Archive for Euclid Consortium

« Older Entries

Page Charges at A&A

Posted in Euclid, Open Access with tags , , , , , on January 20, 2025 by telescoper

The journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A for short) announced last week that it was increasing page charges on longer papers. The table of new charges to be implemented is here:

A&A is published on behalf of the European Southern Observatory by EDP Sciences (Édition Diffusion Presse Sciences) which began life as a joint venture of four French learned societies in science, mathematics, and medicine. The company was acquired in 2019 by  China Science Publishing & Media (which has headquarters in Beijing). Judging by its social media activity, EDP Sciences sees A&A as a flagship journal; for a list of other journals it runs see here. I gave some background on A&A here.

A&A publishes papers through a curious hybrid model called “S2O” (Subscribe to Open; not to be confused with “420”). This is not fully Open Access because it requires libraries to pay a subscription to access the journal. For this reason it is not compatible with some institutional open access policies. Unlike some journals, however, A&A does allow authors to place their papers on arXiv without restriction, so they can be read there for free. Previously A&A required authors (or their institutes) to pay “Page Charges” – essentially an Article Processing Charge (APC) – if they were not from a “member country”; this policy was introduced in 2020. Authors from a member country will now have to pay APCs to publish (if their paper exceeds the page limit) but their institutional libraries still have to pay a subscription if they are to access the paper. In other words, A&A is double-dipping.

According to A&A,

… the average length of papers has also been increasing. Too often, papers are longer than necessary, leading to increased workload for authors, referees, and editors, and hindering the reader’s ability to efficiently grasp their content. As well as needing logistical consideration, the challenges related to the journal’s growth have financial implications that must be addressed to ensure long-term sustainability.

I agree that many papers are far too long. As a journal Editor myself I know that it is much harder to find people willing to review very long papers, a fact that some authors seem reluctant to recognize. On the other hand I very much doubt that any of the funds generated by page charges will be given to the refeees who do the most important – indeed I would argue the only important – work of a journal.

If the desired effect is to reduce the number of long papers this policy may work, though I suspect authors who are incurably prolix will respond by splitting their work into several shorter papers to avoid the page charges and thereby generating even more work for the journal. I suspect however that the desired effect is really to increase revenue; so often in the context of academic publishing “sustainability” really means “profitability”. I would also bet that these charges will increase further in future.

The changing charges at A&A have widespread implications, including for the Euclid Consortium, most of whose scientific papers are published there. I’m sure the Euclid Consortium Editorial Board will discuss this development. I’m not a member of the ECEB so it would be inappropriate to comment further on publication policy so I’ll leave the discussion to them. I would say, however, that the publication process at A&A is rather slow. The main post-launch Euclid Overview paper by Mellier et al., for example, was accepted for publication in August 2024 but has still not appeared. It is, however, available on arXiv, which is all that really matters. That paper, incidentally, is over 90 pages long. According to the table above that would cost about €12,000 in page charges. It was submitted in May 2024 and accepted quite quickly but is planned to appear in a special issue Euclid on Sky the publication of which is being delayed by other papers still going through the editorial process.

(Incidentally, Mellier et al. has already acquired 157 citations despite not yet being officially published, which illustrates how little difference “official” publication is actually worth.)

11 Comments »

2025: The Year Ahead

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth with tags , , , , on January 1, 2025 by telescoper 
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

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

January is named after the Roman deity Janus, who according to Wikipedia, is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Since I did a retrospective post yesterday about 2024 in retrospect, I thought I’d do a quick one today (1st January 2025) to mention a few things looking forward.

January will, as usual, be dominated by examinations, and especially the marking thereof. The first examination for which I am responsible is on January 13th.

February sees the start of a new semester. I’ll be teaching Particle Physics for the first time at Maynooth. I taught this subject for many years at Nottingham and Cardiff (the latter combined with Nuclear Physics), so it should be OK. My other module is Computational Physics which I have taught at Maynooth every year since 2018, apart from 2024 when I was on sabbatical.

The big event in March will be the release of “Q1” data from Euclid. This is only a very small part of the full survey, but is an important milestone and will no doubt attract a lot of press coverage. There’s a blog post by Knud Jahnke here. No doubt I’ll do a few blog posts too. The first full data release DR1 will take place in 2026. The Q1 release is timed to coincide with the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting, which this year takes place in Leiden. I won’t be able to attend in person, as it happens during teaching term, but may be able to follow some of the sessions remotely.

In April we will have a very special visitor to Maynooth to deliver the Dean’s Lecture (of which more anon). Much less significantly, I’ll be giving a Colloquium in the Department of Physics.

May will largely be taken up with second semester exams and assessments – there will be a lot of computational physics projects to correct as well as the usual examinations.

The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society takes place in Cork in June. I’ve been to Cork before, but am looking forward to going again.

And then it will be summer. I did a lot of travelling during my sabbatical so I am not planning to travel much in 2025, though I may try to visit some more places in Ireland. Hopefully I’ll be able to get on with some research too. This year I am supervising my first MSc project at Maynooth, so that will be an interesting new experience.

And then we’re more-or-less into the next academic year 25/26. That’s beyond my planning horizon. I don’t know what I’ll be teaching, but it may be the same as 2024 (at least for Semester 1). I wonder if I’ll get to teach any astrophysics or cosmology here before I retire? It doesn’t look likely…

3 Comments »

Space Warps from Euclid

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 24, 2024 by telescoper

A few months ago I posted about a joint initiative between Euclid and Galaxy Zoo that involved engaging members of the public in a project involving galaxy morphology. Well, a new “collab” (as you young people call such things) has just been announced on social media, and I encourage you to investigate further

The new venture is called `Space Warps – ESA Euclid’, and its aim is to find strong gravitational lenses in Euclid survey images. You can find out more about this project in this blog post by Knud Jahnke and you can find instructions and sign up for the project here.

The announcement of this initiative gives me an opportunity to pass on a little update on progress with the Euclid survey. The first `Quick’ Data Release (known to its friends as Q1) was made available to Euclid Consortium members just a few weeks ago. This will be made available to the general public next March, around the same time as the joint ESLAB and Euclid Consortium meeting in Leiden next year.

The Euclid survey is constructed as a set of contiguous `tiles’ covering the survey region, which will ultimately be about 15,000 square degrees (about one-third of the sky), with most of the region scanned by the satellite many times. The Q1 data will just be a taster of this. The main component of the Q1 data relates to a single visit (at the depth of the Euclid Wide Survey) over the Euclid Deep Fields (EDFs): 20 deg2 of the EDF North, 10 deg2 of EDF Fornax, and 23 deg2 of the EDF South. The deep fields will subsequently be visited multiple times during the mission.  The Q1 release will be of Level 2 data, i.e. data at the level of individual tiles.

The first full data release (DR1) is due to be published in June 2026.

1 Comment »

52 Weeks of Euclid in Space

Posted in Euclid with tags , , on October 7, 2024 by telescoper

The Euclid Consortium is celebrating the first year of the journey of the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission into space! Over the past 52 weeks, Euclid has been scanning the cosmos, uncovering new insights into dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe. The Euclid Consortium has produced a slideshow, showcasing the key moments and discoveries from the first year in space.

The slideshow can be seen on YouTube here:

Here is a poster:

This can also found in interactive form here where you can click on each of the 52 images to see what it’s about.

P.S. The subtitle of the poster is “first year of a big journey to new physics”. There’s no guarantee that Euclid will find any new physics, rather than confirming our existing ideas, but it might.

Leave a comment »

Euclid Galaxy Zoo

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on August 1, 2024 by telescoper

Today sees the launch of a new initiative between Galaxy Zoo (part of the Zooniverse conglomerate) and the Euclid Consortium which I am delighted to be able to promote on this blog. What follows the graphic is the text of the announcement which is being promoted across social media today. I’ll start with a little factoid which might surprise you: already in November 2023, before science operations even began, Euclid had sent back to Earth more data than the Hubble Space Telescope has done in in its entire lifetime.

Thanks to a new Galaxy Zoo project launched today, you can help identify the shapes of thousands of galaxies in images taken by ESA’s Euclid space telescope. These classifications will help scientists answer questions about how the shapes of galaxies have changed over time, and what caused these changes and why. 

In its mission to map out the Universe, Euclid will image hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies. In November 2023 and May 2024, the world got its first glimpse at the quality of Euclid’s images, which included a variety of sources, from nearby nebulas to distant clusters of galaxies. In the background of each of these images are hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies. 

This square astronomical image shows thousands of galaxies across the black expanse of space. The closest thousand or so galaxies belong to the Perseus Cluster.

For the next six years, the spacecraft is expected to send around 100 GB of data back to Earth every day. That’s a lot of data, and labelling that through human effort alone is incredibly difficult.  

That’s why ESA and Euclid consortium scientists have partnered with Galaxy Zoo. This is a citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, where members of the public can help classify the shapes of galaxies.  

Euclid will release its first catalogues of data to the scientific community starting in 2025, but in the meantime any volunteer on the Galaxy Zoo project can have a glimpse at previously unseen images from the telescope. 

You could be the first person to lay eyes on a galaxy 

The first set of data, which contains tens of thousands of galaxies selected from more than 800 000 images, has been made available on the platform, and is waiting for you to help classify them. 

If you partake in the project, you could be the first to lay eyes on Euclid’s latest images. Not only that, you could also be the first human ever to see the galaxy in the image.  

The Galaxy Zoo project was first launched in 2007, and asked members of the public to help classify the shapes of a million galaxies from images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the past 17 years, Galaxy Zoo has remained operational, with more than 400 000 people classifying the shapes of galaxies from other projects and telescopes, including the the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.  

Humans and AI working together 

These classifications are not only useful for their immediate scientific potential, but also as a training set for Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. Without being taught what to look for by humans, AI algorithms struggle to classify galaxies. But together, humans and AI can accurately classify limitless numbers of galaxies. 

At Zooniverse, the team has developed an AI algorithm called ZooBot, which will sift through the Euclid images first and label the ‘easier ones’ of which a lot of examples already exist in previous galaxy surveys. When ZooBot is not confident on the classification of a galaxy, perhaps due to complex or faint structures, it will show it to users on Galaxy Zoo to get their human classifications, which will then help ZooBot to learn more.  

On the platform, volunteers will be presented with images of galaxies and will then be asked several questions, such as “Is the galaxy round?”, or “Are there signs of spiral arms?”. 

After being trained on these human classifications, ZooBot will be integrated in the Euclid catalogues to provide detailed classifications for hundreds of millions of galaxies, making it the largest scientific catalogue to date, and enabling groundbreaking new science.  

This project makes use of the ESA Datalabs digital platform to generate a large number of cutouts of galaxies imaged by Euclid. 

Thanks to a new Galaxy Zoo project launched today, you can help identify the shapes of thousands of galaxies in images taken by ESA’s Euclid space telescope. These classifications will help scientists answer questions about how the shapes of galaxies have changed over time, and what caused these changes and why. 

The first set of data, which contains tens of thousands of galaxies selected from more than 800 000 images, has been made available on the platform, and is waiting for you to help classify them.  

Examples of Euclid galaxies to classify are shown in this image.  

Euclid Galaxy Zoo galaxies to classify. Forty galaxies are shown against a black background. The galaxies are all different in shape, some look like spirals, some look barred, or smooth. Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence 

About Euclid 

Euclid was launched in July 2023 and started its routine science observations on 14 February 2024. The goal of the mission is to reveal the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the visible Universe. Over a period of six years, Euclid will observe the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years.  

Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium – consisting of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 15 European countries, the USA, Canada and Japan – is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the payload module, including the telescope. NASA provided the detectors of the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP. Euclid is a medium-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme. 

2 Comments »

Farewell to the ECDC!

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Harassment Bullying etc with tags , , , , on July 2, 2024 by telescoper

It was officially announced at last year’s Euclid Consortium Meeting in Copenhagen that I had been appointed to the role of Chair of the Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee (ECDC). Following the tradition, a similar announcement was made at the Rome meeting this year that from 1st July there would be a new Chair in the form of Helmut Dannerbauer, who is based at the Instituto de Astrofísicas de Canarias on Tenerife. There are still a few loose ends to tie up, not helped by my computer problems, but I’m gradually winding up my activity on the ECDC and handing things over to Helmut.

As I pointed out in my post last year, I was in the final year of my stint on the ECDC when I was made Chair so it was always envisaged that I would serve for only one year. I only agreed to do it, in fact, because I had my sabbatical coming up. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do the job alongside a full teaching and other workload and didn’t even consider continuing after my sabbatical was over.

Instead of trying to describe the role and activities of the ECDC generally, I will direct you to the information given on the brand new Euclid Consortium website which is a one-stop shop for everything to do with Euclid. You can find specific information about Equity, Diversity and Conduct there and/or on the ECDC’s own public website here from which I’ve taken a screengrab of the nice banner:

Just for information, the Euclid Consortium has about 2600 members so it really is a very large organization. It is also very international, with many people working in countries they were not born in and whose language is not their first. It is the aim of the ECDC to encourage a positive and inclusive environment within it for the benefit of everyone in it. The diversity in Euclid has many dimensions, including gender, nationality, ethnicity, and career stage as well as type of work; Euclid comprises specialists in instrumentation, software engineering, observational astronomy and theory to name but a few. The aim of the ECDC is to try to make sure everyone can work together in an inclusive environment.

It has been good to see over the few years some policies have been implemented to allow a greater diversity among leadership roles in the Euclid Consortium, especially by having a planned programme of rotating chairs and coordinators. I think this and other inititiatives are making a difference.

Euclid was launched a year ago yesterday, and the past twelve months have involved a huge amount of hard work by everyone concerned and not a little tension in some parts. The stress will continue as we head towards DR1, the first main Data Release, in 2026. The Euclid Consortium has a Code of Conduct to remind members to behave professionally towards their fellow workers at all times.

I’d like to wish all the new members of the ECDC, and those continuing, all the best in the future. I’d also like to extend personal thanks to those members who are leaving this year, especially Marc, Florence and Chiara. We have had regular telecons virtually every fortnight for the last year and I’ve enjoyed everyone’s contribution to the discussions.

1 Comment »

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!

Leave a comment »

The Mystery Object

Posted in Euclid with tags , , , , on June 18, 2024 by telescoper

Among the various items of Euclid Merch in the goody bag given to attendees at the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting in Rome are a nice bag, a cap, a notebook, and a mystery object:

Can anyone suggest what this item does?

(Wrong answers preferred.)

8 Comments »

Sono arrivato a Roma

Posted in Biographical, Euclid with tags , , , , on June 17, 2024 by telescoper
Crossing the Italian Coast

This morning, I took a short (~ 90 minute) flight from the pleasantly warm (23°C) Barcelona to the swelteringly hot (31°C) city of Rome. It’s actually forecast to be 39°C on Thursday and 40°C on Friday. Fortunately, I’m not staying that long!

The occasion for this trip is the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting, which is being held at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza“. The main sessions are in the splendid Aula Maxima thereof, with its imposing mural:

I’m giving a talk there in the first plenary session  tomorrow…

Update: here’s me giving my plenary talk:

1 Comment »

Gearing up for Thursday’s Euclid News

Posted in Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on May 21, 2024 by telescoper

It’s a hectic time ahead of a Big Event on Thursday 23rd May, which will include the publication of five new Early Release Observations (EROs). I’m not at liberty to say what they are until after 12 noon (CEST) on Thursday except that they’re very pretty. You can watch the live stream here:

Including the five released on November 7th 2023 that will bring the total to ten. All the ERO pictures will be available on the ESA archive here.

Thursday will also see the release of ten scientific papers related to the EROs; they will appear on arXiv on Friday 24th May. These will be the first science results from the Euclid mission.

But that’s not all! Thursday will also see the publication of five papers from the Euclid Consortium (of which I am the sole member based in Ireland). These will be the principal technical reference papers aimed at the astronomical community about the Euclid mission, covering the instruments, cosmology and other astronomy science possibilities, as well as the cosmological simulations used to assist the analysis of the mission. One of these, the main overview paper for the mission, has over a thousand authors (one of whom is your truly).

Thursday’s announcements are likely to significant level of press interest. That’s not only due to the European Space Agency’s own social media feeds and the like, but also local activities in Ireland. For example, there’s this from Science Foundation Ireland using this, from the Little Book of Irish Research:

I have also written a piece for RTÉ Brainstorm, as a kind of update on the one I wrote last year on the occasion of the launch; this will go live after the embargo is lifted on Thursday.

1 Comment »

« Older Entries