The Cosmic Web

Hello again, dear reader. It’s been a little over a month since I posted last, during which time I’ve been up to various things. I went to two conferences in Poland - one on the use of supercomputers in astrophysics, which is quite central to my PhD; and one on Wikipedia and its various sister projects, organised by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is nothing to do with my work - scientists are allowed hobbies! I also moved house to a lovely place in West Oxford. My landlord is now the mathematician and author Marcus du Sautoy, which I find pretty cool even if almost no-one else does.

And, I went to this exhibition as promised. I’ll have some things to say about that and maybe the conferences over the next few days.

In the meantime, here again is a video of Jupiter taken by Voyager 1 during its approach, for no better reason than that I find it absolutely awesome. You can read more about it at my post here.

Voyager 1's approach to Jupiter

It’s good to be back!

Hello everyone! I managed to let myself slip into rather a long drought from posting for a bit - which, I’ve just realised, spanned this blog’s first birthday. I’m planning to start things up again in the near future. In the meantime, I’ll share with you one of the spam comments the blog got while I was away: I’m sure you’ll find it as enlightening as I did.

“I can’t advise you,” Fernandez said briskly. “The decision you face is much too difficult. I can only lay out the situation.” She pushed her intercom button. “Bob, tell Richard and Eileen to bring the car around. I’ll meet them in front of the building.” She turned back to Sanders.

All last week and this I’ve been in Cambridge working on a paper, which hopefully I’ll be able to tell you about sometime soon. Almost as soon as I get back I’m leaving again for the Edinburgh Fringe festival, where I’m performing in a show. So unless I get time to write something in the next couple of days you won’t be hearing from me for two or three weeks.

Until then, clear skies!

Carnival of Space is a blog carnival, and it’s about space.

A blog carnival, in case you’re unacquainted with the term, is a type of online event in which bloggers make collections of links to blog posts about a single topic. The Carnival of Space’s topic is, as alluded to above, space. So each week a blog will host links to various space-related posts written in the last week or so. It’s a nice way of coming across interesting posts, and discovering new blogs you might never have read otherwise.

This week’s issue is hosted at Twisted Physics - and while I’ll deny any accusations about my motives for first mentioning it now of all weeks, I will admit that the first picture in that post is a masterpiece any astronomy blog ought to be proud to host. Ahem.

All the editions of the carnival are listed here.

Welcome to The Cosmic Web!

I intend to write mainly about two topics here, though I may also wander into other territory. The first is astronomy, which I’ll be pitching towards the proverbial intelligent layman. I’ll start out with some posts introducing basic concepts and topics in astronomy, and might review some recent papers I think will be of interest.

The second topic is science communication. I will try to include a reasonable proportion of positive posts about this to balance the inevitable “oh gods the popular press is so bad at science reporting”, but I make no promises.

I’d welcome any comments or questions, either general or related to specific posts, and particularly suggestions for topics you’d like to see covered or news stories and papers you think I might find interesting.

The ‘I’ above is Olaf Davis, a graduate student in Astrophysics at Oxford University.