"It wasn't a miracle, we just decided to go"

This is NGC6523, the Lagoon Nebula, and is found in the constellation of Sagittarius (albeit only from our viewpoint).  Here it looks to be a pinky colour but you or I would see it as a grey due to our eyes not being adapted to such low light levels.  A hot star in the centre shines with a power a million times greater than our own and it's Ultra-Violet light is heating the clouds around it high enough that they leave their own signature tucked neatly into the light that reaches Earth four thousand one hundred years after it left. Immediately you can see the flaws in the image, the incorrect colour blending, the brightness and contrast matching and the anomalies inside the two largest stars.  You wouldn't find this in a calendar of astronomical images without some refinement but the reason for me writing about it is that I took it.

Yesterday was the 'International Day of Human Spaceflight'.  It's only the second time it's been celebrated after the United Nations General Assembly decreed the 12th April significant last year, the 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the Earth.

World Book Day Shenanigans

Celebrated is a much grander word to use than is the reality, like 'World Bread Day' and 'International Cat Day' there are many days for many things, some are revered and hold special memories others are an interesting quirk where you can have some fun, perhaps raise money or awareness of a cause.  In any case over the past two weeks I've been thinking a lot about the future of us a species both in terms of society and in exploration of the space around us.

In the hours that followed the successful landing of the eleventh Apollo mission on the lunar surface Richard Nixon announced "This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation" and, looking back, I can think of so many such weeks, of so many events and achievements that lay behind us. Thinking about the wide-eyed wonder of the world looking up during the Apollo missions makes me feel like I'm glowing.  I have no tangible connection with that moment, nor to the manned missions of today, but share in the excitement of knowing that not just one but hundreds of thousands of people worked together to do that, providing knowledge or solving problems that nobody had ever considered before that morning.  Alas the time of grand gestures, of revolutionary moments, of transcendent experiences seems to be dying.  New data is created and exchanged now in petabytes per day and science continues to make great advances yet much of our data is meaningless traffic and science is now under such scrutiny that it seems that no political leader would ever stand up and announce the next era of humanity to such thunderous applause as in the 60s.

Over Easter I've been doing many things but have spent a considerable amount of time pondering this:

To call an image like this 'commonplace' seems heinous but to many it is; it doesn't mean anything tangible to them, it's a picture of something that they've seen in much more detail at the cinema.  You would not believe how many times I show students video footage of spacecraft or volcanoes erupting and they dismiss it as cheap CGI.

I took the image of the Lagoon Nebula, the picture above of NGC4527 and exposures of three other astronomical phenomena and I did so sat at a computer terminal in Paris just as I've sat in other observatories or computer rooms and taken images before.  The thing is that I didn't have to be in Paris; I did make use of a Comenius grant from the British Council to be there but didn't have to know anybody in particular or bid for time.  I simply signed up as a school teacher and was given 30 minutes to use at will; now that it's gone I have another 30 minutes.  What I've been doing in Paris is seeing how we can use this and many other similar facilities in our teaching and I have a feeling that this might just be the tip of the iceberg.

This dome above shows one of the two Faulkes Telescopes.  In particular this is Faulkes Telescope South and is a fairly average Earth-based telescope sat in the Siding Spring Observatory in Eastern Australia.  It's one of two (the second is in Hawaii) and there are likely going to be more very soon.  I used it from half-way around the world while eating a sandwich.

While I've been away I've met some amazing teachers from countries all around the world and done plenty of sightseeing in one of the most gorgeous cities in the world.  I even spent a random evening with a group of people that I'm unlikely to ever see again; they were students from the University of Chicago who were studying for a quarter at their Parisian campus (the unfairness of that is more than offset by the amount they pay every year in fees).  This group were all required to gain their Physics credits, some hadn't picked their major or their minor yet, some seemed to like Physics and some didn't but they were all in Observatoire de Paris on the same Wednesday that I was, when it was too cloudy to see the Moon.  We got to talking and chatting, we got to walking and subwaying, we got to Mojitos and Guinness and eventually I got to talking about the Universe being so big and us being so small.

I'll remember my time in Paris for many reasons, for more than just science and for more than just  people but hopefully someone else might remember when some English nutcase who they forced into hopping five Metro barriers started talking about how the vast expanse of the Universe shouldn't make you feel insignificant but so tremendously happy.  I can't think of a greater honor than being one of a finite number of people here to witness the Universe, to share their existence with others and to do something that people might remember after they've gone.

It's entirely likely that they'll just remember me as being a little bit mad and breaking the law.  In the worst case scenario that they don't remember me at all I have the two straws from those Mojitos as a memento and I'll remember my time in Paris dearly enough for all of them.