Well, the eclipse yesterday was fun. There were enough patches of sky between the clouds to get some good views. I was pleased that the pinhole cameras I made out of miscellaneous cardboard tubes, tins, paper and tinfoil worked really well. Also, the trees around the front of the sciences building gave some nice natural […]
Continue readingThere’s a great event coming to our neck of the woods soon (by neck-of-the-woods I mean Australasia and South Pacific) – a total solar eclipse, on 14 November (for those like NZ on the west of the international date line) or 13 November (for those on the eastern side – which won’t be many – […]
Continue readingI haven’t read ALL of Tolkien’s work, but I suspect space-travelling hobbits don’t feature anywhere. However, what do feature are hole-dwelling hobbits, and I had the fun of seeing their holes in the countryside near Matamata yesterday. The original set for Lord of the Rings was mostly removed after filming, and rebuilt for the filming […]
Continue readingThat was different! Yesterday no-one expected the sky to be clear enough to see the transit, but see it we did. We had an early start – herded onto buses and shipped up to Uawa/Tolaga Bay – a rather poignant place to see the transit, given that’s where Captain Cook arrived in 1759 after viewing […]
Continue readingWell, if I knew that I would be busy doing it. Perhaps you’d be better off asking Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess who have just won the 2011 prize for their discovery of the ever accelerating expansion of the universe. I love the story I’ve heard (whether it is true or not I don’t know) that, […]
Continue readingThis one’s a bit old, but it’s quite topical. Love the colour. From http://icanhascheezburger.com, of course.
Continue readingIt’s one of those busy weeks – blogging’s been pushed to one side a bit, and I’m writing this at home with a cat on my lap who wants to walk all over the keyboard. So any bizarre sllepingh msitkaes or random characters *&fh$f{ are probably not my doing. I was talking with a student […]
Continue readingIt’s great to hear that NZ is an integral part of the Australasian bid for a giant radio-telescope network. The Square Kilometre Array promises to produce some great images of southern skies in the radio frequency band. Radio waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just like light waves, and can be used to provide […]
Continue readingD’oh. Missed the exploding meteor last night. From the news reports it sounds like a pretty impressive sight. (N.B. I like the comment on the stuff.co.nz article that says "Faster than a plane = definitely over 10000 km an hour. I don’t know how many planes this guy has travelled in, but doing 10000 km […]
Continue readingNo, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t vanished. It might not be so prominent in the news as it was two years ago, but it is quietly colliding protons together and generating lots of useful data for analysis. Here’s a couple of bits which I gleaned in Melbourne 1. What lies inside a quark (if anything?). […]
Continue reading