuters) covered it here: Astronomy Project Hunts for Chinese Helpers , (or the Chinese version ); since this a news fe...