Elementary, my dear.....

Not a Sherlock Holmes quote, but a stellar reference today. Spent a wonderful day at RAL studying astrometry and photometry! Learned about the instruments on the Gaia space telescope and how they will be used to determine precise measurements of one billion stars in our galaxy.

One billion! And that's only 1% of the stars in the Milky Way! I love astronomy. :)

I made a spectroscope as one of the activities today and took a photo of the emission lines of one of the lights in the lecture room. The bright lines you see above are caused by the elements in the light source emitting at particular wavelengths (characteristic for a given element). Telescopes can have spectroscopes too; they analyse the light from stars and nebulae so we can tell what elements are present.

Did I mention that I love astronomy?