Tag Archive for: astronomy

#girlswithtoys

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Yesterday, National Public Radio in the US published an interview with an astronomer, in which he’s quoted saying:

“Many scientists, I think, secretly are what I call ‘boys with toys’.”

Many other scientists are, of course, not boys at all. But they still have toys, and for the last eleven hours or so Twitter has been awash with fantastic photos of scientists, grouped under #girlswithtoys. There are lots of telescopes:

…there are plenty of other bits of apparatus and equipment:

I have no idea what a dual intracellular amp is, but it’s clearly making someone happy.

Then there are the not-really-instruments-just-cool-toys:

Drop whatever you’re doing and spend a few minutes scrolling through the #girlswithtoys stream (see also the live feed). It’s a glorious depiction of scientists doing what they love, with the tools and instruments of their work.

(top image from this tweet – who doesn’t love a spot of Antarctic heli-fishing?)

Update, 11am: One of the most remarkable photographs is this:

Margaret Hamilton during the Apollo Program (NASA / WikiMedia Commons)

Margaret Hamilton during the Apollo Program (NASA / WikiMedia Commons)

I’d never heard of Margaret Hamilton, which seems outrageous given that she was the lead flight software engineer on the Apollo programme. That is: the code written by her team landed men on the moon. In the final moments before touchdown, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module computer was swamped with excess data and pushed beyond its limits. It’s a fairly standard story in software engineering circles about how the development team anticipated such a situation and had built a system that could tolerate it. Their foresight avoided calamity.

I’ve read the story many times, but I’ve never heard it mentioned that Hamilton led that development group, nor that she coined the very term ‘software engineering.’ Her Wikipedia page is awesome.

The Wonders of the Sun

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Your Universe: Explored

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Explore your UniverseOne of the projects Think Physics is partnered with is Explore Your Universe, a national campaign celebrating the physical sciences and run by the Association for Science & Discovery Centres and the Science and Technology Facilities Council. We’re delivering a range of workshops and activities, and on Saturday we capped off a frenetic  British Science Week by hosting a family science show here in Think Lab:

This was the first time we’ve used Think Lab as a performance space like this, and it seemed to work pretty well. Thanks to everyone who came, and we’ll keep you posted on future public events.

 

Solar Eclipse and Physics in Perspective

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We’ve had a predictably hectic first British Science Week here in Think Lab and around the region. We’ll catch up with reporting next week once we’ve had a bit of a lie down in a darkened room, but speaking of darkened: you might have noticed the solar eclipse this morning.

We were out on the Northumbria campus greeting sixth-form and college students arriving for our Physics in Perspective enrichment event. Here are a few snapshots from the morning – during and after the eclipse.

Tinkering Thursday: 11th December

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In the photograph above, Joe is pointing a telescope at the sun. Two things about this are remarkable:

  1. It’s December, we’re in Newcastle, and we actually saw the sun today.
  2. Joe can still see.

We all know – obviously – that looking at the sun through telescopes, binoculars, even cameras is, in general, a really really bad idea. But let’s be clear, just in case this is news to you:

Looking at the sun through a telescope, pair of binoculars, or indeed any sort of optical instrument is a really, really bad idea. You’re quite likely to blind yourself.

Don’t do it.

…unless you have a solar telescope. Oh heck yes, we have one of those. It has a very, very precise and very, very dark filter, and through it the sun looks like this:

The sun’s disc, with a little cloud, as seen through the solar telescope. December 11th 2014.

The sun’s disc, with a little cloud, as seen through the solar telescope. December 11th 2014.

So that was fun. We’ve some work to do getting the best performance out of the solar telescope, but the good news is that we’ve managed to extract the weird bits of material that were floating around in the eyepiece, so the whole thing doesn’t have to go back to the manufacturers. In California. Phew.

Back in Think Lab, we continued Tinkering Thursday with Joe making rather more smoke than he’d intended. He was attempting to make a lightbulb from scratch, but since we haven’t yet worked out how to isolate the smoke detectors in the Lab, we packed that in sharpish. We’ll come back to it.

Our attention turned, therefore, to the more careful (and less combustible) pursuit that is trigonometry. There is, it turns out, good reason you learn sines, cosines, and (in this case) inverse tangents in school: so you can make adorable little robots draw not-quite-lined-up Christmas trees:

This sort of thing makes us happy. If you look closely you might catch a glimpse of some extremely rough-looking code – the main output of the afternoon was, perhaps, a bug report filed with the lovely Mirobot team. We continue to be big fans of our dinky little robot friend, and as the software settles down it’s proving even more capable than we’d hoped.

More Tinkering next Thursday!

Philae has landed!

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Philae’s descent to the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image courtesy of esa.

Last night space history was made when the Philae probe successfully descended from Rosetta and landed on Comet 67P. The Think Physics team watched the scenes unfold from our own mission control: Think Lab. We would like to extend our congratulations to everyone involved in the landing and wish them every success during the rest of the mission. More information can be found by visiting the European Space Agency’s website here. You can also review the journey that Rosetta has made by using this mind-blowing interactive map.

This afternoon, we have a small celebration of our own – the official launch of the Think Physics project. Not quite as complicated as landing a probe on a comet 510,398,393 km away, but we’re having our own nail-biting moments!

Tag Archive for: astronomy

You won’t believe the scale of this activity…

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We recently had a request from a local school for a workshop that linked maths and space.  A natural fit, of course, and an example of the sort of workshop we can pull together to fit in with your teaching needs.

As a starter, we looked at the first half of the classic ‘Powers of Ten’ film:

It’s a great film to use to show the massive range of scales over which physics is useful, from galaxies to people to quarks. However, for this session, I wanted to focus just on the journey out to the edge of the observable universe.

After than we turned out attention to our nearest (natural) neighbour – the Moon.  Although the diagrams of the solar system often show the Moon as being very close to Earth, you can visualise the distance easily because the Moon is about 10x the diameter of the Earth away from us.  Using any ball to represent the Earth, wrap a piece of string around the middle of the ball ten times.  Unwrap, and there you have a nice visual representation of how far away the Moon is.

When I was teaching in a school, one of my regular activities was to make a scale model of the solar system.  The problem with the solar system is that space is BIG. It’s really hard to create a solar system model which has the same scale for both the diameter of the planets and the distances between the planets.  The activity I used for Think Physics is one which is adapted from ‘The Earth as a peppercorn,’ and there are variations on the theme all over the internet.

How big are the planets in relation to each other?

food stuffs

Objects to use in our scale model of the solar system.

There are online calculators which will allow you to do the scaling without effort, but as we were doing a maths workshop, we got out our scientific calculators and did the maths ourselves.  We used a football (diameter 20cm) as the Sun, and used scaling to work out the diameter of the planets.  If you don’t want to do your own calculations then I like the Thinkzone version of the solar system calculator.  In the picture you can see the options that I offered as possible objects that would be the right size for our model.

Having worked out that hundreds and thousands are about the right size for mercury, silver dragées work for Earth, and cherry tomatoes would be good for Jupiter, we then tried to put the objects in the correct place – using the same scale.

We used a toilet roll to help with the distances (similar to this NRICH activity) – and the students quickly realised that there just wasn’t enough space in our lab.  In fact, using our scale (the Sun as a football), the only planet we could fit into Think Lab was Mercury.  The maps show where we would have to put our objects.

The orbits of the inner planets, if the sun is 20cm in diameter.

The orbits of the inner planets, if the sun is 20cm in diameter.

The orbits of the outer planets (and Pluto) according to our scale model.

The orbits of the planets (and Pluto) according to our scale model.

 

If you want to do this activity – you could use the Thinkzone calculator and center the solar system on your own school – you just need your latitude and longitude, which you can find by placing a marker on Google Maps.  Students can then work out where their house is on the map, or you could even go on a solar system safari and walk the distances involved using a trundle wheel and your map.

 

Lunar diaries

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Explore the moon from your back yard with our handy downloadable observation diary.

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Tag Archive for: astronomy

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