Archive for June, 2025

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Foster, by Claire Keegan

Posted in Literature with tags , on June 23, 2025 by telescoper

I can’t believe that it’s three months since I splashed out on six books in an attempt to restart my reading habit. Anyway, I took the opportunity of the by train trip down to Cork to read Claire Keegan’s novella Foster, as it was this work that inspired the beautiful Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin which I blogged about here. It’s a very short book, only 88 pages, but is an absolute gem. Keegan’s prose is spare but beautifully crafted and manages to convey great emotional depth largely by what is not said. For once the gushing praise not only on the jacket but also in the few pages of preamble is fully justified. I must read more by Claire Keegan. If there’s anything even more remarkable than the book, it’s how perfectly the film captures its essence.

There’s a line in the book that I remember well from the film

Many’s the man lost much because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Ain’t that the truth.

1 Comment »

Vera C. Rubin Observatory “First Look” Images

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 23, 2025 by telescoper

Just a quick note to say that the “first look” images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be revealed at 11am (Eastern Daylight Time; 4pm local Irish Time). This is the live stream:

I understand there will be a watch party at the EAS meeting in Cork, but I will be on the train so I’ll miss it.

A few images have been released already as a sneak preview. Here is one, to whet your appetitite:

This image shows a small section of NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s total view of the Virgo cluster.
Image by NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Leave a comment »

EAS 2025 in Cork

Posted in Biographical, Open Access with tags , , , , on June 22, 2025 by telescoper

Tomorrow I’ll be travelling to the fine city of Cork, where I shall be for most of next week, attending the 2025 Annual Meeting of the European Astronomical Society I was planing to travel today, but I have some things to attend to at home tomorrow morning so I won’t get to Cork until late afternoon.

The EAS Annual Meeting is a very large meeting with well over a thousand participants expected. It is held each year in a different European city but, according to tradition, never a capital. Last year it was in Padova (Italy) and the year before that in Kraków (Poland).

I usually enjoy smaller-scale meetings and workshops over these mega-conferences, but I’m looking forward to this one. There will be a strong Maynooth contingent there but I also hope to see some old friends from elsewhere, as well as catching up on some exciting science results.

Talking of science, I am on the Scientific Organizing Committee for this meeting. The programme is very large and diverse and there were a few headaches on the way, but nothing compared to the logistical challenges facing the local organizers; they will probably reach peak stress levels ahead of the opening of the meeting, but I’m sure everything will go well. The Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM) was actually held in Cork in 2023. Although a much smaller meeting than EAS, the experience of running that will probably have helped the organizers.

I’m not actually giving a talk at EAS but I will be participating in a panel discussion in a special session on The Future of Scientific Publishing: Strategies and Challenges for Astronomy on Tuesday 24th June. When I saw the initial announcement for this special session, I was was concerned that it would be entirely dominated by representatives of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and their publisher EDP Sciences. The first session (9.00 to 10.30) titled “SCIENCE PUBLISHING TODAY AND TOMORROW” is still like that, but the panel discussion in the second session (13.15 to 14.45) “SCIENCE PUBLISHING: A COMMUNITY’S VIEW” is a bit more balanced than that, with a representatives of NASA/ADS and the European Southern Observatory (among others). If I’m given an opportunity to get a word in, I’ll be arguing that traditional journals are unnecessary and obsolete.

3 Comments »

Summer Solstice 2025

Posted in Irish Language, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 21, 2025 by telescoper

In case you weren’t aware, the Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere took place this morning Saturday June 21, 2025 at 02:42 UTC (03:42am local Irish Time). Among other things, this means that today is the longest day of the year (as defined by the interval between sunrise and sunset).

According to this website, the interval between sunrise and sunset in Dublin today will be 17 hours and 12 seconds. which is a whole second longer than yesterday (!) and six seconds longer than tomorrow.

In the Northern hemisphere, days will get shorter from the Summer Solstice until the Winter Solstice in December.

The nights are drawing in. Although sunset does carry on getting a bit later for a few days, the days definitely start getting shorter from now on. I explained this in earlier posts here.

Incidentally, the word for “solstice” in the Irish language is grianstad which translates literally as “sun-stop”. The Summer Solstice is Grianstad an tSamhraidh“. The nominative singular word for “Summer”, a masculine noun in Irish, is Samhradh, but in the construction used here, “of summer”, it is in the genitive case so becomes Samhraidh. Moreover, when a masculine noun beginning with s- in the singular genitive is preceded by the definite article an) it experiences an initial mutation in the form of a t-prothesis; hence (an tSamraidh is “of the Summer”.

The Winter Solstice is Grianstad an Gheimhridh. The word for winter is Geimhreadh, which is masculine, and has a genitive form Geimhridh. In this case, however, because it doesn’t begin with “S” there is no t-prothesis but instead a lenition (séimhiú) that softens the initial “G” indicated by the “h”. Hence Grianstad an Gheimhridh, “Sun-stop of the Winter”.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

4 Comments »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 20/06/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 20, 2025 by telescoper

Yesterday (Thursday 19th June 2025) was a national holiday in the USA, which means that no new papers were announced on arXiv today (Friday 20th June). I have therefore decided to bring forwarded the usual weekly update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics by a day. Since the last update we have published three new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 74, and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 309.

The three papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. All three were published on Tuesday, June 17th 2025. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

The first paper to report is “Illuminating the Physics of Dark Energy with the Discovery Simulations” by Gillian D. Beltz-Mohrmann (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) and 12 others based in the USA and Spain. This describes new high-resolution cosmological simulations providing a testbed for alternative cosmological probes that may offer additional constraining power beyond Baryon Accoustic Oscillations. It is filed in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It is “LIGHTS. The extended point spread functions of the LIGHTS survey at the LBT” by Nafise Sedighi (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain) and 15 others based in Spain, USA, Iran, Italy and the UK. It describes the procedure used to construct the extended Point Spread Functions (PSFs) of the LIGHTS survey in images taken with the Large Binocular Cameras (LBCs) of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT).

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially-accepted version of the paper on arXiv here.

Finally this week we have “Fast radio bursts as a probe of gravity on cosmological scales” by Dennis Neumann (Leiden University, Netherlands), Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn, Germany), Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany) and Hendrik Hildebrandt (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany). This is about using dispersion measures derived from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in combination with cosmic shear to investigate modified gravity theories, specifically Horndeski gravity. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll revert to the usual schedule for updates next week, and post the next one on Saturday 28th June.

 

1 Comment »

Climbing to Seefin Passage Tomb on the Summer Solstice – Tarn MacArthur

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on June 20, 2025 by telescoper
Seefin Passage Tomb, County Wicklow, photographed by Joe King – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26328239

The Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere takes place tomorrow, on Saturday June 21 2025, at 02:42 UTC (03:42am local Irish Time). In advance of the big event I thought I’d share this poem I found online, which seems appropriate to the occasion.

No one knows what calls us, days like this
that seem to stretch all sense of reason:
the hillside scrub abuzz with silver-washed

and dark green fritillary, the red grouse
and hare, a lone buzzard counterpoised
on the breeze overhead, near motionless,

weighing the balance of each warm
and distant heartbeat. And who would
claim the old gods dead when the sudden

cadence of your breath slips to the sound
of something pulsing through from the far side
of the ridge, neither ghost nor glossolalia

but wholly of the earth, like the hum
that guided you through summer nights
in childhood when you found yourself alone,

and a field too far from home, as the light
began to fade. Sometimes what we love
is the incongruity of things: the latent sense

of having been here yet having never been
before, that strangely familiar clutch of stones,
how every shadow beckons with a promise

of safekeeping. If, as someone said,
it’s true that the souls to match our souls
lie patiently in wait to take our places

when we step aside, then we should lower
our sights from the brilliance of the sky
and down towards this aperture of darkness.

To enter the tomb is to enter the one world
we know, the cool walls of the passage
summoning us forth with the chance hope

of an earthly meeting. Alone, you are
not alone, the carved stone appears to say.
Nothing is eternal, and everything remains.

by Tarn MacArthur

Leave a comment »

St James’ Infirmary Blues – Ted Heath Orchestra

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on June 19, 2025 by telescoper

Not to be confused with the former UK Prime Minister, Ted Heath was the leader of a famous big band that was especially popular in the UK during the 1950s. His orchestra also served as a kind of “day job” for up-and-coming British jazz musicians, allowing them to earn enough cash through radio work and recording sessions to subsidize their jazz ventures. Among the excellent musicians that played with Ted Heath’s band were Ronnie Scott and Don Rendell (tenor sax), pianist Stan Tracey and trumpeter Kenny Baker, all of whom were what you might call modernists. I thought I’d share this recording of St James Infirmary – a tune that the legendary trombonist Jack Teagarden famously referred to as “the oldest blues I ever heard” – not only for the fine arrangement, but because of the excellent trombone solo on it. There is no personnel listing but I’d bet my bottom dollar that the featured trombonist is Keith Christie, who played with Humphrey Lyttelton’s band for many years before leaving to join the Heath band in 1957; this track was recorded in 1959.

3 Comments »

The 2025 Leaving Certificate Physics papers

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 18, 2025 by telescoper

As I have already mentioned on this blog, examinations for the 2025 school Leaving Certificate are under way. One of the interesting things about the Irish system is that the examination papers are put up online immediately after the examinations so it’s very easy to share the content. I have already posted the two Mathematics papers for 2025. This year’s Physics examinations (at Ordinary and Higher level) took place this morning, so I thought I’d share the papers here. In particular, readers in the UK might be interested to compare the standard of these papers with that of current A-levels in Physics.

One thing I should mention is that Leaving Certificate Physics is not a prerequisite for entry into any of our Physics programmes at Maynooth University. Some do have it, but many don’t. We teach the first-year material from scratch for all students. Anyway, here are this years papers, Ordinary and Higher respectively. As usual comments are welcome, through the box below:

LC021GLP000EVDownload
LC021ALP000EVDownload

I think the Ordinary level paper could have done with better proof-reading. As well as Jim’s comment below, there is

Explain how your calculations can be used to verify the principle of conversation of
momentum.

4 Comments »

Bullying at UK Universities

Posted in Harassment Bullying etc with tags , , , , on June 17, 2025 by telescoper

Regular followers of this blog will interested to see that the Daily Telegraph has published an article about Professor Neil Wyn Evans about bullying in UK universities, with particular reference to his own experiences during a long-running dispute at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.

If you would rather not click through to the Torygraph, here is the most remarkable revelation (amongst many). It is about an investigation by an independent barrister that took over eighteen months to do complete. When Prof. blew the whistle on what he saw as bullying, he ended up being himself investigated, though the investigation dismissed all the claims made against him:

In his independent report into Prof Evans’ whistleblowing claims, the external barrister appointed by Cambridge University said he regretted the length of time that the investigation took and “the effect this will undoubtedly have had on all those involved”. The barrister also raised concerns that several staff members pulled out of providing testimony “over fears they would face retaliation.

It is a sorry state of affairs when members of staff refuse to provide testimony to an investigation for for fear of retaliation, and an even sorrier state when you realize that the feared retaliation would come from the University’s own Human Resources Department!

This is not only a problem at Cambridge, of course. Universities generally are terrible at dealing with this sort of thing. At least there’s at least a chance of doing something about it in Cambridge, however, as Neil Wyn Evans is standing for the Chancellorship of Cambridge University. He’s got my vote.

2 Comments »

Maynooth University Library Cat Update

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , on June 16, 2025 by telescoper

It has been a nice day for Bloomsday, though I was forced to spend nearly all of it in my office on campus (including having a sandwich lunch there). Fortunately m’colleague Joost Slingerland sent me this picture of Maynooth University Library Cat basking in the warmth of the outdoors.

3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »