Francisco diego astronomer who discovered

Planet Earth sits in the middle of the vast emptiness of space, according to the human eye. 

But a new discovery by European astronomers has confirmed that it is not so empty after all.    

Scientists at the University of Geneva’s observatory say they have been using a newly invented camera that can spot galaxies born up to 10 billion years ago.

They say that previous searches for galaxies had missed up to 90 per cent of them.  

Al Jazeera spoke to Dr Francisco Diego, an astronomer from the University of London’s observatory, about the new discoveries and how they could possibly revolutionise our understanding of the universe.  

This week we talk to Dr Francisco Diego from UCL's Department of Physics and Astronomy about his long and varied career at UCL, his passion for education and outreach, and the healing power of classical music.

What is your role and what does it involve?

I am a Lecturer in a module for first year undergraduate students (large numbers!) which involves practical work at the UCL Observatory, and the Admissions Tutor and Lecturer for the new course, Introduction to Astronomy (evening classes for mature students). I am also the founder and director of the UCL Your Universe Annual Festival of Astronomy and Particle Physics.

I also run lectures and workshops for schools, teachers and the general public, called ‘The Mind of the Universe’ and ‘Think Universe’, developed under a couple of STFC Science in Society fellowships, reaching audiences of around 30,000 (in the UK, Mexico and Cuba). Some lectures have featured in the UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lectures.

I have also appeared on TV documentaries such as Stephen Hawking’s Universe, BBC’s The Planets, Genius by Stephen Hawking, The Seven Ages of Starlight, The Secret Life of the Sun and the live BBC broadcast of the 1999 total solar eclipse, and I am a regular guest contributor to live interviews on TV News channels such as BBC, Sky, Aljazeera, Euronews and TRT World (the picture shows my Sky News studio interview about the Rosetta mission to comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko).

How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?

I came to the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1982 as a postgraduate student, with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Mexico. My PhD thesis was about the optical design, building and testing of the UCL Echelle Spectrograph, one of the largest ever built, installed at the then Anglo Australian Telescope. Subsequently, I collaborated on similar projects in Hawaii, Mexico, Canary Islands and the European Southern Observatory.

I w

Francisco talked to us about his experiences at the 2006 total eclipse on March 29th.  Francisco says he saw his first eclipse in 1970 — he must have been the only 5-year old in Mexico with a degree in astrophysics!   Since then he must have seen dozens of eclipses :  his laptop is loaded with photographs of all kinds from them;  and still he strives to get the perfect set of shots, and frets if his carefully-laid plans don’t go perfectly.  Turn on an eclipse programme on the TV, or open a book on the subject and, very likely, there will be Francisco.

For the March 2006 total eclipse, Francisco travelled to Turkey near Manavgat, with a group from the UCL Diploma course.  He gave us a run-down on his standard ‘eclipse kit’.  He takes about 6 instruments and an iPod loaded with audio of his planned actions during totality — usually he has around 20 seconds spare to actually look at the eclipse!  Otherwise he’s very busy for the 4 minutes or so, running the cameras, and setting filters.

Among his many talents, Francisco is renowned for his ability to extemporise workable equipment with every-day items.  His eclipse kit makes extensive use of plastic from empty juice cartons (the filters slide out very easily) and bits of 4x2.   We’ve always said he could make a cyclotron from some cereal packets and a bottle of washing-up liquid.

He has an 80-mm refractor mounted with a celostat (moving mirror which reflects the image up the fixed telescope tube), a motorised equatorial mount carrying 3 instruments, and 2 tripods with wide-angle and fish-eye instruments.

We were treated to a full review of Francisco’s shots from the eclipse plus a selection of striking pictures taken by other people.   Among the most breathtaking are composite images of the corona built-up with image-processing software from a range of exposures taken during totality.   Equally, shots of the Moon’s shadow racing across the Earth, taken from space, are brilliant.  Click on the thumbnails here for

The Sun, our closest star, has been a source of fascination and awe since the very earliest civilisations and was worshipped by many ancient peoples who built monuments to mark the position of the Sun during the year. It was long believed that the Sun orbited the Earth until Copernicus and then Galileo proposed a heliocentric Solar System. By the nineteenth century solar astronomy was gaining momentum with observations of sunspots and measurements of absorption lines in the spectrum of light from the Sun and in the 1930s the Sun's mechanism for the production of energy was determined to be nuclear fusion. Since the 1970s there have been a series of increasingly sophisticated satellite missions which have discovered many more intriguing features of the Sun and significantly progressed our knowledge of our closest star, however, a number of mysteries remain including the coronal heating problem. This conference seeks to review the history of the Sun and engage with the latest solar research on the outstanding questions.

The programme for the day is below:

MORNING CHAIR: Alison Boyle (Science Museum, London)

10.30 am WELCOME

10.40 am Dr Francisco Diego (University College London) - Discovering Our Sun: From the Most Important God to a Mere Dwarf Star [VIDEO]

11.30 am Professor David Wootton (University of York) - The Sun: From Copernicus to Newton [VIDEO]

12.20 pm Professor Helge Kragh (Niels Bohr Institute) - The Problem of Solar Energy Generation: From Eddington to Bethe [VIDEO]

1.15 pm LUNCH BREAK

AFTERNOON CHAIR: Dr Michael Weatherburn (Imperial College)

2.15 pm Dr Andrzej Fludra (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) - The Sun from Space: Discoveries from Space Missions over the Past Forty Years [VIDEO]

3.05 pm Professor Philippa Browning (University of Manchester) - Unsolved Questions and Future Prospects for Understanding the Sun [VIDEO]

4 pm TEA/COFFEE BREAK

4.30 pm SUMMARY OF THE DAY'S PROCEEDINGS - Dr Harry Cliff (University