As our last night on the mountain draws to an end, we’re fighting strong winds and occasional technical glitches in the camera control system (solution : turn off, turn back on again) to get images of some of the most useful galaxies we’ve seen yet. One is a more distant version of Bill’s personal touchstone, [...]
The whole point of the observing run is to try and understand dust in external galaxies, but we’ve already encountered dust in the Milky Way, and producing spectacular sunsets and tonight I observed another manifestation of dust – the zodiacal light, subject of Brian May’s thesis.
You can see it in this picture from the all [...]
The second Galaxy Zoo paper, which introduces the survey and provides details of our initial data analysis, is now available online via astro-ph.
I look forward to hearing your comments….
I’m proud to announce the winners of the first Galaxy Zoo Caption competition. Bill, Anna and I decided the winner by printing out all the entries and then standing around pointing at them. All the entries were appreciated in getting us through the wee small hours of the mornings, but there can only be, in [...]
Colour in astronomy is a difficult and often controversial topic. Rather than just lump all the photons together, we like to use separate filters which allow a standard set of wavelengths through; that means that when I talk about a ‘blue’ image, then I will certainly be talking about the same ‘blue’ as anyone else. [...]
I’ve already written a little about the WIYN telescope itself, but equally revolutionary at the time was its enclosure. Domes used to be designed to keep as much of the external world out as possible, isolating the telescope from the turbulent air outside; the high point of this design might be represented by the Kitt Peak [...]
Despite patchy cloud, we’re just about ready to start observing on night 4. Probably thanks to that low cloud, it was a spectacular sunset over the neighbouring mountains.
At a first glance the seeing looks reasonable, and we’ve already selected our first galaxy.The main aim for tonight is to fill in our collection of elliptical/spiral pairs; [...]
Tonight has been much less straightforward than previous nights; we’ve dealt with a succession of computer glitches in the camera controls, for starters. Nothing serious, and nothing that our telescope operator hasn’t been able to resolve fairly rapidly, but still enough to eat up some time. For most of the middle of the night, the [...]
Anyone keeping an eye on the blog should know that we’re looking at overlapping galaxies to try and understand the nature and distribution of dust in galaxies. Prompted by very pertinent questions from Barbara, our guest for the night in the control room, it’s suddenly occurred to me that we haven’t ever told you why we [...]
