I have recently upgraded my telescope to diffraction limited Schmidt–Cassegrain computerised system StarBright ulti-coated 9.25" mirror. All the equipment was bought from 365Astronomy online shop run by a friend of mine who offers thousands of products at literary unbeatable prices and great support. If you are interested in getting some astronomical equipment, I highly recommend checking his website above.

In this occasion I am finally realising my long-term plan of setting up a local astronomy group in Plymouth, which has already around 20 members. We will be stargazing whenever the conditions are good and my plans include teaching people a little bit about night sky and particularly some basics of astrophotography. The telescope is also equipped with a solar filter so we will be able to look at the activity on the Sun and make some nice photos too.

The meetings will be held at our rooftop terrace in the 'Alen house' 'with beautiful view of the most of the visible sky. Apart from that, there will be occasional camping events at Dartmoor where we'll bring the telescope over and do some stargazing and astrophotography. 

Contact me if you live close to Plymouth and are interesting in popping over for the stargazing nights.

Internal GPS

The CPC Series' internal GPS receiver automatically downloads the date and time from orbiting satellites and pinpoints its exact location on Earth. This eliminates the need for you to manually enter the date, time, longitude and latitude.

Celestron's Revolutionary SkyAlign

Once the CPC's internal GPS has established the telescope's position, aligning the telescope is simply a matter of using hand controller to locate three bright celestial objects. You do not need to know the names of the stars — you may even pick the moon or bright planets! Celestron's NexStar® software technology will model the night sky to determine the position of every star, planet and celestial object above the horizon. Once aligned, the remote hand control allows direct access to each of the celestial catalogs in its user-friendly database.

Celestial Object Database

The CPC database contains over 40,000 celestial objects including Messier objects, the Caldwell Catalog, as well as NGC Galaxies, nebulae and planets. User-definable filter limits make navigating through this expansive database quicker and easier. Filter Limits let you filter out objects that are outside of your local horizon (ie, if trees or mountains were in the way). Identify feature tells you what you're looking at, but it can also be a very fun way to tour around the sky. Just point the telescope up somewhere and ask it to identify Messier objects (for instance) and it will show you the 5 nearest Messier objects to your position and let you GOTO them.

_{The picture below shows some of the images I've taken with my old Newtonian 8" telescope, Canon DSLR and Philips CCD cameras.} 

Our team visited the robotics laboratory of European Space Agency shortly after my talk finalising the 'Evolution in Robotic Islands' project done with collaboration of the advanced concepts team of ESA.

We have been shown the model of the famous ExoMars rover, its physics simulator and also the testing platform that you can see in the picture below.

Peniak M., Bentley B., Marocco D., Cangelosi A., Ampatzis C., Izzo D., Biscani F. (in press). An evolutionary approach to designing autonomous planetary rovers. TAROS-2010: Towards Autonomous RObotics Systems Conference, Plymouth, August 2010 (download pdf)

I am traveling to Noordwijk, Netherlands this Thursday to visit European Space Agency again and do a final presentation summarising the whole project, experimental results and suggesting future directions.

The scientific rationale of this project has been to strengthen the Evolutionary Robotics methodology which seeks the automatic design of Artificial Neural Networks as controllers for rovers (or robots in general), by making use of recent advances in global optimisation. Specifically, the research and technological roadmap included:

1. Integration of the custom rover's physics simulation environment developed at the University of Plymouth with the PaGMO libraries implementing the island model for global optimisation developed by ESA-ACT
2. Demonstration that such an integrated system enhances the design of neuro-robust controllers for rovers’ navigation tasks, including a complex domain such as active vision

Results

• Extension and integration of the Mars Rover Simulator developed by the university of Plymouth with PaGMO for an open source application on robotic island experiments
• Assessment of the contribution, but also the limiatations and constraints for the use of the island paradigm in robot exploration experiments
• Testing on model robustness in different environments and controller configurations
• Promising preliminary results on the evolution of active vision strategies for the integration of local (e.g., sensing sand/icy/standard ground) and distal (landmark) information in exploration tasks

The study has demonstrated the robustness of the island approach to evolve controllers for autonomous rover navigation. Comparisons between island model and single population models on different tasks show that the island model performance is statistically significantly better, by producing improved results in terms of computational performance (island model is faster) and quality of the evolved neuro-controllers. The active vision experiments also show the feasibility of the proposed methodological approach for complex tasks requiring multiple levels of decision-making and action.

 There is a moment in the near future that scientist believe will transform the notion on what it is to be human. 

I have created a section on this website where I put all the presentations I did, subject of which I find interesting to share. I have also converted some of my articles into presentation format so they are now easily available online. 

Dear Visitor,

Thank you for visiting my personal website that I started about a year ago. I hope you find some of the material here interesting whether it is my research, articles, videos, photos, or slides. The website started with few visitors a day and thanks to people like you it has become more popular over the last months and it is getting nearly 300 visits a day. Being aware that more people are visiting the website has motivated me to update it more often with material I find interesting enough to share with you.

Over the last year the website got 50,000 hits and the number of visits grew exponentially since the release of several of my videos. I hope that some of the material here has inspired you or at least provided you with some food for thought. If you have any suggestions on how to make the site better or more interesting please let me know or simply leave a comment below this article.

Thanks again, your support is very much appreciated! 

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine"~Sir Arthur Eddington

Many of you have become familiar with the interesting work of a physicist and consciousness explorer Thomas Campbell who published his theory in the 'My Big Toe' trilogy, which I highly recommend to everyone interested in finding more about the nature of this reality. 

Recently I have come across another interesting researcher who was born in England, grew up in New Zealand and became a psychologist then computer analyst and later professor. Brain now works at Massey University in Auckland and researches how human and social requirements can "drive" technology design and evaluation. His vision is that people and computers are more than people or computers.

Bear with me for a second! Brian Whitworth's interest stretch far beyond this. He wrote two amazing papers that are just great food for thought. Below are the abstracts from both of them, see for yourself and leave some comments if you like so we trigger some discussions.

The emergence of the physical world from information processing

This chapter links the idea of the physical world is a virtual reality to the findings of modern physics. What is usually the subject of science fiction is here proposed as a testable theory subject to empirical evaluation. We know from physics how the world behaves and from computing how information behaves, so whether the physical world could arise from information processing is a question that can be evaluated. This chapter presents a prima facie case that modern physics now makes the virtual reality hypothesis more likely than traditional objective reality assumptions. If a photon is a pixel on a multi-dimensional screen that creates space, the speed of light could reflect its refresh rate. If mass, charge and energy all arise from information processing, the many conservation laws of physics could reduce to a single law of dynamic information conservation. If the universe is a virtual reality, then the big bang creation was simply when the system was booted up. Deriving the core physics from information processing could reconcile relativity and quantum theory, with the former how processing creates the space-time operating system and the latter how it creates energy and matter applications.

download full paper

Simulating Space and Time

This paper asks if a virtual space-time could appear to those within it as our space-time does to us. A processing grid network is proposed to underlie not just matter and energy, but also space and time. The suggested "screen" for our familiar three dimensional world is the inner surface of a four-dimensional hyper-sphere bubble. Light waves and matter travel on this surface in directions defined by its architecture. Time derives from its processing sequences, as movies run static states together to emulate events. Yet what is proposed to exist is not the static states but the dynamic processing between them, with quantum collapse the irreversible event giving time its direction. In this virtual reality, empty space is null processing, directions are node connections, time is processing cycles, light is an information wave, objects are information tangles and energy is information in transfer. This strange interpretation suits a world where empty space is not empty, directions warp, time dilates, light never tires, existence smears and energy is the common currency of all interactions.

download full paper

Check the new Sparta 2010 album form our latest party where everyone was dressed like an ancient Greek.