Blogging holiday July 5, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy . Add a comment
Bit of a holiday, back in a few weeks. Meanwhile, enjoy the first all-sky map released from cosmic microwave background satellite Planck!
Herschel looks into the Heart of Darkness May 10, 2010
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Star formation in Gould's Belt
Last week a big conference took place at the European Space Agency hub ESTEC, down the road in Noordwijk. The town was inundated with the lucky scientists who got to play with the first data from the new infrared space observatory Herschel and were finally allowed to talk about it to the rest of the world. And now that the conference is over, as expected, science from Herschel is everywhere!
Beautiful Sun April 22, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, pics . Add a commentFirst results from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory are in! In dynamic fashion, NASA have released a bunch of movies on YouTube of the satellite’s first observations, as well as great images. Enjoy.
Beautiful sun with the coronal mass ejection of 8 April 2010.
Prominence
Pretty solar storms April 7, 2010
Posted by sarah in: pics, space, weather . Add a comment
I don’t usually envy people who live in places like Iceland or Northern Canada – cold, dark and desolate places. But I am insanely jealous of them for one reason: the Aurora Borealis. Aurorae light up their skies, when charged particles streaming out from the Sun slam into the Earth’s magnetic field, get accelerated along the field lines towards the poles, creating these luminescent showers of light as they interact with the atoms in the upper atmosphere.
Ada Lovelace Day 2010 March 24, 2010
Posted by sarah in: science, women . 4commentsToday is Ada Lovelace Day, commemorating the 19th century British Countess who became one of the pioneers of computing. The first Ada Lovelace Day was held last year, as an international day of blogging about inspirational women in science and technology. I read some really great pieces last year, so decided I’d make a bit more of an effort too this time round.
When I started my PhD at University College London, I joined the astronomy department’s instrumentation lab. Not many astronomers knew where to find us, we were way down in a dark windowless basement. At the time the group was in the final throes of building an instrument for the 8-m Gemini South telescope. Behind my tiny little desk in our large office was a much larger cubicle with a desk, and on, under and all around it was truly the largest amount of paper I have ever seen. Somewhere buried beneath was a computer, and judging by the muffled but incessant ringing, a telephone. That was the desk of the scientist who was managing the project, and that person was Maggie Aderin-Pocock.
