38 things you might not know about the Moon

(Unless, of course, you are extremely keen on the Moon, in which case you probably do. Anyway . . .)

1) Our Moon is the largest moon relative to the size of its planet in our Solar System. Some moons are larger - Titan and Ganymede, for instance - but are hundreds of times smaller relative to Jupiter and Saturn. This of course leaves out Pluto and Charon, which besides no longer belonging to the "planet" class are more of a several-body system. On that topic, our Moon is more than five times the mass of Pluto!

2) It's as bright as a sunspot and as dark as coal. A sunspot is a darker point on the Sun's surface. If you could isolate it, it would shine as bright as a full Moon - which looks extremely bright in the sky, especially when full. But its rocks are about the colour of coal. Its apparent whiteness is because it's nearby, and we see it contrasted against a darker space. Its albedo is roughly 0.1, which means it only reflects 10% of the light that hits it. (Ice is about 0.9, meaning it reflects 90% of the light, and charcoal about 0.04, meaning it reflects about 4%.) The Earth's albedo is about 0.3, though of course it varies from place to place. Mercury's is similar to the Moon's.

3) In pictures, the Moon is almost always drawn much bigger than it really is - because it is so bright and captures our imaginations. Its angular size in the sky is between 29.43 to 33.5 arcminutes, which is actually very small. The Andromeda galaxy appears six times larger than the Moon from Earth - but then, of course, we can't usually see that.

4) The size of the Moon appears to vary because of its elliptical orbit - and not because of where it is relative to the horizon. The famous "Moon illusion", the fact that the Moon appears huge when it's on the horizon, has been documented at least since Aristotle. Various theories have been put forward to explain it: one from Ancient Greece was that the Earth's own atmosphere had a magnifying effect. In fact, it doesn't - and you can check this for yourself by holding an object of fixed size next to the moon, at a fixed distance from your eyes. The cause is probably from the way we see the sky: we imagine it as fairly flat, or at most, a gently curving dome, making objects near the horizon seem further away than objects immediately overhead. There are also more landscape features like trees and buildings to compare the moon to on the horizon.

5) Actually, it's not quite simple. The Earth's atmosphere does have a lensing effect on the Moon which can turn it into funny shapes - but you need to be lucky to see it! It can be due to layers of air with different temperatures, such as here:

From the International Space Station, astronauts have seen a "squishy" Moon as a result of the Earth's atmosphere diffracting sunlight!

7) The Moon is 1/81th of the mass of the Earth, but its gravity is 1/6th. Why? Because of Newton's laws of gravity. (To be pedantic, the inverse square law specifically, which was not Newton's alone.) Gravity gets stronger the closer you are to the centre of something. If you have two bodies of exactly the same mass, but one is smaller than the other, the smaller one will have a greater gravity, though over a smaller area. This is why, in a binary star system where one star has died, the white dwarf, neutron star or black hole will often start accumulating matter from the star. As the Moon has a much smaller radius than the Earth, an astronaut standing on the Moon is much closer to the centre of the Moon than she would be to the Earth's standing on the surface of the Earth. Surprisingly, this effect is more significant than the mass of the body - double the mass and you double the gravity, but halve the radius and you multiply the gravity by four.

8) There is no atmosphere or liquid water on the Moon, meaning there is no weather. The escape velocity of the Moon is 2.38 kilometres per second (so it's much easier to fire rockets off the Moon than off the Earth). At Earthly and Moonly temperatures, this is easily low enough for all gases to escape immediately. (At a very, very cold temperature, such as Pluto and Charon, gases move far slower, so it's easier to hold onto them.) This has many implications . . .

9) . . . for example: Moon dust is dangerous to astronauts and their spacesuits! It's extremely abrasive - because no water has rubbed it and rounded it, the way rivers make pebbles smooth on Earth. It's very hard, because meteorite impacts give it a melted, glassy coating. This hardness and abrasiveness means it pierces spacesuits easily. It's very fine, and having no air or water to drive this fine dust around or turn it into soil, it stays there - static and clingy, getting into the Apollo craft and into the astronauts' lungs. The static comes from UV light which knocks electrons off the atoms and molecules. All this will need to be taken into account if we want to live on the Moon.

10) It has often been thought that there is water on the Moon - the Tintin characters, going there in the 1950s, see stalactites and stalagmites - and that hypothesis was correct: there is. It's ice, of course, and trapped within the rock - no rivers or lakes exist, and any water that seeped to the surface would immediately boil or be rapidly photodissociated. But absorption spectra by NASA's Moon Minerology Mapper show the presence of a tiny amount of water within the rock. This has wannabe lunar colonisers very excited indeed. Recently, researchers at the University of Michigan did a study on moon rocks which suggested that the water seems to have been there from the time the Moon formed. This is odd, because the Moon is thought to have been very hot when it formed, which would have boiled off any water. (The same, I suppose, goes for the Earth. Our water may have been brought via comets from the Late Heavy Bombardment.)

11) A "blue moon" is actually not a blue coloured moon at all, but simply the second full moon of any given month. Since the Moon's orbit is 27 days 7 hours 43 minutes, and your average month is 30 days and 10 hours, this doesn't happen often - every two or three years. Occasionally some Facebook page will tell you that a blue moon means something incredibly significant and spiritual. It doesn't: it's simply an inevitable lining up of human generated unequal series of numbers. Calendar months are entirely human choices. Sorry!

12) The Moon is red during a lunar eclipse because the light that reaches it is filtered through sunrises and sunsets. To visualise what is happening, look at this beautiful picture of Saturn:

Saturn's air itself is carrying the Sun's light around the planet (as the air does on a cloudy day on Earth). Earth's atmosphere does the same thing: the atmosphere around the edge of the planet carries the light on and diffuses it into Earth's own shadow. It's red light, for the same reason as sunsets are red: blue light is scattered and all goes off at an angle, leaving red light's path comparatively clear. There are also plenty of particles in the Earth's atmosphere, and particles tend to turn light redder. Light filtering through a sunrise and sunset has the most atmosphere to travel though. That's why people say there's "no protection" when you get sunburnt at noon: the Sun's light goes straight through the thinnest layer of air.

I made a silly little diagram to illustrate this for my March Galactic Orchids talk:

and incidentally, exactly the same thing happens when looking at spiral galaxies face-on versus edge-on:

(This lovely pair are NGC 4126 and NGC 3814. From the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope.)

13) We see perfect solar eclipses because of a wonderful cosmic coincidence: the Sun and the Moon appear exactly the same size. The Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, but also 400 times further away. Actually, this varies - if the Moon is near apogee (furthest point away) due to its elliptical orbit during a solar eclipse, it won't quite block out the Sun, and we get the "ring of fire".

The shadow of the Moon on the Earth is actually surprisingly small. From the Planetary Habitability Laboratory:

(Eclipses are very emotional events. If you want to cheer yourself up, I strongly recommend watching this Sky at Night episode about Chris Lintott's trip to Turkey to see one!)

There is almost certainly no other planet on the Solar System where we could see such perfect solar eclipses - and this is in time, too, as well as space, because . . .

14) . . . the Moon used to be closer to Earth than it is now - and is moving away from us at the rate of 3.8 cm per year. We check this constantly by firing laser beams at retroreflectors placed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts. As we know the speed of light, we can time how long the reflection takes to get back to us and get the Moon's distance to an accuracy of millimetres. In my lifetime, so far, it's moved away about 1.16 metres.

On average, that is. Its elliptical orbit varies by a huge amount more than that. But there's a slow progression. And the unavoidable conclusion is that the Moon used to be a lot closer to Earth than it is now. Tides would have been more dramatic; the Earth's own crust would have been under more strain, as would the Moon's. The friction this caused is why the Moon's face is always pointed towards us - and why we are heading the same way . . .

15) Earth's own orbit is slowing down, so one day we will always be showing the same face to the Moon, too. Our faraway descendants will never see a moonrise . . . But that will not be for a very long time.  At the moment, we only need to add a "leap second" less than once a year.

As Phil Plait put it: "I hope you liked 2008. Because you're going to get an extra 0.0000031689% of it today." (2008 was possibly the worst year of my life so I was not pleased, but the extra 0.0000031689% passed quickly!) As he explains, the Moon isn't the only influence - there's also the Sun, the fact that the Earth's structure is part solid and part liquid and generally uneven, earthquakes and tsunamis, and even the weather. So it's slow. But it seems that one day, a lunar orbit and an Earth day will be the same length - 47 of our present Earth days.

We know from fossil records and even rocks that the Earth's day was once 21 hours when life was very young, and 23 hours in the time of the dinosaurs. Coral is particularly good at showing this - they grow leaving marks like tree rings, marking days and years (or rather, periods of light and dark, and seasons, respectively). The older the records, the more days there seem to be in a year - indicating that days were shorter.

16) The Moon is speeding up! This is why it is receding from us, and how it will eventually only see one side of the Earth, as we do it. Essentially, it's taking energy from the Earth's rotation around its axis and putting it into its own orbit - like grabbing the hand of a spinning ice-skater. However, even though the Moon speeds up, it takes longer to complete its orbit, since it's further out.

17) The Moon may be responsible for the seasons. Some planets are very tilted (some ridiculously so, like Uranus); some are very sensibly aligned, with their equators on the same plane as the Solar System. Earth's is pretty tilted, and it keeps the tilt consistent as it goes round the Sun - hence, of course, the seasons. If the Moon was created in a giant impact (see later), this would have knocked us over; Uranus is thought to be tilted for the same reason. However, Earth also has a "wobble" (a very steady one; it's not going to fall over like a spinning top) which is shown in Milankovitch cycles. However, all these are steady and fairly minor, unlike Mars, which wobbles all over the place as its two titchy moons fail to exert any stability against the massive objects such as Jupiter pushing it around in the Solar System. The Moon has been shown to have a stabilising effect on the Earth's orbit - though this, much like the eclipses, will cease as it gets further away from us.

18) It may seem obvious, but art does not always capture it: the appearance of the Moon indicates where the Sun is, like an arrow. You will never see a crescent Moon looking like an open parachute: if the crescent is on its side, the "horns" will point upwards, indicating that the Sun is"below" the Earth's horizon. A full Moon indicates that the Sun is "behind" the Earth. My favourite ever scientist, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, wrote in a 1954 astronomy textbook, agreed at the time to be the best in the world: "It is an amusing pastime to note the 'impossible moons' portrayed by some artists: a new moon high in the northern sky, for instance; a full moon near sunset in the west; or a crescent with horns pointed downward." (That is probably the American version of this book - I wonder if I have bought the only 1954 copy on the market?)

19) The Moon has a molten core and magnetic field. Both are very small - but it's enough to perturb the solar wind from the Sun. The molten core was found with the help of seismometers left by the Apollo astronauts. This is pretty interesting, since not all planets have a molten core or magnetic field - Mars's, for instance, has pretty much shrivelled up, and Martians have no protection from the solar wind.

20) Tides are caused by gravity. Nothing else. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Moon does not preferentially pull on water. It does not affect us "because we are mostly water". True, the Moon does have some cultural effects, hence the werewolf, the word "lunatic", and the Sussex police claiming that there's a rise in crime around the full moon. I've heard people tell me in all seriousness that they "feel different when it's a full moon", that they "felt really angry when the Moon was red during an eclipse", but the Moon isn't picking some of the molecules in your body and dragging them around whilst ignoring the others. I'm not going to pretend I know why these mood alterations seem to happen, but I suspect a lot of it's simply that we expect them. Moonlight is a wonderful, shivery thing, after all - I will never forget taking a walk in a moonlit wooded area around the lake on my university campus. The water was black and silver and the moonlight reflected astonishingly off the silver birch trees. The thrill was slightly marred by the fact that it was so muddy that one of my companions had wrapped his shoes in plastic bags . . .

The Moon's gravity - not to mention the Sun's - pulls on everything, including the Earth's crust. CERN had to take this into account building the Large Hadron Collider, if I recall correctly what was said on my visit there.  There are tides because water moves around easily. As for the Sussex police, I also recall Chris Lintott's comment on a podcast called "Living Space": "Anything to do with the Moon in Sussex has got to be Patrick's fault."

21) The much-missed Sir Patrick Moore wrote his first paper about the Moon when he was only 14. He was invited by a local astronomer, W.S. Franks, to come and use the Brockhurst Observatory which was very near where the young Patrick lived. Mr Franks was suddenly killed by a car knocking him on his bicycle, and Patrick was asked to take over the observatory. He presented a paper to the British Astronomical Association named "Small Craters in the Mare Crisium". You'll find the Mare Crisium on the far right here. "I sent it in, and was notified by the Association's Council that it had been accepted, but I felt bound to explain that I was not exactly elderly. I still have the reply, signed by the then secretary, F.J. Sellers: 'I note that you are only fourteen. I don't see that this is relevant'." (This, by the way, is exactly what you should be saying to young people interested in science.) You can read more in Sir Patrick's autobiography. (You can also leave a tribute for him here - and yes, he did play the xylophone.)

22) The darker areas of the Moon, "the man in the Moon", are called maria, meaning seas. Tell that to someone you know named Maria, if she'd be interested? The maria are of course not seas - they are in fact old lava flows, quite possibly made as the result of impact craters that filled with lava. There still seems to be debate whether the impacts caused an upwelling of lava or whether it was volcanism. They are dark because they are more iron-rich than the rest of the Moon's surface, indicating that they come from closer to the core. (Just like the Earth, the Moon has more iron towards its centre, because iron is heaviest, and it started off molten so heavy things sank to the bottom.) In this picture by Alan Friedman you can see a large lava basin which then received a later impact:

23) There isn't a "dark side of the Moon". There is a "far side" of the Moon that never points our way. But, as you can see for yourself, every side of the Moon experiences day and night with its rotation just as the Earth does. We can see the far side of the Moon, however, using spacecraft such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

24) The Moon does not, strictly speaking, orbit the Earth. Rather, the Earth and the Moon orbit a common centre of mass. This centre of mass, or barycentre, is just under 2000km below the surface of the Earth. That means that Earth goes round in a little circle, and the Moon goes round in a big one. (If they were the same size and mass, the centre of mass would be exactly halfway between them.)

The Earth and Moon feel equal and opposite forces: gravity balances a "centrifugal force" (I say that in inverted commas, because there's actually no such thing as centrifugal force, and the idle use of the term drives some physicists crazy. It's actually the law of inertia: the urge of the body to keep going in a straight line. If either body started going in a straight line, it would be going away from the other one. It doesn't, of course, because of gravity. When you whizz lettuce in a salad whizzer, it is flung against the wall of the bowl because it "wants" to go in a straight line, but the container prevents it from doing so). That's why we have two tides, not one. Water nearer the Moon feels the Moon's gravity more, and wells towards it. Water on the far side of the Moon feels the "centrifugal force" more, and moves towards outer space.

25) There are more maria and larger craters on the "near" side of the Moon that points our way, and the core is about 2km closer to Earth than the actual centre. It is tempting to conclude that all this is because the Earth's gravity pulled the heavy parts of the Moon towards us. But the Moon feels exactly the same effect as in the item above this: it has an equal and opposite "centrifugal force" pulling it away from the Earth as towards. It could be due to a massive impact (or several) coming from roughly Earth's direction; but we don't know. Perhaps one day we'll find out?

(It is not shameful, by the way, to answer a scientific question with "we do not yet know". It doesn't mean "scientists are stupid or lazy", but that the Universe is too big for us to have explored the whole thing yet. Otherwise we wouldn't need any scientists! Indeed, it's often when we think we're close to tidying up and claiming to understand the Universe that the greatest surprises of all occur - relativity and quantum theory, for example, or the accelerating expansion of the Universe. OK, rant over.)

26) The Moon is the second densest moon in the Solar System. The densest is Jupiter's volcanic moon Io.

27) Because of the Moon's elliptical orbit, we do get to see occasional corners of "the far side". This is called libration. Here, have a pic and get nice and dizzy.

There are other reasons for the libration: the moon's own axis is not quite at right angles to the plane of its orbit, so we see a "nodding" movement; and the fact that we're over 6000km from the Earth's centre, so we ourselves see the Moon from a very slightly different angle at the beginning and end of a night.

28) Phil Plait has a huge list of debunkations for conspiracy theorists who claim that the Moon landings were faked. You can read it here. I'll just go through one: the idea that upon launching, the Moon's dust "should have been blown around more".

Do an experiment. Next time you get out of the shower and the bathroom's full of steam, watch that steam for a while. Then blow on some steam quite far away. Or a balloon, if you desire; or a boiling pot of water or the kettle or a candle half a room away - whatever takes your fancy. You will notice that there is a pause, and then it will start swirling about. What did that?

Air, of course. The air from your lungs? Well, partly. But also all the air that's in between you and the steam. The air from your lungs knocked into air molecules, which knocked into more air molecules, which knocked into . . . well, on the Moon, this doesn't happen. Blown air, or blown anything, meets a vaccuum. Only that which is right next to the blowing gets touched. On the Moon, air will quickly dissipate into space.

For more lighthearted stuff, the Clangers are always willing to help.

29) For Moon observers, the best time to look at details is not at full moon, but when it's a crescent so there are lots of shadows. (This is only something I've been told. I'm a rubbish observer; I've used my telescope twice and then broken it!) Shadows show detail. Thank you Graham Bowes for this amazing image:

30) We've known for many centuries that there can't be air on the Moon, because its edges are sharp. Look at the Earth's own horizon, and it'll be misty, blue, and blurred. That's air getting in the way. You don't see that on the Moon. William Herschel, however, speculated that there might just be air in the craters - at the lowest points on the Moon's surface - and that aliens might live in these. He pointed out that at craters are on average 50% lit and may be lit from any angle, so alien buildings capturing the warmth of the Sun would probably be circular. Incidentally, Herschel has craters named after him on our Moon and on Saturn's moon Mimas.

31) Very occasionally, we see abrupt changes on the Moon, such as a spot turning brighter or darker or changing colour. These are transient lunar phenomena, thought to be caused by impacts, outgassing etc. You can hear a lot about the first ever recorded instance, in 1178, in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". Some monks at a monastery in Canterbury saw "a splitting" of the very new crescent moon, and reported fire, smoke, darkening, and that the Moon "writhed" and "throbbed", "like a wounded snake". This was probably a large impact, and has been suggested to be the formation of the Giordano Bruno crater. Other odd phenomena include that static, UV-light-blasted moon dust, from number 9: the Apollo astronauts saw "twilight rays" towards the horizon, which was probably dust in a continually rising-and-falling state from the surface.

32) Going to the Moon made us much more aware of our own Earth. If you've ever spent a long time in a country other than your own, you'll know that you learn a huge amount about your own country, too. The first ever complete photograph of the Earth from space, "The Blue Marble", taken from Apollo 17 in 1972, and "Earthrise", taken by Bill Anders as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon in 1968, had a great effect on people's environmental awareness.

33) We're now pretty sure the Moon was formed by a giant impact on Earth, probably by an object the size of Mars. We can tell this from the fact that the Moon is made of fairly similar materials to the crust of the Earth, but not the core (it's less dense). Other theories of formation, historically, have included that it was captured, that the Earth and Moon formed together, or that the Earth was spinning so fast a piece of it bulged out and broke off!

It would take extreme luck to capture a passing body that was going at precisely the right speed to start orbiting the Earth, rather than colliding or simply escaping. If they had formed together, the Moon's iron core would probably be larger. This is also the case with the spinning theory. The giant impact hypothesis is supported by the fact that the Moon's composition is fairly similar to the Earth's crust. A more recent hypothesis is that there was a three-body collision, out of which the Earth and Moon formed together.

34) The temperature variation on the Moon is huge. At "night" - and a night lasts 2 weeks, since the Moon rotates at the same rate as it orbits the Earth - the temperature falls to -173 ºC, while by daytime at the equator, it rises to 127ºC.

35) There is a place near the Moon's south pole which is the coldest known place in the Solar System! There are very deep craters where sunlight never reaches the bottom. These have been measured to be -240ºC, 33ºC above "absolute zero" and 10ºC colder than Pluto. Of course, there might be similar permanently shadowed and even colder places in the Solar System just waiting for us to find them . . .

36) The Apollo astronauts brought back 2,415 separate samples of lunar rock, weighing a total of 380kg. You can go and see a piece of it at the Science Museum in London.

37) Nobody owns any land on the Moon. This has been decided in a treaty which specifically prohibits any country's sovereignity or its use for military purposes. So if someone tries to sell you a plot of land on the Moon (or to name a star after your loved one, or what have you), they are defrauding you - no matter how fancy the certificate you receive.

38) You can help explore the far side of the Moon and classify its craters with citizen science. Go to www.moonzoo.org.uk.

Thank you Graham Bowes for this ghostly galleon too.

Ice Blobology in the Kuiper Belt

Back in 2006, just before my interest in astronomy was rekindled by Galaxy Zoo, a spacecraft launched. It was called New Horizons. On 14th July 2015, it will reach a dwarf planet foursome: Pluto, Charon, Nix and Hydra. One of the things it will do there is use a spectroscope to examine Pluto's atmosphere - and see if Charon has one too, though that is another story. Its spectroscope, incidentally, is called Alice, which unlike CERN's is a whim not an acronym. The Rosetta spacecraft has an Alice on board too.

Diagram of New Horizons, from the BBC

So at the moment, New Horizons is about halfway to Pluto. But once it's done that job, it's got a whole Kuiper Belt to explore - and NASA is employing a wonderfully democratic way of choosing where to send it next: zooites.

The Kuiper Belt is the part of our Solar System that lies beyond Neptune. In 1943, a man named Kenneth Edgeworth speculated that beyond Neptune, any matter would have been too widely distributed to condense into more planets. Gerard Kuiper wrote in 1951 that a belt of small bodies would have been around in early times, but - because he believed, as many people did at the time, that Pluto is the size of the Earth, when we now know it is less than a fifth the size of the Moon - he did not think it would be there today. He is far from the first scientist to be remembered for something he did believe in! If Pluto had been as massive as Earth it would have done what actual planets do, that is, gravitationally scoop up or scatter all the other matter in its orbit.

The Kuiper Belt extends out to roughly twice as far as Neptune. It's thought to be the origin of a some comets, as even materials such as ammonia that we think of as gas are solid so far from the Sun. It is not the same as the Oort Cloud, which pretty much extends halfway to the next star - a sort of Sun-bubble, if you like. It's believed to be of a complex structure - Neptune's gravity, and resonances, and the fact that it maintains roughly the same disk shape as the rest of the Solar System, bunch up areas of the matter together. But, being of bodies so small, and so far from any source of light or heat, it's not been very easy to study. In fact, it was only really discovered for certain in 1992! This discovery involved painstaking poring over what were doubtless faint fuzzy images by two astronomers named David Jewett and Jane Luu, working in Hawaii in the late 1980s.

Technology has moved on since then, and now there are thousands of ground-based images of the Kuiper Belt. The Zooniverse has set its - what is it now, 400,000? I keep losing count - volunteers to going through these images to find possible Kuiper Belt Objects. If all goes well, New Horizons will be able to explore one or more of them.

This project is called Ice Hunters. Here's a sampling for you:

You can read about the mission and do the tutorial and so on - but here's a quick overview of what to do with that image. How to tell what is a Kuiper Belt Object out of that lot? (Click to enlarge, by the way.)

Well, what happens with image like these is that the area is looked at twice, and two images produced - one positive, one negative. When the two are overlaid, if nothing has changed, the image should be consistent. But if something has changed, it will be obvious. This, incidentally, is how Henrietta Leavitt found her Cepheid variable stars - very plodding, detailed work indeed, when plates meant sheets of glass, spotted with black or white, and spectra about 2mm long.

In practice, you can probably see that it's not working quite that smoothly: all the white blobs that contain some black are background stars. But there are two (or more, if I've failed to spot them) pure white blobs. Here they are, marked out:

(PS if you're wondering why my Facebook tab has "aaaaaaargh" as its heading, it was because I was commenting on a dreadful joke made by Richard Wiseman. I'm so intellectual sometimes.)

You can go back and look at images you classified. Here's one of mine, which has another interesting object in it. It's on the lower right.

It probably looks like a wormy thing at this size. In any case, it's actually apparently three blobs stuck together. Just like in the Galaxy Zoo Asteroid Thread, asteroids move relative to the Earth, so their position changes. So we're keeping an eye out for asteroids too.

Very thin, hairy streaks tend to be cosmic rays, not asteroids. I got caught out a couple of times marking them before re-reading the tutorial and realising I shouldn't. Oh well - as with all the Zooniverse projects, the beauty of it is they get several people to classify each image, so just such mistakes get ironed out. And, added up, human eyes are much better at this than computers.

Another way I got caught out is by images like this one:

On the right there is a dark streak, which is full of pure white blobs. Whenever there are that many pure white blobs, they tend to be in just such a dark streak, and I've come to the conclusion that these must be where the subtracting has slipped and we're being shown just one plate. They're doubtless stars - otherwise, Kuiper Belt Objects would be all over the place. Which just goes to show how important it is to clean up all those pesky stars! That must take an awful lot of programming, which is still continuing judging by the fact that they've got a checklist where we can mark out what's wrong with the image on the right.

And, being very fond of paraedolia, I couldn't help but laugh at some of the silliness in many of Ice Hunters's images . . . look at this little man jumping around on the bottom left!

We also have doughnut eyes . . .

. . . and a lot of spaghettified bottles and heads in bubbles!

So who wouldn't want spaghettified bottles, heads in bubbles and a chance to help NASA decide where its spacecraft is going to go? There's already what might turn into a row about which is the best Zooniverse project on my Facebook page. Personally, I have a fierce, mindless, animal loyalty to Galaxy Zoo, for being my first, and the one I have looked after for four years (Chris and I joked in Chicago about how the baby is growing up and has to go to preschool!). But I think I might hang onto Ice Hunters better than I did the other ones I tried. We'll see. Sadly, there just isn't time to pay attention to them all.

Doctor Proctor and the Irregular Galaxies

Before I write this post, an apology. Formspring, the question and answer site - on which you're all welcome to contact me with an astronomy question (no guarantee I can answer it, but I'll do my best) - turned one of my entries into a blog post here without any form of notification. I always make sure I have the "blogger" tickbox un-ticked, so it shouldn't have been able to do that. Annoyed and caught off guard, I deleted the unwanted blog post - and forgot to save a comment someone had left! Sorry to that person. Please do leave it again.

Back in 2008, when the first of Galaxy Zoo's many projects on merging galaxies got underway, the zookeepers posted a list of galaxies they wanted us to identify as mergers or not. We had a zooite called Waveney, which, incidentally, is also the name of the hall of residence that I was in at university - and which he had been in many years earlier! Waveney, whose real name is Richard Proctor, wrote a program allowing us to go through the list much faster, Galaxy Zoo style - and made quite a difference, by allowing mini-projects to run quickly and enjoyably on the forum.

One area which hasn't been looked at much in astronomy, including in Galaxy Zoo, is irregular galaxies. We've been focussing - especially in the early days - on galaxies with a defined shape we can study, such as spiral or elliptical:

(From the Galaxy Zoo 1 tutorial. Click to expand.)

An irregular looks like neither of these. In fact, I can't really describe an irregular's shape. It might be a cloud, it might be a set of clouds or starforming clumps, it might be a crazy-shaped mass after a merger . . . There's a good sample here and the forum's whole collection here if you'd like to browse. Here's one for illustration, but it's hardly a representative of all of them.

(From SDSS.)

Now, on the one hand, irregular galaxies got more interesting since the launch of Hubble Zoo because it seems to me that nearly every galaxy we get on that is irregular! Hubble Zoo is mostly looking at galaxies much, much further away than those we looked at with the SDSS telescope. That means we see them as younger than our own - and younger than they would be now if light travelled instantaneously. Most of them are, frankly, a mess. It's fascinating to think that these wispy, often unclassifiable things are a prelude to the gorgeous creatures nearby. As an aside, to me, that's a hefty piece of evidence in favour of the Big Bang. I've classified well over 100,000 galaxies by now, and seen how different they look according to age. (Granted, this is not a scientific study.)

And on the other hand, irregular galaxies are interesting because Waveney is going to do a PhD on them.

His irregulars project has been running for a while, and as I write this, the "click count" is 88,488! The largest sample of galaxies looked at by a professional astronomer that he can find is 161; Waveney's project has many thousands. These were mostly collected by extracting all the ones from the Irregulars thread on the forum, and a brilliant, dedicated lady in Puerto Rico named Aida Berges going through the rest of the forum and the SDSS databases to find others. (Have a go at navigating around; it's terrific fun!)

To take part in the irregulars project, I recommend a quick look around Galaxy Zoo or the forum for a few tips, so you know what you're doing. But I don't mean masses of intense study. Galaxy Zoo itself does not require you to be an astronomer; it requires you to be better than computers at looking at shapes, and as (presumably) a human, you therefore qualify. There is an "irregular checking examples" thread where people can ask for advice.

You'll be asked: how clear the irregular is (i.e. how reliable anything is you say about it - some are very faint or fuzzy); whether it's a compact galaxy or whether it's all over the place; whether it has various features that larger galaxies have - a core, a bar, any spiral features; and whether it's alone or among a lot of others, for which there are zoom buttons you can use to help (even so this can be a bit thorny, as galaxies that appear to be nearby can often be millions of light years further away, just in the same line of sight). There are also buttons to indicate whether it happens to be the same as the previous irregular - for the SDSS camera often focussed on more than one point in a galaxy - and whether it's not an irregular at all.

Waveney's initial results show some definite differences between irregulars and other galaxies - their blueness, for example, which is an indicator of heat and star formation. You can also look at their metallicity to see how old they are. For example, are irregulars basically very young galaxies who might eventually evolve into the spirals and ellipticals we know? Or are they simply the cosmic plankton, unobserved amidst the sharks and whales yet a bedrock of the ecosystem - because, perhaps, not enough gas happened to be a round where they formed? (Spiral galaxies, for instance, need to be a certain mass to become the complex rotating disk we're familiar with.)

The method Galaxy Zoo uses to gain a really accurate database is for lots of people to classify each galaxy. For example, 90% of people might think that something's a smooth elliptical; but the other 10% may claim that they can see signs that it's rotating, or disturbed. It's easily possible that neither sample of people was wrong. Although I can seldom resist talking about irregulars as if they're the animals we don't notice because they're small and unglamorous, galaxies do not have particularly fine lines drawn between definite types. There's a lot of argument on the forum over whether or not one type of galaxy turns into another, or whether it's just that some sit on a blurred line!

Waveney uses the same method: get as many people as possible to look at each irregular. You could say that 25% of people think this has some spiral structure, and therefore, in a sense, this is 75% an ordinary irregular and 25% a sort of proto-spiral. That may sound unscientific, but it's less so than trying to force it into a human-defined category when it genuinely doesn't belong to one.

He got the idea of turning this into a PhD thesis from a remark Chris made along the lines of "you've done half a PhD here". " I recognise this means I have done 10%," he writes cheerfully, "but it got me thinking – why not do it properly. I don’t want to do this full time, I have a very full time job – but could I do it part time. Does the Open University do part time PhDs – a quick web search yes it does…" There's nothing like simply looking at what you could do and what options are available!

As I said, he's looking at colour and metallicity, also the irregulars' masses and starforming rates. He's comparing these with equivalent samples of spirals, ellipticals and also the peas, the intensely starforming compact galaxies we amateurs found and studied in 2007 and 2008. None of the irregulars contains an active galactic nucleus, which suggests that they are all of low mass. (An active galactic nucleus is the activity surrounding a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy - where stars and other matter whose speeds around the disk are insufficient to keep them in orbit forever, and which therefore pile up in the middle. When a huge amount of matter arrives in a small place this way, before it enters the black holes, it becomes unbelievably hot, and can outshine the entire galaxy.)

What else? Doubtless he has other plans up his sleeve. I only feel sorry that, in the early stages of the project, when Jules and I were also helping, my part - examining the irregulars' environment, i.e. how close they were to their neighbours - came to a standstill before I even started, because nothing I did with SQL actually worked. Months later, Chris told me that in fact my task wasn't possible with current tools - I am sure there are other avenues, but I am no programmer and am an unlikely candidate to find it out. Waveney has tactfully described me as being "in a supporting role". That does seem to be my role in most citizen science projects, and it does seem to be helpful to at least the people and the communication, if not the data itself. Perhaps one day that'll change. If not . . . well, supporting people are very useful.

You can keep up with what Waveney (who has stoically ignored the nickname of "Doctor Proctor" I couldn't resist giving him) in the Galaxy Zoo Library, and do give him some irregular clicks. If you're interested in the wider issues of citizen science and education, please note that the Open University is among the umpteen bodies whose funding is being slashed. Some of us at Galaxy Zoo, me included, have studied astronomy and (in my case) mathematics, inspired simply by what we're doing and discovering - and it's the only chance for so many people to combine study with their jobs, families, and other real-life commitments. Waveney's PhD thesis will bring new knowledge to the field of astronomy, not to mention be a shining beacon for people who thought their chance to learn and contribute was over. Knowledge is not a drain; it's progress - so let's not let it go.

Watching science launch like a rocket

Despite an exceptionally lazy weekend, I'm still feeling slightly breathless from a ridiculously active couple of weeks. Here's what I did for the first three days - October 11th to 13th, Monday to Wednesday.

Well, actually I'm not allowed to tell you exactly what I was doing on Monday; suffice to say that Jules, who moderates the Moon Zoo forum, and I went to Oxford to talk to Arfon and Rob about a new project. It looks terribly exciting. I think it'll work well.

I asked Rob why he calls himself Orbiting Frog, and he told me that frogs have been in orbit as well as chimps and poor Lassie. But they don't get the same sort of publicity. According to good old Wiki, the first creatures in space were fruit flies. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana, etc. etc. In fact, Lassie is a lot better known than Albert II, a chimp who was launched into space in 1949, only to die on impact upon returning to Earth.

There's one random fact of the day, to take your mind off the tantalising mystery of what the new project is (you will probably like it, but it may come as a bit of a shock . . .). Here's another: Oxford is beautiful. It's got this sense of peace and restfulness, like a person in a comfortable home who is well looked after. Contrary to all my expectations, it's not at all snobby. I've yet to meet anyone there who hasn't been very friendly. What is clear is that an awful lot of work goes into making and keeping it so nice. That's worth doing. It probably keeps a lot of people in work, and how much better to have a city that the citizen feels they are part of, that they jointly own with everyone else - somewhere worth preserving. Jules
and I snapped quite a lot of photos. Hers will be considerably better than mine.







I'd been up all night preparing a lecture on Cassini (which is why I had to rush back to Wales on Wednesday evening!) so I ended up going to bed in the youth hostel at 6.30 and sleeping for over 12 hours! I was up and springing (unusual for me) at eightish, and went to get breakfast - it was pricey and not gourmet food, but it would do. I thought the chap behind the counter was giving me a funny look as he doled out beans, tomatoes, sausage, bacon and hash brown onto my plate (the eggs looked like crumbled polystyrene) and when I went to sit down, under the annoyingly blaring loudspeaker, an itch I'd felt on my neck for a while became intolerable. I thought my hair must be caught in my collar. I moved a hand up to rip it out and scratch it. At that point a butterfly flew off my neck and around the room. I was so surprised I couldn't stop thinking about it. Where had that butterfly come from? Had I accidentally packed it in Wales or something? Sadly I doubt it survived. I'd rubbed off half its scales (I forget what sort it was - something very pretty like an admiral or a peacock) and none of the windows were open. For some reason it flew up to sit on the vent. Maybe I'm a spontaneous butterfly generator . . .

It was generally an odd sort of morning! I hopped on a train to London and went to the British Museum - a mind-blowing place that it will take me many visits to see all of, much less take in. By the time I'd walked around enough I was hungry again, and craving fruit, which is almost as unusual for me as getting up early. I bought a ridiculously overpriced pineapple and smoothie. While eating, I noticed a funny taste in my mouth, just behind my top front teeth. I put my thumb there. It came out covered in blood. It bled for some time and was quite sore for a couple of days. Maybe that was somehow connected to the butterfly; I can feel a really freaky fantasy novel coming on now. Or maybe I'm old enough to accept coincidence for what it is - even I used to be reluctant to do that. Or maybe I should be more careful how I eat. Maybe I also shouldn't have spent such a ridiculous amount of money in the British Museum shops, but their Rosetta Stone mugs really are gorgeous. They're thin bone china, comfortable to drink from, large enough, delicate, elegant, and the hieroglyphs, cuneiform and Greek letters are painted on so you can feel them, and your hand makes a singing sort of noise as you run your finger over the symbols. No, I'm not secretly their advertising agency, just an over-enthusiastic tea and coffee drinker - and very particular about my mugs. I have far too many, and they're all lovely - especially these!

Thus loaded, I then set off on a nice walk south to the Thames. Central London is surprisingly compact; it doesn't take too long to walk, for example, from Euston to the Houses of Parliament. Only problem is, don't rely on Google Maps to get you there. I did, and I ended up outside the Treasury, where Dean and the others had been campaigning three days previously.

I, a born Londoner, didn't realise the Houses of Parliament was the same building as Big Ben is. How embarrassing is that?

Well, I found it eventually, and there were signs up all over the place telling us that tresspassing was a prosecutable offence under the dear SOCPA law and that we must have passes if we wished to enter. There was nobody I could ask who wasn't behind some kind of chain, barrier, or wall, so eventually I had to sidle up and do that. The chap who was letting people in, or not, looked like he might or might not have been a policeman, and didn't seem to know what I was talking about when I asked how I could get a pass. But when I told him I was there to lobby Parliament in Committee Room 10 at 3:30 he let me straight in.

There was a long metal ramp to queue on, with an additional ramp to the left, railed off, into which a chap behind me ducked to hurry through ahead of those politely waiting. I was ashamed of him, and doubly so of the people in the queue around me who encouraged him to do it. He was back in about 30 seconds, announcing that the folks seeing us through had told him "No chance". Apparently he was late for something . . .

They'd told us to try and get to Parliament by 2:45; due to my muddling around like a moron I wasn't queueing until after three, but it wasn't half past yet when I got to the front. There was a pair of footprints drawn on the floor to stand in. I was so busy looking at them that they had to explain to me to look up so that a camera could take my picture. I was given this to wear around my neck. They didn't want any ID or anything. I was quite embarrassed to be carrying my coat, rucksack and a bag of British Museum stuff, and was dreading not being allowed through since the website is pretty specific about no luggage. (I'd been to Charing Cross but they'd have charged me £8, to which my reaction was bollocks to that!!) But they were fine. What was less fine was that they also say no sharps, and for some reason there was a pair of scissors in my rucksack. What they were doing there I have no idea! That was dreadfully embarrassing, especially as I had to remove all my underwear and hold people up while I got the wretched things out. They were very nice about it, though. They just gave me a nice laminated bit of paper to carry around, and I left the scissors in a pigeonhole. Then it was out, briefly, into the open air, turn right, and into the House of Commons.

It looked like a huge entrance to a castle: great wooden doors, a vast stone hall, stained glass windows in the far distance ahead. Near the front was a tourist stand full of maps and leaflets. I asked a guide where Committee Room 10 was. She told me in great detail. People were astonishingly polite, telling me please to go this way madam, but not smarmy or sarcastic. I felt quite out of my depth, quite awed by the grandeur, and at the same time determined and proud that this was where our country had been governed for centuries and also where I, and any other ordinary citizen, could come to make our voices heard. This was our House of Commons, a common heritage, and I immediately felt that everybody ought to see it.

Committee Room 10 was upstairs on the left, at the end of a long passage - whose chequerboard-like ancient flooring seemed to be in the process of being restored - and then up a spiral staircase at which point I was met by a TV set telling us what was going on in the chambers, and one second later by Michelle Brook. Michelle is a frighteningly bright Twitterer who's done two degrees and is a core player in the Science is Vital campaign. She was quite unfazed by the grandeur while I couldn't stop gawping around! Committee Room 10 was almost full which, I gather, is not a frequent occurrence. We settled on one place to sit, then saw more people to catch up with and moved, then decided to go and sit in what to me looked like a little raised area with a rail around it and quite comfy-looking chairs but Michelle said was called "the dock". I joked about how we must be the criminals, then froze, considering where we were and how you can't seem to say anything these days without incurring suspicion. Nobody heard, though. I did attract the interest of a chap in a suit in front of me when I reached up and touched the wall to see if it really was made of crimson velvet, or whether it was just clever wallpaper. It was velvet. The fellow asked me if I was looking for air conditioning. I said no, wondering what on earth kind of air conditioning this might be.

Like the House of Commons's debating room itself, this room's centre was its lowest point, all chairs pointed towards it, so there wasn't really much of a "stage" - Imran Khan took it, though, and he and Jenny Rohn made splendid speeches about why it made no sense - economic or otherwise - to cut funding for science. But something was niggling me: what were they doing making speeches to us, the people, the lobbyists, who'd come to say this to the politicians? I'd somehow assumed that the politicians would be there, and that we'd somehow know who they were. For all I knew the room could have been full of MPs without my knowing, though; I'm not a telly watcher and would probably not recognise most of them. We were joined by Julian Huppert, who'd only just got back from Gaza, and by a fellow who was there to read out Vince Cable's reply to us, seeing as Vince Cable was at that moment busy making important announcements about tuition fees. His deputy said that he would do his best to be Vince Cable by pulling his glasses down his nose. What he said sounded fairly encouraging. Annoyingly, I can't remember any specifics - there was just too much going on.

I had further cause to be proud of our democracy - yes, we do still have one - when we were told that, if our MP was not present and had not replied to our letters, we could nip downstairs and sign a "green card" asking them to come to Committee Room 10. I did that, along with a stampede of others; I had to ask to borrow somebody's pen! My MP, Stephen Crabb, did not appear; nor has he yet replied to my letter - but that's no excuse not to do everything one can. I was there, I did my damnedest, and so should anyone who wants anything to change. I added to the numbers and I'm writing about it now.

Update: Brilliant post by Della on all the things the campaign has been doing, including a much more informed account of Tuesday than my own!

A few days later, Michelle, Della, Imran and others presented the petition to No. 10 Downing Street. As I write now, there are 36,159 signatures. 33,804 of these were in time to make it to No. 10.

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday morning and afternoon I attended the launch of ESERO, a project to encourage the use of space and astronomy as part of science, maths and technology teaching in schools.

I was very flattered to be asked along; I don't know how they heard about me - maybe just by finding this blog! They gave me a badge saying Galaxy Zoo; I chuckled to myself with some embarrassment that as I'm not an official paid member of the team, I was not permitted to describe myself as "from Galaxy Zoo" for my first formal lecture, at Intech Planetarium two years ago, and wondered what they'd say if they knew. (That is, I was requested not to, so as to avoid the hassle of them having to approve everything I said - fair enough.) It was a useful label, though. Quite a few people came up to me and asked "Galaxy Zoo? What's that?" But the teacher of one of the very enthusiastic schools who came along took one look at my badge and exclaimed, "Oh! Galaxy Zoo! I set that for homework all the time!"

The launch took place in the Institute of Physics, a modest little place within one of London's terraces. We were an interesting mix of people from various space related industries, museums, organisations, and I think five schools - eight or ten secondary school kids got to come along, some having travelled from the North of England to go. There was excellent coffee and I couldn't believe how friendly everybody was. When I stood around with a mug in my hand feeling gormless, people came up to ask me what I did. It was great to hear the buzz of space and astronomy talk all around me, to lap up the various ways it trickles into society and learning. It was both like coming home and setting out.

We then had a morning of talks, and a video from our British astronaut Tim Peakes - you can read more and see the video here. The talks were wonderfully frank and lively: space is an inspiring thing, it's what encourages people to go into science or technology, we should be teaching it - and this is what we're here to do. They were also pretty straightforward about Britain being a country of inventors and great science; it's good to hear that, when so many people around me seem to regard deriding Britain as the only respectable or politically thing to do, earning modesty points for themselves at the expense of a feeling of confidence, of progress, that you need in order to get anywhere . . . We then had a demonstration of some science experiments, such as making a comet nucleus (great mess and fun) with the same science teacher who set the zoo as homework and a couple of school pupils! All in all, it was a morning of smile generating. We got a free lunch too, and an exhibition of pupils' work.

I was emotional and gibbering. The kids were going on about spectroscopy and cosmic rays and enantiomers. They wanted to know this stuff because it was there, not to pass any exams. The teachers were showing them things for fun, for excitement, for the latest news. In other words, everything that had been forbidden to me in my PGCE, everything I was told was impossible because the kids "wouldn't understand it at their age" or that it was a waste of their revision time - it was going on. And they could do it. I felt as if something I had been the only one to believe had been proved right. Oh, if only those miserable, repressed, curriculum-driven teachers I'd worked under could have seen this!

The kids loved showing me their stuff, getting me to sniff beakers of different enantiomers (one smelled much sweeter than the other), and I told some of them freely about what my teaching year had been like. They were quite amused. Some sixth formers from one school showed me a machine they had to detect cosmic rays. I said that I thought cosmic rays were stopped by the atmosphere and they said no, there were some in the room right now. I thought - wasn't that neutrinos they were thinking of? But who was I to say I knew more than they did? I wasn't working on this stuff, unlike them.

I talked as much as I could to the teachers, and the friendly one offered me some work experience. She works in the north, but if I can get somewhere to stay I might well give it a shot! When I told her I had been thrown off my teaching course, she said, "Oh, try it again!" That day, believe me, I wanted to. But I was driven away too far from that, and am now on a different road - I'm doing too many other things. (For one thing there are so many adults who aren't getting all the opportunities that schoolchildren are to learn - yet adults are often so much more willing!) And yet, and yet - I do want to do more work in schools. I love the classroom, I love education, and I want to write about it . . . My head was buzzing!

My only disappointment was the question time. I put up my hand and got to ask the first one. I said that I'd been at the Science is Vital rally the previous day and that cuts of between 10 and 25% were expected in the science sector - would this affect projects such as ESERO and indeed British investment in the European Space Agency, and if so, what could we do about it? I fear this question rather threw them because they turned into uptight men in suits, waffling about how cuts needed to be made, but certainly not addressing any practical issues such as what we could do or what specific effects such cuts might have. Oh well. My question was asked. These fantastic kids (and doubtless many of their classmates who couldn't come) will not be too hasty in letting the next generation slide into scientific barbarity.

I picked up an awful lot of literature while I was there - now I must actually sit down and read it! To round off a perfect day, Sotira (who I'd also seen at the She is an Astronomer conference) and I found a delicious restaurant and indulged ourselves in coffee, profiteroles and chocolate fudge cake. Even though going home meant burying myself back in that Cassini lecture's Powerpoint presentation when all I wanted was to celebrate and sleep, you can imagine that after three days of different ways of bringing science to the people, things have never felt quite so . . . how can I describe it? . . . right.

Tea with the Stars

A few weeks ago I blogged about two wonderful people here in Pembrokeshire, Steph who gave my charity a lot of equipment and Tony who offered me a free venue to hold a fundraising astronomy talk.

The fundraising astronomy talk has turned into nothing less than a fundraising astronomy lecture series, and we've named it Tea with the Stars. I'd like to invite anyone who lives nearby to pop along. I'm afraid we are charging - obviously, because it's to raise money for charity - but you get a free tea thrown in, and a telescope tour if the weather permits!

It's at Nant-y-Coy Mill, near the village of Treffgarne, which is on the road between Haverfordwest and Fishguard. If you're travelling north it's immediately after the especially wriggly bit of road around Treffgarne Gorge (by the way, the geology round there is fascinating!). The talks are on alternate Thursdays at 7.30 p.m. You can see Tony's PDF here, and their general events page here (Hayley might well be interested in the paranormal evenings, the last of which I understand continued until three o'clock in the morning!).

We launched on Thursday 30th September, so I can announce that I co-founded two lecture series within ten days of each other. My talk was about Galaxy Zoo. I thought, therefore, that I was prepared and it would only take a little while to adapt my old talk from Intech Planetarium. Wrong. I was up until 6am. That did not in any way aid me in concentrating at work. When I got home, I had time to go to bed for half an hour before heading off to Treffgarne - believe it or not, that actually did me huge good!

Now if you'll forgive me sounding like an advert for five minutes, Nant-y-Coy Mill, now run by the Pembrokeshire Tea folks, is an absolutely beautiful place. An ancient stone house with a water wheel behind it . . .


Up close:


Inside:



I was very flattered to see this, and apparently a lot of people asked about it:


(The piece of paper asks people not to touch the telescope and advertises a coming astronomy lecture series this autumn.)

Outside is even more gorgeous. Here's my least fuzzy dark photo of the woodland, and there are a few more on this page . . .


But there was no tme to appreciate all that on Thursday evening. It was getting dark and pouring with rain. I poked my head into the kitchen, failed to spot anyone, so went straight upstairs to the gallery. Tony heard me on the stairs. He'd arranged the gallery beautifully and had the projector all ready. It turned out the little remote thing you hold in your hand to make the slide change only works on Macs, and my laptop was constrained by very short wires, so we decided I'd simply sit with it at the back rather than stand at the front. Actually I preferred that!


Seven o'clock came. Tony got me a cup of ginger tea. It was very subtle, not at all like that choking powdery lemon and ginger herbal stuff in bright yellow boxes. Nobody arrived. The wind and rain lashed down and the blueness outside intensified. We stood at the door looking out, but realised getting wet wouldn't help. Seven fifteen. Nobody. Nothing. We wondered if we'd launched the whole thing too soon. We lamented not getting round to going on the radio or into the local rag yet. Tony'd been so busy - though he had found time to stick up a lot of posters. Tony asked me what I'd do if nobody came at all. I replied that I'd wait until eight and then go home in a bad mood. It sounded so straightforward, but it didn't stop me pacing around. By seven twenty-five we were ready to crawl into the dry stone walls. By seven twenty-nine I was ready to go home. At about seven twenty-nine-and-fifty-five seconds, a vanload of five people arrived!

We welcomed them in and brought them in for tea. It was one of their colleagues who had brought along various extended family. A few minutes later a sixth person arrived, a geologist who had driven twenty miles down from the Preselis. Tony and Michael got them tea and sold little cakes to those who'd eat them, and insisted that the lecture fee be given directly to me, not even reclaiming costs for the tea, bless them. The atmosphere was very friendly, as it so often is in Pembrokeshire, chatting away as if we all knew each other. (I got into some trouble when I spent a summer in Devon for forgetting that that isn't always the social setup.) I think they were quite disappointed to hear that the lecture wasn't going to be in that comfy room with the sofas, but upstairs. However, as soon as they reached the top of the stairs, the cries of "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw!" began!


I knew we had to have stars and tea as our logo, plus some of my more colourful mugs, but it was my sister who thought of the Clangers. For anyone who doesn't know, they're an utterly adorable TV program about little creatures who live on a small planet out in space, and are able to take a musical boat out into space to catch things - here they are on Wiki, the BBC and as the world's cutest conspiracy theory. Actually they often point out useful scientific facts as well - when you're little, you don't immediately realise that "You don't see light unless it shines on something." Which makes a lot of things clear!

Perhaps I shouldn't have started the lecture by making Clanger noises, but I think people forgave me. I started by saying that as we were so few, rather than have a Q&A session they should interrupt me with questions whenever they wanted.

And off we went.


I focussed on the early doings of the Zoo - how it began because of Kevin having 900,000 objects to classify and how successful it was; the clockwise/anticlockwise results, the Voorwerp, the rings, the peas, the irregulars, and finally the red spirals/blue ellipticals result. It was a very beginner audience, who had no idea what a quasar or a spectrum was, or why some stars were blue and others red, so I hope I answered their questions properly and didn't go over their heads too much. I told them I'd be doing a lecture on exactly what a spectrum is (it'll be called "starcodes"); and I guess I can use the Black Holes lecture this November to talk about quasars. I used a saucer to demonstrate quasars and ring galaxies (the geologist very nicely lent me hers!).

Anyway I don't think it went too badly, because there was the occasional gasp of "It's so beautiful" during the lecture, and afterwards, "I'm overwhelmed!" They all said they'd come to the next one and tell other people about it. The attendance may have been tiny, but it did mean each one got plenty of attention.

Afterwards I carefully put away my things - not only my laptop and its bits and bobs, but also my work newsletters, leaflets, cards and so on. Then I realised I'd lost the bag I'd brought them in. I also couldn't find my two copies of the September edition of Astronomy Now, which I'd brought along to show off, I mean give people a chance for further reading (where's the spade?). I spent about half an hour looking for them. Tony, who had also seen that bag, helped me, and in the end gave me a spare and promised to arrest it if he saw it.

When I got home I found the plastic bag which had contained the work stuff in my laptop case, the magazines on the sofa and that I'd left my mouse behind instead. Well done Alice . . .

I went and picked it up on Saturday, showing my mum around the beautiful walk instead. When we arrived in the building, I found I needed ask no questions: Michael called from a little office behind the counter, "Hi Alice, I'm using your mouse!" I'd left it on the projector.

But at least I did not do what I did just before my first ever public lecture at Intech Planetarium, namely, walking into one of the instruments projecting the Hubble Deep Field onto the planetarium ceiling and knocking my glasses off in the process!

I'll be talking about Cassini on October 14th, black holes on November 11th, the Zoo again in the New Year, and spectra in February. Tony, meanwhile, will be talking about telescope design on October 28th, non-standard cosmology on November 25th, and astronomy and art in the New Year. We're keeping a few slots open for local astronomy buffs, and have already had an offer to do dark matter.

If you live in Pembrokeshire, I hope to see you there.