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.Astronomy: Here’s One We Made Earlier

April 7, 2011 By

Can’t believe .Astronomy is over for another year, but here I am, at Heathrow, on my way home. Our final day yesterday was pretty fun-packed, and apologies to those on twitter who really didn’t need to hear quite so much about kittens or David Hogg. There were some great talks, but I first wanted to list some of the hacks that people presented on Wednesday morning.

I was impressed with what people produced, and .Astro definitely seemed more techy to me than in previous years. We awarded some prizes to hacks we particularly liked in technical and artistic categories – just like in figure skating, cause who doesn’t love figure skating?

In no particular order, here are some links I like. This is by no means a complete list….

Jose Enrique Ruiz recorded a set of pencasts – I’m not sure what the correct verb for this activity is – basically got people to talk about and draw their work with a magicFu pen. It looks super cool.

Amanada Bieberauer put together an arrangement and backing singers for her Pluto song and got Heidelberg’s Markus Poessel to record a music video to go with it. It’s already a bit of a hit I understand, full info and credits on the dedicated site. Markus also produced another .Astronomy trailer, like last time. I loved Boris Häußler‘s video showing exactly how many devices we used to bring down the college wifi network – and ABBA. All the videos are embedded below.

On the tech side, Eli Bressert, Tom Robitaille and Matthew Graham [updated 13/04]produced some code that scrapes Arxiv and displays on one nice page the paper’s title, authors and abstract (like on astro-ph), but also a list of tables and figures for easy downloading. We may never need to read words again. I look forward to seeing this hack up and running.

Our top hacking prize went to Jon Yardley, Haley Gomez, Ed Gomez and Rob Hollow for their ChromoTone project, which lets users explore astronomical images in sound. Top marks for coming up with the chord structure to represent different wavebands and the insertion of the occasional blue note. You can’t go wrong with that.

Pamela Gay, Stuart Lowe, David Hogg and Phil Marshall came up with Astrotaches – an html5-based site that allows users to draw on images as a way of tagging interesting objects. A kind of Galaxy Zoo on speed.

And there were many other fun and useful projects that I hope to hear more about in months to come. And here are the videos…

 

 

 

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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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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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.Astronomy Day 3: Hack!

December 5, 2009 By
Hackers in action

Hackers in action

One of the things we decided early on in the organisation for .Astronomy is that we wanted to set aside an entire day that was not in any way scheduled. We’d call it a Hack Day and just let people decide for themselves what they wanted to work on. The Lorentz Center is the perfect location for this: plenty of rooms and offices of a variety of sizes, a large common room with on-demand caffeinated and sugary stuff, and decent wifi throughout the building. But I admit that I was a little worried about Hack Day. What if people didn’t get it? What if they just saw this as a midweek day off and didn’t come? What if they expected more organisation? I had no idea if this would work.

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