Two More Euclid ERO videos

Posted in Euclid, Football with tags , , , , on July 1, 2024 by telescoper

I’ve been a bit busy catching up on things since my departure from Barcelona with the result that I almost forgot to post anything today. Fortunately there are two more Euclid Early Release Observations I can share to fill the gap. They’re about 4 minutes apiece, so there’ll be plenty time to watch them while waiting for the VAR operators to make an offside decision during the next European Championship match…

The first is entitled Measuring Luminosity Function for the Perseus Cluster of Galaxies using Euclid ERO data:

The article describing this work can be found on arXiv here; it perhaps makes up for the missing article in the title of the video.

The second one is this, about gravitational lensing and the search for high-redshift galaxies:

The paper for this one can be found on arXiv here.

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Farewell to Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 30, 2024 by telescoper

Two things threatened to complicate my return from Barcelona today.

The first was industrial action by Aer Lingus pilots, which started last week. When the list of cancellations caused by the first stage of this ( a work to rule) was announced, I checked to see which flights were affected and found the Barcelona-Dublin route wasn’t among them.

The other matter was Taylor Swift’s residence of three concerts in her ‘Eras” Tour in Dublin this  weekend, making flights very busy (and more expensive than usual).

Taylor Swift was performing in Sydney when I was there earlier this year and in   the UK when I was there earlier this month. I think she’s following me around. I’m sure she only wants me for my money…

Anyway, owing to the combination of these circumstances, and the probability of escalation of the industrial dispute, I decided not to take a chance on Aer Lingus but instead to opt for an early morning flight with Ryanair. Although I had to get up at 4am (3am Irish Time) to get the plane back to Dublin, all went according to plan. The Barcelona airport bus, incidentally, runs all night.

My own personal ‘Eras’ Tour (i.e. sabbatical) is not over until the end of August, but I’ll be spending the rest of it somewhere a bit cooler and with less hustle and bustle. But first I have to get my laptop sorted…

It just remains for me to thank publicly the staff and students of the ICCUB,  especially Raul and Licia, for making me so welcome in Barcelona for the past 9 months (off and on).

Now I think a little siesta is called for…

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Como si fuera esta noche la última vez

Posted in Barcelona, LGBTQ+ with tags , , on June 29, 2024 by telescoper

This afternoon, it being my last full day here, I decided to make a farewell tour of Barcelona. I shall miss this place, as the streets have become quite familiar. Two things I won’t miss are the crowds of tourists in some quarters and the heat – it was 28° C at 6pm.

La Rambla (S)
La Rambla (N)

Anyway, my walk included a last ramble up La Rambla from the old harbour towards my flat. I thought it looked unusually quiet when I started, but then realized there was a big crowd at the top end (where it joins Plaça de Catalunya). Pride month in Barcelona started yesterday (28th June, LGBT Pride Day, the anniversary of the start of the Stonewall Riots) and goes on for about a month. This demonstration was a kind of counter to the “official” Barcelona Pride events, a protest against excessive commercialization, pinkwashing, homophobic and transphobic violence, among other things. Pride is, and should be, a protest.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 29, 2024 by telescoper

It’s a rainy Saturday morning here in Barcelona, and here’s the last update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics before I depart these shores. In fact there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 52nd paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 167th altogether. It was published on June 24th 2024. With six months of the year now over, I predict we will have published about 52×12/6=104 papers by the end of the year.

The title is “Comparing Mass Mapping Reconstruction Methods with Minkowski Functionals” and it  is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The authors are: Nisha Grewal (U. Edinburgh, UK), Joe Zuntz (U. Edinburgh, UK) and Tilman Tröster (ETH Zurich, Switzerland);  the paper is about quantifying the accuracy, precision and efficiency of lensing reconstruction methods using topological characteristics known as Minkowski Fuctionals.

Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

P.S. Since I only had the one paper to publicize this week I took a few minutes to add the overlays to last week’s post, which I couldn’t do at the time because of computer problems.

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Fundació Joan Miró 

Posted in Art, Barcelona with tags , , on June 28, 2024 by telescoper

My time in Barcelona is rapidly drawing to a close so I thought I’d spend the morning visiting the Fundació Joan Miró, which is situated in the Parc de Montjuïc with excellent views of the City. Quite apart from the strange and wonderful collection of things inside, it’s just a beautiful space to wander around; there’s a sense of light and space which is very refreshing. It took no longer than 30 minutes to reach it from my apartment, via the Metro L3 and the funicular railway from Parallel which takes you within 5 minutes’ walk of the building.

As well as the permanent collection of works by Joan Miró, there are pieces that influenced his development as an artist, such as the 14th Century altarpiece shown above: in his early years, Miró experimented with the very flat perspective often deployed in mediaeval art. The exhibition includes a large range of materials, including sailcloth and wool as well as the more usual oil and canvas; there’s also a mercury fountain. There is also a temporary exhibition by Vietnamese sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyen whose creations include dynamic shapes evoking explosions made from fragments of unexploded bombs found in his homeland in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

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Recent Citations in Astrophysics

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on June 27, 2024 by telescoper

When I was on the train yesterday I thought I’d pass the time by looking up some numbers to answer a question someone asked me after my seminar in Valencia. I thought the results were Quite Interesting so I thought I would share them here. Just for fun I worked out the average number of citations so far for all papers published in 2023 in the “leading” astrophysics journals:

JournalMean citations per paperMedian citations per paper
ApJ6.23
MNRAS6.94
A&A7.74
OJAp8.45
Source: NASA/ADS

I suspect these numbers don’t turn out the way most people would have imagined! I don’t think you should infer too much from these figures because the window for citations is very narrow, but they do demonstrate that there’s no evidence that papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics attract any less attention than those in more mainstream journals.

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A Time Out in Cosmology

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on June 26, 2024 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – may recall that earlier this month I gave the inaugural Pride Lecture in the Physics Department at Oxford University. That lecture was given in person but also  streamed via Zoom. This is just an update to let you know that a recording of that stream is now available here should you wish to view it:

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From Valencia

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, Open Access on June 26, 2024 by telescoper
Torres de Serranos, Valencia

Here I am, on the train from Valencia back to Barcelona. I’ve been to Valencia many times but the last time was so long ago that I don’t remember when it was exactly. I only had time for a short walk about this morning before getting a lift to the University campus, which is a bit out of town.  I gave my talk as planned, had a nice lunch, and was personally driven back to the railway station, and am now on my way back to Barcelona.

I’ll probably doze off on the way, so I’ll just take this opportunity to thank Vicent  Martínez for inviting me (including last night’s dinner) and everyone for their hospitality and nice questions after my talk!

Update: I got back to Barcelona about 15 minutes late, which wasn’t a big deal, although it’s a notably slower route than the Madrid-Barcelona line I travelled on a couple of months ago.

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To Valencia!

Posted in Barcelona, Open Access, Uncategorized on June 25, 2024 by telescoper

Ailing* laptop notwithstanding, I’ll shortly be taking the train to Valencia where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow. The trip is about 350km each way and takes about 2 hours and 50 minutes. That’s a bit slower than the very fast train to Madrid but it looks like it’s all along the coast, so hopefully it will be quite enjoyable.

*I managed to get it to boot up into Windows, but it is running so extremely that I can’t do much on it. I have no idea what the issue is.

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Euclid Consortium Roma 2024

Posted in Euclid with tags , on June 24, 2024 by telescoper
I’m in there somewhere!

I thought I’d share the conference photograph from last week’s annual Euclid Consortium Meeting in Rome, along with a big “Thank You” to the organizers (both LOC and SOC). It’s a huge amount of work to organise a meeting of over 600 people.  Although I was only there for a couple of days, I thought it went very  well.

Next year’s meeting will be in Leiden in March so I probably won’t be able to attend because of teaching. But guess where it will be in 2026? Barcelona!

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