Participation in the European Southern Observatory

8 years ago Featured

Irelnd is to joint the ESO in 2018. Thank y9ou everybody who supported this petition! And thank you Government of Ireland for making such a wise long-term investment!!!

8 years ago Featured

It is very important and know the rapid changes in the mass which is vital for human existence

This is a no-brainer. Why would we not want to be part of this community?

"Finnegans Wake [is] the single most intentionally crafted literary artefact that our culture has produced." - John Bishop In his essay on the precession of the equinoxes in Finnegans Wake, Roy Benjamin suggests a new meaning for the circular diagram that appears on page 293. The Euclidean diagram, featuring two intersecting circles with a Vesica Piscis triangle forming in the center, is generally considered to be the book's centerpiece. It appears in the middle of a math and geometry lesson as Shem and Shaun are doing their homework in the "Nightlessons" chapter. The diagram represents the source of all life, "the whome of your eternal geomater." (FW 296). The precession of the equinoxes occurs because of a slight wobble in the earth's rotation on its axis, much like a spinning top. If you picture the earth's axis as a long point extending outward from the north pole, this point rotates very slowly, moving about 1 degree every 72 years, taking roughly 26,000 years to spin in a full circle. Throughout these "circumcentric megacycles" (FW 310.07), the pole star, the star even with the point of the earth's axis, gradually changes. The shift also leads to a change in the relative position of the sun in the zodiac during the equinoxes, shifting backward through the 12 constellations, hence the precession of the equinoxes. Benjamin builds on the comparison of the diagram, by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon in ‘Understanding Finnegans Wake’, to a map depicting the precession of the equinoxes which appears in ‘Hamlet's Mill - An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth’ by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Central to de Santillana and Dechend’s is the claim of an early (Neolithic) discovery of the precession of the equinoxes and an associated very long-lived Megalithic civilization of "unsuspected sophistication" that was particularly preoccupied with astronomical observation. The knowledge of

8 years ago Featured

Ireland needs to be apart of this extraordinary data reserve, what is holding us back?

Do it

#IrelandESO Here's the commerce bit: Ireland's participation will give access to the ESO’s extraordinary data reserves to what is soon to be the only English speaking country in the world’s largest trading bloc. That data is, in turn, the raw material for the generation of wealth, primarily in the intangible - but tradable - form of intellectual property. Increasingly, proprietorship and management of intellectual property is how value is created and stored; how revenues are earned and competitive advantage accrued. Boost to R&D Royalties from patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights Portfolio of rights to ideas and innovations Role in the global technology industry Knowledge economy / New-economy businesses A new ecology of competition in intellectual assets Automated data-mining and visualization software Proprietary market advantage Secure and sustain market hold Monetisation / Financial performance Enhanced competitiveness Blurred industry boundaries Goodwill Brand: Astrophysics Ireland Attract new capital and enhance corporate value Outflank competitors Exploit market opportunities

"What is the stars, Joxer"?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

It would be great to see this island being involved in this.

Ireland needs to work harder to contribute to international science!

9 years ago Featured

its about time we stopped lagging behind on this stuff. lets get involved and open up some proper opportunities for our researchers.

9 years ago Featured

As someone who has visited Ireland 18 times over the past 10 years, and who has made many friends in Ireland during that time, I feel very confident in saying that the Southern Observatory project is very much in line with Ireland's cultural values and national aspirations. In solidarity with all things Ireland, I ask that Ireland gives its support to this worthwhile endeavor.

This needs to happen

Join!

This would greatly enchance my experience as a space science student

For Bloom!

Dublin charted by astronomer! (This story is over 2,000 years old.) The astronomy of Claudius Ptolemy's ‘Mathematical Compilation’, (Μαθηματικη Συνταξις) synthesized, in the second century BCE, some five hundred years' effort to account for the observed motions of the stars, sun, and planets on the assumption that their proper motions were uniform and circular and that the earth lay immobile at the centre of the rotating universe. Ptolemy's grand system, which was known later to Arabic and Latin readers as the Almagest, had neither successor nor rival for 1400 years until the publication of Nicholas Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium , published in 1543, ten years after the birth of Adam Loftus, who would be the first Provost of Trinity College Dublin. Ptolemy believed that the heavenly bodies’ circular motions were caused by their being attached to unseen revolving solid spheres. For example, an epicycle would be the “equator” of a spinning sphere lodged in the space between two spherical shells surrounding the Earth. He discovered that if he represented the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five known planets with spheres, he could nest them inside one another with no empty space left over and in such a manner that the solar and lunar distances agreed with his calculations. (His estimate of the Moon’s distance was roughly correct, but his figure for the solar distance was only about a twentieth of the correct value.) The largest sphere, known as the celestial sphere, contained the stars and, at a distance of 20,000 times the Earth’s radius, formed the limit of Ptolemy’s universe. As well as mapping the heavens, Ptolemy also produce the first map of Ireland and the first cartographic reference to Dublin. Claudius Ptolemy, astronomer, mathematician, and geographer, lived from around 87 to 150 A.D. He spent much of his life in Alexandria (Egypt), but it seems that he originally came from Greece. He played a key part in la

9 years ago Featured

As someone who has worked on James Joyce and astronomy, I am proud to associate Ireland with achievement in both the arts and sciences. I support this petition.

Agreed