Early Release Observations

Archive for Early Release Observations

New Results from Euclid

Posted in Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, Early Release Observations, Euclid, Euclid Survey, European Space Agency on May 23, 2024 by telescoper

As it was foretold, exciting new results from the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission have now been released.

You can read more about these images here.

Together with the five images released last November that makes a total of ten Early Release Observations from the pre-survey phase of Euclid. It’s not all about the pictures, however. Today also saw the release of ten scientific papers to go with these images, as well as five reference papers for the main survey. You can find them all, with accompanying information here. They will be announced on arXiv tomorrow.

You might also be interested to read my Euclid piece on RTÉ Brainstorm which has just appeared. This is not just about the new images, but gives an update on what Euclid has been up to since launch, and what we can expect in the future. There’s also a version adapted for Maynooth University PR purposes here. It includes this quote:

Today’s release of new data and technical papers from Euclid is exciting in itself but also marks the start, after months of painstaking calibration and testing of the instruments, of Euclid’s main cosmological survey. We are on the threshold of a new era in cosmology. Maynooth is the only University in Ireland to be involved in this mission and it is very exciting to be at the forefront of such an important scientific development.

I’m also quoted in a piece in the Irish Times. You’ll probably find the article blocked by a paywall but my bit is:

Euclid in the Media

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, Early Release Observations, ESA, Euclid, European Space Agency, social media on December 3, 2023 by telescoper

Yesterday came across the above “infographic” – as I’m told such things are called – showing the media traffic generated by last month’s Early Release Observations from the ESA Euclid mission. Some quite interesting facts emerge from it. The new observations were released n 7th November, hence the big spike in the left hand panel on that date.

I see that about 31% of the activity was on Twitter, which I am no longer on, with a slightly smaller amount on Facebook. Overall, social media account for about 60% of the “reach”, with mainstream media (including print, online, and TV/Radio) languishing far behind. Blogs (presumably including this one) account for a mere 1%.

The breakdown by country is interesting too; the table shows only EAS member states. The UK is way out in front, no doubt because BBC News ran a major item on the day of the release. France, Germany, Italy and Spain all have major scientific involvements in Euclid and correspondingly active public engagement activities.

I was pleasantly surprised at the significant amount of interest in Ireland, given that some bigger countries with far greater scientific involvement in Euclid (e.g. Denmark and The Netherlands) generated so little. As the only member of the Euclid Consortium in Ireland I could try to pretend that this was all down to me, but I rather think it’s more likely to be a result of the fact that many Irish people read the UK media so some of the Irish traffic could be spillover from the big UK spike. Still, I think one can interpret this as meaning that the Public in the Republic have an appetite for news about space, something that we have certainly noticed when organizing events in Maynooth.

I thought I’d mention another nice thing. Here is one of the PR images produced by ESA about the early release observations. The point about Euclid is that to achieve its science goals it has to have extremely good optical quality across a very wide field of view. The systems are currently being tested and fine-tuned to see how good their performance actually is, but so far it’s looking good.

The main thing that caught my eye, however, is the collection of little flags along the bottom. How nice it is to see Ireland’s among them!

Euclid Early Release Observations

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags Dark Energy, dark matter, Early Release Observations, Euclid, Horsehead Nebula, IC 342, NGC 6397, NGC 6822, Perseus Cluster on November 7, 2023 by telescoper

So today’s the day. The first science-quality observations from Euclid have now been released to the public. The official press release is here, and the press conference showcasing the new observations can be viewed here:

The images themselves can be found in this repository. In summary they are (in no particular order):

And here they are – you can click on them to make them bigger:

A few points of my own.

First, it is important to realise that these observations are not part of the full Euclid survey, which will start in early 2024, but were produced during the process of verification the capabilities of the telescope and detectors. They are all very short exposures, taking up less than a day to make all the images, but they demonstrate that Euclid is performing very well indeed!

Euclid is designed to achieve very sharp optical quality across a very wide field of view, so its strength is that it will produce beautiful images like these not only of a handful of objects but for billions. We need to map very large numbers of galaxies to perform the careful analysis needed to extract information about dark matter and dark energy, which is the main goal of the mission.

While these images are, in a sense, by-products of the Euclid mission, not specifically related to the main aims of the mission, they are interesting in their own right and there are proper scientific papers related to each of the five sets of observations released today. We expect many more non-cosmological spinoffs like these as the mission goes on.

There were some problems during the commissioning of the instruments carried by Euclid, the most serious of which was an issue with the Fine Guidance Sensor used to control the pointing of the telescope. This has been fixed by a software update and everything is now functioning well, as today’s new results confirm!

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Euclid Update!

Posted in Euclid with tags Cosmology, Early Release Observations, EROs, Euclid on November 6, 2023 by telescoper

Just one more sleep before the first actual science images from European Space Agency’s Euclid mission are released tomorrow. These are called the Early Release Observations (EROs) – they aren’t part of the full survey, but are to demonstrate the performance of the telescope and detectors.

There has been a slight change to the schedule advertised here so the press conference will now take place on Tuesday 7th November at 14.15 Central European (not Summer) Time, CET, which is 13.15 GMT. For more details, see here.

You can watch the press conference on the new ESA Web TV channel or on the Youtube Live Stream. I’ll post a quick update tomorrow after the images go public.

Preparing for Euclid’s First Images

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, Early Release Observations, Euclid, European Space Agency on November 3, 2023 by telescoper

Another quick update about the release of the Early Release Observations (EROs) from Euclid, due to take place next Tuesday 7th November. For one thing, here is a little taster video.

Five images will be released on Tuesday. I know what the Early Release Observations are but you will have to wait until Tuesday to find out. If I told you now I’d have to kill you…

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Euclid Update!

Posted in Euclid with tags Cosmology, Early Release Observations, EROs, Euclid on October 30, 2023 by telescoper

Just a quick post to give advanced notice that, gremlins in the pointing system having been dispelled, the first actual science images from European Space Agency’s Euclid mission will be released on Tuesday 7th November at 14.00 Central European (not Summer) Time, CET. These are called the Early Release Observations (EROs) – they won’t be part of the full survey, but are just to demonstrate the performance of the telescope and detectors.

You can watch the press conference on the new ESA Web TV channel. I’ll post more about the EROs after they become public, but not before.

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