Year: 2009

An open letter from Saidjakhon Zainabutdinov

Human rights activist Saidjakhon Zainabutdinov was released from prison in Uzbekistan in 2008. Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty was one of the groups that wrote letters on his behalf. Saidjakhon has sent a letter of thanks to an Amnesty member in Scotland.  He wants us to publicize his letter so that others who have
also written letters and cards and petitions on his behalf know how grateful he is for their support and what a difference it has made. What follows is an unofficial translation of the Russian letter.

Open letter to Mr Angus MacEwan living in Lochinver, Scotland

You are the hero, not me

Dear Angus, this is a letter from human rights defender Saidjakhon Zainabutdinov from Uzbekistan, the one who after the Andijan events in May 2005, was jailed for disseminating information about those events.

You wrote two letters of solidarity to me. Being in prison, I could not reply to you and now I am able to reply to your letters, which I am doing with gratitude.
Continue reading An open letter from Saidjakhon Zainabutdinov

A flickr badge for Astronomy Photographer of the Year

After a discussion at work about promoting Astronomy Photographer of the Year, I had a look at Chris Heilmann’s unobtrusive flickr badge and hacked it very slightly to display the latest favourites from the competition.

View the Astronomy Photographer of the Year group on flickr.

If you would like to add a badge to your own pages, you will need the CSS file fjb.css and the slightly modified script fjb.js. Chris gives instructions for using the badge.The only change I’ve made is to add a parameter, feedUrl, to the settings at the beginning, which contains the full URL of the flickr feed that you want to display. If you want to change this to a different feed, remember you want the JSON feed, not RSS, so make sure the feed URL ends in format=json.

Astronomy photographer of the year

Astronomy photographer of the year launched today. This is a collaboration between the Royal Observatory Greenwich (my employers), Sky at Night magazine and Flickr. It’s been keeping me busy for the last few weeks, mostly getting my head around the Flickr Authentication API so that I could build the entry form. There’s a Flickr group from which photos can be entered for the competition, via the form that I built on the Maritime Museum website.

The most interesting bit, from my point of view, is our collaboration with the amazing work done by the guys at astrometry.net. Their robot will scan photos in the group, derive astrometric data (coordinates of the centre, orientation, angular extent and names of objects in the field) and then save that data as machine tags on each photo. The machine tags are all in the astro: namespace. There’s a brief overview of the tags on the web site. I’ve also scribbled some notes on how the machine tags might be used. I’d be really interested to hear what ideas other people have for the applications of this sort of data.