Category Archives: Educational resources

The Angularsizeorator

Visit the Angularsizeorator >

One from the archives, sort of. At least, something that was born back in 2015, at the the “hack day” of the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno. These are sessions where people work in groups (loosely) to throw together something to do with astronomy (it’s a pretty broad field). It can be software, hardware or, really, anything. There’s often a lot of coding going on to make software tools/websites, but sometimes things are more simple. Now and again, the “hacks” mature into full-blown projects, and such “hack days” or “maker days” (they go by various names) are a staple of many science conferences. Continue reading

Illustrative images and diagrams

[Cross posted from the Cardiff Physics Engagement Blog]

I get asked now and again for illustrations and images that I’ve made for various purposes. Here’s my attempt to make a few of them available. Most were composed using Photoshop, and the source files are available on request. They are completely free to use, edit or adapt for non-commercial purposes, providing credit is given, and that you also make what you produce freely available in a similar way (a CC-BY-NA-SA license). Continue reading

Chromoscope

Chromoscope is a popular online resource that we developed in 2009 for a Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition stand about the Herschel and Planck satellites. There’s a compact version below, but you can see it fullscreen at www.chromoscope.net.

The team behind Chromoscope was myself, Stuart Lowe (then at University of Manchester) and Robert Simpson (then here in Cardiff) – though most of the hard work (the coding) was by Stuart. It was a huge hit (forcing us to move the image tiles to Amazon AWS to prevent our own servers falling over), and in the first couple of years had around 2 million visitors!

The main aim of Chromscope has always been a relatively lightweight website with a very simple interface. One side effect of that is that Chromoscope can’t zoom in too far – in principle it’s possible, but there would be huge amounts of data for us to store and for users to download. There are other websites which can go much, much deeper, such as WikiSky, Google Sky and WorldWide Telescope. These are more powerful, but generally require a faster internet connection.

One of the powers of Chromoscope is its ability to be used for many purposes. That includes displaying other images sets (see Planckoscope, showing Planck all-sky images), and highlighting specific objects (see our Herschel results page, and a few other examples on the Chromoscope blog).