As expected, ESO Council have accepted the recommendation to build the European Extremely Large Telescope at Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes. The decision was announced yesterday with the customary nice words and some cool accompanying imagery, video and a dedicated ESOCast episode, which you can all see here.

Particularly noteworthy is the nod of thanks ESO give to Spain, who were competing with Chile for the chance to to host the telescope. While many European astronomers, especially the Britons who’ve traditionally had the largest foreign presence on the island, have a great big soft spot for La Palma, I think a collective sigh of relief went through the community on hearing the news. La Palma is undoubtedly an excellent observing site, but it’s just not of the same quality as Paranal or Armazones – it’s more humid, has fewer clear nights and is plagued by Saharan sand in its atmosphere.

With this announcement, all three of the ELT-type telescopes  – E-ELT, GMT and TMT – now have a home. Now all they need is money to start building!

Image: ESO/S. Brunier

Everyone’s been falling over each other to apologise to Lucia for this awful miscarriage of justice – Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Harm Brouwer, Chairman of the Public Prosecution – and apparently negotiations on what compensation she will receive from the government are ongoing.

As usual the best coverage comes from GeenStijl, the Netherlands’ answer to The Onion, who report that Lucia has signed up to star in Kafka: The Musical. If you know Dutch, go read.

Here’s a short news report in Dutch from NOS:

Lucia appeared on Dutch talkshow Pauw & Witteman last week, here is an excerpt from YouTube where she and her lawyer talk about her conviction:

My edition of the book contained the chapter missing from the first edition, which could only be included after a nasty legal dispute had been settled. This chapter, arguably the most angrifying of the lot, is also freely available online and gives an excellent taster of the nastiness Goldacre brings to light in the book. Read it here.

The book also reminded me of the tragic case I wrote about earlier this year, in which a Dutch nurse was convicted of multiple murders on the basis of botched statistics and very little else – and as the case has progressed I thought I’d give a brief update. On 16 March, the public prosecution officially requested that Lucia’s conviction is overturned by the court. They did however not give an official apology to Ms. De Berk, which her attorney was upset about (link in Dutch).  The court will give its final verdict next week, 16 14 April. All agree this is the one of the worst ever miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. I’ll keep you posted.

The Dutch science research council NWO has set up a 2.5 million euro fund (Dutch) to encourage its scientists to publish their work in open access journals. Under the scheme, any NWO grant holder can apply (English) for up to 5000 euro per project to pay open access publication charges. The incentive programme, which went live at the start of March, is a first step in the council’s broad commitment to open access in science.

In this interview (in Dutch) from November last year, NWO Chairman Jos Engelen, a particle physicist who was Chief Scientific Officer at CERN before taking over at NWO in 2009, indicates that the council may bring in an NIH-type public access policy for its grantholders later on this year. He suggests starting off with what he calls a “Swedish model”, whereby publications have to be made publicly available within 6 months of publication in an academic journal. This could then evolve towards a requirement that results from NWO-funded projects be published directly in open access journals only.

Engelen sounds like an excellent straight-talking Dutchman. He admits that right now there is a trade-off between impact and access, with many high-impact journals still charging for subscriptions – but that a natural consequence of NWO’s support for open access is to mirror this trade-off at the grant proposal level.

I was pleased to read about these developments, which reinforce my experience that the Dutch government has a very sensible and forward-thinking approach to funding science. I can’t find a timeline for implementation and hope these plans all get brought in swiftly.

There’s no deadline for applications to this new fund, money will be allocated to PIs on an ad hoc basis until the money runs out.

Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)

ESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.

So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.

What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.

Choosing the site for a new telescope, particularly one which will represent the interests of astronomers in much of Europe, is a hugely complex process – I’ve talked about it before, here. As well as the purely scientific merit of the site for astronomical research, there are a bunch of other considerations: how accessible is a site, where would the astronomers live and work, is there access to a power grid, where is the nearest water source? On top of that there are the diplomatic and political aspects: is the government and scientific community of the host country on board, is the local population open to an invasion of foreign scientists, are there significant business interests in the region? It’s clear that picking a site for the E-ELT is a very involved process that should be handled with sensitivity, diplomacy and a great deal of political nous.

Despite all these considerations that come into play, let’s not forget about the science of site selection. Astronomers’ interest in the skies start with our own local skies, and our weather. In the last century our understanding of the influence of atmospheric conditions on astronomical observations has increased hugely. Temperature, pressure, wind, humidity and other molecular abundances from the ground up to several kilometres in height all have their unique effects on the quality of our data. With the advent of smart telescope technologies that correct in real time for environmental fluctuations, like active and adaptive optics, the need for a detailed knowledge of local conditions both on a spatial and temporal scales becomes ever more important. The huge investment needed for telescopes like the E-ELT demands that we try to get the best possible astronomical site to get the best bang for our buck euros.

Given all that, the committee’s recommendation of Cerro Armazones comes as no surpise. Located close to ESO’s existing facilities at Paranal at a shade over 3000 m in altitude, Armazones appears to be an excellent site. It only became a (presumed) candidate E-ELT site last summer, when the E-ELT’s US counterpart, the Thirty Meter Telescope, announced that their telescope would be built on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. TMT had selected Armazones as one of its frontrunner sites back in 2008, so the Mauna Kea decision freed up the spot for ESO. So in fact, if the E-ELT does go to Armazones, the European community will have benefited massively from the North Americans’ early testing of the site.

And this brings me to the researchy part of this post. I’m loving the way TMT have kept the community informed of their site testing activities. Scientists working for the project have carried out an extensive 5-year campaign at five different sites: Cerro Armazones (Chile, 3064 m) , Mauna Kea (US, 4050 m), Cerro Tolonchar (Chile, 4480 m), Cerro Tolar (Chile, 2290 m) and San Pedro Martir (Mexico, 2830 m). Last year, Schöck et al published the first of a series of 12 (!!) papers in PASP detailing the results of the campaign. This first paper is an excellent read, with a clear overview of the chosen sites and the parameters they studied. More importantly, they talk about the constraints of their work, both in terms of available instruments, calibration and data processing.

As far as I can see, four of the 12 papers have been published so far, dealing with seeing and isoplanatic angle (Skidmore et al, 2009); turbulence profiles (Els et al, 2009); turbulence coherence time (Travouillon et al, 2009). The rest are still in preparation, although much work has been presented at conferences as well (a good listing here). From what I can gather, the TMT site testing team have done a very good job at planning their campaign and gaining the best possible understanding of their equipment and data analysis methods.

In my perhaps limited view, ESO’s reports on site testing have been a bit confusing. Back in 2008, there were five official candidate sites (pdf) – including La Palma but not Armazones. Today’s announcement tells me there were indeed five shortlisted sites, but three of those are different to those on 2008′s list. I’d heard some gossip about there being more sites under consideration, but no names mentioned. It all seemed a little hush-hush, or rather, it was not something the community was being actively updated on. But maybe that just reflects my status as a lowly minion.

The best part of the TMT testing is that the team have created an online database with all their test data from the 5-year survey, free for anyone to download, with a wealth of background and context. I’ve often argued that observatories should treat their site monitoring data the same as the science data, and make them available in archives with proper formatting and metadata.

ESO have tons of astroclimatology data available on their site (see e.g. here, here) and staff were very helpful when I had questions about the data last year, but their state is rather disorganised and badly or wrongly labelled. I really hope they take a leaf out of the North Americans’ book and make available their E-ELT site test results to the community, both with detailed peer-reviewed publications and by making the data publicly accessible.

As Schöck and colleagues rightly point out in their paper, there are many ways to analyse and interpret a given dataset, and perhaps the data can be useful to scientists in ways that go beyond what the initial site testing survey had envisaged. Furthermore, perhaps data from sites that were not selected can be useful for smaller countries or institutes looking for an astronomical base but lacking the resources to fund an expensive test campaign.

The bottom line to the story is that the data from the TMT test campaign show Armazones to be a fine observing site, on first glance rather comparable to nearby Paranal – and from a purely scientific view considerably better than La Palma. I look forward to hearing about a final decision for the home of the E-ELT.

Image: ESO/M. Tarenghi

References

M. Schoeck, S. Els, R. Riddle, W. Skidmore, T. Travouillon, R. Blum, E. Bustos, G. Chanan, S. G. Djorgovski, P. Gillett, B. Gregory, J. Nelson, A. Otarola, J. Seguel, J. Vasquez, A. Walker, D. Walker, & L. Wang (2009). Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing I: Overview arXiv: 0904.1183v1

Els, S., Travouillon, T., Schöck, M., Riddle, R., Skidmore, W., Seguel, J., Bustos, E., & Walker, D. (2009). Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing VI: Turbulence Profiles Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 121 (879), 527-543 DOI: 10.1086/599384

Skidmore, Warren, Els, Sebastian, Travouillon, Tony, Riddle, Reed, Schöck, Matthias, Bustos, Edison, Seguel, Juan, & Walker, David (2009). Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing V: Seeing and Isoplanatic Angle PASP, 121 (884), 1151-1166 : 10.1086/644758

Travouillon, T., Els, S., Riddle, R., Schöck, M., & Skidmore, W. (2009). Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing VII: Turbulence Coherence Time Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 121 (881), 787-796 DOI: 10.1086/605295

Every winter is the time for an age-old mating ritual that takes place in the astronomy community: a special courtship dance where graduate students and postdocs parade round, flashing their colourful feathers, trying to appear smarter and savvier than their peers in the desperate quest for a new mecenas who will support their addiction to MacBooks and airmiles. It’s jobs season, when the friendships we’ve cherished for the past year become meaningless and it’s each astronomer to their own.

The Astrophysics Jobs Rumour Wiki plays a crucial role in this annual ritual. It’s like the carnet de bal of the jobseeking astronomer: how many dates have you had, and did you dance with the George Clooney of the astronomy jobs – the Hubble Fellowship? A casual source of amusement and lighthearted procrastination for much of the year, around mid-February when the season approaches its tense finale, the Rumour Wiki becomes an instrument of torture. Posting your own name to it, particularly in the coveted boldface, means that not only did you meet your Prince(ss), you went back to the castle together and lived happily ever after (for 2-3 years). Posting your name in boldface will also invite the spite of your peers, who will google your name with green-eyed envy. Or maybe that’s what you intended?

Which brings me to my point: what the hell is it for anyway? I can see three purposes, in order of value:

1. To let people know at what stage the hiring process is for jobs. Staff are always swamped with applications, reviews and interviews, and don’t have the time to contact applicants every step of the way. If you’ve applied, heard nothing, and the Wiki says “offer made”, then you know you didn’t get it and can cross it off your list. Forget your Prince, move on to the lesser royals.

2. To keep track of collaborators, friends (enemies?). As well as being nice to know where your old grad school buddies are now, it can be useful to know that that astronomer you’d really like to work with is moving to X. Particularly useful for this are the Faculty hire rumours, as it’s an indication of what postdoc jobs might come up in the next round.

3. Powerplay and vanity. Check out how successful I am!

In recent days the revisions section with accompanying comments has been more spirited than usual. A debate is ongoing about the need for a section with ‘Non-academic jobs’ – which was added, then removed, then added back, removed again – and so on. The kind folks at the Astrobetter blog have put a poll on their site to see whether people see value in this. One commenter mentions that listing non-academic jobs might help remove the stigma associated with “leaving astronomy”. It might also give astronomers an idea of what kinds of jobs they could also apply for if they’re having trouble in research. I kind of agree with that but I’m not sure the Wikis is the place for that – there must be a better forum (or one should be created).

On a side note, I think that the perception of “success” in science is generally very narrow and nowhere is this snobism played out more than on the Rumour Wiki. Many highly successful astronomers do stints in instrumentation, software development, or entirely outside of astronomy research; many of us are involved in education or outreach activities on the side. It would be great if more room was made for that in the definition of a successful research career.

Thoughts? Post a comment.

Image: US Fish & Wildlife Service, Northeast Region

My twitter feed in the last weeks of the decade was often dominated by reactions to and discussions of the funding cuts to physics and astronomy research in the UK announced on 16 December. On the day of this announcement I created a permanent archive for all tweets hashtagged #stfc to keep a record of all that was said on the issue – as regular twitter searches only go back around 10 days. On the last day of the year I exported all the tweets going back to 10 December and I’ve been playing around with visualising them. Here are a few samples.

Here’s a plot of the number of tweets in the 12 days from 15 December to 16 December, binned per hour. The red lines indicate the approximate time of the announcements of the funding cuts on 16 December, and of the postdoctoral fellowships cancellation on 21 December. Click on the chart for a closer look and get the data here. At the height of the buzz, there were almost 120 tweets in one hour, and on the 16th around 500 tweets were tagged #stfc. And while the traffic has quieted somewhat now, the STFC crisis is still an active topic of discussion.

If you thought it was only a small group of people making a lot of noise, think again. Over 330 people tweeted about STFC in the whole 3-week period, and even the busiest tweeters contributed no more than 4% of the total. Click on each pie segment to see the usernames and numbers.

The archive is accessible to anyone and continues to aggregate #stfc tweets at the same location. I’ve placed the data file with the tweets I used to generate these images in a public location, as well as the idl script I wrote to process the data and generate the timeline (the script uses a few functions from the idl astronomy library). The pie chart was created using the Google Pie Chart gadget in Google docs. The word cloud was generated by Wordle, removing common English words plus “rt” and “stfc”.

Despite widespread financial gloom, 2009 has been an excellent vintage for physics and astronomy. The Hubble Space Telescope‘s final servicing mission was declared a resounding success, LHC finally powered up after last year’s false start, several new astronomy satellites were launched and astronomers have tantalisingly reported a possible first-ever detection of dark matter particles. But in the UK, the year was closed on a blue note following an ominous pre-budget report in early December and the subsequent announcement of drastic cuts to the particle physics and astronomy programmes by the country’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC.

For the sake of spreading the word to a wider community, I wrote a general overview blog post on the Lay Scientist blog about the funding cuts to British physics and astronomy research. Go read it here.

JIVE Director looking for an STFC representative (Image: M. Garrett)

Yesterday’s announcement from the Science and Technology Facilities Council was everything scientists had feared it to be, Britain has announced its withdrawal from over 20 large projects and is slashing 25% of studentships and fellowships. For astronomy some notable names are Gemini, the facilities on La Palma (including the robotic Liverpool Telescope) and UKIRT. In addition, the Dutch community will not be pleased with the news of Britain’s withdrawal from two of its flagship radio astronomy projects, LOFAR and JIVE. I haven’t seen any official responses from the Netherlands but will keep an eye out for those – although Astron Director Mike Garrett’s reaction on twitter was telling:

#STFC UK cuts – here ends a very dark and dismal day for international collaboration in radio astronomy… where do we go from here?

I gather that many British physicists and astronomers are feeling a little shell-shocked today after the announcements. There will certainly be an interesting road up ahead to work out what happens now. I don’t have much to add to what has been said all over the web – so like yesterday I’ll just post a round-up of links on the STFC cuts. I set up an archive for tweets hashtagged #stfc here, which will remain there permanently, and will continue to collect tweets into an xml file. I’ll try to create a Google spreadsheet once the dust has settled and make it available online for anyone who’s interested.

Official responses

• Royal Astronomical Society (Andy Fabian)
• Institute of Physics (Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell)
• Lord Drayson, UK science minister
• Prospect, a major union

Media

• Added 18/12: Ian Douglas writes of a bad day for physicists in the Telegraph blogs
• The Guardian
• Physics World talks of “savage cuts”
• The Times focuses on nuclear physics
• ScienceInsider talks of scientists being ‘dissatisfied’ by the cuts. That’s putting it mildly.
• Nature
• Roger Highfield asks if British nuclear physics is doomed in New Scientist.

Blogs

• Paul Crowther – for the gory details
• Subjective Science
• Leaves on the Line (Andrew Jaffe) – good overview and lots of links
• Peter Coles gives a running commentary of the day
• To the Left of Centre gives another balanced post
• Andy’s post from yesterday has gathered a whole lot of interesting comments
• Phil talks about a ‘cold winter’ for British physics

As I’m not based in Britain any more – and I was only a sort-of British astronomer to begin with – I try not to get too sucked in by the doom and gloom across the Channel. The Netherlands is a great place to be an astronomer and I have no reason to worry. But it’s impossible not to be concerned about what is happening right now. Regardless of what cuts are announced tomorrow, the effect the ongoing crisis is having on the morale of British scientists is devastating for progress in British astronomy. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a new space agency when your job is on the line.

A crisis in British astronomy is not just a crisis in Britain. The country is a major player in astronomy on a worldwide level, and even a small squeeze in British jobs can be felt everywhere. Not just British astronomers will lose job security: all astronomers face a tougher test on the jobs market in years to come.

Here’s a round-up of good reading by people who know more:

Paul Crowther at Sheffield keeps track of the developments to an amazing level of detail. Every pound in the deficit is accounted for here.

STFC’s own webpage about tomorrow’s announcement – ironically entitled “Investing in the Future”.

A great post from To Left of Centre.

Andy Lawrence gives a bit of inside info, with lots of comments from other important people.

A letter by Andy Fabian of Cambridge University, President of the Royal Astronomical Society, to science minister Lord Drayson.

Peter Coles in Cardiff gives his thoughts here.

Rob Simpson, also in Cardiff , says it like it is.

Added 15/12 16/12: A post like this one, from A Pacific View. Cheers Tom.

Added 15/12 16/12: A website called Save Astronomy with a bit of info. Who is behind this?

Tweeters to follow tomorrow: @Paul_Crowther, @telescoper, @defjaf, @ProfBrianCox, @jonmbutterworth, @stpkav, @StephenSerjeant – all senior astronomers and physicists at British universities – and @lorddrayson. At the junior end, there’s @orbitingfrog, @chrislintott, @astronomyblog, and me. Hashtag of the day: #stfc.

I also created an archive for all tweets tagged #stfc, see it here (15/12) 16/12. I found some nifty software that lets me save a twitter archive in easily readable formats, if anyone would like them in a spreadsheet  or xml file, drop me an email or a tweet.

[Incidentally, good to see lots of familiar names from my days at UCL on that list.]