Venus

Venus is very bright tonight.

16:52 GMT, looking south west; unretouched phone photo

Once I had checked it wasn’t an aeroplane, I was sure it was Venus.  But I thought I’d check with Google Sky map; it’s always nice to have an excuse to play with that app.  I fired it up, and pointed my phone at the bright light.

No, I don’t think so.  And not just because I knew I wasn’t looking south…

I waited a few seconds, until the orientation sensor kicked in properly, and the image slewed round to show:

That’s better!

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Venus, Jupiter, Mercury

figure from Scientific American blogs

Tonight sees three planets close together in the western sky: Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury. Our new binoculars got their first outing, and we saw the triple very clearly.  Beautiful.

This also gives us an indication of how good these binoculars are for stargazing: with my small birdwatching 8x42 pair, I could see Venus clearly, Jupiter just, and Mercury not at all. With these new 15x70s I could see all three planets clearly.

just visible in the slightly cloudy western sky; Sun 26 May 2013, 21:51 BST

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suddenly telescopes, hundreds of them

telescopes for sale

Yesterday we had a day out at the International Astronomy Show, at the Warwickshire Exhibition Centre, near Leamington Spa. This was a big barn/hanger-like building, with multiple stands from different astronomical kit vendors.  On sale were telescopes, lenses, binoculars, astronomy books and posters, meteorites, plots of land in New Mexico, university courses, small domes, and other astronomically-related things.

more telescopes

a view from the restaurant area, on high

no chance to test any of the kit...

The vibe was a bit like computer shows in their hey-day 30-odd years ago, with crowds of people looking through lots of high tech kit. (The photos here were taken towards the end of the day, when the crowds had thinned. Earlier it was quite a crush.)



It was a typical spring day: cloudy and overcast. However, that didn't stop us buying stuff in anticipation of clear skies later.

We were tempted by the whole sky camera, and the solar telescope, but we eventually just bought a pair of binoculars, in anticipation of comet ISON later this year.

The small comet Panstarrs earlier this year was a bit of a dim, fuzzy disappointment (although some people got spectacular shots of it close to Andromeda).  But we remember the glorious Hale-Bopp from the late 1990s.  So we are getting prepared for later this year with suitable binoculars.  Comet viewing doesn't want a very high magnification, but needs good  light gathering.  So we went for a pair of 15x70.  Let's hope we get those clear skies!

Ironically, we bought the binoculars from Green Witch, our local astronomical supplier, so we could have saved a trip.  (We had previously bough a cardboard solar telescope from them, to watch the 1999 eclipse.  We also bought our proper telescope from them about a decade ago.)

But it was worth going, to see all the different peripherals that are becoming common.  Maybe we'll go for the whole sky camera when the price drops a bit.

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peek-a-boo Jupiter

This happened on Christmas Day, but I've only just come across it.

Rafael Defavari took a video of the moon occulting Jupiter.  It's marvellous, and made even more so by what you can see as Jupiter re-emerges from behind our moon:

Lunar occultation of Jupiter - 25 December 2012

The little dot just visible above-left of Jupiter is one of its moons: Europa.  And the darker dot on Jupiter itself is Europa's shadow!  (It's easier to see on the video.)

There's more info where I found out about this, at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site.

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still here

Guardian item on Mayan apocalypse

I see the world didn't end after all, only the Mayan calendar did.

I suppose that means I still have to do my Christmas shopping, and mark all those exam scripts....

Ah, well.

So, of course, the next end of the world is Monday 31 December 2012, when the Western calendar ends.

What do you mean, that calendar starts again on Tuesday 1 January 2013?

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Sir Patrick Moore, 1923 - 2012

Sir Patrick Moore, astronomer, presenter of The Sky At Night since 1957, author of many popular astronomy books, inspiration to several generations of astronomers, myself included, has died. Still sitting on our TV's hard disc recorder is last Monday's episode of The Sky At Night, not yet watched.  Goodbye, Patrick.

Patrick Moore

The Sky At Night, "A Night to Remember".
 The BBC's 1969 moon landing team: Patrick Moore, Cliff Michelmore, James Burke
(but why is this picture reversed?)

Patrick Moore (photo credit: Paul Grover, from Telegraph article in 2010)

• Telegraph obituary
• BBC News

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early morning moon

looking west, 7:40 GMT.

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citation patterns

An academic's contribution to the community is made through publications.  And so we obsessively keep good records of what we have published, and neurotically check out if anyone has noticed.

To this end, I’ve been playing around with Google Scholar, tidying up my auto-generated publications list there. Although I still maintain my own publications page, this separate one is a useful resource, mainly because it includes citation counts and links.

Citation links are good for more than justegoboo and feeding neuroses, honestly! Citations indicate other authors who find my work relevant to them, so it's very likely that their work is interesting and relevant to my own research. It makes sense for me to check them out, and then also check out the other papers they reference, and also their citations, to see if there’s something interesting and relevant to me. Although it is a bit easy to get sucked into a never-ending death-spiral of link following: there’s just too much interesting stuff.

That's the beauty of Google Scholar.  it doesn't just have a list of my papers (a task I can do myself with relatively little effort); it also auto-generates links to citing papers (a task that would be ridiculously time-consuming to do myself).

More than that, it also provides neat little graphs of citations per year. These are quite interesting for publications that are several years old, where patterns have had time to emerge.

The typical pattern shows a peak a few years after publication, then a tail off into obscurity.

Slightly more gratifying is the pattern of a peak, followed by a drop, but then carrying on bumping along at about the same rate.

But the weirdest citation pattern must be to a paper written during my PhD, published nearly 30 years ago. It caused barely a ripple when published (I comfort myself that there was no Web in those days, and hence restricted access to it). But then there was a second (modest) peak of citations after about 15 years, followed by a drop-off. And then there was a third peak, starting more than two decades after publication.

Clearly, a paper ahead of its time!

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olympic moon

Full moon rising, as seen through the Olympic Rings hanging from Tower Bridge, London. Taken 3 August 2012.

credit: REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

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eclipse by proxy

I didn't get to observe the latest (annular) eclipse of the sun, but there have been some spectacular pictures on the web. My favourite, which I found on Astro Bob (well worth checking out), must be:

Eclipse watchers at Papago Park in Phoenix, Ariz. are silhouetted against the eclipsed sun.
Credit: Michael Chow/ Arizona Republic / AP photo

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a four planet evening

A good evening's viewing tonight.  In the east, a brilliant Venus and Jupiter high in the sky (getting closer for the conjunction later this month), and down on the horizon, a much fainter but still clearly visible Mercury.

Then, turning to the west: twinkle, twinkle little Mars, like a ruby against the stars.  We just managed to get a quick look at it through the telescope before the clouds closed in.

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hello spotty

Take one ordinary digital SLR camera (Canon EOS 20D), add one sun filter (originally bought for the 1999 total solar eclipse), and see a spotty sun:

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Jupiter's moons

Which of Jupiter's moons did we manage to snap yesterday? More help on the web, from the Sky and Telescope site.

So it's Ganymede further out and Europa closer in, then. Callisto is too close to see in this:

Or is it? Enhance, enhance! (courtesy of Photoshop)

Now, with a following wind, I can convince myself there's a third moon snuggling up to the (now very evidently) over-exposed Jupiter. Also, we can see that the camera lens really is a bit rubbish -- with the red and blue splitting out. But still, pretty good with no (very) special equipment.

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International Space Station (2)

I saw the ISS for the first time in April. We saw it again tonight, at around 19:45 BST, with a bit more technology to hand. I used the "Space Junk lite" app on my Android phone to check where the ISS was going to appear -- although it was so bright and obvious that wasn't really necessary (but it's a cool app anyway).

We also had a camera ready. We have a venerable old Canon EOS 20D digital SLR (2005 vintage), with a 18-55mm lens, here set at about 24mm.

The camera wasn't moved between the first two pictures, so the star field is the same, showing the very clear streak from the rapidly moving (from right to left) space station. (Click to embiggen, and see the stars.)

The camera was moved for the final shot, which shows the ISS fading from view as it moves out of the sunlight.

We then went back indoors, and watched the last ever Sarah Jane Adventures episode, over tea. Sniff.

Jupiter was very bright, so a bit later (around 21:30 BST), when we realised just how well the ISS shots had come out, it was time to try to photograph it with a bigger lens, a Sigma 70-300mm, set at 300mm.

Okay, so not the sharpest focus, but, OMFSM, two moons as well! We can stand in our front garden with a commodity camera and lens, and snap Jupiter's moons.

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a marvellous toy

I've been somewhat unproductive this last week, as I've been acquainting myself with my latest toy -- a Samsung Galaxy S II. I'm not an "early adopter" -- I waited a decade before getting a microwave oven, for example. I tend to follow the maxim

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
--- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711

However, I'm so dependent on email, and getting more dependent on a mobile calendar, that I decided the time had come to bite the bullet. I polled a few colleagues at work for their favourites, and ended up with the Galaxy (much to the disgust of the Apple brotherhood).

I've been playing with learning how to use it for the last week. First I had to get it talking to the home wifi. Which required getting the home wifi to advertise its presence a little more than it was doing. Work wifi connection required a quick trip to software support on my part, and for them to press two menu items on the phone (I think my mind "must be too highly trained" for that sort of thing). Now I've got my GMail, contacts, and Google calendar accounts synched. Bliss.

It seemed to take a while for the GPS to synch, so the weather map and other things thought I was in Waterbeach for a while. But after a few tries, it got my location correct, both at home and at work.

First peripheral: a slip case to carry it around in, so it doesn't get pocket-lintified. A quick Amazon search found something perfect. A subsequent search for a travel adaptor so that I can recharge the device in foreign parts, in order to use these facilities away from home/work, has opened up a whole new can of worms. I've ordered a couple of alternatives, and will test them out next week during my trip to France.

Then it was the apps. Google Sky Map, of course -- and MoonWidget.

Another colleague recommended Rail Planner Live, for all your UK rail trip needs. The download route I took for this required scanning a QR code, so I first downloaded QR Droid. The Rail planner app required actual money -- a whole £3.49! -- but it's definitely worth it.

Next, got my Dropbox account loaded -- piece of cake.

Then, I played around with the camera a bit more (more than merely scanning a barcode, that it). It's got autofocus (which I really need) and zoom, and auto-smile detect, and video, and ... more than I'll ever use, I suspect. The main reason for wanting a camera is as use as a "printing whiteboard" -- after a meeting, just snap the board, and email it to the participants -- a great productivity enhancer. (And I don't even need to photograph the board square on -- Paint Shop Pro has a nifty feature to square it up later.)

Of course, the first thing I wanted to photograph, so that I could blog about it, was the device itself. Ah, well, nothing's perfect! I suppose I could have employed a mirror, but I chose the route of using a separate camera.

I also want an simple sketching utility -- not some mini-CAD app that neatens up things into squared-off boxes and perfect circles -- and not something for the inner-artist (which I don't have) -- just something for simple line drawings that are part of the notes I take in meetings. I couldn't find anything -- but sketching on paper, then photographing, is a good substitute.

Games, of course -- Scrambled Net is frighteningly addictive. I also downloaded a few fractal and cellular automata apps, played with them for a few seconds, and then deleted them. I'm pretty sure I'll be writing the odd complex systems app at some point...

Oh, I believe the device also includes a phone. I haven't used that. Years ago I heard an advertising jingle: "You're never alone with a mobile phone" -- and interpreted it as a warning. Email is so much more civilised.

So, I'm not an early adopter, but after a week in its company, you'll get my new marvellous toy away from me when you prise it from my cold dead hands.

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au revoir, GMT

We're now into spring, and the days are getting longer. The vernal equinox (equal day and night, sunrise at 6am, sunset at 6pm, 12h of daylight), on 20 March this year, is past. (It's a bit more complicated than that, of course: according to The Weather Channel website in York UK on 20 March, sunrise was 6.08 GMT, sunset 18:17 GMT, with 12h 9min of daylight. And it's a bit light before sunrise and after sunset, during twilight.)

Yesterday sunrise was 5:53 GMT, sunset 18:28 GMT, with 12h 35min of daylight. Today, sunrise was 6:51 BST, sunset 19:30 BST, with 12h 39min of daylight.

Every year we hear this argument: "let's keep BST all year round, so we can have have more daylight in the evening!" Very few focus on the fact this means less daylight in the morning (very few except those pesky northerners with their later winter sunrises, of course).

Well, I think getting up in the dark is about as uncivilised as you can get. When I Rule the World, the second thing I will do is make it illegal to require anyone to get up in the dark. (The first thing I will do is outlaw lettuce.)

At the winter solstice in York, sunrise is 8:21 GMT, and sunset is 15:44 GMT, with 7h 23 min of daylight. So it's dark when I get up, still dark when I get to work, and dark again when I leave work. Ugh. (But the long summer evenings do make up for it. As I keep reminding myself in the depths of winter. Constantly.)

Those BST-all-year-rounders want me to wait for sunrise for an extra hour,
that's until 9:21 in the worst case, just so I can enjoy that extra hour of afternoon sunshine until ... wait for it ... 16:44. Well, no thanks. Dark mornings are bad enough, without making them longer! (I remember waiting in the pitch dark for the bus to school, back in the early 1970s, when this was last tried. It was not pleasant.)

If you want more sunshine, arrange flexible working times, and get up an hour earlier, in the dark, by yourself. Just don't force me to do it too.

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Cold dark sproing

Before recently starting my blog, I put bits of ephemera in my website's Commonplace book. One of the things mentioned there is a (very sketchy) plot for:

"Cold Sproing", a techno-thriller about one of the curled up space-time dimensions starting to uncurl when a low enough temperature is reached, causing spreading devastation around an Oxford cryogenics lab.

This idea was initially based on weird tea-time conversations whilst graduate students in the early 80s, spurred by an idea from Bill Saslaw that the early universe had fewer dimensions. When string theory and its curled up dimensions came along, hey presto: the "sproing" idea of the uncurling.

So we were amused to see that this idea is still around. Ian O'Neill has reviewed a paper by Mureika and Stojkovic (caveat: I've read the review, but not the paper!), who suggest that the early universe had fewer dimensions, but gets "promoted" to higher numbers of dimensions as the universe cools. Cool.

That reminded us of our story idea, and made us (briefly!) revisit it. Cosmology has moved on (in many ways) since our first decades-old outline. There's now Dark Matter (we don't know anything about it, except that it's matter) and Dark Energy (we don't know anything about it). Well, in our story at least, we now have a source for all that Dark Energy: those uncurling dimensions going "sproing".

The title is no longer "Cold Sproing", but now "Cold Dark Sproing". (The story is still, and doubtless will remain, unwritten.)

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Mercury

I've been admiring the brilliant Jupiter in the night sky for the last few months. So I was interested to read on Bad Astronomy that Jupiter would pass close to Mercury in mid-March before disappearing from our skies for a while. I've only (knowingly) seen Mercury once before, in a marvellous four-planet alignment in 2002. Phil Plait mentioned looking on 14 or 15 March, but those nights were cloudy. Last night was clear, however, so I looked out, just after 7pm. I saw a really bright planet, and then another, slightly fainter one down in the twilight, a couple of degrees below it. Aha, I thought, Jupiter, with faint Mercury close to the horizon -- no wonder it's so difficult to see!

But a quick check in the astronomy mags showed I had it backwards. The higher, brighter spot was tiny Mercury, and the lower, fainter one was Jupiter. Given how bright and easily visible Mercury was, I'm sure I've (albeit unknowingly) seen it many times before.

I didn't get to take a photograph, but here's one from Greg Parker that shows almost exactly what I saw (except for the skyline details, of course).

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