I love the Sixty Symbols videos – and this is a particularly kooky one. I think Valentine’s Day is the most pointless of all the pointless contrived holidays – but if I were to celebrate it, this is how I’d do it.
Behind the Webb
January 1, 2010 By
First of all – best wishes for the new year to you all!
Working on an instrument for James Webb Space Telescope I regularly receive emails from NASA when the telescope features in the media or new images are released. Recently I discovered that there’s a new site for JWST called webbtelescope.org – in the style of hubblesite.org – and it contains a couple of episodes of a relatively new video podcast series called Behind the Webb. The first episode was about the detectors for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument whose testing and calibration I work on. As the components that actually transform the incoming photons from the teelscope into a digital signal that we can see, record, process and interpret, the detectors are the heart of the instrument – and this episode is a nice intro to how it all works. Watch it below via YouTube or go to the original page (whose embed code doesn’t seem to work).
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually
November 22, 2009 By
This week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
Star formation as seen by Herschel
October 3, 2009 By
The great images from Herschel continue to come in. This week ESA released the first image that combines data from two of its instruments, PACS and SPIRE.While each instrument has its own unique functionality, the true power of a multi-mode observatory like Herschel is often the ability the observe the same region of sky with several of its instruments simultaneously, to offer a richer view of the target than possible with a single instrument.
First light for Planck
September 18, 2009 By
First images from Planck, overlaid on an optical image of the galactic plane
The European Space Agency yesterday released first light images from its cosmic microwave background experiment, Planck. Planck was launched together with infrared observatory Herschel in May, and these first data show that the little satellite is in excellent working order.
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