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.