Astronomy Blog

100 Hours Live!

Yesterday the 100 Hours of Astronomy got underway. The24 hour live observatory webcast started at 10 am BST (9 am UT) this morning and I've been following it on and off all day. At the start there were technical difficulties but those were eventually sorted out and the video has been fairly reliable since. It is an amazing feat to get all these remote observatories to send live video back to the hosts at the European Southern Observatory in Germany. Even though we are only 7 hours in, I'd like to say congratulations to Douglas Pierce Price and the team at ESO for (eventually) pulling this off.

If you can't watch live, or had problems with Ustream, you can watch all of the segments that have already occured in the archive on the ESO website.

I'm helping out with the segment at 6 pm BST (5 pm UT) from Jodrell Bank. Thankfully we've got nice weather (not much wind) although our camera doesn't seem to be able to cope with the contrast difference between the control room and the telescope so there might not be any views out of the window. If you tune in, you might see me sat in the background.