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CDS Portal

November 14, 2010 By

screenshot of the CDS portal

CDS, the Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg, already bring us the astronomy research goodness of Simbad, Vizier and Aladin. A month ago, the service launched a one-stop portal for all three services – I’ve been using it this week and it’s a great step forward.

The portal provides just one entry box for an object name or coordinates, and searches within a 2 arcmin standard radius for objects and bibliographic references via Simbad, images via Aladin and catalogues via Vizier. It’s obviously a first implementation, and the input options aren’t as rich as the full interface for each of the services (e.g. different coordinate systems, search radii), but this does provide a much cleaner, simpler look and feel. There’s even an experimental mobile interface, good for those who want to work on the go.

Interestingly, the CDS Portal contains a personalised “My Data” space, where you can import VO tables of objects as input for queries and store up to 500 MB of data for future use. This still looks a bit bare-bones for now but may well be the most promising new feature.

After the introduction of annotations in Simbad, the Portal and data space looks like another step in CDS’ evolution from a static database query service to an kind of integrated and personalised online workspace for astronomy. I’m interested in finding out what other new developments are in the works – and I have a feeling we’ll be hearing something about it at next year’s dotAstronomy…..

CDS’s developer for the Portal sent me a nice tweet inviting feedback and comments – I’m going to take the liberty to extend that invitation to all of you. Post comments on here or contact him via twitter.

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Timescapes: Rapture

November 1, 2010 By

via astropixie:

tom lowe has been traveling around the southwestern part of the US for the last many months (a year almost?) with a huge haul of equipment to record timelapse shots for his upcoming feature film, timescapes, to be released next year.

his past work was gorgeous, but the production footage below shows that he is really revolutionizing this technique. i absolutely love the scenes that follow in the frame of our milky way galaxy across the sky, showing the earth in the foreground moving past. i’ve never seen the universe filmed in such a way. stunning work!

I like Lowe’s tagline on Vimeo: “somewhere worshipping T Malick”

TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

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Scientific hubris, or: Everything you thought you knew about straight line fits is wrong

September 13, 2010 By

ResearchBlogging.orgThink you’ve got your least squares down to a tee? Think again.

In a paper posted to the Arxiv in late August, David Hogg of NYU and his collaborators take us to task on our sloppy data fitting habits. And he’s not in the mood to mince his words.

It is conventional to begin any scientific document with an introduction that explains why the subject matter is important. Let us break with tradition and observe that in almost all cases in which scientists fit a straight line to their data, they are doing something that is simultaneously wrong and unnecessary.

Hear that? Next time you fit a straight line to your data, consider that you’re probably wasting your time. Stop pandering to style to get a “catchy punchline and compact, approximate representations”.

[Read more...]

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Plotting Astronomers

July 22, 2010 By

(click to enlarge)

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is one of the fundamental plots in astronomy. I remember it being one of the very first “sciencey” things I learnt about astronomy. It’s a very elegant plot, as it relates two very basic quantities about stars, their temperature and their brightness,  and presents a visually memorable picture. The main known classes of stars each, like white dwarfs or red giants, populate their own corner of the diagram.

And now Stuart has taken the HR diagram and made a human version of it: the Astronomer HR diagram! It’s very neat, and lots of astronomers have been figuring out where they would place on the plot. If I count my SPIE Proceedings papers, not strictly refereed but usually counted as such for intrumentalists, I’m at [17,4500], nicely along the Main Sequence. Counting just my very strictly peer-reviewed papers, I’m at [3,4500], in the new media section. Either’s fine by me!

Image: S. Lowe

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

Another accolade for CMB scientists

May 30, 2010 By

In another snippet of news, the Shaw Foundation that administers the annual Shaw Prize – the $1 million “Nobel Prize of the East”, on Thursday announced that the 2010 prize for astronomy has been awarded to Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins and Lyman Page and David Spergel of Princeton. The trio have received the award for “for their leadership of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment, which has enabled precise determinations of the fundamental cosmological parameters, including the geometry, age and composition of the universe”.

Cosmic Microwave Background scientists have been real favourites on the prize circuit – take a look:

  • Penzias & Wilson, 1978 Nobel Prize, for their CMB detection
  • Peebles, 2004 Shaw Prize, predicted the CMB
  • Alpher, 2005 National Medal of Science, predicted the CMB
  • Smoot & Mather, 2006 Nobel Prize, for their work on the Cosmic microwave Background Explorer satellite (COBE)
  • Mather & COBE team, 2006 Gruber Prize
  • Bennett, Page & Spergel, 2010 Shaw Prize, for their work on WMAP.
    (… and I’m sure I’ve missed some…)

And quite right too – CMB studies of the last couple of decades have been massively influential in our understanding of the Big Bang, the earliest epochs of the Universe, and the origin of structure. I wonder if the Planck team will be just as successful?

Incidentally, nice to see that the 2010 Shaw Prize for mathematics was awarded to Belgian mathematician Jean Bourgain, who’s at Princeton. I don’t know him or his work, but as I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the Belgian media I thought I’d flag it up here. Congrats!

Image: NASA / WMAP Science Team

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