Apologies for the rather late, and infrequent postings as I originally promised for this blog. However i’m hoping to change this shortly with my first focus/news post on the NuSTAR, (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) as it has recently been in the spotlight for presenting it’s first images of a high energy ‘flare-up’ caused by the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way’s galactic core. As well as presenting a little bit about the flare-up I hope to also talk about the long-life purpose of NuSTAR, what are it’s main questions it hopes to answer for cosmology, what do we hope to gain from the mission as a whole and therefore what potential/further research could be conducted with the instrument? Could having an instrument analysing this narrowband give rise to too many limiting factors for other areas of cosmological study?

NuSTAR is a brilliant mission, analysing high energy physics of the Universe in greater detail than before. Hopefully my attempt of journalism will do the science, and my love of science, physics and astronomy justice .

See you guys soon with (hopefully) a good post,

TheObAstro

@Everydaysexism and @Jess_Chemgeek highlight to constant battle of sexism

Just thought I’d share this; a brilliant tweet by @Jess_Chemgeek (as a response to @EverydaySexism ’s original tweet) who is an active campaigner for women in STEM subjects, as well as being a big communicator as a Chemistry whizz on twitter! Although this is a very humorous highlight on the picture shown in this tweet, it’s still shocking that big companies such as @ASDA are this lazy when it comes to putting their magazines into correct categories without placing a strange male domination over them.

All it takes is one additional sign which says something along the lines of “Specialist Magazines” or “General Interest”! Instead we end up with idiotic people who do things like this, and thus insulting or possibly could even go as far as to say putting off young women who maybe interested in just browsing ‘New-Scientist’ or ‘National Geographic’. Right! Okay, that may seem a little far fetched but I can’t speak for the mindset of every young woman out there, and not everyone shops at ASDA’s ultimately. But, the fact remains that even in this modern society there are still hidden elements of sexism, even when it comes to buying something as simple as a magazine, it seems to be everywhere.

We need to move away from this bizarre ideal and stigma that science/politics or any other subject of specialism is of male interest only, or we’ll be doomed as a society by lack of diversity and thus slowing the evolution of its free-thinking strength. The only way for society to truly evolve is if it removes all stigma towards skin, gender and alike so all that matters is the individual personality. It is my strong belief that science accomplished this ideal long ago, but is still taking a considerable amount of time for this to be rooted out from the average person in the street.

Only time will tell,

The ObAstro

-UPDATE-

Well thanks to consistent tweeting by many, the efforts of @EverydaySexism and @Jess_Chemgeek have been a success! @ASDA is going to change ALL possible sexist signage! I’d say that causes for celebration of victory!

First of all, welcome to this new blog page. At the moment it’s rather bare, but not to worry as I hope to fill it up over time with as much Astro related goodness as possible. Whether it is reviewing new papers/letters/articles in a professional stance, giving tips and advice on observational techniques/telescopes and alike or just simple highlighting of recent events in Astronomy.

You may ask, “Why are you doing this blog?”… Well it’s more to aid me in my own writing in order to maintain good quality-scientific-continuous prose, as well as help aid my referencing technqiue etc. But also I hope that anyone who happens to read the items on this page will find them enjoyable, and elightening reads as well.

So expect some mighty bloggin’ soon guys,

The ObAstro.