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Astro Hack Day, Take Your Pick: SPIE or UK National Astronomy Meeting!
The Astronomy Hack Days we’ve been hosting at the .Astronomy conference since 2009 have been a great success; they are a huge reason why people come to the conference every year. Some of the hacks the...
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Conferencing and Hack Days in Canada
Woman with poodleEvery two years the instrumentation building community in astronomy get together for conference organised by SPIE, the international optical engineering society. It’s big and tiring...
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Little Green Man’s Guide to the Galaxy
This weekend, Oxford Astrophysics is taking a field trip. No, not to a telescope or a conference for once: we’re going to a music festival! A few months ago, our DPhil. student and dotAstronomer Ruth...
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JWST in the Pub
Some time ago I saw the excellent Jon Butterworth of UCL talk about his new book and his work in particle physics with the LHC at our local Oxford Skeptics in the Pub evening, and while I was there the...
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Beyond .Astronomy
A lot has happened in the 6 years since Rob Simpson organised the first .Astronomy meeting in Cardiff – for one, he didn’t know it would be “the first” of anything at that time! After very successful...
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Python in Astronomy: A week of cheese, coding, bicycles and learning
TODAY (28 Nov) is the last day to apply for the Python in Astronomy workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. I was very happy when Tom Robitaille (MPIA) asked me to join him on the...
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E-ELT gets the go-ahead
The E-ELT, becoming a bit more real now. (Image: ESO)I spent a couple of days this week in at MPIA in Heidelberg, working with my colleagues from MPIA and CEA Saclay in Paris on commissioning and...
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BICEP2, or how science progresses
It looks like 2015 has started with a lesson for progress in science, though perhaps not in the sense we’d hoped. A paper is expected to hit Arxiv this week (already available here) demonstrating that...
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Don’t Look at the Sun
Tomorrow morning we’ll be treated to the rare sight of a near-total solar eclipse. I hope so at least; the weather forecast is looking a bit dicey at the moment. Still, I plan to be outside between 8...
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New instruments, amazing new data
In the past couple of years ESO have gradually commissioning a new generation of instruments at Paranal. The newcomers at VLT are KMOS, MUSE and most recently SPHERE. One by one, these instrument are...
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