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.Astronomy 3: Hacks hacks hacks

April 5, 2011 By

A room with a view: beautiful New College (image: Rob Simpson)

Apologies for my short blogging hiatus due to technical reasons – I’m sure I’ve all bored you with my tweeting about it – and excitingly I’m now at New College Oxford for the 3rd instalment of the .Astronomy conference. I’m always excited to get out of the office, off the telecon, to hang out with people with creative ideas who aren’t afraid to Make Stuff Happen.

This year’s conference is spread over three days, with the hack day taking place on the middle day – that’s today!

We opened the conference yesterday with a talk by the most excellent Dr. Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute, whom we were chuffed to add to our participants list. Carolina gave a full summary of the day’s proceedings with some good pictures over on her blog. Today we’re having the hack day, and most of us have been ensconced in corners in twos and threes working on our pet projects. Will Stuart finally have developed the improved internet by morning?

We kicked off the morning with talks on astro-python and CDS [pdf] by the Thomas-es Robitaille and Boch, respectively. We have a number of python enthusiasts amongst the participants who’ve written some great packages that facilitate automated access to and manipulation of astronomical data formats. I’ve been playing around with the ATpy package for my own little hack project and it’s the first time I’ve been productive in python – pat on back to self for that. I was also pleased that we were joined today by Cameron Neylon, probably Britain’s biggest open science advocate. It’s always great to get a few non-astronomers in the club for the broader view.

Our Man in Havana from Microsoft Jonathan Fay is once again in attendance with his customary bravery in the face of a true barrage of Apple devices. Last time he dazzled us with the capabilities of World Wide Telescope, and this year he upped the ante by demonstrating the awesomess that is WWT as controlled by Kinect. Space porn: kicking people porn’s ass any day.

Factlet of the day, courtesy of Rob: there are only 12 armies in the world that are bigger than the Zooniverse community.

Speaking of interpretative dance – keep your eyes peeled on here for the appearance of an astro-themed music video. Lyrics: Amanda, music: Trad./Jon Yardley, backup vocals and moves: Carolina, Ed, Jose, Rob and yours truly, direction: Markus. The content of our creation is highly questionable; if there had been guitars, we would have smashed them.

I’m looking forward to seeing the result of everyone’s hacking efforts – most of which are continuing well into the evening aided by pizza and beers. Results will undoubtedly be posted here in days to come. You can follow the talks via ustream, on twitter via hashtag #dotastro, and pictures are posted to this Flickr group.

 

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AstroInformatics I: From Data to Knowledge

June 23, 2010 By

Optical layout of LSST, the catalyst for many semantic headaches

Like many sciences, astronomy is becoming increasingly data-rich. The next generation of observatories, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will produce staggering amounts of data every night and push the subject into the petabyte regime. The large surveys that feed a substantial portion of the research community today, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, are already demonstrating the difficulties of converting large datasets into knowledge: converting the data into catalogues, estimating selection biases and performing robust statistics are all common problems to those working with the data. Astroinformatics, or the science behind the information captured in our wealth of astronomical data, is therefore becoming an increasingly relevant field of study. The AstroInformatics 2010 conference was organised with the aim of essentially defining this emerging field.

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AstroInformatics 2010

June 17, 2010 By

The AstroInformatics 2010 conference is currently going on at Caltech in Pasadena. There’s a substantial online presence, if you can’t attend but want to take part in the discussion, here’s some links!

More to follow!

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Summer conferencing

May 20, 2010 By

Summer is a busy season for conferencing, and some really interesting and fun meetings in the area of Open Science/Science Online/Science and Society are coming up in the next few months.

From 16 to 19 June, the California Institute of Technology will be hosting the 2010 edition of AstroInformatics, which looks excellent. The meeting has three days of “proper” conferencing, covering many topics – conceptual (changing paradigms in astronomy research, developments in other sciences) , technical (what are the newest tools for exploring, visualising and sharing data?) , people-based (astronomy education, citizen science). The 4th day is a workshop on astro-semantics. I’m really excited about the conference itself and about the trip as a whole – I’m well overdue a trip to the astronomy beehive/wasp’s nest (?) that is Pasadena, home to friends, colleagues and fellow bloggers. A tweetup may be in order – be warned.

Inconveniently clashing with AstroInformatics is the very cool-looking Science Hack Day in London on 19-20 June, hosted at the offices of the Guardian newspaper and sponsored by a bunch of great organisations. It’s a typical weekend of geekery with no real programme, just a bunch of coding-aficionados – and more than a few DotAstronomers, I couldn’t help but notice – getting together to Do Cool Stuff With Computers. I’m sorry to miss it, although I’m a little too technically incompetent to really contribute much. I always had the impression that biomedical scientists were much more active in participating in such events and it’s great to see that astronomers are getting seriously involved too – I spotted that LCOGT are even sponsoring the Hack Day.


I was also very happy to see the announcement of the 2010 instalment of Science Online London on 3-4 September. After last year’s fun and stimulating event at the Royal Institution in London, this year’s SOLo will take place in the British Library, who are cohosting the conference with Mendeley and Nature Publishing Group.There’s not much info yet on programme or fringe events, but if last year was anything to go by, it should be well worth attending.

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Black hole-iday

February 26, 2010 By
IMG_5203

Astronomer (m)e(e/a)ts Powder

As I alluded to in my previous post, last week I spent a rather fabulous week in the Rocky Mountain resort of Aspen. The Aspen Center for Physics hosted a conference, organised by Andrea Ghez, Vicky Kalogera, Fred Rasio, and Steinn Sigurdsson (of the Dynamics of Cats blog), on the Formation and Evolution of Black Holes. I don’t work on black holes myself* but am lucky enough that my significant other does, and the prospect of a week in Aspen just sounded too good to turn down.

I was planning to attend some talks and maybe blog about the meeting, but in the end the lure of the white stuff proved too strong and I spent all my time skiing. Luckily Daniel Holz, blogger at Cosmic Variance, was also in attendance and he will be writing about the meeting on CV.

The one conference activity I attended, apart from eating and drinking, was the customary mid-week public lecture in teh Aspen Opera House, which was given by the ever-enthusiastic Andrea Ghez of UCLA on her work on the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre. As well as being an excellent scientist, Andrea is a fun speaker and a great advocate for astronomy. You can watch the lecture online at Grassroots.tv.

Aspen is a pricey ski resort but the infrastructure and facilities are truly fantastic, if you enjoy the snow I recommend you try to go there sometime (on someone else’s grant). Through the Aspen Center for Physics, conference participants get incredibly generous discounts on lift passes, ski rentals, classes, and even food on the mountains – and these discounts extend to hangers-on like me. A really big thanks for that!

* Yet! That may change in 2011. Sort of.

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