Astronomy Blog

Self-censorship

In the past day or so I have taken an action that I am not proud of. I changed the title of one of my blog posts from 2005 following criticism in the comments on that post.

There had been a Guardian article featuring predictions for the UK General Election by various astrologers, tarot card readers etc. I had checked those predictions after the election. The predictions were not very dependable or reliable and therefore I thought the term "bad", in the original title, was appropriate. Plus, it was a play on the title of Phil Plait's blog.

One of the astrologers I mentioned, did comment on that post. He was admirably good humoured about it considering that my page was ranked at the top of the Google results when searching for him. There was an implication that I should change the title but he explicitly said that he wasn't asking me to do that. I took him at his word. Despite what I feel about the morality of many astrologers (using imaginary versions of the universe to justify getting money from people), I did provide suggestions on ways he could constructively improve his ranking (getting a website for one thing) but those suggestions were not acknowledged.

In the past few days, following an appearance by the astrologer on day-time TV, I had a flurry of comments on that blog post. A few were people asking about their love lives (not sure if they were asking me or hoping that the astrologer reads the comments on my blog) but there were also complaints from someone using the name "Dee". They told me I was being "unecessarily [sic] obstructive" but did not say in what way I was being so. Dee's continued negativity, and lack of acknowledgement of my positive suggestions, got to me.

Last night I did what had been heavily implied (if not explicitly said) and changed the title. I do not wish to be deceitful though so I've included a statement at the top of the post explaining that I have done so. The title is certainly clearer now if less snappy.

Giving people what they want doesn't always solve the problem. Changing the title in this way compromises my integrity and I do not think it helps the astrologer. I actually think it would make things worse for them. Anyway, I can accept that I may be wrong so we'll see if changing the title helps.

Cutaway

Unlike some people I don't see why there needs to be such a separation between the two cultures of Art and Science. Artists don't have to be scared of science and scientists are capable of being artistic. At school I used any excuse to included drawings and graphics in my coursework and I've tried to keep that up since becoming an adult. This has mostly been digital but I've kept drawing on paper too albeit not as much as I used to. I'm quite proud that I even managed to include a pencil drawing in my thesis which was inspired by illustrated books I used to borrow from the library as a child and by the great drawings of R.W. Porter.

The drawing shows a cutaway of the OCRA-p 30 GHz receiver, on a telescope in Poland. I spent a long time working on and with this receiver. Getting it to work and do science was variously frustrating, annoying, exciting and joyful. I feel quite attached to it and I'm glad I captured it in this portrait.

SkyWatch

During the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory launched Project Moonwatch. This amazing citizen science project had a network of observers around the world tracking the first artificial satellites. The data collected proved vital in discovering some satellites and tracking the fate of others. The history of the project is quite fascinating and described in detail in Keep Watching the Skies.

This evening, I was chatting with Mike Peel. Our conversation covered all sorts of ideas from open science to 3D tracking of meteors. By the end of the conversation we came up with the idea of a mass participation Twitter project named SkyWatch, inspired by Project Moonwatch as well as the UKSnow & MeteorWatch hashtags on Twitter. The aim would be to track and identify objects moving in the sky.

Following the examples of Ben Marsh and Tomas Vorobjov, the data could be collected and displayed on a map in real time, along with the images posted to Twitpic or Yfrog. For objects such as the ISS or satellites, it would be possible to watch their path develop and spot when they were heading in your direction. It might be possible to track meteors/fireballs and even identify where a meteorite may have hit theground. This sort of service, if used widely by the public, would also pick up Chinese lanterns and other IFO/UFOs!

To get as many people to take part as possible, it needs to be easy for people to join in. That means less precise input but, as UKSnow and Galaxy Zoo have demonstrated, sometimes large numbers of imprecise observations can give a pretty good answer when combined. Like UKSnow, the idea would be to encourage short tweets with a limited amount of simple information. Mike and I think these should contain a location, direction, brightness and a guess as to what it might be. An example tweet might be:

#skywatch Manchester N 4/10 Satellite?

In these tweets it would be nice to allow the user's location to be provided in as free a format as possible, e.g. postcode or city, and work out where this is (latitude/longitude) using a geo-location lookup service of some kind. The direction would be given as a simple compass direction and the service would recognise values such as N, East, South-west, NNW etc. The brightness will, necessarily, be subjective but could have some guidance such as 10/10 being as bright as the Sun, 5/10 being brighter than the stars that are visible, and 1/10 being on the edge of visibility. It would also allow people to suggest what the object might be e.g. satellite, meteor, plane, ISS, UFO etc.

One of the biggest problems might be the delay between an observation and a tweet. It may be possible to correct for this statistically but some level of uncertainty will remain in the timing (probably to no better than the nearest 30 seconds). One optional addition might be to allow people to say how long ago their observation was but then things start to be more complicated and it may be more trouble than it's worth.

Do you, dear reader, think there is merit to this idea? Do you have suggestions for ways to improve it? If you do, or have the ability to help get this up and running, please post in the comments below.

IYA Closing Ceremony

As I write this the International Year of Astronomy closing ceremony is taking place. If you are quick you can catch some of the live webcast. Currently, Catherine Cesarsky is giving an overview of the year. One of the statistics is that 148 countries took part in the IYA2009. That sounds impressive but I hadn't quite realised how impressive that is. Catherine just showed a map of the world with participating countries shown in red. It is noticeable that Africa isn't as red as other continents.

UK Snow

Via Will Gater I saw this amazing image of the UK taken by NASA's Terra satellite today. The image shows almost the entire country sporting a layer of snow.

On Twitter people have been using the hash tag #uksnow to provide real time snowfall updates (Citizen Meteorology) and Web Developer Ben Marsh has created a real time map to show where the snow is falling as well as people's photos. It has been fascinating to watch the snow head over from Liverpool and Warrington to Manchester in real time and then see it start falling outside my own window.