Monday 31 January 2011

Jasmin graduates from school


The day Jasmin found out her end of school exam results - if you pass, dutch tradition demands
that you hang your school bag from the window. Jasmin is now study law at Groningen Univ.

Jasmin & mum in Scotland

Sci. Adv. Com. visits


ASTRON Sci. Adv. Com. - pre-meeting hospitality at my home.

Boxing day wuth the girls, 2010

Thursday 27 January 2011

H-R Diagram of radio interferometers (total citations 2000-2010 vs abs. fame)




Here is another HR Diagram plot - restricted to radio interferometers and plotting total citations (2000-2010) vs abs. fame - see previous posts on how this is constructed and refer also to @astronomyblog AAS poster. The results show that the VLBA is second only to the VLA in terms of its overall scientific productivity - it comes in at the same level as IRAM (but note this is corrupted by PV single dish). Note that "VLBI" is already contaminated by some VLBA-only results. The GBT is also plotted for reference.

Saturday 15 January 2011

H-R Diagram of radio astronomy facilities, incl. ALMA, LOFAR & SKA




Here is the H-R diagram of existing radio astronomy facilities, plus telescopes still to be built or commissioned (e.g. ALMA, LOFAR & SKA) - they are already doing pretty well!

For more info on how this plot was constructed, visit previous post:

H-R Diagram of radio astronomy & other large facilities




Here is the H-R diagram for radio telescopes with other large facilities (e.g. HST, XMM-Newton, Keck, WHT etc) also plotted. See my previous post to understand how the plot is constructed.

The HST certainly falls into the category of media star, being "off-scale positive" in terms of google hits.

Plots of citations per paper or citations per euro would also be interesting.

H-R Diagram of radio astronomy facilities




This is the H-R diagram of radio telescope facilities, building on Stuart Lowe's H-R diagram for astronomers.

How is it constructed? The x-axis is the number of publications a telescope has produced in the last 10 years (via a search of the abstract of the ADS using both the abbreviated and full names e.g. VLA "Very Large Array". The y-axis represents the number of google hits for a specific facility, again using the same search string as in the previous ADS seaarch. This leads to some contamination that has been dealt with by specifying an additional search term e.g. "Parkes Telescope".

It seems that most radio telescope facilities fall on the "main sequence", a few are branching off into the realm of Stewart's "media stars" e.g. the Jodrell Bank telescope.

All the caveats referred to Stuart's original analysis probably apply.