Another paper involving yours truly has arrived on the scene. This describes the educational project that I am involved with and which my PhD is linked to. My contributions are littered throughout the project, essentially being the prime driver, with David McKinnon, of the curriculum materials used, which we designed separately to, but are used in, the actual Space to Grow project, as well as being a fundamental designer (and researcher) of the professional learning program. I undertake most of the teacher-focussed research, and contribute to the student research led by Lena Danaia, especially as it is hard to consider the teacher or the student separately. I’m also the telescope head monkey who, along with my buddy Mariana, gets all the images, calibrates them, and sends them off to whomever needs them! This is amongst various other things as well that I won’t labour about. Most of the ‘details’ are in the paper if you want to read it, although it is an overview rather than a detailed analysis of the project so there is a lot more to come in future publications.

I quite enjoy interacting, designing and problem solving ways of getting students and teachers to learn, and more importantly, enjoy stuff, which is an awesome mixture of art, craft and science, a combination of intuition and rationality combining many disparate, personal and organizational, subfields of astronomy, sociology, psychology and education as well as providing me with as much Nescafe Blend 43 as I can drink. Those guys have the teacher tea room market by the goolies. My favouritest part of the project though is getting students to do their own research of which I have a whole bunch of students working on different open and globular clusters, but I’m sure you will hear more about all that in the future (and have recently in the past), anyhow, enjoy! (P.S. I’m not actually THAT short, I’m actually the perfect height for a fighter jet pilot which is all that matters, but those guys in Figure 5 in the paper are actually quite tall!)

And just to spice this, otherwise quite texty, post up, here is an extra special secret squirrel image that isn’t in the paper, but could easily go in Figure 1… An image of the Jewel Box as made by one of the students in the project. I dig it. Its Super-Duper.

On a break I had a chance to nip into the Newcastle Art Gallery. Didn’t know what to expect, most of the gallery was in the process of changing over, and the one exhibition that was on was Desert Country, an exhibition of art made by the desert people of central australia. My appreciation for art such as this has grown a lot over the years from it’s initial nieve ‘just a bunch of dots’ opinion of my teenage years… although it is easy to see how I had this stance when you imagine all the tacky knock-offs you see around the place, which is basically all I had been exposed to when I was a youngster. Its still somewhat alien to me, but that is of course expected as it is a different visual language than my hyped up tech/video-game saturated brain is used to. Beyond my growing understanding of the actual style though, there were some I thought just stood out as just aesthetically awesome in their own right. The first one was like *pow*, the actual mixture of colours oozed some delicious taste into my mouth but, as usual, the computer screen doesn’t do it justice at all. Most of the art I got the most from where are actually the sweet subtle ones, like the second two, rather than the more typical higher contrast works.

For a bit of 2010 and a lot of 2011, I had the great pleasure of leading a couple of students through some real astronomical research. This is actually something I have been doing quite a lot, but these two guys, Josh and Tom, were a couple of the first, but far from the last! They originally chose to do an independent research project for their HSC (Higher School Certificate – Yr 11 & 12) on astronomy, so their teacher, Sandra, got me in to give them a run down of what they could do. What we ended up looking at was a group of pulsating stars called RR Lyraes in a globular cluster, with the prosaic name, NGC6101… which is basically just a catalogue number. What was particularly interesting was that, while these stars had been identified in the 1970s, nobody had really looked at them at all until the students did! So what did they actually do? Well first they took images of the cluster over a series of a couple of months to measure these stars ‘twinkling’. The following image is from APOD, and shows how these stars ‘twinkle’ over time.

They twinkle because they are ‘pulsating’, over time they get bigger and smaller due to their instability. When they are small the light generated by the core of the star cannot pass easily through outer shells of the star, so it pushes these shells out causing the star to expand. Eventually, once it is bigger and less dense, the light all of the sudden can get through and the shells get pulled back in by gravity to where it began, ultimately to repeat itself over… and over… and over. A single pulsation happens over the course of less than a day (usually much less!) so this is quite a rapid process! You can actually measure this brightness change over time for each of the stars to get a handle on how they are pulsating… making graphs like below… where up is brighter, down is dimmer and the left/right axis is time….. sorta! Its actually ‘phase’ but ‘time’ works well enough to get whats going on… so they are getting brighter and dimmer over time.

The particularly useful thing about these stars is that they are ‘standard candles’, which means because they are this particular type of star, we can know if they pulsate in a particular way, then we know roughly how bright they should be. By comparing how bright they should be to how bright they actually appear, we can actually measure distance, which formed a significant fraction of what the students undertook in their research. A significant result of this research was an independant measure of the distance to this globular cluster, which gelled and gave strength to previous estimates using different methods. This is particularly important as distance in astronomy is actually quite tricky to measure, and we use all sorts of cunning schemes to measure it, so it is best to measure it in as many ways as possible! And, of course, far from the least achievement in astronomy is the imagery…. so please take a moment to bask in the image of NGC6101 made from our Blue, Green and Infrared images below.

Anyhow, over the course of the last year I took their initial report and their data and their conclusions, and after dealing with a LOT of the more tedious science-y stuff you need to do, like checks and balances and comparisons to previous literatures and some deep thought about how best not to look like an idiot in print, we submitted a proper scientific paper, and it got published in December 2011! Woohoo! A lot of the intervening time, and a lot of the delay in posting about this, has been due to getting ready, and correct (and idiot-free) another, quite substantially larger, paper ready to submit, which I should do this week! Theres also a flurry of other occurances around the corner, and lots to try and fit into my 9am-10pm mega-PhD worklife, but its all quite lovely and grand! While you are waiting, you can check out our emergences (and my apparent, but not real, shortness) into a couple of newsletters here and here. Enjoy comrades.

He seems pretty rad, that image up the top is the work I saw in the gallery. It looks awesome in the flesh, not that awesome in the screen. A dude to examine definitely.

Just before the glorious day of poultry, a paper was published where I am the first author.

Check it out here

It’s called “Using Smartphone Camera Technology to Explore Stellar Parallax: Method, Results, and Reactions”. Which is official-ese for getting high school students to use their Android or iOS phones to play around with the method behind stellar parallax. Stellar parallax,… in a very short explanation …, is measuring how far a star is away from us by looking at how the star ‘wobbles’ in the sky over the year…. the closer the star, the bigger the wobble. Its fundamentally how we know the distance to anything outside of our solar system, and it is how we define the distance unit in astronomy, the parsec. So its pretty essential stuff to learn about astronomy. BUT the way it is usually taught in high school is by giving the students a very abstract definition…. which really only makes complete sense after you understand the definition… so this method of instruction is really just a illusory pile of circular uselessness. You can, however, use some type of camera…. a smartphone with large screen is a tool that seems custom-made for this…. to run through the method in a classroom on the small scale before trying to explain to the students what the definition means on the astronomical scale. The image above is from my early test run where I had a fake star blu-taced to a stapler and took images with my iPhone as it ‘orbitted’ around the fake sun. Its been used in quite a number of classes now to great effect… once the apprentices have some noisy wobbly fun with their cameras then they are in the perfect spot to actually understand the abstract definition… which is no longer abstract but can be directly linked to what they just did with their phones. The next step for the students is to actually do this for real with a real star using real data with real software astronomers use. I have finished the design for running this in class and this will be tried and tested in first term 2012 where they look at a star, Proxima Centauri, for which I have been collected data from for nearly two years from the LCOGT.net telescopes. Watch this space!

What I thought was gonna be pretty awesome actually knocked it to the next category ‘excessively rad’. My first time at Cockatoo Island, and it was pissing down creating quite an awesome atmosphere (especially rain smashing onto iron) to experience some amazing street art. I have minimal criticisms of it all. Only thing that stuck out was the actual bit that looked like an actual gallery…. sorta didn’t gel with the rest of the experience which was seamlessly embedded into the giant tinshed structures around the place. Having said that, everything in the gallery was friggin’ tops. And of course the sponsors area…which is always a little tacked on!

Go there (http://outpost.cockatooisland.gov.au/). Go there in the rain… less people, more atmosphere, wetter footwear. Heres a little vimeo I whipped up using data from my DSLR and iPhone mic.

Pretty cool little gallery opening with 4 new exhibitions from 4 artists. There was nothing I didn’t quite like! My pick of the litter was Cath Robinson – Thought noise/wave form preludes, which is the first image….. Initially I thought it was way cooler than it actually is, but it is still mega-cool. (I’m being a bit cryptic methinks). And what is the next image? Well, you should just go check it out eh?

Whenever you take an image with a telescope, it is never really automated. Sure, modern telescopes, like the ones I use, you just go… Hey mate… couldja.. ya know… point over there at some point and take a little snappy snap? I’ll be asleep, you just do yer work eh? Thank you robotic slave! They ain’t all like that… but thankfully mine are!

Depending on what mood its in, you’ll get what you want in a week or a month or next year… but whatevs… while the process is generally automated and mechanised, and the cameras themselves are not essentially different than the cameras in iPhones or SLRs, albeit with ocean-floor deep pixels and needing to be cooled to -180 degrees C… there is still a human element. It is very very easy to make a crap astronomical colour image. I’m happy to say that kids under my tutelage get to make awesome colour images from an awesome telescope….. BUT it still needs human input. You need to align, colour, stretch, balance, do cartwheels and a jig to get a really nice astronomical image out.

That… and the telescope doesn’t know where its pointing… it doesn’t really know anything.. so I thought I’d see what kinda of image a computer would make if I just told it to grab a whole bunch of images and stitch them together as best it could. So I coded up a little pattern matching routine up using some common astronomical tools that get the computer to analyse, pattern match and balance the images automatically.

The first conclusion I came to was that computers are very inefficient… it took 2 weeks per image running on 2 cores of a modern computer for the computer to match it all up nice and sweet…. where it may have taken me an afternoon or so. But ya know… their brains run in serial rather than parallel like ours, so we have to give them a break…. I didn’t quite know what to expect really because usually when you make an image, the human is involved at some point and ends out looking how you want it, albeit hopefully accurate representing something that exists.

But here you are… what a computer sees when it looks at the sky without the help of a human……

Its a sad day when you meet the girl at the end of the internet.

Reminds me of this also.