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Solo10: Online vs. Offline

September 12, 2010 By

#solo10 Word Cloud

Last week I attended the 2010 instalment of Science Online London, which was held over 2 days at the British Library. Both days were packed with interesting discussions covering lots of topics, loosely bound by the general ideas of science and the internet. One topic that caught my attention in a number of sessions, and that I’d been giving some thought before the conference, was the different pros and cons of online versus offline activities.

I enjoy having an active online persona immensely, and since I started blogging and tweeting I’ve gained a lot of experience, knowledge and perspective. But recently I’ve found myself wondering: what are the limitations of being active online? What can a blog, however fantastic or prolific the writing, not achieve?  And I tried to have some discussion about this at the conference.

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Filed Under: Sci & Soc, Sci 2.0 Tagged With: , , , ,

Exoplanets at a discount

September 7, 2010 By

Fig. 1: An image of Beta Pic's companion taken with the apodising phase plate on VLT/NaCo, after processing. The light from the central star was blocked out (in processing). Credit: ESO

ResearchBlogging.org
Astronomers have many ways of spotting exoplanets round far away stars – but getting a direct look at them, especially with ground-based telescopes, remains a difficult job. With a planet emitting very little light of its own, and appearing to us essentially on top of the host star, its radiation is completely drowned in the image of the star. Catching those few photons and separating them from the flood of light from the star requires some clever observational tricks. To do this with ground-based telescopes, we at the very least need adaptive optics, to prevent the atmosphere from creating a blurry mess and  keep the image nice and sharp, and often some sort of mask that will block out as much as possible of the stellar light. But an upgrade to one of ESO’s near-infrared workhorse imager NaCo on VLT’s 4th Unit Telescope has just made it a whole lot easier.

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The Tweeting Astronomer

September 2, 2010 By

Twitter has been one of the big game changers in social media on the web in recent years.  Those who know me are aware that I’m an active tweeter. In fact, those of you who know me through this blog are very likely to have found me through Twitter. I have statistics to tell me that, it’s rather neat.

So much has been written about the pros, cons and dangers of Twitter in general or in the context of science specifically, I feel this post is moot – but I’ve promised several times to write about Twitter and astronomy,  and it’s about time I delivered on that. I should start off by saying that most of the things I like about Twitter are not related to astronomy per se – I’m sure non-astronomers have a very similar experience. I’ll also concentrate on the person-tweeter, rather than the institute-tweeter or telescope-tweeter – those are whole other topics. So here’s what I think.

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Filed Under: Sci 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,
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