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Domain: aao.gov.au

Stories and comments across the archive that link to aao.gov.au.

Comments · 9

  1. Re:At first there was nothing then it exploded by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1 · on Examining the Expected Effects of Dark Matter On the Solar System

    The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/files/2013/07/kozm_LSS.jpg
    shows stuff coming towards us.

    No, it doesn't. Perhaps the color coding was chosen poorly, but it doesn't show things moving towards us at all. Quite the opposite.

    Tossed that out for a response, thank you.

    I did search it out first
    http://www.aao.gov.au/2df/manual/2df_manual.html
    and
    http://www2.aao.gov.au/2dFGRS/Public/Publications/colless_specz.pdf

    source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2dF_Galaxy_Redshift_Survey

    I couldn't find anything to grab on to, other than "8.2 Simple redshift completeness mask" of the PDF but figure I was on the wrong track
    (ie: made no sense to me).

  2. Re:At first there was nothing then it exploded by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1 · on Examining the Expected Effects of Dark Matter On the Solar System

    The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/files/2013/07/kozm_LSS.jpg
    shows stuff coming towards us.

    No, it doesn't. Perhaps the color coding was chosen poorly, but it doesn't show things moving towards us at all. Quite the opposite.

    Tossed that out for a response, thank you.

    I did search it out first
    http://www.aao.gov.au/2df/manual/2df_manual.html
    and
    http://www2.aao.gov.au/2dFGRS/Public/Publications/colless_specz.pdf

    source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2dF_Galaxy_Redshift_Survey

    I couldn't find anything to grab on to, other than "8.2 Simple redshift completeness mask" of the PDF but figure I was on the wrong track
    (ie: made no sense to me).

  3. Re:Colors in photographs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Hubble Releases First Post-Upgrade Images

    That's what's so special about David Malin's photographs. He was an astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. He developed a raft of techniques to capture the colour of astronomical objects, so the colours in many of his images are true to life.

  4. NO, Wait, don't click that --- by ankhank · · Score: 1 · on Lab-Made Fireball May Be a Black Hole

    Corrected:
    http://www2.aao.gov.au/2dFGRS/

    should take you here:

    The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey
    Final Data Release - 30 June 2003

    The malformed link in the previous post somehow takes you directly to a black hole. Don't go there.

  5. "planetary system" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative · on Alien Solar System Much Like Ours

    Hate to be pedantic, but using the proper terms aids clarity and, of course, helps one to sound credible, so let me offer this helpful advice:

    There is only one "Solar System," and that's the system of bodies orbiting our star, Sol.

    The generic term for any other collection of planetary bodies orbiting some random other star is "planetary system." The planets therein are referred to as "extrasolar."

    Read the original press release and paper. You will see this usage reflected there.

  6. Re:Link to paper by Cyclopatra · · Score: 4 · on Planets In The Habitable Zone
    I was poking around looking for something with an intended audience somewhere between the BBC article and the paper. No real luck, but here's the full story from the Anglo-Australian Observatory website; it's got some figures and vital statistics on the planets, as well.

    -Cyclopatra

  7. Existing DataCentre: CADC by Force · · Score: 1 · on Creating The UniServer
    Check out the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre. It has archives of the HST, CFHT, JCMT, DSS, CGPS, ESO, LaPalma, AAT, ATNF, USNO Guide stars, UKIRT, ... Once the Gemini telescopes are operational, I assume that the CADC will also archive them.

    All these archives are searchable from the web site, and (if you've registered with them) available for download. Images from HST and CADC are restricted to only the primary researcher(s) for a period of time (I think it's a year).

  8. R and other stuff by KjetilK · · Score: 1 · on Open Source Scientific Apps?
    I'm using the R statistics system for my thesis, it's truly astonishing what the R team has come up with in such a short time. Go to CRAN. R has a GNU license, and is similar to S and S-plus in syntax. In fact, one of the original designers of the S system just joined the R core team. R is object-oriented, has many very nice array manipulation features and graphics capabilities, and is still evolving rapidly.

    It can be used on Unices (the use of emacs as frontend is strongly recommended, it's an excellent collection of modes for it in the ESS package) and on Win32, there's a GUI for it on that platform.

    Then, there's the PDL, offering "Number crunching capabilities for perl", I haven't used that either, but I hear it is good. Probably meant as an alternitive to IDL, that I have used, I didn't like it's syntax, so I did some hacking to replace the features I needed from IDL in R.

    As an alternative to MATLAB, I hear SCILAB can be used. It doesn't seem to evolve very fast, and I haven't used it.

    Now, I miss an alternative to Mathematica. Mathematica is the only proprietary software (and that I would think about using...) I can think of that still is better than Open Source alternatives. I have heard that some emacs package does have symbolic mathematical capabilities, but I don't what it is.

  9. Linux and Astronomy by JetJaguar · · Score: 1 · on Feature:Linux and X-Ray Astronomy

    This really isn't anything new. Linux has been supplanting old unix workstations in astronomy for years. In my research group, we started making the switch about 3 years ago, and today we're almost completely a linux shop (we still have an old sparc that I'm keeping around just for grins).

    In reponse to the question of what can the community do, I would give two suggestions:

    1. Help out the saoimage development project, the latest beta release is finally starting to have features that it should've had 3 years ago (eg. true color support). Btw, saoimage isn't just useful for x-ray astronomers, us folks working in the optical and infrared use it too.

    2. If you're perl minded, check out the perl data language project. In order to keep future astronomy analysis software free and open source, the PDL project needs to succeed (as well as improving perl's bindings to gtk). The reason I say this, is that a certain segment of the astronomy community is moving towards IDL, a proprietary scripting and data analysis package from RSI. IDL has some nice plusses, but it's non-free, and in the long run I think perl could be a much more powerful environment. Iraf, may be free and it gets the job done, but IMHO it's a real mess, and too poorly documented to be able to last much longer.

    Ciao