New Year marked the start of night two of our observing run. We finished observing yesterday at just after midday – radio astronomers laugh at both sun and, in our case, cloud. The result’s weren’t great; we lost more than five hours completely to strong winds which might have been dangerous to the telescope, and [...]
We’re off. Our first candidate galaxy is this rather nice system Before we can get to that though, we have to point the telescope at a well-known, bright source – usually an otherwise innocent and boring radio galaxy – to calibrate the system and to focus. Which is where our problems have started; the weather isn’t [...]
I’m sitting in what looks like a perfectly normal hotel room; bed, tv, shower and desk (with every astronomer’s essential needs – an internet connection – catered for). It’s only by opening the curtains that you might realise I’m somewhere special. Skiers are flying past in one direction, while in the other direction others are [...]
If you followed the many interesting discoveries made by us all as part of the Galaxy Zoo team on the forum and the blog, you’ll have noticed that one of the most important things in astrophysics research is getting data. Unlike most other scientists, astrophysicists can’t just take a tiny galaxy into the lab and [...]
Just in time for the holidays, we got a little early Christmas present in our inbox. Applying for telescope time can be a large part of an astronomer’s work, and because astronomers often apply for far more time than is available, many worthy proposals don’t make it. If you’ve been following the blog, you know [...]
This post is from Karen Masters at Portsmouth, who is working on red spirals….
When light travels through stuff it is scattered and absorbed. This is true of light passing through our atmosphere, and it is also true of light as it passes through galaxies. Light of different wavelengths is affected by this scattering and absorption [...]
This is from Dan Darg, a graduate student at Oxford, who’s been working on the mergers:
The mergers paper is finally out and will be quite a tour de force. We are confident Galaxy Zoo is the largest visually examined parent sample from which any merger sample has ever been derived and we were able [...]