An infrequent astronomy blog based in the UK (mostly). Pondering questions such as Who was the first astronaut to run a marathon in space?.
A friend gave me a "Space Origami" set for Christmas. Tonight I decided to try it out. Here is my attempt to make a radio telescope (with a stellar background).
A while back XKCD created a comic called "Up-goer 5". It was about the Saturn V but with explanations using only the thousand most used English words. Inspired by that comic, Theo Sanderson is asking that people describe their research in the same way.
Quite a few astronomers have already taken part. For example:
Last week, some tweets during the BBC's Stargazing Live got me to thinking about the demographics of astronomers.
The tweets I saw were about the "Down To Earth" shows being dominated by men (typically 2 male hosts, 2 male guests and 1 female guest). Aside from the fact I hated people using the word "token" (which has negative connotations about ability) to describe the individuals who were experts in their respective fields, the under-representation of women in science and technology shows does need to be addressed. First some stats.
As in many fields, women are under-represented in astronomy. The UK membership of the IAU was 12.6% female in 2012. IAU membership quite possibly has a bias towards certain age groups so I found the Royal Astronomical Society figures for those in permanent jobs. At the senior professor level, in 2010, only 7% were women. That's rubbish. This goes up to 28% amongst lecturers. Weighting the RAS figures by the number of people employed at each level gives ~20% of those in permanent positions as women. STFC says that in 2009 28% of astronomy PhD students were female (44% in solar system science!).
You'd hope that the imbalance was down to the senior people having come from a less equal time, and that equality would percolate up, but the picture seems more complicated. The fraction of women to men may actually drop as you go to younger groups. The Institute of Physics shows that only 20% of A-Level physics students are female (age 16-18). The split is pretty similar for those starting university degrees (Graph 5). However, these may be an unfair comparison as physics probably has a poorer gender split than astronomy.
I don't like this imbalance and know that, like everyone, I have a bunch of unconscious (and conscious) biases. Do I help perpetuate the imbalance in things I'm involved with? I helped create a regular astronomy podcast in 2006, and was the chief producer from 2009 to the middle of 2010, so I thought I'd compile some statistics to see. From two listener surveys I knew that the listeners were dominated by men (~85-90%) as are subscribers to Sky And Telescope (95% in 2013). What of the show itself? I've been through the show notes from January 2006 to December 2012 to work it out.
The main part of the show is usually given over to an interview with an astronomer. In total, 362 people were interviewed. Episode-by-episode the gender split varies hugely so I've binned the interviewees by year to look for trends. There is some natural variation from year-to-year but it seems to broadly reflect the imbalance in the professional community with just over 21% being female.
2012 was a sad year. We lost Neil Armstrong, Sir Bernard Lovell and, in December, Sir Patrick Moore.
For anyone who grew up in the UK, Patrick was synonymous with astronomy. He presented the Sky At Night from a few months before the launch of Sputnik in 1957 right up to and including the current episode which was filmed just before his death. His books and TV appearances got many amateur and professional astronomers into the subject when they were children.
I only met Patrick on three occasions and each one was memorable. The first time I was a student helper at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Manchester. He was the editor of the daily newsletter and I had a brief chat with him before needing to go off and let the people choosing a committee to name craters* know that if they didn't hurry up they'd get locked in the building over night. The second time was when the Sky At Night visited us at Jodrell Bank to film for the 50th anniversary of the Lovell Telescope. The third time was at Farthings when I stood in for Chris North once.
I may not have known him well but I know quite a few people that did. He was greatly loved and will be greatly missed. His final episode finished with several clips of him closing the show with "goodnight" over the decades. It was very fitting. Goodnight Patrick.
Wow. Satellite photo taken at the stroke of midnight GMT on New Years Eve! (Via@apod) pic.twitter.com/WEDKLI3x.
The implication is that this colourful image is due to new year celebrations. Can you spot the mistakes?
Hopefully the most obvious give-away that this image isn't what is claimed is that all of Europe is illuminated. Aside from the fact that the entire continent wasn't devoid of cloud cover at that moment on New Year's Eve, you might realise that only the UK, Ireland, Portugal, and Morocco exist in the GMT timezone (other countries not visible in this image do too). At midnight GMT, most of the countries in this image would have been at 1am, 2am, 3am and even 4am. Odd times to be letting off fireworks. Also, I'm not sure if the people on oil rigs in the North Sea are allowed to take fireworks with them.
Despite the image not being at midnight, it does have a real source. The original is the new Earth At Night image from NASA which is a composite of many images taken at different times (hence the lack of cloud cover). Here is part of the original NASA image for comparison.
