Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Sunday 19 October 2014

The Cardiff hydrogen sky


More tests of hydrogen over Cardiff. Using a Google street view image this time for a wider field of view. Orientation should be correct, probably.

Saturday 18 October 2014

Concept image - the Magellanic Stream over Cardiff


Work in progress. The Magellanic neutral hydrogen stream, if we could see it, as it would appear from Cardiff. Maybe. Not entirely certain (read : it might not be wrong) I've got the orientation right. Size of the stream in the sky is probably about right, although it's possible the whole thing needs to be shifted further south so less of it might be visible . On the other hand I didn't check the field of view of the image so it's possible the stream should appear even larger than is shown. Lots of checking still to do.

In any case, from some parts of the world the stream would most certainly appear far larger than this, so in terms of showing how much more dramatic the the sky would be in neutral hydrogen, it's not far wrong.

Friday 17 October 2014

Thursday 16 October 2014

EVERYBODY LOOK AT THE PRETTY HYDROGEN


All-sky neutral atomic hydrogen data from the LAB survey, rendered on a globe. Different colours represent different velocity channels. It's all Milky Way gas, just as slightly different velocities from frame to frame.

The Magellanic Stream


The sky would look more interesting if we could see the neutral hydrogen... here's the Magellanic Stream, which would cover 100-200 degrees. More to come up when I clean up some artifacts. In the data, that is, not some old pots I dug up.

This would be fun to show with a landscape in the foreground to show just how friggin' enormous it would look.

Tuesday 14 October 2014

The Magellanic Sky


A happy accident while trying to view the Magellanic Stream (as one does, for science). This is basically the same as the "Hydrogen Sky" video/gif I posted a while back) - neutral hydrogen data overlaid on an optical image. This time I just wanted to view a particular feature, the Magellanic Stream - a huge feature that spans more than half the sky. But by setting the camera's field of view to an absurdly large 180 degrees, I found myself inside Dr Who's time vortex...

The hydrogen sky gif is below, taken from the video here :


Saturday 11 October 2014

My first report on hydrogen

I'm trawling through my undergraduate course notes, looking for stuff that will be useful with simulations. I came across this, my first ever write-up about extragalactic neutral hydrogen (second year "topics in astronomy" module). Robert Minchin [my now very good friend of many years] supervised me, but he doesn't remember. Just as well, a mark of 56% is not particularly auspicious...




Back from the grave ?

I'd thought that the controversy over NGC 1052-DF2 and DF4 was at least partly settled by now, but this paper would have you believe ot...