.Astronomy Day 1: Citizen Science November 30, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, dotastronomy . 3comments
Merge galaxies with the new Galaxy Zoo merger project
Day 1 of .Astronomy is behind us and I think everyone is pleased with how it went. As organiser I was particularly happy that there weren’t any technical glitches, and the Unconference sessions sorted themselves out very nicely. The theme of the day was Citizen Science. Several projects have shown how keen non-professionals are to be involved in science, and how scientists themselves can benefit from the citizens’ active participation.
DotWelcome! November 29, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, dotastronomy . Add a comment
.Astronomy 2009 is here! Yay. 10 months after submitting our first proposal to the Lorentz Center, and a few thousand emails later, the workshop week has actually arrived. And I’m really excited. There are some excellent talks planned all week, great 101 sessions and of course the Hack Day, for which we managed to get some fun hardware to experiment with.
A press release went out on Friday, check it our here in Dutch. The English version is here on the workshop webpage, and will be distributed widely next week.
I’ll be blogging as much as possible from the meeting, and there will be much more online coverage. Here’s a quick overview.
- The full programme and lots of info can be found on our workshop blog.
- The morning sessions will be streamed online via our own .Astronomy Ustream channel. This page also aggregates tweets about the conference.
- The official twitter feed is at @dotastronomy. If you want to keep up to date, follow us.
- On Twitter, the hashtag for .Astronomy is #dotastro. Tag your relevant tweets with this tag and we’ll be able to follow them. If you’re watching talks online and you want to ask a question, send us a tweet!
- The Flickr group is here. Make sure you send your pics from the conference there.
There are may tweeters and bloggers participating in .Astronomy and we expect the #dotastro feed to be a lively affair. Watch it and update regularly if you want to get the latest. Some blog posts on the conference from partipant bloggers are:
DotAstronomy: PreConference post – Pamela Gay
DotAstronomy 2009 – Rob Simpson
Have I missed any? Let me know!
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . Add a commentThis week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
The Lay Scientist: Belle De Science November 15, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science, women . Add a commentFor over 5 years Belle de Jour has been one of the most high-profile and successful anonymous bloggers. In her blog, Belle talked about her experiences as a high-class London call girl. A book followed, then a popular TV series.
Today, Belle revealed herself as Brooke Magnanti to The Times. And that’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti. She’s a scientist.
I wrote a guest post on the outing of anonymous blogger Belle de Jour. Go read the rest of it over at The Lay Scientist!
Review: The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders November 12, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, reviews, science . Add a comment
Once upon a time in a country far away I was a young girl who loved looking at the stars. I didn’t know any other keen stargazers and the internet was still in its infancy, so I relied on books to help me work out what I was looking at.
These days, sadly, stargazing doesn’t feature very heavily in my life anymore given my light polluted dwellings but my earliest experiences of looking through telescopes did inspire me to get into helping design them myself, as a profession. So I was keen to have a read of one of O’Reilly’s publications, The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, by Robert and Barbara Thompson, a copy of which found its way to my desk (h/t to Alasdair).
