A Piece of Euclid

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on January 6, 2022 by telescoper

Fame at last! A colleague from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University told me the above piece appeared in today’s Irish Times so I rushed out and bought the paper. My rapture was rapidly modified however when I discovered that my name was given incorrectly (as Cole instead of Coles), but that was to some extent offset by the amusement it would give my colleagues to see me described as an “Experiment Physicist”. These two slips are now corrected in the online version of the article which you can find here.

I was quite surprised by the sudden appearance of the article today because I spoke to the writer, Seán Duke, about Euclid well over a year ago (May 2020). That’s the reason that some things are a bit out of date. For example, the launch of Euclid will now not take place until the first quarter of 2023. Also the piece states that the largest telescope in space is the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) which is no longer the case (as of Christmas Day 2021…).

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to spot any other errors. Please feel free to point them out through the Comments Box. If you’re not banned, that is…

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Staff Shortages

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on January 5, 2022 by telescoper

After two weeks of festive cooking for myself – something I was quite happy to do- this evening I thought I would mark Twelfth Night by getting a takeaway from my favourite local Thai restaurant. Sadly, however, this turned out to be impossible because they’re closed. The reason? Staff shortages caused by staff having to self-isolate due to Covid-19.

It’s not a big deal to have to make alternative arrangements for dinner, of course, but it got me thinking about all the other areas of life that are currently having the same problems. Many train services in and out of Dublin have been cancelled because of the lack of available train crew, for example. Ireland’s schools are supposed to reopen tomorrow after the Christmas break and it is likely that many teaching staff will be unavailable.

The timing of the academic term for staff Maynooth University is doing us some favours. On Friday 7th we start the examination period. Across the University, 95% of the assessments taking place are online. In my Department that is 100%, so neither students nor staff have to travel onto campus. Teaching does not start again until 31st January so we have over three weeks to see how the situation develops. Some other third-level institutions in Ireland had exams before Christmas so go straight back to teaching right now and I wonder how staff in those feelings are feeling about the prospect.

My biggest source of stress as Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics this academic year has been the fact that we have been short-staffed since the start of the year, half our teaching staff being temporary lecturers, and student numbers are well up on last year. If just one member of teaching staff were to become ill we would have serious difficulty covering the shortfall. Asymptomatic staff just having to self-isolate could teach online, of course, but someone who is ill can’t be expected to do that.

A specific worry I have for next Semester is the Computational Physics module I will be teaching. Last year we did this entirely online, which went satisfactorily; the subject lends itself fairly well to online teaching. This year however we are expected to be back in the lab. We have more than twice as many students in that class than we had last year so we’ll have to work out how to fit them safely into the relatively small teaching space we have available. We’ll certainly have to do two sessions per week but I may offer students the option of following along at home via Teams if they wish. I’ll decide that after the exams are over.

It is of course possible that the situation deteriorates very badly and we have to go fully online again. Possible, that is, but I think not likely. The Government seems determined not to countenance a return to remote working and probably won’t unless things get very much worse. As things stand, the omicron variant is running through the population like wildfire in terms of infections, but this has not led to ICU admissions or deaths on the same scale as last year.

All these issues are as nothing compared to the stress that must be felt right now by workers in the Health Services. After two years of exhausting work many health care workers are having to cover for staff absences in addition to dealing with an average of 20,000 new Covid-19 cases per day.

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A Time For Perihelion

Posted in The Universe and Stuff on January 4, 2022 by telescoper

Earth’s elliptical orbit viewed at an angle (which makes it look more eccentric than it is – in reality is very nearly circular).

According to my new RAS Diary,  today (Tuesday 4th January 2022) at approximately 06:55 GMT the Earth reaches at the point on its orbit which which it is at its closest to the Sun, i.e. at its perihelion. At this time the distance from the Sun’s centre to Earth’s centre will be  147,105,052 km. This year, aphelion (the furthest distance from the Sun) is at 08:11 GMT on July 4th 2022 at which point the centre of the Earth will be 152,098,455  km from the centre of the Sun. You can find a list of times and dates of perihelion and aphelion for future years here.

At perihelion the speed of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun is greater than at aphelion (about 30.287 km/s versus 29.291 km/s). This difference, caused by the Earth’s orbital eccentricity, contributes to the difference between mean time and solar time I blogged about when discussing the Winter Solstice a couple of weeks ago.

It surprises me how many people think that the existence of the seasons has something to do with the variation of the Earth’s distance from the Sun as it moves in its orbit. The fact that perihelion occurs in the depth of winter should convince anyone living in the Northern hemisphere that this just can’t be the case, as should the fact that it’s summer in the Southern hemisphere while it is winter in the North.

The real reason for the existence of seasons is the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation. I used to do a little demonstration with a torch (flashlight to American readers) to illustrate this when I taught first-year astrophysics. If you shine a torch horizontally at a piece of card it will illuminate a patch of the card. Keep the torch at the same distance but tilt the card and you will see the illuminated patch increase in size. The torch is radiating the same amount of energy but in the second case that energy is spread over a larger area than in the first. This means that the energy per unit area incident on the card is decreases when the card is tilted. It is that which is responsible for winter being colder than summer. In the summer the sun is higher in the sky (on average) than in winter. From this argument you can infer that the winter solstice not the perihelion, is the relevant astronomical indicator of winter.

That is not to say that the shape of the Earth’s orbit has no effect on temperatures. It may, for example, contribute to the summer in the Southern hemisphere being hotter than in the North, although it is not the only effect. The Earth’s surface possesses a significant North-South asymmetry: there is a much larger fraction of ocean in the Southern hemisphere, for example, which could be responsible for moderating any differences in temperature due to insolation. The climate is a non-linear system that involves circulating air and ocean currents that respond in complicated ways and on different timescales not just to insolation but to many other parameters, including atmospheric composition (especially the amount of water vapour).

The dates when Earth reaches the extreme points on its orbit (apsides) are not fixed because of the variations in its orbital eccentricity so, in the short-term, the dates can vary up to 2 days from one year to another. The perihelion distance varies slightly from year to year too; it’s slightly greater this year than last year, for example.

There is however a long-term trend for perihelion to occur later in the year. For example, in 1246, the December Solstice (Winter Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere) was on the same day as the Earth’s perihelion. Since then, the perihelion and aphelion dates have drifted by an average of one day every 58 years and this trend will continue. This means that by the year 6430 the timing of the perihelion and the March Equinox will coincide, although I will probably have retired by then…

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Last Day Off Again

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on January 3, 2022 by telescoper

So I find myself almost at the end of the Christmas break as I did on the same day last year. Today being a Bank Holiday because New Year’s Day was on Saturday, tomorrow is officially my first day back at work. I don’t think I’ll be going back to my office on campus in the morning, though, as I think I can probably manage all the things I have to do from home. I haven’t looked in my mailbox since before Christmas so I imagine I’ll spend most of the day mucking that out.

Thanks to the state of the Covid-19 pandemic I will be working from home most of the time at least until Semester 2 teaching starts. Here is the situation, with cases clearly out of control, but no sign yet of an increase in mortality. We’ll see what happens when the weekly death figures are released on Wednesday.

No doubt as we get back to work there will be detailed instructions on what we can and can’t do. Semester Two of teaching in Maynooth doesn’t start for another 4 weeks so we have a bit of time to see how things progress before deciding what will happen. I expect various edicts will be issued from on high in the next few days.

I have been virtually incommunicado so am not sure how everyone else in the Department has been. I do hope nobody has fallen ill.

The January examination period starts on Friday (7th January) and ends two weeks later (Saturday 22nd January) so getting through that and getting the examinations marked is going to be the first priority. Yet again all these examinations will be in the form of online assessments. We have done this sort of examination before, which makes it a bit easier than last year, but they still cause a lot of stress for staff and students alike. I will have over a hundred scripts to mark and will have to do all of them on screen. I’m not looking forward to that at all, but it has to be done. My first exam is on Saturday afternoon (8th January) but there’s a gap of 10 days until the second one so hopefully I can get the first marked before the second is due.

I was tempted at this point to make a list of all the things I have to do tomorrow, but that would be breaking my resolution to take a complete break so I will leave that until the morning. I have done a few bits and pieces for the Open Journal of Astrophysics, though, as we embark on Vol. 5 (2022).

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Another Year, Another Diary…

Posted in Biographical with tags on January 2, 2022 by telescoper

Lacking the energy to do anything more exciting I spent a bit of time this afternoon copying information into the latest Royal Astronomical Society diary from the old one. The forthcoming Semester is going to be very heavy with teaching (again) so it took quite a while to write in the dates and times of all my lectures. It usually takes a few weeks of term before I get into the routine, but I also need to pack in a lot of meetings around the teaching sessions – often at short notice – so it is useful to have the lectures there to form the skeleton of my schedule.

The diary part of the RAS diary, being I suppose intended for academics, actually runs from October to December the following year. In previous years it has arrived in time to use it for Semester 1 but for the last two years, probably owing to a combination of Covid-19 and Brexit, it hasn’t arrived in the post until December meaning that I couldn’t use the first three months in the new diary but they were covered by the old one. The heavy delay of the diary is matched by that of the RAS house journal Astronomy & Geophysics which usually takes a couple of months to reach Ireland.

I’m not sure I like the colour of this year’s diary very much. Last year’s (2021) was black, the one before that brown and before that red. The 2018 was a racing green as opposed to this year’s which is more of a chartreuse…

Digging these old diaries out reminds me that it was almost two years ago that I attended the RAS Club’s 200th anniversary dinner. The Club has effectively been in abeyance since February 2020. I wonder if it will be among the many venerable institutions that does not survive the pandemic?

Although many of my colleagues seem not to use them, I like old-fashioned diaries like the one above. I do run an electronic calendar for work-related events, meetings etc, but I use the paper one to scribble down extra-curricular activities such as concerts and sporting fixtures, as I find the smartphone version of my electronic calendar a bit fiddly. I’m interested to know the extent to which I am an old fogey so here’s a little poll on the subject of diaries:

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Not My New Year’s Resolutions Again

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education on January 1, 2022 by telescoper

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

from Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot.

Two years ago, in January 2020, I shared a list of things I planned to do in the (then) New Year. Here they are again for completeness.

  1. Go to more live concerts. Although I enjoy the radio and recordings, I far prefer to listen to live music at concerts. Attending such events helps also support the venues and musicians as without an audience both would die. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t heard any live jazz in Ireland!
  2. See more of Ireland. I moved to Maynooth two years ago but, apart from one visit to Galway and one to Armagh, I still haven’t travelled much beyond the Dublin area. I must get around more, especially to the South.
  3. No more working weekends. I’ve been in the office for at least one day every weekend since I started at Maynooth. I did the same when I was at Sussex too, and seem to have relapsed. I have always had problems managing my own work/life balance but I realize it’s not setting a good example to younger folk to be getting it so obviously wrong. I’ll add not reading work emails at weekends to this.
  4. Be a better colleague. This is something I think one should always strive to be, but I have particular need to improve. I know that over the last four years or so things weighed very heavily on me behind the scenes and I ended up letting people down on too many occasions. I apologize for that and will try to do better in future.
  5. Read more books. I used to be a voracious reader of all kinds of books, both fiction and non-fiction, but I somehow got out of the habit. I now have a stack of unread works that I must try to read before the year is out!
  6. Finish more things! Not unrelated to No. 4 above, I have been very poor over the last few years at completing projects and writing papers. I need to clear the backlog and get on with some new things.
  7. Do more to promote Open Access publishing. I’m not surprised that the status quo in academic publishing is proving hard to dislodge, but I believe that change can be achieved if researchers take the initiative. I’m proud of what we have achieved so far at the Open Journal of Astrophysics but there’s much more to be done.

I achieved very few of these in 2020 or 2021. The pandemic made the first two impossible. Number 3 changed when we had to start working from home, which made it difficult to get away from work at all but since I moved into my house in August 2020 I at least have a study on which I can close the door. I haven’t improved much on the 4th one either, although the reasons for the past two years are different. Likewise with 5 and 6. I have done as much as I possibly can on 7 but there is a lot to do.

It is true however that I haven’t coped with the stress and isolation of being a Head of Department during the Covid-19 era as well as I should. I don’t know whether it is the high levels of anxiety that have sapped my energy or whether I’m just feeling the effects of age.

Anyway, there’s no improvement in sight in terms of workload so I suppose I’ll just cut and paste this old set of non-resolutions into this year and hope that 2020 v3 turns out better than the first two! More immediately I think I will take the opportunity to do a thorough clean-up of the house before the examinations start (a week today).

Finally, today Irish becomes an official language of the European Union so let me take the opportunity to say athbhliain faoi shéan is faoi mhaise daoibh!

P.S. I note with disappointment that once again I have been denied the opportunity to turn down an award in the New Year’s “Honours”.

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A Citation Landmark

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 31, 2021 by telescoper

Just over a week ago I posted an item about the citations garnered by papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics in the course of which I speculated on whether we would reach the 1000 mark before the end of 2021. Well, I checked on the NASA/ASD system today and it seems we have just made it:

There is still one paper we have published but not yet listed on ADS so the real number might be a little higher. It’s also possible that the figure will dip below a thousand again, at least for a short time. That is because ADS sometimes counts the citations to a published paper and to its preprint separately thus causing some duplication; when the issue is finally resolved the number of citations can go down.

Anyway, that’s a nice note to end the year on. Tomorrow we start with Volume 5 (2022)!

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Another Covid New Year

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 on December 30, 2021 by telescoper

I’ve had a very quiet Christmas break. Apart from regular trips into the garden to feed the birds, and putting out and bringing in the bins yesterday, until this afternoon I hadn’t left the house since Christmas Eve. I ran out of bread and milk, though, so had to venture forth to do a bit of shopping. I didn’t pick a good time for it: it was pouring with rain.

I’m doing my bit to slow down the spread of the Omicron variant through sheer inertia. Although this strategy is perfectly fine by me, it does leave me short of new things to blog about. I therefore had a look at what I posted on December 30th last year.

On December 30th 2020 the Taoiseach announced that Ireland would go into Level 5 restrictions following a surge in Covid-19 cases. This was the state of play then together with today’s figure:

Notice that the y-axis on the right is ten times the scale of that on the left. The increase at the end of 2020 was to continue into the new year to produce a huge spike in cases (and, sadly a great number of deaths) that peaked around January 10th, after the Level 5 restrictions were imposed. A similar trajectory seems likely in early 2022.

At the time I was very angry about the Irish Government’s decision to relax restrictions before Christmas, which I still think was culpable. This time round there was a similar increase in cases following a relaxation in November to reopen nightclubs and other hospitality venues (which I also think was wrong). It wouldn’t be fair to blame the recent surge in cases on that, however. The timescale of increase of the omicron variant is so short that the wave would probably only have been delayed by a week or two.

The latest 7-day average of new cases is 12582.0 per day and it is likely that we’re at least a week away from the peak. These figures are almost certainly serious underestimates, as testing capacity has been reached. What I wrote on December 30th 2020 also applies today:

Unfortunately the Christmas wave hasn’t really hit these figures yet so I think thinks are going to get a lot worse before they get better. 

Fortunately this year we have the vaccines and these have had a clear effect on the death rate. Let’s hope this line of defence holds but, even if it does, the Health Service will be under severe strain in January. Although the vaccines reduce the rate of serious illness and death per case to about 10% of that experienced last year, we have more than ten times as many infections.

I didn’t imagine things would look even grimmer at the end of 2021 than they did at the end of 2020, but there we go. We’ll just have to wait and see how it pans out. One thing I can be sure about is that I won’t be going out on New Year’s Eve!

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R.I.P. Willy Kley (1958-2021)

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 29, 2021 by telescoper

Once again it is my sad task to pass on news of the death of a colleague from the field of astrophysics. Prof. Dr. Wilhelm (“Willy”) Kley of the Institut für Astronomie & Astrophysik at the Universität Tübingen
in Germany passed away suddenly on 21st December 2021, at the age of 63.

Here is the official announcement (in German) from his institution:

Willy Kley was a computational astrophysicist who worked on accretion processes, especially in the context of the formation of planets and planetary systems. I knew him a little personally, as he was for a time in the Astronomy Unit at Queen Mary & Westfield College (as it was then called) at the same time I was there. He worked with the group led by John Papaloizou, alongside Richard Nelson and others, and I was working on cosmology, so we didn’t work together, but I did get to know him a bit and had a number of interesting discussions. He was a very nice man as well as a first-rate scientist. Looking at his (extensive) publication list it seems that he continued to collaborate with former QMW colleagues after his return to Germany in 2000.

His death was unexpected – I believe he suffered a heart attack – and I’m sure the news will come as a shock to many of his friends and collaborators. To them, and to his family, I send heartfelt condolences.

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The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on December 28, 2021 by telescoper

For the second year running I’ve spent Christmas at home in Ireland. It seems a very long time since I last visit my birthplace in the North East of England, which is where I usually went at this time of year. We often went for a spin around the countryside on Boxing Day and over the years I’ve posted a few pictures.

The last visit was in 2019, in fact, not long after my Mam died. Here’s a picture I took on Cresswell Beach, Northumberland on Boxing Day 2019.

The skies looked rather ominous, although I had no inkling at the time that the pandemic would come and put paid to any more yuletide travelling.

Looking at that picture reminded me of a few other Christmas memories of Newcastle and surrounds I’ve posted on here over the years. Here is one from 2012:

It may not look like much but that bit of wall is all that remains of the first house I remember living in, in Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne. The house itself was demolished a long time ago, and a new estate now stands where it was. The door you can see bricked up used to lead into our back yard in which there was an outside toilet. You can also see two bricked up apertures to the left of the door, which were the coal holes.

This one was taken 10 years ago, and shows Warkworth Castle.

Here’s a closer view of Warkworth Castle from 2013:

This shows a rather busy Boxing Day on the beach at Cullercoats, with St George’s Church in the background, taken in December 2015. This one reminded me a bit of a painting by L.S. Lowry!

I wonder when (if ever) I’ll set foot in Northumberland again?

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