You are here: Home / 2008 / Archives for October 2008

Don't Mess with Texas

October 20, 2008 By

I’ve been a bit quiet the last few days and the reason for that is that I travelled across the Atlantic for an extended work visit. For the next month I’ll be working at UT Austin, where there is an excellent instrumentation group. I’ll be giving a talk on some of my work in a couple of weeks’ time.

First impressions of Austin are pretty nice. The weather at the moment is like that perfect summer’s day that all Northern Europeans dream about,  that only comes along maybe one day of the year, if we’re lucky. Only it’s like that every single day here at this time of year. Nice! The colour of choice here is burnt orange, and LOTS of it. And undergraduates look just as young here as back in Europe.

More soon!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Hubble rescue under way

October 16, 2008 By

Engineers at NASA yesterday begun the procedure that should bring the Hubble Space Telescope back to life. The space telescope has been out of action for several weeks now after a failure in the data handling unit that prevented data from being sent back to Earth. Fortunately, a redundant B-unit was designed into the telescope from the outset to prevent single point failures of this kind. In the last few weeks NASA engineers have been working on a plan to carry out the switch to the B-side, which hasn’t been powered on since 1990.

In a news conference last Tuesday, NASA confirmed that their engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center have now tested the command procedures and are confident that they understand how to carry out the switch-over.

The procedure was started on October 15 and is expected to continue through to Friday. Daily reports are being issued on the main Hubble page, and so far everything looks good. Follow the progress here and let’s all keep our fingers crossed for Hubble!

Filed Under: Snippets Tagged With: , ,

What’s up on the Internets? Ask Spacebuzz.

October 15, 2008 By

Inspired by the recent .Astronomy meeting in Cardiff, Stuart over on Astronomy Blog is working on a great little project called Spacebuzz. Spacebuzz trawls through 50+ astronomy- and space-related blogs, looks at the tags and ranks them in order of occurrences.

Read more about it here or give it a go!

Filed Under: Sci 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

Awesome Kilauea

October 13, 2008 By

Hawaiian volcano Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupting more or less continuously since 1983. One of five volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaii (the others are Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, Hualalai and Kohala), Kilauea has had 61 recorded historic eruptions, with no less than 34 times since 1952. In Hawaiian, “Kilauea” means “spewing” – yeah, no sh*t! In recent months the volcano’s has been particularly unsettled, with several explosive eruptions taking place. The most recent one of these took place on 12 October, and USGS cameras recorded the event. Watch it below, it’s *so* awesome.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtH79yxBIJI&hl=en&fs=1]

For detailed information on Kilauea’s daily activity, check out the status page on the USGS’s dedicated Hawaiian Volcano Observatory website. The USGS Volcano Hazards Program publish regular updates on all the world’s major volcanoes. For a natural disasters geek like me it’s fantastic (as is their earthquake notification service – but I’ll talk about that another time).

You can even follow the USGS on Twitter!

Filed Under: Snippets Tagged With: , ,

A Podcast a Day….

October 12, 2008 By

Doctors around the world proclaim the benefits of a balanced diet: get your carbs, your protein, fats and fibres, for a healthy long life. But your friendly neighbourhood Astronomy Doctors, equally concerned about your physical and emotional well-being, would like to add their own recommendation to that: a serving of astronomy a day will improve your health, outlook on the world and make you a happier person – all in just 10 minutes per day. It also aids weight loss, combats malaria and alleviates troublesome body odours (*).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Sci & Soc Tagged With: , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »