The Electric Circus

Agile–What’s the problem?

2011-11-09T16:24:00.001Z

Within my social circle there has been a lot of discussion around agile, scrum and waterfall software development lifecycle techniques (SDLC). The basic issue is that the grass roots feedback coming from sales and delivery is that the customer is asking for agile based delivery and more over, scrum based delivery. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the companies may miss out on lucrative projects through not offering a scrum approach to delivery. Now personally I’ve not seen any customers reject proposals by not offering a scrum approach however that’s not to say that it hasn’t happened. So the question has to be asked why I don’t subscribe to a scrum approach in all cases?

Well the first and foremost issue is that many of our customers request either a fixed price approach or a fixed date approach neither of which fits well with a scrum approach to the SDLC. Fixed price depends on a full understanding of the requirements and a full set of designs before committing to a price, or a significant proportion of the price is contained within contingency to accommodate the risk associated with not knowing the detail behind each requirement. Likewise an understanding of the complexities of interfacing to applications within and without the business domain is required to develop confidence in your commitment. The fixed date approach also requires a set of, and to quote the (ahem) USA philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, ‘known, knowns’. Even Ken Schwaber in his book ‘Agile Project Management With Scrum’, realized that the scrum approach ‘had no silver bullet’ for fixed price/fixed date delivery, going so far as to state that the approach would require ‘adding a waterfall phase to the front of the scrum methodology’, anathema to most scrum advocates.

Steve McConnell in his book ‘Software Estimation’ differentiates between estimates, targets and commitments when estimating software development projects. He states that ‘Businesses have important reasons to establish targets independent of software estimates…While a target is a description of a desirable business objective, a commitment is a promise to deliver defined functionality at a specific level of quality by a certain date’. He goes on to state that ‘a commitment can be the same as the estimate or it can be more aggressive or more conservative than the estimate’. So what does this mean for SDLC?

Customers who are looking for certainty in what is generally an uncertain process want a commitment, either financially in the form of fixed price or schedule, hitting a fixed date release. Since I base pricing on my ability to estimate the delivery of the project on ‘known, knowns’ through a structured approach using models and spread sheets I have to understand and communicate the approach and its impact on the SDLC in a way in which the customer will understand. Steve Resnick et al, in their book ‘Professional Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010’, make a distinction between waterfall, agile (which they call MSF after the Microsoft Solution Framework) and scrum:

Waterfall – Scheduling is predictive. Using a known team and known technology, an experienced team can predict the duration of each phase and task. This method doesn’t respond well to slippage, as dependencies among tasks and phases are often very complex.
MSF – Scheduling is predictive, as in the waterfall method. However, because MSF is iterative, with more frequent releases, schedule slippage is more manageable. Subsequent releases can add or remove features to react prior impact.
Scrum – Scheduling is empirical. Work is scheduled based on the scrum team’s velocity. Estimation becomes more accurate with each successive sprint, based on actual work completed. Scheduling is very reliable because of the fixed-duration sprints. The scope is less reliable because features will move in and out of sprints and releases to accommodate the fixed schedule.

So what can we take away from these points. Well the first two approaches, waterfall and agile, have a very structured approach to gathering and engineering requirements therefore we can be very predictive around development of the estimate and the delivery schedule at a cost of being less reactive and flexible in adding additional requirements or making a change in the priority of the requirements. The third approach, scrum, has reduced confidence in predicting a schedule due to the nature of the backlog/sprint technique. It is extremely difficult to estimate the initial duration of the project when the points associated with delivery of the requirements within the backlog is based upon velocity, which is based upon historical evidence of delivery of software into the SDLC. This poses difficult questions around how you make a commitment to deliver requirements or how you make an accurate estimate for a fixed price/fixed date SDLC using scrum. So based upon this information, it looks like an agile approach would be the best at satisfying our customers requests to be flexible, yet agreeing to a commitment. I currently have an agile approach which works for me that develops the requirements and designs outside of the iteration using test driven development and continuous integration. This gives the best confidence in providing a price and a date to a customer and in making a delivery commitment to them.

At this point in the discussion I’d like to make in important point. Agile ≠ scrum. In fact for the best breakdown of myths regarding agile and scrum take a look at Eric Brechner’s book, ‘I.M. Wright’s Hard Code’, (2nd edition). He has many good points on this topic based upon his experience of the SDLC within Microsoft. Let’s take a look at his entry from March, 2006 entitled ‘The Agile Bullet; Enemy of the truth’:

Myth #1: Agile = eXtreme programming (pair programming, scrum, test driven development, user stories or some other agile method).

Actually what he describes in this section is that agile is actually a collection of many different SDLC approaches. You have to ensure that you have the right approach for the right project. I have spent a lot of time developing methods and I feel confident that the agile approach I have adopted will accommodate my customers requested commitments.

Myth #2: Agile methods can’t work for large groups.

I think that this is tosh, agile ≠ scrum. Agile doesn’t require that the customer product owner sits with the team 100% of the time writing user stories. I often work in a distributed fashion with more and more emphasis placed on an offshore delivery model using the India, Manila, China and Brazil. This means that it is impossible to have the product owner sit with the development team. Therefore an approach which works for this model is required. Agile provides the ability to develop requirements and designs outside of the iterations therefore it can accommodate large scale and distributed development teams.

Myth #3: Agile methods can work for large groups.

Now I know what you’re thinking “how can he justify this statement when he’s just praised the approach for large groups?” Well, Eric has a good deal to say on this. ‘The agile philosophy values “customer collaboration over contract negotiation” and “responding to change over following a plan”…[customers] get touchy when millions of dollars are involved…[therefore] applying agile methods to large-scale projects requires you to be flexible and creative to deal with these issues.’ So the approach is to make a commitment to fixed price/fixed date delivery based upon an on going discussion with the customer to ensure that they are happy with the priority of the functionality being released from the SDLC and also to discuss or negotiate the impact of changes on the SDLC and the fixed price/fixed date delivery. This means having a team at the customer site working with the product owner and communicating to the team at large.

Myth #4: Agile means no documentation.

Eric makes the point that ‘the agile philosophy values “working software over comprehensive documentation”’. So what does this really mean; No documentation? Of course not. Documentation should be seen as a deliverable and should be factored into any estimate and planned accordingly. Documentation makes the maintenance of the application possible and helps the organisation further develop the application in the future.

Myth #5: Agile means no up-front design.

When making a commitment to a customer, even using the agile approach, a certain level of design documentation is required. How else do you work out the complexities of the application architecture, which patterns you may use, what software models you may select? Again the design will not emerge from developers ‘doing stuff’. The balance is to generate enough of a design to help with the estimate and to drive requirements engineering so that the backlog and iteration plan is as well developed as it can during the SDLC.

So all in all, we’ve looked at the reasons why I prefer agile as opposed to the scrum approach to the SDLC, we’ve looked at the differences between estimates, objectives and commitments and finally we’ve looked at some to the myths associated with the agile approach. Wrapping this entry up I think we can safely say that although scrum is an excellent approach if you are not making a commitment to your customer and if they can make a mutual choice between delivery of functionality or delivery to price/date. However, most of our customers have fixed budgets and a timeline to hit making scrum a difficult choice pushing us to a decision between waterfall and agile.

If you’d like to have a further discussion then please get in touch.

Technorati Tags: agile,scrum,waterfall,software Services,software development,SDLC,Microsoft,Team Foundation Server,TFS

Microsoft Team Foundation Services Preview

2011-11-03T09:13:00.001Z

Recently I was given a link to the Azure based Team Foundation Services CTP which is currently underway. I’m always curious to see how Microsoft are transitioning products into on demand services based in the Cloud. Access to TFS Services preview is only available via a GUID key which is only available from an invite from a user already on board the CTP. That said, if you haven’t a handy contact to obtain one of the keys there is a short video on the access page which shows an overview of what you get if you are lucky enough to hold the keys to the magic kingdom.

So, let’s assume that you have a key to access the site and therefore have access to the TFS Services environment. What next? Well with many of Microsoft’s services you will need to have a Windows Live ID to authenticate you against the Azure security services. You’ll also want to have an idea of what you wish to call your TFS project. The name you choose will become part of the overall URL in the form of https://yourprojectname.tfspreview.com which will also the the URL you’ll use later on to connect your Visual Studio client to the Cloud based TFS server. Finally you’ll need to enter the GUID key you received and click the check box to agree to Microsoft’s terms and conditions. Once this stage has been complete you’ll be forwarded to the Windows Live ID login page where you can enter your credentials to connect the Service with your Live ID.

Once on the inside you’ll be shown the Welcome page which has a number of activities and information. The item reaffirms the URL you use to connect your Visual Studio client to the TFS project collection. The second item is a link to a page to create a new team project. Lets take a look at this. Clicking on this link opens a pop up which prompts you to enter a name for the project, a description of the project and prompts you to select a process template for use within the project. In my first project I selected the default choice which is the Scrum template provided by Microsoft. Once you’ve created the team project you may wish to connect a Visual Studio client to the project. This couldn’t be easier. Start Visual Studio and from the Start page select ‘connect to Team Foundation Server’. Click on the ‘Servers…’ button and then the ‘Add…’ button. Enter the URL you generated for you Project Collection and then authenticate using your Windows Live ID. Voila, you are connected to your TFS Preview project Collection. You then merely have to select the relevant project to connect to.

Now there are some gotchas you’ll need to be aware of before connecting to TFS Services. If you are using Visual Studio 2010 you’ll need to download the following:

In that order. If you wish to avoid downloading these installs then you can (if brave/stupid enough) download and install the beta preview of Visual Studio Dev11. This can take considerable time, SP1 is around 60MB which depending on your bandwidth could take over an hour to download and install. The hotfixes are minor but again may take over 30 minutes to download and install. The beta preview of Dev11 will take considerably longer at 1.1GB.

In addition you will need to configure a local build server to run the build agent. This isn’t available within the current setup so you may need to have a handy server sitting around to run this service.

Well, if you’ve achieved all that, pat yourself on the back, sit back and relax while you wander around the new landscape of TFSPreview. The UI will be familiar to those of you who’ve used TFS anywhere and if you are used to this type of interface then you’ll get on fine with managing the project via the browser. Developers/testers and power users will want to use the integration with Visual Studio to access the project, but hey, nothing new there right? The project is free to invite team members and they don’t have to have a unique key to obtain access, although depending on what permissions you apply to their accounts will determine what they can and cannot do. My advice would be to start a small project with some colleagues/friends for fun and see how you get on.

In my opinion this will be one of the game changers for distributed teams. I love the thought of having my team working out of their homes or from offices spread geographically. Mix this with other collaboration tools such as Office 365 then you have a great set of productivity tools which really does mean that the office can be a thing of the past.

Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server,TFS,Microsoft,Azure,Cloud,Development,Software Services,TFSPreview

Managing a Software Services Company

2011-09-14T16:38:00.001+01:00

As an employee of a software services company working in their software architecture group I’m constantly looking at how I can progress from a customer focused individual into an internal management focused individual. At this juncture I had better give you some background to this post.

I’ve been in the technology consulting game for nigh on 16 years working my way through the organisation from developer through project management and back into development services as a solutions architect. I’ve successfully managed projects, teams and at one stage 80 employees and a multi million pound P&L account. It was this role which I found most stimulating. The management of a P&L is where I want to take my skills. Identifying strategy and delivering on that strategy to drive revenue, manage cost and hence increase controllable income.

To enable me to progress this area of my career I’ve been reading the following:

Operations Management: AND MyOMLab; Prof Nigel Slack, et al
Balanced Scorecard, The: Translating Strategy into Action; Robert S Kaplan, David P Norton
Managing the Professional Service Firm; David H. Maister

These books came highly recommended for giving you the thought leadership required to deliver on the process and organisational aspects of running a software services company. All three are classics in their field and together give you the information required to manage the operations of a service based business, measuring the relationships between strategy and business initiatives and organisational management. The only thing missing from this is a decent sales and innovation set of books. For innovation I would recommend Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates; Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson.

Sales is a more difficult to pin down. I personally like the Solution Selling methodology looking at solving the overall business problem rather than looking at the individual technology sale. There are a number of books on this subject from SPI who own the copyright to the content and I advise reviewing these publications.

Hopefully one day an opportunity will arise where I can apply these skills to get me the role I want to be in for the second half of my working career. Fingers crossed eh.

Technorati Tags: Business,Technology,Management,Books,Software Services

What Does A Career Mean To You

2011-09-07T11:02:00.001+01:00

Recently I’ve been inundated with recruitment firms spamming my LinkedIn account wanting to be my “friend”. I see it as akin to cold calling my telephone or knocking at my door. It parallels door-to-door salesmen and in my opinion rank just below those people who try and get you to switch energy provider or the perennial charity muggers or more commonly labelled by their euphemism, “chuggers”.

Although I know that they have a job to perform and that they are generally highly motivated to network and make connections, I fear that I loathe the way in which they trade you as though you are fattened calf off to market. The faux cheerfulness, the chirpy, upbeat, ‘we can achieve anything’ nature of the email or call. In reality you are column fodder for the organisation engaging the consultancy to find them a candidate.

This led me to ask myself, what my career means to me? I’ve been in work for 24 years since I left school at 16. Changed careers once and made redundant once. I’m a qualified engineer, a certified project manager and have been in my time a software engineer and systems architect and worked within a council’s environment department managing the closure of public byways and footpaths during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. I’ve not really had a plan for my career. I’m an opportunist. I look at opportunities as and when the arise and make a choice on the facts as they are presented to me.

The spamming of my mailbox has made me think, as I reach middle age, should I take more care over my career path? I’ve made a pretty good show of it so far climbing the ladder of seniority early on in my career through long hours, hard work and making opportunistic moves into software engineering in the early pioneering days of IT in the 1990s with a global systems integrator and consulting firm. Moving to a start-up in 1999 helped me see the fun side of life, working with a bright bunch of guys who had no idea on how to run a business. This gave me the insight into operational modelling and data gathering to run a commercial venture, or I should say, how not to do it. Moving into my next venture in 2001, I took a short term contract with a public body and wow, was I in for a shock. Trust me, the stereotypical view of public bodies is right. Unionised, inefficient and bloated. No wonder my taxes are so high. My final career move in 2001, back into IT consultancy has seen me stay with my current employer the longest in my 24 year history or work.

The early days were classified by the can-do attitude and nonchalant bravado of the young company. An air of Dot Com pervaded the office. People at the top of their game working with entrepreneurial sales and management drove the company on from zero revenue to create a billion dollar global company within 10 years. By anyone standards that’s an amazing achievement. I’ve made many good choices and a few bad ones during my tenure and now as one of the senior members of the team I find myself banging on the glass ceiling. Which brings me back to the title of this blog entry. What does a career mean to you?

I’ve been analysing my options and my current position within life. I’ve been reviewing what I want out of my career and what I want out of life. Call it a midlife crisis. Call it an awakening. Call it what you will. I’m now looking at the second half of my life and wondering what I want out of it. I’ve set a few criteria to paper in order of preference:

Personal Life – I have a wonderful partner who is open, inquisitive, and fun loving. I intend to make the most of my time with her. I have also developed a of love country sports. The sound of guns popping across a grouse moor or over a cover crop of sweet corn is a joyous occasion. I have made it a commitment to make more of the countryside. More shooting, fishing and walking.
Relationships – I love cooking and love making dishes for others. Hospitality and me go hand-in-hand. I have made it commitment to socialise with my friends more at home and abroad.
Career – It’s now all about making time to do the things I love. To set me up for retirement in a country cottage on a shooting estate with a river running at the bottom of the valley. To make sure I have enough in the bank and retirement fund to ensure that I can live without wants into my dotage.

So what does a career mean to me? It’s a means to an ends to satisfy my own wants. It means delivering on your commitments to the organisation to ensure that not only do you satisfy your employers but that you satisfy your own self worth. This self worth drives the ability to improve your personal life and your relationships. It also gives you the ability to generate the income which you require to chase your dreams, in my case the cottage on the shooting estate with the river at the bottom of the valley. Thatch roofed with a path down to my own trout stream for a little game fishing. That’s what a career means to me.

Taming the data avalanche

2011-06-23T09:56:00.001+01:00

Avanade had some recent press supporting Ferranti in building out a Microsoft Dynamics AX solution. My colleague, Daryn Edgar explains why Avanade and AX were the perfect solution for Ferranti. This article was first published in the Sunday Telegraph in the UK on Sunday 19th June, 2011.

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Ferranti and Avanade are working in partnership to bring a pioneering software system to the UK that will empower smart utilities as they address the challenges of a rapidly transforming market.

Utilities used to be regarded as dull but safe local monopolies. Not anymore. The suppliers of the water and energy without which modern life would be impossible are now exposed to the winds of competition and waves of criticism from fickle customers and angry shareholders.

On top of that, the industry is in the front line of the global response to climate change, having to adapt to complex charging structures to encourage people to use less energy, switch to green energy and even generate their own and sell it back on to the grid.

And it is going to get worse. A wave of new entrants and mergers is putting strains on IT departments presented with the need to re-engineer their software systems on a regular basis.

So it is a critical moment for the reappearance in Britain of one of industry’s great names: Ferranti. Back in the 19th century, Ferranti virtually invented the system of central power stations distributing AC power. Working In partnership with leading systems integrator Avanade, Ferranti is bringing to the UK its product suite for the utilities – MECOMS.

Ian Campbell, Ferranti’s business development director in Britain, explains: “The MECOMS product makes optimal use of
Microsoft Dynamics AX and covers a wide range of utility business areas such as customer information systems, CRM, Complex Billing, Meter Data Management, Load Forecasting and Enterprise Asset Management with a strong focus on lowering cost to serve.”

Avanade – a joint venture between consultancy Accenture and Microsoft – is the perfect partner. “The strong relationship with Microsoft combined with the in depth experience of Avanade and the strength of a product that has been proven in liberalised markets across Europe makes this a very appealing proposition for any utility,” Campbell says.

“MECOMS streamlines business processes such as meter-to-cash to combine high efficiency with first-class customer service. This flexibility to adapt to changing business needs is also reflected in local blueprints which enable MECOMS to handle complex aspects of the UK market such as market interaction, which deals with meter readings, changes of supplier, changes of tenancy and so on by exchanging messages across an industry network of consisting of many hundreds of participants.”

MECOMS is particularly suited to meeting the challenge of the Government’s smart metering programme which mandates the roll out of 53m smart meters to 27m premises, each producing an avalanche of data.

Daryn Edgar, senior director, Dynamics AX at Avanade believes the combination of MECOMS and Dynamics AX offers something new to the utilities market. “Avanade has a deep technical expertise across the entire range of Microsoft technologies combined with a services approach, harnessing expertise from consultants round the globe,” she says. “MECOMS and Dynamics AX form a platform that ties the front and back offices together and streamlines operations.”

One of the strengths of MECOMS is its close integration with the world’s most widely used and best-understood software, Edgar adds.
“It sits on the Microsoft technology stack so it is relatively low cost and easy to use. Case studies show that staff in call centres can be on stream in a couple of days instead of weeks Don’t get buried in data or months.”

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Avanade,Dynamics AX,Daily Telegraph,Ferranti,Technology

Twitter Analysis. What’s My Impact?

2011-06-01T17:40:00.001+01:00

One of the things I am really interested in is how to make use of the data that his being made available to organisations out there embarking on a social software journey. To that end I have often had to ask myself the million dollar question ‘so what’ when any new visualization software comes along offering yet another view on the data from Twitter/Facebook/FourSquare and so on. There seems to be so many software houses and lone wolf developers taking advantage of the API’s to generate data visualizations on hash tags or @names. The big question on their minds should be the million dollar question.

One of the better representations of Twitter information is xefer from which I’ve taken the image above. Basically it takes your user name or #hashtag and queries the stored data which Twitter has to build out a data visualization. The technicalities behind this are not as complex as you may have first thought. xefer has used Yahoo Pipes which is a high level auto code generator based upon a drag-and-drop style design surface. The pipe generator allows you to select a source, link it to a series of computational modules before pushing the resulting data out to a desired API, in the above case, the Google Charts API.

So what does the chart show? Well basically it’s my tweet history over a defined period showing when I’m most active and my reach across my Twitter network. The bigger the bubble, the more tweets I made and the more retweets and replies I received. The chart is organised into a matrix of information with day and time as the Y and X axis. It’s easy to read and provides me with personal data which can be interpreted to say that I tween more in the morning as I get up and later in the afternoon as I ramp down.

Now the real power of this would be if you could collect and analyse data using pipes and data visualization techniques to show sentiments across the blogosphere and or twitter universe to show how your marketing campaign may be running or how relevant your personal profile may be if your a celebrity of note. It could be quite powerful stuff. There are of course pay-per-use SaaS models from providers such as trendrr but these come with a fee.

The world of data consumption is out there, grab it by the neck and give it a shake.

Technorati Tags: Technology,Social Software,Data Visualization,Google,Yahoo,Trendrr,Twitter,Google Charts

Crowd Sourcing and Social Good

2011-05-27T14:04:00.001+01:00

I read this article on Mashable this morning and it made me stop and think. Many organisations have a Corporate Social Responsibility programme often referred to as CSR. It generally centres around the CSR team selecting a preferred charity or local Non Profit Organisation (NPO) and either making a cash donation or through supporting the employees by donating time to help out with the charity or NPO.

Now I love the thought of crowd sourcing solutions to peoples problems, but I have to admit my first reaction to seeing this news item was that it is going to be full of duplicitous people looking to freeload of generous individuals who are looking to genuinely relieve some suffering out there. To some degree I was right. Judging by the requests for money from some people you could assume they were freeloading. However, on closer inspection you notice that the stories all have a pattern. The individuals in question all seem to have had a tragedy within their lives making them down on their luck or causing them to develop a mental illness.

This alone makes you realize that you are in a unique position to help others less fortunate than yourself. By providing a small amount of charitable time/money/advice you can help move these people out of their current situation and maybe, just maybe, move them onto a stable path rather than a downward spiral. The fact that Wish Upon a Hero is using a Social Media paradigm to attract and enable donations confirms that Crowd Sourcing can provide actions in a wider social context. All of those people out there who do not understand the power of Twitter, Facebook, Quora and so on, take a look at Wish Upon a Hero and see how you can get involved with Social Media and try and project how you could build upon the concept held within this site and apply it to future uses of Social Media then you will begin to understand the power of this technology.

Technorati Tags: Social Software,Crowd Sourcing,Charity,Corporate Social Responsibility,Wish Upon A Hero

East London Tech City–Fact or Fiction?

2011-05-23T14:01:00.001+01:00

So for some time I’ve been looking into the whole East London Tech City hype. I’ve been living part-time in Hackney and commuting into Soho where I work for a technology company and wondering whether it would make more sense for me to look for something in the East End. So when this story broke about David Cameron launching a new initiative to get the Shoreditch area of East London to become the UK equivalent of Silicon Valley I immediately started collecting information and following the stories in the news.

PM announces East London ‘tech city’

On Thursday November 10th 2010, David Cameron announced that “We’re not just going to back the big businesses of today, we’re going to back the big businesses of tomorrow…Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic Park to help make East London one of the world’s great technology centres…we have had dozens of meetings with technology companies and venture capital investors from across the world…[to build] a hub that stretches from Shoreditch and Old Street to the Olympic Park.” Wow I thought, that sounds innovative and forward thinking, bearing in mind that the UK is a service economy which depends on innovation to ensure a consistent and steady growth. So what’s happened in the past 6 months?

East London marked to rival Silicon Valley

The FT reported on January 28th 2011 that “Two years ago, 'Silicon Roundabout’ was nothing more than an in-joke used by those working in the cluster of tech start-ups that had sprung up around London’s Old Street landmark.” Now it is back at the forefront of the news after Cameron’s remarks regarding the formation of the East London Tech City initiative.

However, rejuvenating the East End between Shoreditch and Stratford will be an uphill task. It contains some of the poorest residents of London in Tower Hamlets. The following graph shows the number of working age people claiming benefits comparing 2002 to 2009. (You can click on the link to access the research).

So to encourage companies to invest in this area of London you have to encourage the workforce to move into the area. Although it may sound like a difficult task, technology is after all a high income profession, I predict that it won’t be much of a problem. Shoreditch, Hoxton and Bethnal Green have always attracted the innovators, whether in technology, fashion, music, or art. People who want to be seen want to be seen in the East End. Brick Lane is 15 minute walk from Old Street roundabout. The City is a 10 minute walk and there are now good transport links with the reinstatement of the London Overground network which serves the East End and the main line stations of Stratford and Liverpool Street. Then of course Shoreditch has a number of the coolest bars and hotels in London.

Cisco promises half a billion dollars for Cameron's BIG idea

A further development took place on February 1st, 2011 when Cisco backed Cameron’s venture with a cool half a billion dollars. Cisco has pledged to help the Olympic Park survive the Tsunami of athleticism and to provide additional employment for the area post the Olympics in 2012. Cisco believes that the UK is moving from an "information economy [to a] networked economy." Why has Cisco done this? Altruism, or an overwhelming need to be seen as the white knight riding in to slaughter the big white elephant which many believe the Olympic Park will become post 2012? No of course not. With the investment into the East End Tech City concept they see a ready made companies who will all required networks, VOIP and other such business tools to help them expand and grow. Mi casa es tu casa, just make sure you come to me for the wiring.

Whatever you may think, the East End Tech City is becoming reality. On May 9th, 2011 the CBR reported that Kevin Eyres, the former MD of LinkedIn in Europe has accepted the position of Mentor for the formation and growth of the East End Tech City concept. He’s quoted by the CBR website as saying "We have a real opportunity to help make Tech City the digital capital of Europe. The basic assets are already in place and the momentum is growing. Now we need to foster this in every way we can to ensure it reaches its full potential. One of the main ways to do this is through delivering and developing talent". So it seems that the Government is keen to get this off the ground and obtain support from some of the tech industry giants. To that end, Google, Facebook, Vodafone and Intel have all registered interest in the concept and what David Cameron’s government can provide. It is yet to be seen if this concept will become more than a sketch on a napkin at the terrace bar in Westminster Palace but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I quite like the idea of developing cool software products during the day and then dropping by Bar Kick for a game of table football and a beer in the evening.

Technorati Tags: East End Tech City,Shoreditch,Technology,Cisco,Facebook,Kevin Eyres

Review Your Social Software Power With Klout

2011-05-17T12:39:00.001+01:00

So I’ve been using social software for a number of years now and I like the way it has become part of my social life, work life and the way it integrates smoothly into my general life. I’m not concerned about having my information out there in the ether being consumed by other applications or being viewed by anonymous lurkers.

As such I’ve often wondered what my profile is on the web and whether my musings influence others either in the way they reference my posts or in the case of Facebook and Twitter, ‘Like’ my posts or ‘re-tweet’ my tweets. What I found is a beta piece of social software called Klout. This software mines Twitter and looks at the way in which your tweets are amplified (re-tweeted), referenced and responded to.

It generates a wealth of information regarding your usage of Twitter and then generates a set of reports and diagrams which show how much influence you have in the Twittersphere. Below is my current positioning on the Klout Quadrant and shows where I’m positioned. I’m looking to become more influential in my posts and trying to get my reputation enhanced.

I’m currently trying to assess what this actually means for me but at least I can see that I’m currently a casual user of Twitter who listens more than participate. I’m focussed in the topics I post and respond to and as such at least give out a consistent message around what I do and want to say. That said, I do need to move up the Participation scale somewhat.

Technorati Tags: Klout,Social Software,Technology,Twitter

Robotics and Animatronics

2011-05-11T10:44:00.001+01:00

I found this link through Feedly. This is one of the best animatronic/robotics developer I have ever seen. Although these creatures contain no real processing power the movement of the creatures is life like and very, very disturbing in some cases.

Technorati Tags: Animatronic,Robot,Robots,Technology,Feedly,Honda,ASIMO

Can you imagine the overall effect of adding this animatronic capability with the processing and learning capabilities of the Honda robotics team?

Microsoft Acquires Skype

2011-05-10T16:28:00.001+01:00

So this is an interesting turn of events. Microsoft today announced that they had acquired Skype to take advantage of the customer base and the video technology that powers the Skype Brand. In addition they are looking to provide the tools and services via their Windows7 products.

Below is a screen shot of the proposition being presented by Steve Ballmer regarding the Acquisition.

I look forward to seeing what Microsoft will do with the technology with regards to linking up the xbox360 platform, Microsoft Lync and end carrier providers such as AT&T or Vodafone.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Skype,Acquisition,Technology,VoIP,Windows7,xbox

Line Up Of Planets Throughout May 2011

2011-05-04T16:56:00.001+01:00

There are great views of the moon and planets lining up this month just before dawn. Between the 7th and 19th May Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury line up to form a number of great opportunities for some great astrophotography. Here’s more about it from NASA

NASA JPL May Sky Notes

Technorati Tags: Space,NASA,Science,Planets,Astronomy

YouTube - Google Buzz Launch Event

2010-02-10T12:59:00.000Z

YouTube - Google Buzz Launch Event

This is a link to the Google Buzz launch presentation. I'm still wondering how this fits into the overall strategy of Google with their Apps, Wave, Gmail, Search etc. Once I've formed an opinion I'll share my thoughts.

Fast and Microsoft SharePoint 2010

2010-01-29T14:25:00.001Z

Over the last few months, many of you have been busy installing beta versions of SharePoint 2010 and scanning the internet for information hidden in blogs regarding the search functionality being shipped with the product. There was a whole debate just before Christmas around whether or not SharePoint 2010 would be shipped with the FAST Enterprise Search Engine (ESP) as a core element of the install. Well the good news is, yes it will. Furthermore, I hope to give you an insight into the core Microsoft search platforms and those included within SharePoint 2010.

Core Search Platforms

Microsoft currently provides 5 core search platforms.

1. Microsoft Search Server Express 2010.

2. Microsoft Search Server 2010.

3. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Search.

4. Microsoft SharePoint Search.

5. Fast Search Server for SharePoint 2010.

Each version of Search Server has a purpose and position within an enterprise depending on the Search strategy and size of site(s) you wish Search Server to cover. The following outlines each platform and when it’s best to select that particular Search Server.

Microsoft Search Server Express 2010

This is the baby of the group. It is a free download from Microsoft and like their other Express offerings is a cut down version of the full server application for individual or departmental usage. Search Server Express is to Search Server as Microsoft Access is to SQL Server. It has a single server architecture in as much that you can only deploy to a single server and is configured to crawl a Windows Share Point Services farm as an external data store. You and your customers should only consider using Search Server Express 2010 if you are looking for an entry level departmental solution where a single server model meets the needs of the business.

Microsoft Search Server 2010

This product is the stand alone search server aimed at enterprises who wish to implement a Search Strategy that scales out across multiple servers. Microsoft suggests that this platform be implemented if you require a solution which is required to service a large network and which is required to support multiple crawl servers and query servers. It has a scale performance limit of up to items and a suggested deployment scale of between 2 to 15+ servers although no further information is available on scaling beyond 15 servers at the moment. There is one index partition which includes the full index and a primary copy of the query components and a mirror copy. For redundancy purposes the mirror copy is placed upon the second server, hence the minimum requirements for 2 servers within the deployment architecture. The administration component is on the crawl server which has one crawler associated with the single crawl database.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Search

If your customer does not require enterprise search capabilities but still wishes to provision search within SharePoint 2010 then Foundation Search is the answer. This platform provides built-in search capabilities for SharePoint site collections which have been developed as a single site collection. It is not suitable for crawling external data sources outside the SharePoint domain and hence doesn’t provision a service to crawl external data sources. It is reasonably easy to get this up and running as most of the Search Services can be automatically configured from within SharePoint and the crawler automatically indexes items without setting up scheduled crawls and hence does not require an administrator to control the schedule. The platform can be deployed across a single server in the same manner as Search Server Express. However unlike Search Server Express you can scale out the server to increase the capacity of the search farm. Each Search server uses a separate crawl database for indexing and for performance enhancement for requests. Each server is assigned to crawl a separate content store and as with Search Server it can support up to items per index. To further enhance the search performance Foundation Search databases can be deployed to its own, dedicated instance of SQL Server.

Microsoft Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

The final Search Server available from Microsoft is the Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. This product is the ultimate search platform and includes all the search features and integration capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 and complements this with ability to scale and provision enhanced content processing capabilities. The Fast Search platform should be considered when your customer requires scale and performance. The ability to crawl different types of internal and external content including large scale web based content with the ability to custom tune results for relevancy and navigation. Fast also gives your customer the ability to use customized pipes for content processing such as property extraction from documents, lemmatization, and synonym addition on during content processing and indexation. The deployment architecture for Fast takes advantage of SharePoint 2010 query servers and uses the SharePoint Crawling services to populate its indexes within the Fast farm. The Fast farm can be shared across multiple SharePoint farms and provisions index partitions, content processing and query processing services. There is no ideal topology when implementing a Fast farm and the size of the SharePoint Server 2010 farm will be based upon the overall needs of the SharePoint Server Services such as the volume of data being crawled and the performance requirements of the query servers although Fast does reduce the loading of these servers.

Well I hope this has given you insight into Microsoft’s Search Platform and the different options available. Further information can be found on the Microsoft TechNet site.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Fast,Search,SharePoint 2010

Leonid Meteor Shower

2009-11-16T18:46:00.000Z

So I generally enjoy the yearly firework display which is the Leonid Meteor shower, but this year will prove the exception. A week of poor weather has taken the shine right off my usual ebullient mood for sitting in a deck chair in the garden, raising my eyes skyward, looking like the Michelin Man has been to the fake tan salon in my orange snowboarding jacket. The weather is conspiring against me this year, cloud interspersed with heavy rain showers do not make for an enjoyable evening. So it may be that I keep my fingers crossed for tomorrow that the forecasted low pressure weather system blows through the South East of England and is followed by much calmer, high pressure with excellent seeing properties. Failing that, I think I’ll just read the reports from the International Meteor Organisation and become rather envious of those who submit fantastic records of sightings from all over Northern Europe.

Scotland Lands Dark Sky Award

So West Scotland has some of the Darkest Skies in Europe. Fantastic. I can’t wait for it to be lit up by all the dumb tourists who read about it in the paper and want to come and see what all the fuss is about. Of course, they will come at night in their 4x4s with their extra spotlights to navigate the difficult roads that they have up there in the North, pointing their 6000 candle maglites in the general direction of the astronomers so they can see what they are doing. Hmm, sometimes, not winning an award can be the best thing.

To Dig or Not to Dig

I’m really not getting the best use out of my SkyWatcher 150mm Newtonian. It’s currently in the conservatory waiting for a clear night, where I have enough time to get it out to cool down before 10pm. Lately I’ve not had a decent opportunity so I’ve been using my binoculars instead. The downside is that I’ve missed out on some of the best viewing opportunities of Jupiter and the moon. So, in my mind’s eye I’ve been planning a permanent structure in the middle of the garden to site the scope. I’m thinking of digging out a foundation and laying concrete to site a pedestal for the scope so it can be permanently sited in the Garden. I just have to find the right pedestal and a set of plans for the footings and mountings for the damn thing. Any ideas?

Technorati Tags: Leonids,Meteor,Telescope,Dark Sky Award,Scotland

Google Technology – Don’t You Just Love It?

2009-11-11T13:12:00.001Z

So here I am sitting in the office waiting for a backup on my machine to complete. To cut a long story short, somewhere between shutting down the PC and restarting it at a customer site this morning it bricked. So having travelled back from my customer I’m sat at my desk. Backing up my 30 gigs of data, so I can re-image the damn thing with the latest Beta image (Win7) from our IT support group. Anyway, while I’m doing this I’m checking out Google – the Google car passed me this morning; I should have mooned it or something – when I think, how can I think about using its technology for my advantage?

iGoogle

First of all I use iGoogle all the time. I love the way I can position different gadgets on the page. Currently I have the following:

Google Latitude: Basically Google maps which tracks your ‘friends’ via their Latitude enabled mobile devices. You install Latitude on your smart phone and give it permission to report your location based upon cell resection. Excellent for seeing if your mates are near. The real power is if you do this for your kids. You can make sure they are not straying too far from where they should be.
Google Mail: Well what’s not to like about Google Mail? Searchable mail, folders, sharing, favourites, all the time saving functionality within an easy to use format.
Weather: I have my favourite locations set up which first thing in the morning allows me to get dressed according to the weather in my destinations location. Handy if you’re a long distance commuter like me. 50 miles can make a huge difference in weather conditions especially when you factor in London’s microclimate.
News feeds: I currently have the following news feeds set up;
1. BBC UK News
2. Daily Telegraph UK News
3. The Times UK News
4. New Scientist Headlines

Google Wave

So with this set up, how do I make the most of the technology? Well, having gadgets on the desktop allows me to see everything I need to know in the morning. Once at work, I collaborate with friends on social media technology using Google Wave.

Google Wave is ingenious and I love the way that you can organise stuff, like social gatherings, holidays, project management all sorts of stuff. It seems to be limited by your imagination only.

Google Docs

Google Docs allows me to write documents and keep them in the cloud. That means that I can access them from any machine in any location as long as I have an internet connection. I use Starbucks a lot for coffee and relaxation, I always have my Samsung NC310 with me and being a Starbucks Loyalty Card holder means I have free Wi-Fi access via BT OpenZone.

So writing documentation on the go is no trouble. Saving it to a location which I can share with others is also no trouble. Easy to use and easy to share, this makes Google Docs a must have application if you are a light traveller like me.

Google Docs provide all the usual business applications such as a word processor, presentation app, Spreadsheet app and a forms generator. All handy little apps to help you run your business on a zero application footprint.

Picasa Photo Management

My final application which I use a lot of is Picasa. As I mentioned earlier I love to travel and I don’t travel without my beloved Sony Alpha 100 camera.

This is a great way to store and share your photographs. You can even embed your photos into your blogger page from here like so:

That’s a nice picture of the modern architecture at Valencia, Spain. Oh and this gives me another opportunity to show off Google maps. Here’s a map of where this photograph was taken:

View Larger Map

The green arrow is where I took the photo from. Well it looks like my backup has completed. So I’ll sign off from writing this update.

Cheers,

Kevin.

Technorati Tags: Google,Technology,Google Wave,Picasa,Google Docs,Documents

2009-10-10T13:54:00.002+01:00

So here I am sat at home looking at www.expansys.com wondering whether the 3GS unlocked iPhone is worth the ~£950 as advertised. I'd love an iPhone just because it looks sexy, looks easy to use, has a wonderful number of applications which I would use all the time, but nearly a grand is a large amount of money to spend on a device.

Ho hum. I expect I'll wait to see if my company get the iPhone on its Vodafone contract.

The New Samsung NC310

2009-07-17T13:43:00.001+01:00

So as part of my company’s benefits scheme, they provide us with a gadget allowance so we can keep at the forefront of technology. So wondering what I could spend my final tranche of $$$ I was thinking hard on what I could purchase. Then I saw one of these bad boys on the London Underground. Bought a sleek looking black one from Amazon and it arrived today. Work has gone out the window as I’ve been setting this up all day long <snigger> don’t tell the boss though, I’ve labelled it as technology research!

So first impressions, are good. It comes in a small form factor which is small enough for ladies to put them in their handbags and us rufty tufty men to put them in out manbags. The look is stylish although it does have some of the largest branding I’ve ever seen on a netbook or laptop; “SAMSUNG” embossed across the cover in 20mm high lettering. Opening up the little beauty I find a full keyboard although again rather small to cope with the small form factor and a 1060 x 600 screen. Large enough to view a decent real estate when browsing the web, but I would recommend hitting the F11 key in IE8 when browsing to maximise the screen.

Pre-installed software includes Windows XP – what no Vista? McAffee security and a Samsung utility for ensuring that you have a complete restore point (doesn’t windows do that anyway?) I’ve just downloaded all my favourites from the web including Tweetdeck, Live Mesh, and Live Writer. Next will be Office 2007 when I get home and pop the install media onto a USB memory device.

So far so good. I’ll blog in a few more days once I’ve used it in a more real world situation and let you know how I’m getting on with it.

Technorati Tags: Samsung,NC310,Netbook

crunchcam

2009-05-13T09:15:00.001+01:00

Is this the most ridiculous use of photons known to man? Watching people blogging in an office in the USA?

Technorati Tags: Blogging

crunchcam

HTC - Products - HTC Touch Diamond2 - Overview

2009-04-16T14:08:00.001+01:00

Just ordered myself one of these beauties to replace my ageing HTC Touch Pro which now seems bulky and clunky. There’s a great set of videos on using the Microsoft Mobile 6.1 op system on youtube and some nice product videos from HTC.

del.icio.us Tags: HTC,Touch,Diamond 2,Windows Mobile,youtube

HTC - Products - HTC Touch Diamond2 - Overview

Perseid Meteor Shower

2008-08-06T15:27:00.001+01:00

The Perseids are building up to their zenith and I'm rather exciting. Apart from the Leonids later in the year these are the best meteors to view as an amateur. Usually bright with a good trail and usually lots of them. No waiting around for half an hour to catch the odd glimpse of a streak that if you blink you may miss it!

Checking the weather in my locality it looks as though I'm going to miss the build up this year. www.metcheck.co.uk has a good astronomy weather page and the predictions for the next few days look rather bleak. 100% cloud cover for today, 74% for tomorrow and 85% for Friday. Not particularly conducive for meteor shower observing. It looks as though I won't be submitting any details to the BAA or IMO this year.

So to the history of the Perseids. Located in the constellation perseus, the meteor shower have a mean zenith hourly rate (ZHR) of approximately 100. They are visible from July 17th until August 24th in 2008. Historically the velocity of the shower has been estimated at 59 km/s. The radiant for the shower is given as alpha = 046 degrees; delta = +58 degrees.

Commonly associated with the tail of comet Swift-Tuttle they occur due to the Earth's orbit slicing a path through the tail of the comet and hence encountering debris from the tail. Most of the meteors that you see from the Perseids are sand sized grains entering the upper atmosphere and igniting from atmospheric friction and never reach the earth's surface. Good thing really.

If you live in a Northern Hemisphere, good luck on your observations!

Technorati Tags: Astronomy,Meteor,Perseids

Trying Mobile Blogging For The First Time

2008-05-30T15:16:00.002+01:00

This is a combination blog really. Mixing technology and music together. Those of you who know me will know that I'm a big Iron Maiden fan. So it was exciting to receive the Christmas card through the post last year.

I know I'm six months late with this but it was technology that prompted me to blog the card. I'm testing the mobile blogging functionality of Blogger and thought that since my blog is about music, space and technology, I'd give it a go.

Technorati Tags: Music,Technology,Mobile,Blogging,Iron Maiden,Heavy Metal

Robo-Monkeys Use Brain Power To Grab A Bite To Eat

2008-05-30T12:34:00.001+01:00

Scientists have successfully enabled a robotic arm to be controlled by thought process alone. The New Scientist magazine reports on a scientific breakthrough whereby a monkey can feed itself by thinking of moving the robotic arm towards its mouth. Previously this type of experiment concentrated on applying the brains neuron discharge to cause a set of muscles to contract in a specific way. This in turn powers a set of microprocessors which act as the interface to the robotic arm and produces a set of movements. This new method however uses the neuron discharge to directly control the microprocessors.

It is hoped that this type of technology can be used to advance bio-mechanics. Imagine the use for this technology. Medically, people who have been paralysed may be able to walk again with the use of actuators implanted within their legs. Or people who have lost limbs may be able to have a prosthetic limb which functions in exactly the same way as the original limb would work.

The technology used in this experiment is far in advance of previous attempts to interface directly with the brain. A set of electrodes, the width of a human hair have been inserted into the area of the brain know as the motor cortex. This area is responsible for controlling all motor function within the body. Usually millions of neurons fire to produce complex motor function within the body.

Monkey Controls Robotic Arm By Thought

Based upon this research the team at the University of Pittsburgh are getting human test subjects ready. Previously this type of research has concentrated on animal experiments and within a virtual environment. However the technology is perceived to be significantly advanced to start human testing.

"It's impressive how naturally the animal interacts with the robot," says John Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal. "It's a natural extension of their own body because they control it so easily just by thinking." In tests undertaken by Pittsburgh University, A monkey was able to control the arm to reach for a marshmallow and guide it to its mouth successfully with one monkey reaching a success rate of 61%. The University is hoping to advance this technology further over the coming years but The New Scientist have issued a warning stating that "treatments for people with disabilities are still years away. Schwarz's robotic arm requires computers, bulky equipment and a technician, and brain-implanted electrodes may not last a lifetime. And ideally, a prosthetic would send tactile sensations back to the brain – a challenge scientists are only beginning to tackle."

For more on Robotics visit The New Scientists special report.

Technorati Tags: Robots,Biomechanics,University of Pittsburgh,Neuroscience

Mars Probe Set For Touchdown

2008-05-15T11:47:00.001+01:00

Previously I've blogged about NASA's Phoenix project during its launch and journey through space. On the 25th May Phoenix will start its entry into Mars' atmosphere and take the dangerous 20 minutes to the surface. 14 minutes prior to landing, Phoenix will enter the upper atmosphere at 20,000 kph, slowing through atmospheric friction to a more sedate speed allowing the deployment of parachutes to slow the craft further. At a speed of 400 kph, the heat shield will be jettisoned and the undercarriage will be deployed. The craft will then slow further to a speed of approximately 200 kph. At this speed and only a few seconds from impact at 1 km above the surface, the parachutes will be jettisoned and the craft will be slowed using small thrusters to slow its decent and maintain its attitude.

It is hoped that the ground designated for landing will not be strewn with large stones which may impact on the underside of the probe and pierce through the outer protective shell damaging the equipment inside. That said, the NASA engineers should have done their homework to ensure that this area is relatively safe.

Here the engineers talk about the project and the decent into the atmosphere.

And part two...

I'm certainly looking forward to the next instalment....

Technorati Tags: Mars,Space,NASA,Phoenix

Science cuts 'hit UK reputation'

2008-04-30T17:26:00.001+01:00

Finally it seems that someone has seen sense and spoken out about the outrageous depletion of funds to the UK astronomy and science community. This BBC news article says it all. A committee of MP's usually the ones undertaking the cuts, have announced that the UK has been left looking 'unreliable' and 'incompetent' within the scientific community after the cuts in spending and then the knee-jerk reaction of reapplying funding to several projects as I reported here and here previously on this blog.

The MPs on the Commons innovation, universities, science and skills committee have directly criticized the head of the STFC, Keith Mason, stating that "We are at a loss to understand how Professor Mason could think that secretive reviews would have anything other than a divisive effect on the community and undermine confidence in any of his future decisions." This was in reference to the peer review process in which each project requiring funding was reviewed to inform the decision to allocate funding. It has emerged that a number of reviews were instigated but the results never published to the wider scientific population.

The committee concluded that the process possesses "weaknesses" and that it was "inadequate" and that "We are at a loss to understand how Professor Mason could think that secretive reviews would have anything other than a divisive effect on the community and undermine confidence in any of his future decisions." These comments have been interpreted as a slight on professor Mason's ability leading to the MPs issuing a thinly veiled statement asking for professor Mason's resignation; "This raises serious questions about the role and performance of the chief executive, especially his ability to retain the confidence of the scientific community as well as to carry through the necessary changes". Professor Mason has replied stating that "A number of issues highlighted by the report have already been recognised by STFC, and I have taken decisive actions to address them over the past few months".

Time will tell whether the STFC will change its mind or funding policy but for now, even with all its bluster, the committee still stands behind the cut in funding with John Denham, the secretary of state at the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills commenting that "There is a recognition that some things could have been done differently and that the programme could have been communicated differently to the scientific community. I think the issue now is actually moving on from that and the STFC showing over the next couple of months it has the ability to address the issues raised in the report".

Microsoft Introduces the World Wide Telescope Application

2008-03-05T15:28:00.001Z

A colleague of mine recently attended the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference (TED) over the last weekend. On his return, excited by what he had seen he emailed me a link to the Microsoft World Wide Telescope programme run out of the MS Research Labs in San Francisco and Redmond. The application looks to me to be a catch up with Google Sky, taking hi-res images from ground based and space based telescopes and stitching them together to form a geographic whole.

The advertising for the application shows a pretty cool run through of the application and the zoom and slew looks pretty slick, although this could be down to the size of machine that is running the application as apposed to the application itself. From a first view of functionality it seems well established. For example, in the Flash movie presentation they comment on building your own routes through the stars and being able to send this to friends.

The above video is the TED presentation by Roy Gould of Harvard Centre for Astrophysics and Curtis Wong of Microsoft. The application itself is an extension of the work originally begun by one Jim Gray at Microsoft on the SkyServer application. A copy of the original research paper can be found here.

All-in-all it looks like a good competitor to Google although I have yet to experience the application on my machine. I'm waiting for it with excitement though.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy,Astrophysics,Microsoft,Worldwide Telescope,SkyServer,Jim Gray,Roy Gould,Curtis Wong,TED,Technology Entertainment and Design Conference

Astronomers Given Gemini Reprieve

2008-02-15T12:18:00.001Z

After I reported on the demise of funding in the UK for astronomy and physics the BBC has run a story regarding the reprieve of the Gemini telescope project. The STFC has decided that it will continue with its £4 million p.a. investment in the project. The shift comes as a surprise to the UK astronomy community as the STFC has changed its position from a complete withdrawal to a reduced investment approach.

The Gemini partnership is quoted as saying "The UK has committed to continue their operations payments during 2008, and wishes to open negotiations with the executive agency and the board to explore their options for continued participation in the Gemini Observatory." As such the Gemini partnership is in the process of reinstating the time slots allocated to the UK for use of the Gemini telescope through out 2008 to aid in the continuation of the projects funded by the STFC. These include:

When did the first stars and galaxies form?
How do stars and planets form?

Many astronomers in the UK have welcomed this re-engagement with the Gemini partners rather cautiously. They are yet to be persuaded that the STFC will commit to the programme on a long term basis.

The UK has approximately a 23% share in Gemini. U.K. astronomers through the PATT committee are allocated ~70 nights per telescope per year. The UK ATC, Durham University, UCL and Hertfordshire University have played a crucial role in the design and build of many of the facility-class instruments operational at Gemini including GMOS, Michelle, GNIRS, bHROS and GPOL. The UK is also involved in the design and feasibility studies for the proposed second generation instruments.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy,Gemini Telescope,STFC

Street Lights Off, Stars Come Back, Public Concerned About Crime

2008-02-13T14:59:00.001Z

The Daily Telegraph in the UK has run this story regarding experiments by local councils in turning off street lighting to help save money. Now I personally view this as good thing. The British Amateur Astronomical Association currently campaigns on behalf of all UK astronomers to save us from the orange glow of street lighting. Where I live in Chelmsford, Essex, the council have started to introduce town centre lighting that reduces light pollution through cowling of the light and better direction down onto the street.

This is a reasonable start however, the lighting experiments have not met with complete excitement. Members of the public are unsure of the impact that this will have on local crime in the areas where the lights are being switched off between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m. in the morning. Letters have already started to come into the local newspapers regarding the darkness as a shroud for criminals and road users. I say, first, it has been proved in studies undertaken by the BAAA that lights help criminals, not darkness, as it allows them to see better when they are breaking into houses. Secondly, road users have lights, turn them on and use them!

Hopefully the results of the test in Maldon in Essex will spur the council on to switching off all the major conurbations' lights between these hours so I can actually see stars fainter than magnitude 3 or 4. I still haven't seen a deep sky object from my back garden.

Technorati Tags: Light Pollution,Astronomy,Daily Telegraph,Essex,Chelmsford

Cloudy Skies Bring Woe to the UK

2008-01-22T14:05:00.001Z

What is it about living in the UK that brings both joy and sadness in equal amounts for an amateur astronomer. It's been several weeks since I have had my full blown Newtonian out of hiding and into the cold night air. Heavy rain, grey cumulus clouds and strong winds have all taken their toll. My quest to see the Tuttle comet 8P was shortened due to weather which really saddens me. I will now have to wait for the return visit. I am reminded of Patrick Moore who famously recorded an episode of the sky at night in a garden enclosing a 20" telescope. The best laid plans came to naught when cloud covered over the moon which was the subject for the programme. "We may have a break....Yes I can see it...No it's gone again" Patrick can be heard saying. His technician then complained about the speed in which he could reposition the 20" scope.

Ho hum, lets hope for some better weather over the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy,Weather,UK

Comet 8P/Tuttle Comes Into View

2008-01-02T16:28:00.001Z

For those of you interested in comets, now is your chance to see a comet that is visible with binoculars given clear skies and a dark site. Comet 8P/Tuttle has returned to our night skies and is a great opportunity to see a stellar body other than planets and meteors. So let's start off with a little science about comets.

According to the World Book at NASA, comets are 'an icy body that releases gas or dust. Most of the comets that can be seen from Earth travel around the sun in long, oval orbits. A comet consists of a solid nucleus (core) surrounded by a cloudy atmosphere called the coma and one or two tails'.

The origin of short-term comets is believed to be the Kuiper belt situated beyond Neptune - remember that Pluto has been down graded to a dwarf planet which is part of the Kuiper belt. Comets are classed as small bodies within our solar system and are given the name Kuiper belt objects or KBOs. Comet 8P/Tuttle fits into a group of KBOs called 'periodic comets' or 'short-periodic comets'.

Astronomers believe that short-period comets are pulled out of the Kuiper belt due to the gravitational forces exerted on them by the planets and the sun. These objects then gradually create an elliptical orbit through our solar system taking less then 200 years to complete one orbit. It is this orbital pattern that causes comets to leave a tail behind them. As a surface is rotated towards the energy given out by the sun, the surface of the comet begins to melt, exuding gases and dust particles that reflect the visual light waves. Experiments have shown that the gases ejected from comets include, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. They also eject organic compounds such as methanol, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, ethanol and ethane. It is also theorised that more complex molecular structures such as hydrocarbons and amino acids may also be in existence which make comets a likely origin for life on many planets through comet impacts.

Comet 8P/Tuttle was first discovered and catalogued by Pierre Mechain of France in 1786 however it was the Tuttle brother, Horace Parnell Tuttle, who gave it a name when he observed the comet in January of 1858. The comet is the father of the Ursid meteor shower due to enter the earth's atmosphere between the 1st and 6th of January and is currently observable making its way through Andromeda heading east-south-east passing Triangulum. During much of the first half of January you should be able to spot the comet heading past M33 and down towards the equator where it will come into view for the southern hemisphere observers.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy,Comets,8P/Tuttle,Space

UK pulls out of key physics and astronomy projects

2007-12-15T11:12:00.001Z

I can only apologise to my readership, and one is assuming that they are out there somewhere in the ether, that I have not posted any new news on this blog in what seems like eons. Suffice to say that a change in hardware, and the re-development of the applications that I use to develop my blog entries has taken its toll on my ability to note down my thoughts. However, a full service is resuming so here is the next instalment of the ongoing Electric Circus Blog.

The UK government has yet again cut funding for space exploration and science. The Science and Technology Facilities Council has cut funding to the following projects:

The twin 8 metre Gemini telescope and its search for extra solar planets.
The Isaac Newton telescope and its search for extra solar planets.
The International Linear Collider particle accelerator development.
High Energy gamma-ray astronomy regarding solar emissions and their effects on the earth.

The main reason for cutting these projects budgets is the overspend on the physical buildings associated with the Diamond Light Source project in Didcot. This project is designed to use high energy particles, focused on samples of material, to produce test results on the composition of those materials and the effects that the particles are having on the samples. Although I agree in part that the UK is not sufficiently rich enough to support manned space flight, I do feel that we are concentrating too much on supply of aerospace components and not enough on practical research. The STFC has stated that the cost of running the new facility at Didcot has meant a cut in funding for other projects by approximately £80 million. These cuts will directly affect more theoretical research through a 25% reduction in grants to physicists and astronomers over the next year. According to the New Scientist Magazine, these cuts "come at a time when the UK is trying to encourage more young people to pursue careers in the physical sciences". ergo, if there are additional cuts to funding research, then the brightest pupils will not apply for research posts in the UK and will as per the last 50 years continue the brain drain into continental Europe and the USA. It is imperative that the UK builds a strong pool of highly educated astronomers, physicists, chemists, molecular Biologists and engineers. This will provide the UK with the ability to extend our reach into space and also contribute to the economy through the results of spin off from the research projects that the UK is so good at exploiting.

The president of the Royal Astronomical Society was quoted as saying "The Government needs to recognise that astrophysics, space science and solar system science make a direct contribution to the UK economy through spin-off and knowledge transfer on time-scales which can be surprisingly short. The students and postgraduates that we train are highly skilled and sought after by industry and the financial sector. Astrophysics and particle physics are major attractors of students, including international students, into university physics courses. For example, my Physics Department at Imperial College receives 40% of its research funding from astrophysics, space science and particle physics and 90% of our students said that these fields were the reason they chose to study physics. Astronomy and space also play an important role in attracting school-children towards science".

I couldn't agree more. The full report is available here.

Technorati Tags: Space,Astronomy,STFC,RAS,Royal Astronomical Society,Research,Physics

Venus Express To Tackle Climate Change

2007-11-29T13:11:00.001Z

The BBC ran a story today regarding the Venus Express programme, sister to the Mars Express currently in orbit around the Red Planet. ESA is to use its Venus Express satellite to observe the atmosphere around Venus and use the results to look at how our own atmosphere may be affected by the green house gasses.

Venus as you will know has run through an extreme version of climate change reported as "runaway greenhouse warming". Being closer to the sun than the earth at 108 942 109 km at aphelion it is subject to a higher degree of solar heating. It is proposed that due to the lack of tectonic plates, Venus can not generate its own magnetic field, which has lead to the overheating from the sun's solar radiation. This is turn has lead to the greenhouse gas effect observed on Venus. The atmosphere is nearly all CO2 at 96.5% with a small amount of N2 at 3.5%. This contrasts with earth's CO2 at 0.038%, O2 at 20.95% and N2 at 78.08%. Surface Pressure also vary with Venus coming in at a heavy 9.3mPa and the Earth at 101kPa.

So how can Venus help us understand our own climate change models? Published this week in Nature magazine Professor Fred Taylor, a Venus Express interdisciplinary scientist, University of Oxford, stated “It is really surprising how un-Earth-like Venus is now”. When you compare its stats you realise that once it must have been very similar. Venus has approximately the same mass as the Earth yet it is hotter, where surface temperatures can be over 400°C and the surface pressure is a hundred times that on Earth.

Dmitri Titov, Venus Express science coordinator from the Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research thinks that “Today’s results focus on the different science themes Venus Express is covering...An important first set of results concerns the complex dynamics and structure of Venus’s atmosphere, studied with a whole suite of instruments.” A second set of results concerns both the atmosphere’s composition and its chemistry. Venus Express has taken compositional profiles of the atmosphere around the planet, and unambiguously confirmed the presence of lightning which can have a strong effect on the composition of the atmosphere itself. A third set of results is about the processes by which the atmosphere of Venus is escaping into space. This is driven by the solar wind – a stream of electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. As the solar particles collide with electrically charged particles near Venus, they energise the gases, stripping them forever from the planet.

Professor Taylor, commented that "It is now becoming clear why the climate on Venus is so different to Earth, when the planets themselves are otherwise quite similar. "Our new data make it possible to construct a scenario in which Venus started out like the Earth - possibly including a habitable environment, billions of years ago - and then evolved to the state we see now." This model will be used to assess our own possible future if climate change continues its own upward drive.

Technorati Tags: AStronomy,Observing,Venus,Venus Express,ESA,Climate Change

Earth's Moon is 'cosmic rarity'

2007-11-23T16:59:00.001Z

The moon seems to be taking up an inordinate number of column inches in my blog lately. Well it's been a slow couple of weeks post Comet Holmes and the Kaguya images. So as I was looking out of my office window I spotted the enormity of the the full moon. Then this article from the BBC website popped up on my RSS feeds so I thought I would share it with you.

According to Paul Rincon, a BBC Website science reporter, the moon has been reported within the Astrophysics Journal as being rather special. Based upon research into the amount of dust created when two massive objects collide within the universe undertaken by Nadya Gorlova of the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, it is estimated that 5% to 10% of moons orbiting planetary systems in our universe are developed in this way.

"If there were lots of moons forming, we would have seen dust around lots of stars - but we didn't." states Gorlova. When old stars die and super Novas are created, the blast obliterates many planets and other matter within its influence. This dust can be seen around many nebulae. New stars are formed and this matter is slowly condensed into planets/moons. According to the article, astronomers think that this process takes between 10 and 50 million years. This is the basis for the research that Gorlova undertook. Her team observed star systems that were estimated to be around 30 million years old and using the Spitzer Telescope, looked for the tell tale dust and debris. "We found about two to four objects, but only one fits all the characteristics of a moon collision. The dust is at the right temperature and at the right distance," Dr Gorlova stated.

So next time you are looking up into the sky and bathing in the gentle glow of light reflected from that moon up there, think about how special it is and how lucky we are not only from the point of view of being the only habitable planet with sentient lifeforms in our solar system but also how rare and beautiful our moon is.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy , Observing , Moon

Kaguya beams back HD video or the Earth setting over the Moon.

2007-11-15T10:47:00.001Z

Well, Jaxa and the Kaguya team have posted video of the Earth setting over the Moon's horizon. This video shows a great deal of detail on the surface of the moon.

The video is shown faster than real time but it is a unique perspective on the sunset or moonset that you are used to. The surface of the moon is very sharp and a lot more detailed than I can currently achieve with my 6" Newtonian reflector.

Technorati Tags: Kaguya , Moon , Astronomy , Observing , Earth

Kaguya beams hi-def images of moons surface back to earth.

2007-11-08T13:17:00.001Z

Jaxa's Kaguya moon satellite which I reported on here, has returned two hi-definition film clips taken while in orbit at 110km above the moon's surface. The official Jaxa website has the stunning images and movies of the lunar orbiter traversing the equatorial region and also approaching the North pole of the moon.

The image below is taken from the Jaxa website and shows the approach to the moons northern pole. The level of detail as you can see is high, including the contrast between crater walls and surface objects.

The two large craters in this image are Brianchon and Pascal with Hermite towards the pole. This is a fantastic image and really shows the detail of the surface of the moon. In particular the depth of the craters and the long shadows within the floors of the craters.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy , Lunar , kaguya , Japan , JAXA , Moon

Astronomy's future brightens with new X-ray proposal

2007-11-05T13:08:00.001Z

The New Scientist has run a story regarding the XUES (X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy) X-ray astronomical telescope. The project has been selected to launch in 2018 and is the first new X-ray programme since the launch of the Chandra-X observatory. Professor Turner of Leicester University in the UK is Chair of the XEUS International Steering committee and stated that “XEUS is an X-ray observatory 30-50 times more sensitive than XMM-Newton, which will be placed 1.5 million km from Earth, beyond the Moon, at the second Lagrangian point, a quiet stable location where the instruments can observe the universe undisturbed. Because it is so large, the observatory has two spacecraft. The five-metre diameter X-ray lens is in one, and the instruments in another. The two spacecraft fly together, 35 metres apart, to keep the instruments at the focus of the lens".

XEUS has been selected for study by ESA as part of its Cosmic Vision programme. If the study outcome is successful it will be launched on Ariane 5 from Kourou in 2018. Turner commented "we have been developing the XEUS concept for an advanced X-ray observatory, for many years. This acceptance by ESA is a major step forward for X-ray astronomers all over the world." XEUS will help astronomers find out about the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions of temperature, pressure, and gravity. It will also study the influence of black holes on the formation of galaxies and stars.

Meanwhile, NASA is planning its own next-generation X-ray observatory, called Constellation-X, designed to focus on high-resolution spectroscopy. With 30 times more collecting area than Chandra and detectors about 10 times more efficient, Constellation-X would be about 100 times more sensitive for spectroscopy than XMM-Newton. The original design called for four separate spacecraft that would fly in formation, but rising launch costs recently forced a redesign to a single spacecraft.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy , Observing , Chandra-X , XUES , ESA , NASA , Leceister University , Constellation-X , X-ray

The Great Beyond: New planets’ hidden mystery

2007-11-02T10:10:00.001Z

Today's news is about the identification of three new planets outside of our solar system. A blog by Daniel Cressey at Nature.com identified the new planets as Wasp1, Wasp 4 and Wasp 5. The naming convention struck me as a little odd but reading through the article I found a reference to the Super WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) on Wikipedia. The WASP consist of two wide angled, robotic observatories located at the Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, in the Canary Islands - I've been there, the caldera is fantastic to walk around. Is part of the South African Astronomical Observatory and consists of two telescopes each with an array of eight canon 200mm f1.8 lenses fitted with CCD's to a resolution of 2000x2000 pixels.

The Super WASP telescopes are operated as part of a consortium of eight academic institutions which include the University of Cambridge, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Keele University, the University of Leicester, the Open University, Queen's University Belfast and St. Andrews University. It is hoped that SuperWASP will revolutionize our understanding of planet formation paving the way for future space missions searching for 'Earth'-like worlds. The array and separation of the telescopes allows the observatory to have a field of view of around 500 sq degrees.

In September 2006 the WASP observatory identified Wasp 1b and WASP 2b orbiting around a planet similar in mass to Jupiter. The orbital period of these planets is calculated at less than 2 days and are among the shortest orbital periods ever discovered. On October 31, 2007, the team reported the discovery of three extrasolar planets: WASP-3b, WASP-4b and WASP-5b. The discoveries make the SuperWASP team the first and only one to detect planets in both the northern and southern hemispheres using the transit detection technique. The WASP-4b and WASP-5b planets are the first planets discovered by the WASP project's cameras in South Africa, while WASP-3b is the third planet discovered by the WASP project's cameras in La Palma.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy , Observing , Super Wasp , La Palma

Moon Map Frustration

2007-10-30T15:20:00.001Z

Last night I spent an hour or so at the telescope viewing the moon's terminator area, marveling at the shadows cast and the deep, dark craters. I duly focused my 10mm eye piece through my 2 x Barlow lens. The view was fantastic, good seeing and transparency meant little 'boiling' at the eye piece. I duly sketched the objective and returned in doors to review my work against the Phillip's Moon Map. Now this is where it all went wrong.

I have become confused over the orientation of the image that I sketched through the eye piece to the Moon Map's orientation. I know that the Moon Map is orientated with east oriented to earths equivalent west position. South is still south and north is still north. However, I also know that the image that you see through the eye piece has been reversed through the process of reflection through the secondary mirror.

My sketches are not that bad, no masterpiece I grant you but it's not that difficult to draw some outlines recording the positions of features and then reference this drawing against a map showing the same features. However, I still can't find them. The moon will have shifter its terminator tonight and hence the probability of catching it again will have reduced.

Ho hum such is the lot of amateur astronomers.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy , Lunar , Observing , Telescope

Keilder Water Has New Observatory

2007-10-29T16:46:00.001Z

I picked up this story from the Daily Telegraph Online Newspaper in the UK today. Keilder water, a large reservoir and commercial forestry area has traditionally been an area for outdoor sports and walking following a nationally famous art exhibition trail. However, it's not the art that is exciting, rather the award to Charles Barclay Architects for the design and construction of a public access observatory.

The observatory is located in one of the darkest locations in the UK, check out the dark skies map and see that only mid and west Wales and the highlands and islands have darker skies. From the Keilder Observatory web site: "The winning design has been likened to the 'deck of a ship sailing above the Kielder landscape'; it's planned that eager astronomers will be able to visit the observatory at its rugged hilltop location in the heart of rural Northumberland (North East of England) in late 2006. Kielder has been recognised as one of the best places to view the stars in the United Kingdom due to its pitch-black and pollution-free skies. The development of Kielder 'Observatory' is being funded by the Northumberland Strategic Partnership and the Northern Rock Foundation with support from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) and Arts Council England. Once completed, this unique facility will be used by specialist and amateur astronomers, scientific researchers and as a learning resource for education workshops".

In addition to this cutting edge development, there is also a camera obscura type installation by artist, Chris Drury. This building is made of locally sourced stone and is cone shaped to take the reflected image from an externally facing mirror. The final installation in a same vein is that of artist James Turrell who has also constructed in local stone, a beehive style building that is open to the sky. It focuses your senses on the sky which is framed by the tapering edges of the building.

I'll be in Northumberland in 2008, I'll certainly be visiting these installations.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy , Observing , Kielder Forest , Chris Drury , James Turrell , The Daily Telegraph

Comet Brightens Mysteriously By A Factor Of A Million

2007-10-26T13:55:00.001+01:00

This is the big news of the week. Comet 17/P Holmes, has suddenly brightened by a significant magnitude. This comet, which usually is not visible to the naked eye, was discovered by Edwin Holmes (no relation) in 1892 while he was observing the Andromeda Galaxy. It has an eliptical orbit around our sun and makes a complete orbit once every seven years.

The comet is usually 25 000 times to dim to see with the naked eye, but since the 23rd October 2007, comet 17/P has brightened significantly. To put this into context, according to David Morrison of NASA Astrobiology Institute in Moffett Field, California, "This is equivalent to the planet Saturn suddenly becoming as bright as the Full Moon".

Now in anyone's book this is an exciting event according to the New Scientist magazine, "Comets do sometimes show extreme changes in brightness. They are thought to occur when the Sun's heat vaporises newly exposed ice on the comet, blasting dust off its surface. Sunlight reflecting off the dust increases the comet's brightness."

The comet can be found in the constellation Perseus.

Technorati Tags: Comet, Astronomy, Observing

Giant balloon to loft world's largest solar telescope

2007-10-25T13:58:00.001+01:00

Ever thought about those emissions from our star and wondered how sun spots develop? Well, Michael Knölker, director of the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is thinking about this a lot. So much so, that he has developed an interesting way for us to get out of our own atmosphere to take an ultraviolet view of Sol.

Knölker has developed a high altitude balloon to transport the largest solar, ultraviolet telescope up into the stratosphere at 37 km high.

The Sunrise project, a 1-metre solar UV telescope, will be transported to where our atmosphere has little effect on the Ultraviolet band of the light spectrum. Ultraviolet observations cannot be done from the Earth's surface, since the same UV-absorbing properties that make ozone so beneficial to life also block the light from reaching ground-based telescopes. The telescope would be able to image features on the Sun as small as 30 kilometres across, more than double the resolution of other instruments. That is thought to be the size of the smallest features so far observed on the Sun's surface – bright structures called flux tubes.

"They are key to the evolution of magnetic fields [that can lead to] solar eruptions of magnetised plasma that – when it reaches the Earth – can cause a geomagnetic storm and disrupt satellites," says Knölker. "We are confident that if we can resolve, say 30 kilometres, we will be learning something very substantial [about the flux tubes]." he adds.

Magnetic Flux Tubes are of interest because of their close relation to their much larger cousins: Sun Spots. By modeling MFT's it is hoped that more can be learned about Sun Spots. Sun Spots are much larger and longer lived. They are the single biggest influence on the amount of solar radiation that reaches the earth, and can have tremendous impact on radio communications, and the thickness of the earth's atmosphere. When sun spots are active they cause heating in the upper atmosphere, which in turn causes expansion. Skylab fell to earth prematurely in 1979 due to this phenomenon when an unexpected Sun Spot flared up. The launch of the Hubble telescope was delayed for a year because of Sun Spot activity.

The Sunrise telescope is expected to be ready to make its first scientific observations in mid-2009. Then, organisers hope to take advantage of the 'midnight Sun' to send it on a flight around the Arctic lasting as long as two weeks (though this is dependent on Russia relaxing its current ban on US balloons flying in its airspace).

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Sun, Telescope, Magnetic Flux Tube

BBC NEWS | Magazine | How to build your own Sputnik

2007-10-23T11:54:00.001+01:00

I thought that this article was worth a mention in my blog as the world is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 satellite. The majority of the items required to build this system can be obtained from electronic component stores. If you don't believe me, then check this out:

1	Tomy Baby Monitor - Empire Stores	£44.99
2	Netgear Wireless Router - Maplin	£49.99
3	Mercury Thermometer - Rapid Stores	£1.05
4	4 x 6v Battery - Maplin	£19.96
5	balloon - Maplin	£3.49
6	Back-up Power Supply - Maplin	£3.20
7	Internal Thermostat - Maplin	£4.99
8	Internal Fan - Maplin	£3.96
9	Biscuit Tin and Foil - Sainsbury	£2.99

So there you go, for a modest amount of cash, you too can produce a satellite with the same functionality as the Sputnik 1.

Getting it into space however is a different story altogether. The UK's biggest investment into space flight was through the Black Arrow space programme in the 1950s and 1960s. The pioneering work in the UK was undertaken by the British Aerospace company, Saunders-Roe. Based out of the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of the UK, Saunders-Roe produced flying boats. in 1955 a design for a rocket was put forward to the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE)code named Black Knight. 22 motors were built and test fired between 1955 and 1965 from a station located on the Isle of Wight near the needles. Actual vehicle launch tests took place from Woomera, Australia where the RAE was testing the possibility of the BK being used as the launch and re-entry vehicle of the Blue Streak ballistic missile programme.

BK was superceded in the 1960s by a secondary design named Black Arrow. This vehicle was larger and more powerful capable of carrying greater payloads. The following from Wikipedia shows the launch programme for the Black Arrow bringing the UK into the Space Race. R0 was launched on 28 June 1969 and was destroyed by ground control after an electrical fault led to a loss of guidance control. R1 was launched on 4 March 1970 and was successful, although it carried no third stage payload. R2 was launched on 2 September 1970. The first stage was successful but a leak in the HTP pressurisation system meant the rocket did not have enough velocity to reach orbit, and crashed into the Gulf of Carpentaria with the loss of the X-2 experimental satellite. R3 was launched on 28 October 1971. The launch was completely successful and placed into orbit the Prospero X-3 satellite, making the United Kingdom the sixth nation to place a satellite into orbit.

The cancellation of the Black Arrow project was announced in the House of Commons on 29 July 1971 by the then Minister for Aerospace, Frederick Corfield, although permission was given for the final launch of R3 to take place after this date. The last vehicle, R4, was never launched, and may be seen on display at the Science Museum, London. The decision to cancel the programme was taken on grounds of cost effectiveness; it was decided that using NASA's solid fuel Scout rocket for future launches would offer adequate performance at a lower cost.

Technorati Tags: Space, Rocket, Black Arrow, Black Knight, Sputnik, Space Race, BBC

Jet Propulsion Lab Solar System Simulator And The Phoenix Mission

2007-10-22T10:27:00.001+01:00

While reviewing the Internet for information about the Phoenix Mars Lander I cam across a link to the JPL Solar System Simulator. This is a fantastic tool that allows you to track many objects, from space craft to the planets and moons in our solar system. So I thought, while reporting on the progress of Phoenix I would have a go at plotting the course of Phoenix as at 10:00 UTC on 22d 10m 2007y. This is the result:

Now I know that this is a very small image but if you look carefully you can just pick out the Earth (blue), Mars (orange) and the Phoenix and Rosseta space craft (green) on their respective flight paths. More images of the flight path are available from the Arizona University website located here. I urge you to have a go with the programme at JPL, it really is quite remarkable. As you can see - or not from the size of the diagram, Phoenix is currently traveling at 114 217 kph and has traveled 226 411 km since launch.

The mission's objective is to obtain and analyse material from the Arctic north of the planet. Phoenix's Principal Investigator, Peter Smith, states "What I hope that we can find – and I have no way of knowing – is that the ice preserves the organic material that has at least fallen on Mars over the last four billion years," Smith says. "A lot of it comes from asteroids and comets – you find organics on the Moon, for gosh sake. Why don't you find it on Mars?" And more importantly, how do you know where to land?

With the landing site issue in mind, the Phoenix project reviewed images taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which had sent the following images back to earth showing potential sources of water at the polar regions.

In this image the the water is not indicated by the colour blue, but by the colour red. But still more information is required as so far the topography of these regions have not been mapped to a significant level of resolution to understand the actual geographic lay of the land. So the Phoenix team is waiting for more images from the Mars Orbiter, at a higher resolution before selecting the final landing sites. This next image is one taken from the Mars Orbiter. As you

can see it shows sand dunes in their classic crescent shapes created by the Martian winds. You can find more on the Martian geology here.

The current issue is to obtain information at the next level down, i.e. what is the surface of this area actually like? Are there boulders? How high are these dunes? What can we expect from the surface of the planet? My assumption here is that the information supplied by the Mars Rovers will be used in conjunction with current magnetic imaging and high res photographic images to assess and select a possible set of landing sites. According to the Register a site has already been rejected as pictures showed it was studded with boulders the size of mini-vans. Good luck to the team with that!

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Mars, Phoenix Lander, Geology, JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab, Arizona State University

2008 Solar Eclipse

2007-10-17T16:07:00.001+01:00

October's edition of the Journal of the British Astronomical Association has an excellent article regarding the 2008 solar eclipse which will be total when viewed from certain parts of Canada, Russia and China. Most of the information is available from the NASA web site but just in case you don't have the time or the inclination, here's a preview.

On Friday, August 1st 2008 a total solar eclipse will be viewable from the Northern Hemisphere. The small corridor of total eclipse is estimated to be around 200 km wide and will be traveling at approximately 0.6 km/s at ground level.

At 09:23 UT the moons umbral shadow will touch the surface of the earth in Nunavut, Northern Canada. As you can see the path then takes it out on a north eastern trajectory across the Naires Straight and on across the northern end of Greenland and reaches land again at the northern coast of Novaya Zemlya at approximately 10:00 UT. The instant of greatest eclipse occurs at 10:21 UT (latitude 65° 39'N, longitude 72° 18'E) when the axis of the Moon’s shadow passes closest to the centre of Earth (gamma = +0.8307, where gamma is the minimum distance of the Moon’s shadow axis from Earth’s centre in units of equatorial Earth radii). Totality reaches its maximum duration of 2min 27s, the Sun’s altitude is 34°, the path width is 237km and the umbra’s velocity is 0.507 km/s.

This more detailed map shows the resulting path across Russia, Kazakhstan and China. The centre of the track follows the China-Mongolia border for several hundred kilometres while the central duration and the Sun's altitude both decrease. From Altay, China, the total eclipse begins at 10:59 UT and lasts 1min 25s with the Sun 25° above the horizon. Across the border, western Mongolia is very sparsely populated and the Altan Mountains bring cloudiness to the area. Ten minutes later, the umbra just misses Hami, China where a deep partial eclipse of magnitude 0.998 occurs at 11:10 UT. This region in northwest China is noteworthy because it offers some of the most promising weather prospects along the entire eclipse path. Its position between the Gobi Desert to the east and the Talikmakan Desert to the west spares it from the monsoon systems that affect much of Southeast Asia during the summer months.

The best place to watch the eclipse is from the Gobi Desert in China. For those of you who are die hard solar eclipse hunters, the adventure travel company Explore, has a holiday that coincides with the eclipse here.

The reason for watching the eclipse from the Gobi Desert is the chance of good weather. The above diagram shows the average cloud coverage over the path of the eclipse. As you can see the cloud cover drops dramatically around the Chinese town of Hami. There will be a partial eclipse across most of northern Europe so if you can't make it to Hami, don't worry. Get your Solar scope out and enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Solar, Solar Eclipse, Eclipse, China, Hami

Astronomy, the Lake District and the BAA.

2007-10-15T13:52:00.001+01:00

Again I must apologise for the lack of blogging this past week. I have been on yet another vacation. This time to the lake district staying at the Graythwaite Estate.

Perfect weather, good seeing and dark skies gave a good clear view of the East-to-West skyline. The Milky way was a fantastic sight and the open clusters around the sword of Perseus, shown here as h+x were visible with binoculars.

The clear skies also gave a good sight of Andromeda (M31) which my wife found exciting as her first galaxy sighting. It is strange that she has never really taken any interest in astronomy until last weekend when a lack of light pollution really brought home to her the number of stars that can be seen with the naked eye. Even so, the concept of the milky way blew her mind. The fact that you can 'see' the spiral arm of our own galaxy matched against the thought that 31 is also a galaxy 'far, far away' made her feel a little small and inconsequential.

I think that astronomy can do this to you if you're coming at it from a non scientific point of view. The enormity of it all can really take your breath away. For me, that's the exciting aspect. The fact that there are billions of stars linked to billions of galaxies. The fact that the light that you are seeing can be thousands of years old.

I received my welcome pack from the British Astronomical Association on my return from vacation on Saturday. Given the fact that I have had only a cursory glance through the materials that have arrived, so far I am really impressed with both the level of detail and type of information included in the cost of approx' £40 per year. This seems to have been a good idea on my behalf (for a change) and hopefully means that I have access to a lot more experience in the shape of old hands and professionals who can help me through more advanced techniques for observing. If you haven't done so already I would recommend joining this community.

Well that's it for now. I hope that you are reading this with some interest. I would appreciate some feedback from you all, good, bad and indifferent so I can tailor the blog entries and to ensure that you have something interesting to read on an occasional basis.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Observing, Lake District, Vacation, Cumbria, Perseus, Andromeda, Galaxy

Extreme star cluster in new Hubble images

2007-10-03T09:49:00.001+01:00

The Hubble telescope has captured another stunning image of the nebula NGC3603 within our Milky Way. The cluster is known to be one of the largest star formation areas and is located in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20 000 light-years from the Solar System. According to the ESA website where I found this article, astronomers have been watching this cluster for some time. The cluster contain stars of varying age and the image below shows the gas cloud formation where the stars are born.

NGC 3603 was first discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834. It is known to harbour a blue supergiant star called Sher 25, believed to be on the verge of exploding as a supernova. It is often known as the Milky Way counterpart of the predecessor of the now-famous supernova SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

As you can see, most of the stars are giving off an ultraviolet blue light which indicates that they are young stars. The radiation of these stars is creating a solar wind that has generated a cavity in the gas cloud around these stars pushing away the pillars within which the necessary minerals, gasses and debris are located for new star formations.

Why is this of interest to astronomers? Well lets start with the image and how it shows many stars with varying mass. The colouration of the stars also indicate that they were created within the same timeframe. Stars of different masses evolve at a different pace, and hence change their colouration at different rates, so this star cluster makes it possible to study several types of stars at varying stages in their lives, in detail. Astronomers can compare clusters of different ages with one another and determine which properties (such as temperature and brightness) change as the stars get older.

Dr Jesús Maíz Apellániz from Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain, is leading the Hubble investigation and according to ESA's article, 'the cluster appears to gather the most massive stars at its core. His team has discovered that the distribution of different types of stars at the centre of this dense cluster is similar to that of other young clusters in the Milky Way'. The team has also found that a number of stars within this cluster have exceeded known theoretical limits to mass. One theory put forward to explain this is that there may be multiple stars in close proximity from which the light being emitted is combining to give the appearance of a single star. At a distance of 20,000 light years, Hubble's resolution is not fine enough to separate out each light source and hence astronomers are second guessing on whether this theory tests positive.

The swirling nebula of NGC 3603 contains around 400 000 solar masses of gas. Lurking within this vast cloud are a few Bok globules, named after Bart Bok who first observed them in the 1940s. Bok globules are dark clouds of dense dust and gas with masses of about ten to fifty times that of the Sun. They resemble insect cocoons and are in the process of collapsing under their own weight, forming new stars. Bok globules appear to be some of the coldest objects in the Universe.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Milky Way, Herschel, Hubble, ESA, European Space Agency

Religion and Astronomy - The Papal Scientific Community

2007-10-02T10:37:00.001+01:00

If you follow the current discussions between Professor Richard Dawkins and the religious community you will know that there is a degree of tension between them. Dawkins, at a simplistic level, believes that unless you can prove the existence of god(s) through empirical evidence then he/she/they do not exist. The religious community on the other hand put forward the view that just because you cannot prove the existence of a supreme being, it doesn't mean that they do not exist. What ever your belief system is, you cannot ignore the contribution that the religious community has made to astronomy. So it was with interest that I read this story on the BBC website regarding the Papal scientific community and the Papal Observatory.

In particular, I was attracted to it due to the comments of one Guy Consolmagno, who in my opinion, wrote the best introductory book to astronomy, 'Turn Left at Orion'. It was this book that allowed me to practice observing objects in a more systematic way as opposed to just pointing my binoculars towards the sky and crooning 'ooh that's interesting'. Guy has been attending a scientific meeting at the Vatican to discuss astronomy and focus on disk galaxies in particular. According to the BBC they have the objectives of discussing 'abstruse formulae and mathematical simulations about the physical origins of the universe, involving concepts such as cold dark matter and black holes'. This is pretty heavy stuff.

The church has had a mixed bag of acceptance of scientists and their theories since Pope Gregory XIII set up the reformation of the church and patronised the Jesuit order who were more open to science and new thinking. Many theories were deemed as heretical, such as the theory of our sun being the centre of our solar system and that the earth rotates around it, rather than the opposite of the sun rotating around the earth. However, Galileo who put forward this view, first promoted by Copernicus a century earlier, was attacked by the church and underwent an inquisition. It wasn't until Pope John Paul II term that Galileo was absolved of his heresy.

Today, the Vatican is at the forefront of astronomy with their 1.8M Newtonian reflector set in the hills outside Tucson, Arizona. Guy Consolmagno is a respected observer and scientist contributing to both the professional and amateur communities through his publications. Long may this last for the advancement of the science, whether to prove the existence of a supreme being or just to look on new worlds.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Observatory, Vatican, Guy Consolmagno

NASA Resurrects Canceled Black Hole Mission

2007-09-28T09:38:00.001+01:00

After a hard earned break in the Channel Isles, I return to bring you more interest in Astronomy and Space. This news story took my interest today with NASA again pushing black hole research onto the table. The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) being developed as a joint venture between a number of contributors including NASA's JPL, CalTech and the Danish National Space Centre. The telescope, due to be launched in 2011, is seen as an additional explorer mission wedged between the 2009 launch of of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the 2013 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft will map areas of the sky in the light of high-energy X-rays and complement astrophysics missions that explore the cosmos in other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

NuSTAR It is part of NASA's Small Explorer class of missions, which have a cost cap of $105 million, not including launch costs. In 2006 NASA canceled this mission due to funding diversions created by the re-emphasis on Lunar exploration but have now re-commissioned the project. The mission will make detailed observations of the matter around black holes, which may help explain the origin of the powerful jets that spew from many of them. The mission will also investigate the debris left behind by ancient supernova explosions and will scrutinise the X-ray afterglow of gamma-ray bursts, thought to signal the collapse of massive stars and collisions between neutron stars. A preliminary design for the mission was completed before the 2006 cancellation, but a more detailed one will need to be carried out before construction of the satellite can begin in preparation for the 2011 launch.

The NuSTAR instrument consists of an array of three co-aligned hard X-ray telescopes. The grazing incidence mirrors focus onto three shielded solid-state pixel detectors, separated by a mast that extends the focal length to 10m after launch. A laser metrology system monitors the mast alignment. The optics utilize thin glass shells coated with depth-graded multi-layers to extend the bandpass and FOV over that achievable with standard metal surfaces. Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CdZnTe) detectors provide excellent spectral resolution and high quantum efficiency without requiring cryogenic operation. The following graphic shows the energy spectrum that NuSTAR will operate at which can be seen to be an expansion of the XMM, Chandra and Astro-E2 telescopes.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Space, NASA, CalTech, NuSTAR, X-Ray, Telescope

Space 'Bling' May Not Be As Common As Once Thought

2007-09-18T16:29:00.001+01:00

In February 2005, the New Scientist reported on carbon rich areas of the universe that may contain planets with kilometer thick layers of diamonds. It is believed that these planets can withstand the greater temperatures and heat that is found in astral bodies that are closer to their stars. The creation of these planets may, it is speculated, be due to the proliferation of carbides and graphites that make up the rings of dust around new born stars forming into solid bodies as they are created as part of the star's growth pattern. According to Marc Kuchner at Princeton University, 'High oxygen levels produce silicate-based planets like the Earth, Venus, and Mars. But high carbon levels cause carbon compounds to condense out of the disc and clump together, producing carbon-based planets'. These planets were thought to be common in new star formations and were the basis of speculation that Uranus or Neptune also has this layer of carbon and under intense pressure at the centre of the planets diamonds may have formed along side other mineral deposits.

However, recent investigation into both Uranus and Neptune's probability of having this diamond layer has been refuted. Luca Ghiringhelli of the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands led a team that performed computer simulations of the pressure, temperature and carbon content inside planets like Uranus and Neptune. According to the New Scientist, 'They found that the rate of crystallisation of carbon into diamond was exceedingly slow because Uranus and Neptune contain only 1 to 2% carbon'. The study's co-author, Daan Frenkel of the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, showed that planets would need in excess of 15% of its total mass to be carbon before the process of diamond creation begins. This level of carbon can be found in bodies around stars that are being born and stars which are dying. White dwarfs that have thrown off their outer layers would be cooling. A perfect environment for liquid carbon to be present. Under pressure and slow cooling the carbon would crystalise into differing forms of diamond. Observations of a White dwarf star, BPM 37093 has astrophysicists offering theories around the size of the crystalline structure contained within.

We can find this process happening closer to home. Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies five billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's core will crystallise leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Diamonds, Bling

Japanese spacecraft launches to study Moon's origin

2007-09-17T13:28:00.001+01:00

The most advanced space craft to reach the Moon since the Apollo missions of the late '60s and '70s has been launched by Japan. The project previously named SELENE has been re-christened Kaguya after the Japanese mythological moon princess. Launched at 01:31 GMT aboard a Japanese H-IIA launch vehicle manufactured by Mitsubishi from Tanegashima Space Centre, Kaguya carries two smaller probes which will be launched with the mission objectives of obtaining orbit around the Moon and relaying information about the surface, geology and to carry out some radio experiments.

The Main Orbiter Once in a stable peripolar orbit at an altitude of 100 km will release the Relay Satellite in an elliptic orbit at an apogee of 2400 km. This Relay Satellite will relay communications between the Main Orbiter and the ground station. The VRAD Satellite will play a significant role in measuring the gravitational field around the Moon. The Main Orbiter will be employed for about one year and will observe the entire Moon.

Kaguya is interesting in as much that it is the most sophisticated space craft launched by Japan. It comes after missions from the European Space Agency with the SMART-1 project and precedes China's Space Agency lunar orbiter, Chang'e I. The objectives of the project are to Study the origins of the Moon and its geologic evolution, obtain information about the lunar surface environment and perform radio science on lunar orbit. JAXA describes Kaguya's scientific goals as:

Science of the Moon: The Moon has been observed and explored extensively as the most familiar body. Although the Moon is more thoroughly studied than any other planetary bodies in the solar system, its origin and evolution process are still controversial. The KAGUYA mission targets are the global characterization of lunar surface and detailed gravimetry. This mission will provide globally the high-quality and high-resolution data on element abundance, mineral assemblage, surface topography, sub-surface structure, magnetic and gravity field, and precession. We aim to better understand the origin and evolution of the Moon by these observations.

Science on the Moon: The KAGUYA mission investigates energetic particles, electromagnetic field and plasma, around the Moon. The measurements on the lunar environments are highly valuable scientifically, and also provide important information for the future human activity on the Moon.

Science from the Moon: The KAGUYA orbiter provides unique opportunities to study the earth's plasma environments. Imaging of the earth in the wavelength from extreme ultraviolet to visible radiation will contribute to clarifying the global dynamics of terrestrial plasmasphere. The topographic study of the polar region will also provide the basic information of future construction of the astronomical observatory on the lunar surface.

With all this in mind it will be interesting to see if all this information will be shared with China, the USA and the European Space Agencies to advance their efforts to create a lunar base. And more importantly, whether the human race can put aside cultural, economic and political differences to drive us out into the 'Final Frontier'.

Technorati Tags: Space, Moon, Japan, JAXA, ESA, NASA, China, Kaguya

Google Is All Spaced Up

2007-09-14T09:45:00.001+01:00

Google seem to be hedging their bets lately with space exploration and space applications. A couple of weeks ago I reviewed their Google Sky application which was released into the general market place and includes input from NASA. It seems that this was just a precursor to a tighter relationship with the USA government and their Space Agency. Today's Daily Telegraph in the UK has run a story relating to Google's ability to park their private Boeing jet on a government airfield which is four miles away from their head quarters in Mountain View, California. Now you may not think that this is anything to think about but cogitate on this. They are the only non-governmental organisation to be allowed to park their vehicle in what is a military compound. OK, they pay around $1.3 million for the privilege, but if this is the case, why aren't other billionaire business men allowed to do the same? Is it because Google is investing $30 million in space related programmes for the advancement of space related technology? Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research centre is quoted by the New Scientist magazine stating that 'NASA is kind of an interested bystander...If a private company perfects a process to get payloads to the Moon, NASA will have a lot interest in that'.

If you also then view the timelines of when Google are setting the completion goals of their competition along with the retirement of the current NASA space shuttle, they tie up nicely, being 2010. Can this be the start of a beautiful relationship between the government of the USA and private industry to fund further space exploration? Or is it just a whim of a couple of billionaires who are pouring their money into a dream where one day they will set foot on the moon?

Technorati Tags: Space, Google, NASA

UK 'Must Have Human Space Role'

2007-09-13T14:31:00.001+01:00

This morning I picked up this story from the BBC in my RSS feeds. What's interesting about it is the fact that the UK is still interested in playing a major role in space exploration from both a robotic and human perspective. This has a number of consequences for the UK.

Funding for human space exploration has to grow considerably.
Development of future skills in science and technology needs to be encouraged.
retention of capability within the UK needs to be addressed.

The UK Space Exploration Working Group (SEWG), set up in January 2007, has produced a report which it delivered to the British National Space Centre (BNSC) under the guidance of professor Frank Close of Oxford University, is quoted as saying that 'Such participation in this and in future unmanned missions was vital for both UK science and the economy'. And as such 'the UK should develop a formal strategy for exploiting the substantial, wider benefits of space exploration to science education, commerce and culture. This should include funded programmes of public engagement and education'.

The wider benefits are generally considered to be the expansion of knowledge in technology required for space travel, the increase in medical knowledge and techniques required to keep astronauts alive and of course the economic results of activities related to building the space craft and associated research programmes and the economic results of harnessing the potential of the raw materials found on the Moon and Mars which are assumed to be the first and second objectives. The key recommendation emanating from this report is that the UK should pursue a programme of space exploration in which an active role is played in both the robotic and human elements of the Global Exploration Strategy. In order to make the most of emerging opportunities in the field of space exploration, maintain existing standards of excellence and develop new capabilities that ensure a prominent role in future international space activities the SEWG suggested that the UK should:

Pursue a programme of space exploration in which an active role is played in both the robotic and human elements of the Global Exploration Strategy.
Develop a strategy for exploiting the substantial, wider benefits of space exploration to science, education, commerce and culture. This should include coordinated, properly funded and sustained programmes of public engagement and education.
Maintain leading UK involvement in planetary science within ESA Programmes and, where appropriate, in collaboration with other international partners. This must include continued involvement in the robotic exploration of Mars, especially through ESA’s Aurora programme.
Initiate a targeted UK robotic lunar programme based on the use of low cost satellites, rovers and resulting operational services, ideally in collaboration with other partners while keeping control of some key technologies.
Identify and exploit opportunities for mutually beneficial, bilateral activities with NASA and other prospective partners. The Global Exploration Strategy and the recently signed NASA-BNSC Joint Statement of Intent create narrow windows of opportunity during which agreements of high value might be secured.
Take appropriate early steps to prepare for a future role in human space exploration efforts by securing flight opportunities for British astronauts within the next decade to conduct science research and advance science education.
Build capacity in relevant UK scientific and technological communities by funding and establishing academic chairs, fellowships, post-doctoral and doctoral positions at UK centres of excellence. These positions should cover the full range of life and physical sciences relevant to the exploration programme, and would expand upon the success of the existing Aurora Fellowship scheme.
Engage with research and industrial communities across a broad range of sciences and technology to assess the opportunities that may be raised in the new era of space exploration. This should extend beyond the existing BNSC core partners (DIUS, STFC, NERC) to include MRC and EPSRC and industrial sectors such as mining, prospecting, media and entertainment.
Investigate the current opportunities offered by a modest focused subscription to ESA’s life and physical sciences programme (ELIPS) which could facilitate UK access to ESA’s microgravity facilities in order to build up the UK life and physical sciences microgravity community in preparation for the longer term opportunities that will arise from participation in the GES.
Initiate a substantial and sustained national technology R&D and demonstrator programme focused on those areas of technology which underpin the UK’s goals within the GES and strengthen the UK position in related ESA programmes. Knowledge exchange opportunities should be embedded in the programme from the start.
Survey and identify customer commitments, and quantify value added business for the exploration-related services identified in this report – from near term (e.g. lunar communications relay) to long term (e.g. exploitation of planetary mineral rights).
Review and update the UK licensing regime to encourage high value added activities such as space tourism and related activities such as inexpensive, regular and reliable launch of scientific payloads and small spacecraft which build on existing UK strengths and support proposed UK efforts in exploration.

The focus on robotic exploration as well as human exploration is an interesting one and triggered a memory of an article that appeared in Scientific American back in 2006. Bill Gates, or more appropriately Microsoft, has released an integrated development environment aimed at robot programmers. Robotics Studio is a free, fully functional and rich development tool. It is aimed at the home developer market although a number of Robot design and manufacture companies are also using it. However, what is most important here is not that a small number of professionals are picking up the tool and using it to programme their robots, more that this is released to the general public, just as Dos Basic was in the '80s. Imagine, thousands of teenagers programming their Lego Mindstorm robots. Developing more innovation, driving the development and sophistication of the tool and language forward much quicker than the development employees at Microsoft could. Then these teenagers, go through college, university, and finally become available for the employment market. Space exploration can only benefit.

Technorati Tags: Space, Robots, SEWG, BSNC, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Microsoft Robotics Studio

CalTech And University Of Cambridge Obtain Clearest Images Taken Of Space

2007-09-11T10:55:00.001+01:00

There is a lot of debate in the UK University establishment regarding the funding of research and the development of new projects. Only today, a news announcement from Oxford University has a reformer stepping down from the college governance structure due to the resistance to change by members of the governing body. This is bad for UK research and development. Without an increase from government coffers or the injection of cash from outside businesses, UK universities will not be able to continue applying time to cutting edge research and development such as the Lucky Imaging Team at the University of Cambridge.

The Lucky Imaging Team and CalTech have been undertaking a joint operation to create a series of images such as Cat's Eye Nebulae below. You can see the clarity of the Palomar Observatory 200 inch telescope image on the right when compared to an image taken by the Hubble telescope on the left. What is exciting about this image is that Hubble should not be subject to Atmospheric turbulence, often referred to as 'seeing' by astronomers, being in orbit around the earth, and yet the clarity of the image created by the Lucky team shows the finer tendrils of gas and dust encircling its planet in greater detail.

Lucky Imaging has been around for a while, since the mid 20th Century. The concept is known to all astrophotographers and is employed in the majority of images created using CCD and SLR cameras mounted to an amateur telescope. The camera technique takes high speed, short exposure images and uses imaging software to 'flatten' the multiple images into one overall photograph. The theory is that the short exposure and high speed takes faint images but reduces the effect of 'seeing' caused by rising thermals and changes in air temperature through out the atmosphere. It therefore creates a more stable image and reduces the instance of blurring caused by light refraction.

A advance in optical technology , known as adaptive optics - referred to as AO - had been available to astronomers since the 1990s. This technology measures the variability in the light wave which hits the mirror and then computers adjust the mirrors profile by distorting the mirror using mechanical pressure. This adjusts the reflected light and removes some of the variability which generates a more clear image from the telescope. This technique reduced the effect of atmospheric turbulence, and it is this system has been built into the Palomar telescope. Previous attempts by the lucky team had seen them install the Lucky Imaging camera in the NOT observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Some success with this installation proceeded another installation at the NTT telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Finally the decision was made to attach the camera to the Palomar telescope in California. The camera was attached to the AO technology and multiple images were taken. Many images are affected by Atmospheric turbulence even with the AO technology but some of them are exceptionally clear. This 'chance' imaging gives the technology its name, Lucky Imaging.

So coming back to the start of my post, would all this have been possible without investment from government and private investors? Will the science of astronomy be advanced if universities do not adapt to the current climate and change their view of outside investment? Are universities in the UK doomed to lag those of the USA as research grants dry up and the scientists depart these shores for overseas posts?

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Observing, Astrophotography, Hubble, Lucky Imaging

Astronomy Weather Websites

2007-09-10T10:56:00.001+01:00

One thing that all astronomers get excited about is the weather. Reading my local astronomy forum, you can always find posts about the lack of good weather in the UK for spending your evenings observing. Weather plays an important part in the psyche of astronomers. At the weekend when you can spend a reasonable time outdoors in your home observatory or just in your garden weather becomes a consuming passion, nearly as great as the itch felt to get outside, balance the scope and set up the chair, table and other accoutrements for a good night observing. When it's sunny during the day, only to cloud over as the evening progresses, it can create a real feeling of disappointment. After suffering from this issue, I decided to get closer to real time weather and searched the Internet for weather providers who offered services for the astronomer.

A Google search some weeks ago returned an entry that I found interesting. AccuWeather is now publishing astronomy weather and other information for your locale. You can access this information by clicking on the 'Interests' link in the toolbar at the top of the site. One of the blind style menu commands is an astronomy link. Click on that and it will give you all sorts of weather related information. You can customise your location so the weather is right for your area. I use my post code and it seems relatively accurate, enough to help you plan your observing evening. The following is an actual screen shot taken from my personalised AccuWeather page.

Sticking with AccuWeather, as I happen to think it is one of the better services out there, there are a number of features that are helpful to the astronomer. For example, take a look at this image above and you will see that there is information regarding the rising and setting of the moon and planets. This is relatively easy information to have at hand if you own a planisphere or use software for astronomy or like some of you out there, own an astronomy almanac. However, if like me you take pride in your ability to navigate around the celestial sphere using RA and DEC measurements then the ease of locating this information is appreciated if only to help locate the said objects based upon its arrival above the horizon.

Now there are many of these services out there, tailored to your locale. MetChecker issues astronomy weather that includes cloud cover percentages at altitude level which for any amateur is pretty comprehensive and helpful if like me you check your weather at work before planning an evening of observing. This segues into the next thought on weather tools for the amateur. I've included a feed from the AccuWeather website on my blog, and in the technology arena there is a concept of application 'Mash-up' where by you take an application such as Google Sky and mash in another feed from applications or websites such as AccuWeather. Therefore the astronomer could not only review the object that he/she was planning to view, but also predict the weather, from his/her location and obtain a live feed to show the prediction of temperature, wind, and cloud at differing altitudes. Marry this with news feeds from AstronomyNow or the Sky At Night Magazine and you are starting to get to a point where these mash-up applications start adding real value to the amateur.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Weather, Mash-Up, Observing

Phoenix Passes Comms Test

2007-09-07T17:01:00.001+01:00

I'm a big fan of space exploration, see previous posts. So with NASA launching its Phoenix programme, I thought, great, something I can get excited about and follow. So after the launch and basic system tests Phoenix has most recently undergone communications tests on its UHF radio and radar systems. Its amazing to think that once these tests are complete, to conserve energy, NASA will shut down these systems and not re-test them until they get close to Mars.

These systems are incredibly important to the Phoenix lander. The radar system is used to send out 'pings' to the surface of Mars so the lander can manage its entry velocity and landing. The radar monitors the last three minutes of descent and triggers the firing of the descent engines. So a failure in this system means a failure of the project. If you think about it, this system has to operate under the most stressful of conditions. Take off and landing, like terrestrial flight, is the most dangerous part of any space flight. Any failure at this point means a belly flop into the largest mass in Phoenix's trajectory. Or in space would that be a vector?

Since the Phoenix launch on the 4th September, the lander craft has been communicating using an X-band radio which operates from 7 to 12.5GHz overlapping the KU (Kurtz-Under) Band. This band is usually used by military weapons systems and satellites, in fact NBC became the first broadcaster to use KU Band for broadcast in 1983.

It is particularly effective in communications over long distances, which you could say is useful for Phoenix, which on 1st September had covered over 81 million kilometres. Once close to Mars, the vehicle will be given a signal to jettison this radio unit as it will have done its job and the lander could do with losing a few lbs before entering the atmosphere of Mars.

The next check is scheduled for October 16th along with signaling Phoenix to change course.

Technorati Tags: Mars Express, Phoenix Lander, NASA, Arizona State University

Apollo Moon photos reveal detail

2007-09-06T10:19:00.001+01:00

I may have mentioned this before, but I live in a very urban environment which limits my observing to the brightest objects in the sky. So as part of my enjoyment I observe the moon. Starting out with a pair of 8x40 binoculars that I purchased for wildlife watching and progressing onto my newly acquired SkyWatcher 150mm Newtonian reflector. Having purchased and read 'Patrick Moore On The Moon' I've been observing said celestial body trying to recognise the features and commit them to memory for easier navigation. To do this I use a combination of Moors's book and the Phillip's Moon Map which is one of the best resources I could lay my hands on. So it was with interest that I picked up this news feature from the BBC in the UK.

Photos of the Apollo missions are finally to be digitised, catalogued and released by NASA after more than 30 years of gathering dust in the archive's freezers. Arizona State University is using a leica DSW 700 photogrammetric scanner with a resolution of 200 pixels to the mm to scan the old images. ASU had to modify the scanner from a 12 bit to 14 bit A/D converter. More information on this technology can be found here. This technology compensates for the lack of contrast on the moon and provides 16,000 shades of grey with which it recolours the images. Some of the older images have been provided by NASA to Google for its Google Moon application but this new archive will show a much greater level of detail, for example the original RAW image taken from one of the Apollo 15 missions is around 1.3Gb in size. This level of information can now be shown in an image available on the Internet.

An issue that ASU has faced is the problem of scanning geometric shapes. For example, try scanning a piece of graph paper and see the results for yourself. This was overcome using the Leica scanner and the resulting scans are so clear that stereo measurements can be made from the images allowing the ASU team to overlap the images which in the future may be provided as topographical images, think Google Earth or Google Mars.

ASU has built a web interface to the site presenting the images via the flash technology. This allows for rapid loading of the images given their large file size. It also allows for a better user interface and control to pan across the image for a better resolution in the main viewing pane. At this moment in time ASU have provided five example images on its 'Metric Preview' site which has an actual pixel to ground ratio of 6.2 meters which provides an amazing amount of detail with a high degree of clarity.

If you are interested in the Apollo missions and the imaging that is obtained from them then I would urge you to track these websites and watch out for further improvements, or if you fancy it, Google is recruiting for its Copernicus Project here. Just be careful what you wish for.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Lunar, Moon, Arizona State University, NASA, BBC, Photo, Google, Copernicus

Radio Telescope to Become Outdoor Cinema

2007-09-03T10:44:00.001+01:00

This story took me by surprise, not only because it's quirky but also because it's a great way to get people into Manchester University's Jodrell Bank radio telescope facility. Jodrell Bank was established by Bernard Lovell in 1945 to further his interest in background radio signals or 'cosmic rays' after his tenure with the British Government's Radar development team, the Telecommunications Research Establishment during the second world war. However it wasn't until 1957 until the 'Lovell Mark 1' was built. At 76M in diameter it was the largest radio telescope in the world at that time and still remains the third largest single parabolic dish radio scope in the world. To give you some idea of how big this will be, take the largest IMAX cinema screen in the world and double the effective size and that's what you have.

This year is the Lovell Telescope's fiftieth anniversary. So to celebrate this fact and to take astronomy to the masses, the team at Jodrell Bank have decided to use the dish of the telescope as a large cinema screen. The event is called the 'Space50' and will show clippings from 'early space exploration, astronomy, engineering, the history and future of radio astronomy and the construction of the Lovell telescope itself'. The images will be accompanied by music, although the Jodrell Bank website has no track listing but I assume it will be Holst or Strauss. All of this will also be complemented by a custom designed light and laser show which should be something to see in the sky's of Cheshire.

So from the Jodrell website:

Bookings. This event will take place on Friday 5th October and Saturday 6th October 2007 at Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 9DL. Doors open at 7.30pm and showtime is at 8.30pm. Tickets (priced £12 and £10 for concessions) are available from the Jodrell Bank Visitor Centre (tel. 01477 571339) or Jodrell Bank Observatory (tel. 01477 571321).

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Jodrell Bank, Bernard Lovell, Lovell Telescope, Radio Telescope, Manchester University

Tips On Creating A Great Astronomy Website - Part 2

2007-08-29T17:31:00.001+01:00

Aha! I hear you say, the second part of that great article on creating a great astronomy website. More depth, greater tools, and more visitors! Well, maybe the first two are correct, the third I'm afraid is down to your skill at writing engaging articles and your ability to attract attention. So lets get busy and investigate those tools that allow you to put all your heart and soul into publishing your passion.

I finished the last article by talking about WYSIWYG editors, Tags and Categories. By now I hope that you have created your blog and started to publish your thoughts, photo's and experiences. I hope that the Tags have born fruit and you are now thinking, 'how do I bring more people to my website?' Well, lets start with that magic word, 'traffic'.

Traffic is the measurement of people hitting a URL, universal resource locater = unique web address. Think of it as footfall in the retail industry. How many people have visited your site. This can be measured quite simply by placing a counter on the homepage of your website and will increase each time someone visits. There are many 'free' counters available from the Internet, but be warned. Many of them will collect information about you and your website. Will create spam for your inbox and be a general nuisance.

A more reliable and better service is available from Clustr Maps. This service is free to use and is easily implemented as Clustr Maps provide all the code you need to plug the service into your blog or website. It uses a statistical method of recording visitors based upon their IP Address. It then process this information on a periodic basis -I've chosen daily - and publishes the map to your website. The map, which is located to the right of this blog, shows all visitors by country. The larger the dot, the more visitors you have had. As you can see the majority of my visitors are from the UK - The Sky At Night Forum no doubt.

For the Rolls Royce service, you can do no better than Google Business Solutions. The Analytics section of the Google Business Solutions website provides a free statistical breakdown of visitors to your site and couldn't be more easy to implement. If you already have a Google account via its gmail or blogger applications then its really easy to sign up and start using it otherwise, you'll have a short set of forms to fill out which includes the homepage of your website. Once this has been accomplished Google Analytics provides a wealth of information for you all for free. In fact for a blog of this size it is total overkill. Logging into Analytics loads a 'dashboard' where you can review high level information such as Site usage by day in the form of a line graph. Traffic Sources, i.e. where have they come from, in the form of a pie chart. And a cluster map in a similar vein to the widget provided by Clustr Map. On the left hand side there are a number of navigation buttons that allow you to drill into detail on Customers, Traffic Sources and Content. There is just so much you can measure with this product it really only warrants using if you have a large scale website.

So where does that leave you? If you can create your website/blog. And you can attract visitors to your site. If you can then measure what they are looking at and where they are coming from, then you can tailor your content. Hence you can drive more visitors to your site and hopefully get a dialogue running with like minded people.

Technorati Tags: Google, Clustr Map, Analytics, Sky at Night Magazine, blogging, Astronomy

Was the brightest supernova the birth of a quark star?

2007-08-28T12:13:00.001+01:00

Those of you in the UK may have seen a recent documentary called Atom. It was well written and presented with Professor Jim Al-Khalili from Surrey University. The final programme introduced Quarks into the overall discussion which in my personal view was challenging, but exciting in trying to understand the concepts and theory. So it was interesting to pick up this supernova story from the New Scientist.

Last year in October, the star SN 2006gy was observed as a supernova one hundred times brighter than typical observed supernovas. The theory that was put forward for the immense amount of energy produced by the collapse of the star was the result of a collision of two stars creating a fusion of matter and antimatter. The prevailing view among astronomers and cosmologists is that the type Ia star SN2006gy, a white dwarf star, started to absorb the energy from its neighbour NGC1260. When the companion star's energy was absorbed, creating a phenomenon called the Chandrasekhar limit, both stars exploded.

This theory was questioned during the explosion of SN 2006gy as antimatter is not usually produced during the supernova process. A team at CALTECH in California has suggested that SN 2006gy was so large that its mass was as much as 150 times greater than the mass of our own solar star the Sun. The size of the star creates a heavy core that produces a high pressure environment that is hot enough to create both matter and antimatter in the guise of electrons and positrons. The production of both particles causes an instability within the star and a drop in the overall pressure within the centre. Thus the star begins a runaway nuclear fusion process that starts to dismantle the star's structure. The seeping of the star's energy into the atmosphere and reduction in pressure around the core is what causes the star to be brighter than its surrounding stars as the energy is released as light.

A secondary theory has been put forward by the university of Calgary. They have suggested the Quark theory, i.e. the birth of a Quark star. When a star is crushed to such a density that the core gets hotter, current quantum physiscs suggests that it becomes hot enough to develop quarks. It's this process of producing quarks as strange matter that releases energy and hence creates the brightness of the star. The explosion of the supernova drives the creation of strange matter that then expands outward crashing into the debris of the supernova causing the debris to become highly energised and hence release more energy into the space around the star. This I must add is just a theory and Calgary university are continuing to monitor the star for evidence to back up their theory.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Space, Supernova, New Scientist, Quark, Physics, Astrophysics

Tips On Creating A Great Astronomy Website - Part 1

2007-08-24T13:15:00.001+01:00

Over the last week a number of friends have asked me how I created my blog and how do I keep it up to date with information. Well I thought, this is different, I could write a post about how I started blogging and the free tools that are available for Astronomers out there to keep a site interesting. So here goes.

I've been lucky enough to work in technology for most of my career, whether it was as a research engineer for a large engineering company, as a Visual Basic programmer with a large IT consultancy and most recently as technical sales support in a medium sized consultancy. So I have absorbed a lot of information from the advent of the Internet in the mid 1990s.

The easiest way to get a website up and running is via a blog. A blog is an online diary and it stands for web log. My current service provider, this site, is hosted for free by Google under the title of Blogger. Blogger is a really simple tool to use and has been around for around eight years. There are many users of this service and it's growing every day. There are no charges for this service and it is a simple registration process to get you up and running. Blogger provides templates that you can select to provide you with a simple layout. The beauty of this is that you don't have to know how to write computer code to get it going. Once you have a Blogger account you can start looking for information that interests you. I use a number of services for this. The easiest method, and one all beginners should start with is just reviewing your favourite websites such as Astronomy or New Scientist. This is a good way to start but is very time consuming. So to help cut down on having to trawl through lots of pages and websites, you can subscribe to areas of these websites using 'Really Simple Syndication' or RSS.

RSS is a technology that falls into the 'publish and subscribe' method. Publishers write articles and you subscribe to them. Now again there are many tools available to do this but a simple method is to use your web browser. Most if not all browsers have RSS readers. I use Windows Internet Explorer version 7 which has a built in RSS Reader which it calls 'Feeds'. To use this technology, when you next browse your favourite website, look for the orange RSS logo. Clicking on this logo will usually take you to a page where it asks if you want to subscribe to the feed. Subscribing places the feed in your 'Feeds' area of your favourites window. Other browsers may differ so have a play about to see where your feeds are located. Each day my browser will ask the website for updated content and show this when I click on the individual feed. This ensures that I don't have to trawl websites looking for news as the technology does it for me.

In addition to this, I also use Google's News search function. You can visit Google's news site and use the 'News Alerts' to target searches for your favourite search words. This works reasonably well and allows you to trawl thousands of news sites for potential stories to report on. These are emailed to you on a periodic basis which you can select, for example, daily or weekly. These are great for a scatter gun approach to collecting information.

So you have the news items, you have the idea, what next. Well you need to write the article. So, you can use the built in editor in Blogger or like me you can use an offline editor. I use the Windows Live Writer application. This is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and has a wealth of tools to help you develop your article. First you can set it up to automatically connect to your Blog. It will download your template so you can see how your article will look in the blog. It can save drafts to your local hard drive so you can continue to write your article while not connected to the Internet (great if you're still on dial up). It will load images from your hard disk drive and you can use Tags and Categories.

What are Tags and Categories? These are key words that you use to register with a tagging site such as Technorati. These key words are essentially counted by the website and the more keywords of the same name, such as 'Astronomy' the higher up the ladder it creeps. It allows other users to search for blogs along the same lines as their interests. Categories are great for categorising your entries so that visitors to your website can filter the articles by these key categories. Once you've entered Tags and Categories, go ahead and publish your article to your blog.

Well I think that that is enough for now. The next article in this feature set will include more advanced topics such as comments, trackbacks and free statistic websites to gain insight into who is visiting and what pages they are looking at.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, blogging, Windows Live Writer, Blogger, Technorati

RAS Respond to UK Government White Paper on Planning for a Sustainable Future.

2007-08-24T09:56:00.001+01:00

As some of you may have realised by now, this is a real bug-bear of mine. Light pollution. I was raised in South Wales, part of the United Kingdom and lived high up on a mountain top in a small village. Our village had little street lighting and the light overspill from the towns in the valley bellow was negligible. Hence, I remember cold crisp nights with a wonderful view of the stars. Now, I live in a large town around 40 miles away from London. My house is in a suburban jungle with heavy lighting, a supermarket at the end of the street and the orange glow of the town centre to the west. My astronomical viewing is restricted to the brightest objects, the moon and certain Asterisms. So campaigning for the reduction in light pollution is a key part of my interest in astronomy.

Now I'm not so retarded that I think that my local town council will spend an inordinate amount of cash on rectifying the street lighting that they have already installed. I also think that it is difficult to stop other home owners installing kilowatt security lighting in their back gardens in the mistaken belief that this will deter thieves and undesirables. So the only way to tackle this issue is with forward thinking planning. Changing the current planning laws will at least stop people installing lights that are strong enough to light a football ground. and any future housing development can be planned with lighting that is shielded correctly.

The President of the Royal Astronomical Society, Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson has stated that

"Although most of our major professional optical telescopes are now located on remote mountain-top sites like Hawaii, Chile, and the Canary Islands, retaining the darkest possible night-sky in the UK remains

important to astronomy for several reasons. Firstly the training of young astronomers at university generally takes place on UK telescopes. Secondly 'amateur' astronomers make important contributions to astronomy by scanning the sky for new comets and supernovae, and through monitoring of brighter variable stars, including those being occulted by companion stars or planets. And finally it is vital for astronomy to retain the support of the public, who take the greatest interest in astronomical events like eclipses, comets, and meteor showers. The darkness of the night sky in towns and villages could be enormously improved by sensible planning decisions, for example reducing the pressure in neon street-lamps, capping all outside lighting, turning inessential lights off on or before midnight. An example of good practice is the island of La Palma where the Canarian government has imposed strong restrictions on night-time lighting in order to retain the quality of its astronomical observatory."

I urge everyone of you to campaign locally for better planning laws against more and more light pollution. With the environment being a very hot topic in global news, this is a perfect vehicle with which to launch your campaigns. The report located here, by Mr Martin Morgan-Taylor has a great set of comments regarding the amount of carbon that these high watt security lights emit via the electricity generating stations. It also has an interesting fact that in the UK not one local council has electrical meters installed on public lighting circuits. They have no idea how much this is really costing them, and I assume they pay the electricity generators a lot less than it really costs to generate the power. Look to your local astronomy clubs to support you in lobbying your local representatives.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Light Pollution, Campaigning, Royal Astronomical Society, UK Government

Celestial add-on points Google Earth at the stars

2007-08-23T09:45:00.001+01:00

Google Earth has finally got around to releasing its Google Sky application. It's available as a new release of Google Earth, version 4.2.0180.1134 (beta) released on the 20th August. To switch from Google Earth to Google Sky you have to use the tool bar menu View > Switch to Sky.

This will change the perspective from the Earth to the stars. Initially the sky is filled with constellations. To set your current position for viewing the stars, use Google Earth's search function to find your own address. Once located, switch to sky view as per the previous instruction. Notice towards the bottom of the screen you have both declination and Right Ascension figures. Placing the cursor over any of the stars will display the Dec and RA figures for the star in this information bar. The initial view is restrictive as the sky map is magnified. Use your mouse scroll wheel or the scale slider located in the top right of the screen to scroll out.

In the bottom left of the screen is a layer section. If it is not shown, then us the tool bar menu View > Sidebar. At the bottom of the Sidebar is the window labeled Layers. Click in the boxes to enable or disable the layers. This adds or deletes the layers from your view. To add a celestial grid to the view use the tool bar menu View > Grid. This adds in the Dec and RA grid and annotates it with hours and degrees. So this has set up our view to our desired level of detail. What about actually viewing objects?

For those out you who wish to navigate to say the Crab Nebula, it couldn't be more easy. Just type Crab Nebula into the search box and watch the sky whirl. The sky changes from constellations layout to a photographic representation of the nebula. The photo is provided by NASA. You will notice that if you have the Hubble Showcase layer enabled within the Layers Window, an icon that looks similar to a spiral galaxy is located just above the image of the nebula. Clicking on the icon opens another window with a close up Hubble image of the nebula. This is followed by short introductory paragraph with an Internet link out to the Hubble website. Clicking on the link will open another window at the bottom of the application and launches the website within this website. You can adjust this window to take up as much of the main Google Sky window as you wish or close it by clicking on the X button in the right corner of the screen.

While we are in that area take a look at the other buttons next to the close window button. These buttons are squares with a shaded portion. Placing your cursor over each button tells you that you can dock the window in different areas of the main Google Sky window or undock it so that it open your web browser and loads the website as a separate application.

Google Earth has a great amateur following. People upload their own pictures, and create their own informational snippets a la Wikipedia. This functionality is available in Google Sky, so those of you who are keen astrophotographers, get snapping and load them into Google Sky. There is so much that you can do with this application that I don't have the time today to list all the features. It's a great tool for learning the constellations and other near and deep sky objects. It will enthuse the beginner and tickle the more advanced observers fancy. The only drawback that I see so far is the lack of night time mode so it would not be good for taking to a star party.

Technorati Tags: Google Sky, Google, Astronomy, Observing

What Telescope?

2007-08-16T16:43:00.001+01:00

I've had a slow day at the office today. The project I'm working on is in its data gathering phase and collecting and tabulating data in a spreadsheet is not my idea of fun. Never mind, tomorrow I can start analysing and cross referencing the work produced earlier this week, which should be marginally more engaging. However, the slowness of the work has meant that my mind has been wandering and thinking about my imminent purchase of a telescope. I have read several books and pamphlets about which type of telescope to buy i.e. Refractor or Reflector. I think that the SCT and MCT are too expensive for me as I have a budget of around £500 to play with which may preclude the more sophisticated scopes. I've posted some questions to the Sky at Night magazine forum but you have any advice, then please leave a comment...

Technorati Tags: Telescope, Astronomy, Space

ESA’s Mars Express will keep an eye on NASA’s Phoenix

2007-08-14T11:17:00.001+01:00

NASA's Phoenix Mars lander has has made it's third most important maneuver during it's transit to the surface of Mars. the NASA website report that Phoenix has successfully made its first adjustment to its course heading.

The lander craft is currently traveling at a velocity of 33 180 meters per second, around 74 200 miles per hour. The adjustment is calculated to adjust the velocity by approximately 18.5 meters per second, around 40 miles per hour. During this adjustment NASA tested a number of on board systems and readied the space craft for its next course correction in October.

But how are they monitoring its progress? Well apart from its onboard communications, NASA, working in a joint team effort with the European Space Agency (ESA) has set the Mars Express space craft to monitor the approach and tricky Entry, Decent and Landing (EDL) phase of the Phoenix craft. Mars Express which is already in orbit around Mars after delivering its Beagle 2 lander in 2003/2004, will monitor the Phoenix lander using its Mars Express Lander Communications system (MELACOM), which was originally designed to communicate with probes (read Beagle 2) on the planet’s surface.

The elliptical orbit of the Mars Express means that NASA and ESA can ensure that the the 13 minute phase is always in radio contact as the orbit has been optimised to always be in lone of sight of the Phoenix lander craft. It is hoped that Mars Express will continue to communicate with Phoenix for the full 90 day mission. And you never know, if the boffins at NASA manage to patch together some Heath-Robinson communications, Mars Express may even be in contact with the other Mars Rover vehicles.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Space, Mars, Phoenix Lander, Mars Express, Beagle 2, NASA, ESA, European Space Agency

Stargazers enjoy meteor spectacle

2007-08-13T11:45:00.001+01:00

Hands up, who can just about keep their eyes open this morning? Did you stay up late and watch the show? I did. Almost perfect viewing in my back garden if you discount the light pollution from the street lights. Although my garden is overlooked on all sides by two story buildings there is a gap towards East-Nor-East that shows Cassiopeia and the Perseid cluster between the hours of eleven o'clock and the early hours. A beautiful, balmy, clear night meant that I could relax in my reclining chair and wait. I wasn't disappointed, the meteors passed through the earth's atmosphere with a tremendous regularity, starting off slowly and gaining in frequency as I hit the zenith hour or 02:00 hours.

This was a show that anyone could get involved with as they can be seen with the naked eye and is a great starter into Astronomy. In fact my interest with Astronomy started with the Leonid shower back in the late 1990s. My wife and I were living in the heart of Wales in a small farming community in the Elan Village. I'd heard on the BBC that the UK was expecting to see one of the most spectacular meteor showers so far in the 21st century. We packed some warm drinks, wrapped up tight against the cold weather of late February and drove our car to the top of the nearest mountain to give us a great view of the horizon. The weather was not great with broken cloud but when we did catch a glimpse of the shower we were captivated.

So back to the future, I'm looking forward to the other meteor showers that are visible from the Northern Hemisphere later in the year. If you would like to know more about visible meteor showers then the International Meteor Organisation (IMO) has an excellent web site within which they publish a pretty comprehensive calendar of showers. Some which are visible to the naked eye and others which you will require some sort of equipment to view from a pair of binoculars to more advanced telescope technology.

If you are interested in knowing more about last night's shower, the IMO has published the results for the shower already. How do these guys do it? You can see a pretty comprehensive report here. I'm not sure if this will be updated but the initial statistics look pretty good. The Zenith Hourly Rate (ZHR) for the Perseid shower reached 79 last night. Kudos has to go to Jakub Koukal of the Check Republic who observed for a total of 39 hours with a tally of 219 observed meteors and of course to Mark Cook the only UK reporter who observed for 1 hour and observed 3 meteors.

Roll on the Draconids in October which have been known to reach Storm level although it's more likely to be a ZHR of single figures.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Space, Meteor, International Meteor Organisation, IMO, Perseid, Draconid, ZHR

Phoenix lander blasts off to Mars

2007-08-09T16:41:00.001+01:00

And so it begins. The Phoenix lander launched on August 4th 2007 and is on its long journey out to Mars. The launch went flawlessly thanks to the choice of launch vehicle and favourable weather conditions at Cape Canaveral.

The Delta II rocket system from Boeing stretches right back to the origination of the space race in the 1950s. The rocket is based upon the design of the THOR ballistic missiles created as a deterrent during the cold war with the Soviet Union and updated to take a commercial payload as opposed to a nuclear warhead. If you review the current official Project Phoenix website you will be given a number of facts regarding the mass of the vehicle, which weighs in at 285 tonnes, and requires 890 000 Newtons of thrust to overcome the earth's gravitational pull and reach an appropriate escape velocity. You can learn more about escape velocity here. The launch vehicle has an envious launch history being the vehicle for the Tiros and GOES satellites which advanced atmospheric physics in the USA. The Telstar and Intelsat satellites and the delivery into space of the Pioneer space craft.

According to the Pratt and Whitney website the Delta II rocket is powered by the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne RS-27A booster configuration. They have a one hundred percent success rate for a launch vehicle and hence are the the thruster of choice for stage one which lasts a mere four and one half minutes of the vehicle's trajectory into space. The rocket system for the Delta II can be arranged around the stage one vehicle section in configurations of three, four or nine graphite-epoxy motors.

These motors, developed and built by ATK, are purpose built for the Delta family of launch vehicles. There are three types based upon the diameter of the body of the booster, 40, 46 and 60 inch. The diameter of the body dictates the amount of solid propellant that can be carried. The propellant is a grain mix of the fuel and an oxidising agent to promote the burn of the fuel. The fuel is most commonly aluminium with the most common oxidising agent of ammonium perchlorate.

These boosters and the RS-27A motor are jettisoned at stage 1 and allowed to fall back to earth. Stage two of the Delta configuration utilises an Aerojet AJ10-118K second-stage engine which separates in the upper atmosphere leaving the final third stage of the launch vehicle. This stage allows more accuracy in deploying the payload as the stage has the capability to restart the motor giving the launch team more control over vectoring the third stage. To provide this precise maneuvering of the third stage the vehicle has to have a certain level of redundancy built into the guidance systems of the second stage component of the launch vehicle. The third stage has a Thiokol Star-48B solid rocket motor equipped with the long nozzle PAM-Delta configuration with a an 80 inch length. This motor is also manufactured by ATK and is designed to position the payload ready for deployment at a speed close to payload cruise velocity.

Well, I for one am excited about the latest Mars mission and will be following the journey of the lander and documenting it here on the Electric Circus.

Phoenix lander blasts off to Mars - space - 04 August 2007 - New Scientist Space

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Science, Space, Mars, Lander, Phoenix

UK PM Responds To Light Pollution e-Petition

2007-08-07T13:01:00.001+01:00

This is a perennial problem in the area within which I live. My house is deep in the suburbs of the UK and as such the back garden is overlooked on all sides. Our neighbours have high intensity, security lighting that is activated using an infrared motion detector. I have a cat, my neighbours have a cat and I'm sure the population density of felis catus is quite high in my area. So every evening my back garden is lit up like a sports stadium which not only ruins my opportunities for sky viewing but is very annoying when it wakes you up at 4am. I am a fairly easy going chap and respect the rights of my neighbours to do what they want in their 200m square of liberty, as long as it doesn't impact on anyone else. So, I was heartened to read this report.

The British Astronomical Society has been campaigning to improve lighting so that it is efficient and directed where required, down onto the ground, not up into the air. Directing light down increases the visibility of the night sky and decreases the amount of energy required to light a specific area as the light that would normally vector off into space is collected and redirected down via a mirrored bowl that cowls the light source.

However, the government in the UK has also given the layman and Astronomy enthusiast the tools required to bring action against those deemed to cause a nuisance through light pollution. Way to go Tony Blair - or maybe Gordon Brown, not quite sure who I should thank for this legislation. The Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (DEfRA) in the UK has managed to get an an act through parliament called the "Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act". Chapter 16, section 102 has a clause regarding "statutory nuisance: lighting". This updates the previous legislation, The Environmental Protection Act of 1990, by adding a subsection that relates to "artificial light emitted from premises so as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance". This now gives the individual the recourse to law to try and reduce the amount of light that burns an orange glow or a beam of white heat across the night sky reducing the visibility of the stars and planets and hence putting a stop to amateur astronomy if you live in a suburb or city. I've previously reported on why the Canary Islands are a mecca for observatories in the Northern hemisphere due to their location near the equator and also due to their height and lack of light pollution. The local governments in the Canaries have fitted light cowls to all street lighting that stops light interfering with their observatories. It would be nice if the UK could do the same.

Of course there are beneficial impacts to be had with better lighting. Ecologically speaking, little to no study has been undertaken to review how our towns and cities affect our wildlife through the progressive increase in light pollution. So we have no understanding how this could affect the well being of our flora and fauna. Our carbon footprint could be substantially reduced if street lighting was changed to LED lights fitted with a cowl to reflect light. This would also reduce the cost of powering the lighting which is surely a good thing for the local government institutions?

Read the report about the PM's response here at the Royal Astronomical Society website.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, UK Government, Royal Astronomical Society, British Astronomical Society, Space, Light Polution, DEfRA

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Giant truck set for sky-high task

2007-08-03T16:32:00.001+01:00

What a great way to start the week. Space and engineering have always had a pull for me. They both seem to have grandeur and size akin to the fabled colossus. Both seem too large to understand as a whole but still provides a spectacle that can be admired with awe. Take the truck that is required to transport the Alma (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) telescope into the Chilean Andes. A single antenna weighs in at a mass of 115 tonnes. At approximately 12m in diameter the parabolic dish has a surface engineered to a precision of 20 microns. That's one thousandth of an millimetre (1x10^(-6)). That's a lot of engineering. The telescope will be able to receive electromagnetic signals at a sub-millimetre length. This potentially allows the telescope array to see into deep space. The theory is that the scope should be able to see deep enough in the universe to see the formation of new galaxies. This sounds like exiting stuff and is certainly something I will be following when the array comes online in 2013. Until then the monstrous truck designed and built specifically to maneuver the telescopes into place can be caught on a web cam at the ESO ALMA OSF web cam.

The array is positioned in Chile's Atacama region which is mostly desert and at an average height above sea level of 925m is one of the most arid areas known to mankind. This bodes well for the Atacama array as previous attempts to reach deep space have been hampered by atmospheric interference, particularly water vapour.

The array is situated at a point approximately 5000m above sea level and in a particularly arid area and this alone ensures that the array will not suffer from water vapour interference. Thus images with a quality 10 times that of the Hubble space telescope may be produced from up to 64 antennas, fibre optically linked and controlled by a bespoke computer system named 'Correlator'. The array is expected to receive wave lengths in the range 0.3mm to 9.6mm and will produce a resolution of 0.005 arc seconds.

BBC NEWS Science/Nature Giant truck set for sky-high task

Technorati Tags: Space, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Telescope, ALMA, Chile

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | NASA selects next Mars lander

2007-07-25T17:31:00.001+01:00

Back in August 2003, the BBC reported that NASA announced the plans for the next mission to Mars the 4th planet in our solar system. The mission was to be called Phoenix and will send a lander craft to the Northern pole of Mars which is thought to have a polar ice cap just under the surface. NASA's interest in manned exploration of our solar system and multi-year flight possibilities are gaining support within the Bush administration. So much so that they are looking for a habitable staging point. Mars would make an excellent staging point and currently has enough potential as a planet that may hold life that they are funding further exploration with Phoenix.

The mission has a tripartite organisation between NASA, the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin. The US government has capped research and mission costs to $325m but there will be extra investment from the Canadian Space Agency through the development of metrological instruments and input from UK academics.

Jump forward two years and the BBC reports further progress on the project. NASA has given the go ahead for project Phoenix. The project has a primary objective of exploring the geology and climate of the polar region located at the northern point of Mars. The name Phoenix was chosen as a homily to the failed previous attempts of the Mars Lander programme one which was lost during decent in 1999 and the next programme being canned by the incumbent administration in 2000.

So another two years has passed and the BBC reports further progress on the project with a Blog from Dr Tom Pike who has contributed to the Atomic Force Microscope Team charged with creating and analysing the results of the MECA (Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer) instrumentation. His Blog details the pre-mission testing a preparation that the team is undergoing before the mission launch in August 2007. I'll be watching out for updates and checking out the Phoenix website from time-to-time.

Technorati Tags: Space, NASA, BBC, Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Phoenix, Mars

Astrophysics - Mathematical Jump Start & Observing the Stars

2007-07-18T12:43:00.001+01:00

So, I've finally started to get into studying for my Open University degree in Astrophysics. After receiving the pre-course material I've been reading the first book and attempting the diagnostic quiz to assess my current levels of readiness. I must say that the diagnostic quiz is so far resembles my 'O'-level maths examination paper that I undertook in 1987. So there's not much there to trouble me. Typical questions relate to squares, geometry, and writing notation for maths.

The idea behind undertaking the diagnostic quiz is to assess weakness in my mathematical understanding. This then allows me to identify the areas within the pre-course material on which I should concentrate.

On the process side of studying, I'm finding that around 1.5 hours to 2 hours per day is currently enough to undertake the amount of work required. I expect that as this course progresses it will become much more intense.

Last night, after studying, I decided to use my newly acquired binoculars to review the southern sky. It was quite early and I'm in a very urban suburb of Chelmsford, England. So the quality of what I could see was low. However I did manage to get a good view of Vega and using the binoculars makes a lot of difference. I think that at the weekend I'll take a trip out of town to review the sky to get away from the light pollution.

I'll keep you posted.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Open University, Mathematics

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tests begin on Canaries telescope

2007-07-17T13:27:00.001+01:00

I read this article with interest as in 2003 my wife and I visited La Palma for a holiday and walked the Calderas on which the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory is located. There are a number of observatories located around the summit of the mountain and a precipice dropping around 8000ft to the western shore and sea level.

It's a beautiful place, peaceful, majestic and something you should all get to see. The obvious positioning is due to the lack of light pollution. All the street lights have a cowling attached to direct light down. The nearest large scale habitation is on the island of Tenerife and has little to no effect. Thus at around 2 800 meters (9 000 ft) it's pretty high up and above the general cloud level.

Technorati Tags: Science, Astronomy, La Palma, Roque de los Muchachos, Observatory

PLoS Computational Biology - Adaptive, Fast Walking in a Biped Robot under Neuronal Control and Learning

2007-07-13T11:55:00.001+01:00

This is such a great advancement in robotic science.

PLoS Computational Biology - Adaptive, Fast Walking in a Biped Robot under Neuronal Control and Learning

For many years science has been trying to create a biped robot that has all the stability to tackle uneven ground at pace. Mainly to make robots more acceptable to humans and hence reduce the barriers for take up of the technology. It reminded me of the Honda robot, ASIMO. When I first saw the walking capability of this robot I was astounded. It walked upright showing balance characteristics akin to humans. I urge you to take a look at one of the video's of ASIMO walking. Then compare that with the video on the BBC website. Both are fantastic and take the robots one step (pun intended) further down the road of having a more human form.

Technorati Tags: Robot, ASIMO, HONDA

Open University - Astrophysics

2007-07-02T17:07:00.001+01:00

Well, I finally followed my dream this year and decided to take a change in career path. It's going to be a long, hard, haul but I've signed up to undertake a new bachelors degree at the Open University in the UK. After being out of full time education for some 13 years my maths will be a little rusty so I've elected to undertake a refresher course in mathematics, course MU120 for those who are interested. I'm really excited about this as I hope that it will lead to other opportunities in my middle age. The full B.Sc. will take around 5 years to complete and I'm hoping that I could take on a ph.D. after this with the O.U. You never know it could lead to a change in career direction into something more exciting.

I'll keep blogging my experiences of undertaking the degree so you can see and understand the challenges that I face trying to complete the course work while still in full time employment. I'm sure it will be harrowing reading sometimes but I'm hoping that I can remain focused and really enjoy my study time.

Technorati Tags: Open University, Degree, Astrophysics, physics

Iron Maiden - Clive Burr Trust 24th June 2007

2007-06-04T13:03:00.001+01:00

What can I say, gutted. Maiden are playing the Clive Burr charity gig at Brixton Academy this month on the weekend that I start my summer holiday on the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Well, I wasn't to know that they'd be booking that weekend for the last Maiden gig of the year in the UK. No Earls Court show at Christmas like the last couple of years. I was hoping that this would become a bit of an annual affair. Well, I'll post the photos of the Mull trip, hopefully I can capture some nice sunsets or mountain top scenes.

Also if you want to see Maiden live but can't get to their last gig then check out the Download festival this weekend where they'll be streaming the Maiden concert live. I'll certainly be tuning in.

del.icio.us tags: Iron Maiden, Maiden, Rock, Clive Burr Trust