China’s Fengyun 1C satellite, which was destroyed intentionally by China last year, still presents a risk to satellites and other orbiting bodies. I have created a Google Earth file which will let you track the debris in real-time.

Two Oxford archaeologists have won the first ever ‘Dance Your PhD’ contest, which was held in Vienna last month. Dr Brian Stewart, (with help from one Giulia Saltini-Semerari) won the first annual contest by translating his thesis: “Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking and disposal at…

Over the summer I created a Google Sky layer that enabled anyone to access the entire SCUBA submm catalogue of maps and objects in a dynamic fashion. Google Sky was released in August and the open file format means anyone can create data for display. This layer is now publicly…

The recent pass of Comet Holmes and today’s close approach of Asteroid 2007 TU24 (shown below, image from space.com) have gotten me thinking again about open source astronomy. I have always been fascinated by the internet and how modern networking technologies bring things into one big mesh, and astronomy fits…

Soon I will be off on an observing run in Hawaii. I will be using the 15m JCMT telescope on Mauna Kea to take spectral line data using an instrument called HARP.

Since this will be my first professional expedition I will be taking lots of pictures and notes as…

If you’ve ever wondered what it is that I do (this one’s for all you family and friend types), then worry no more. Today I’m giving a talk to the incoming PhD students as part of our Postgraduate Conference. All the 2nd years give talks to all the 1st years…

What follows is my submitted entry for the Wellcome Trust’s New Scientist Essay Competition 2007. There are prizes involved and the top one is publication of the essay in New Scientist. I am very inexperienced with such things, but thought I’d enter anyway, so just in case I don’t win,…

So I’m still musing about the reasons for studying star formation and so I have begun trying to think in a more positive way. This is what I came up with earlier today…

Star formation is a science at a turning point. It will not be long now before astronomers…

The image above shows the Bullet Cluster. Also known as 1E 0657-56, this is a pair of clusters of galaxies some 3.4 billion light years away. As Jon Davies told us in yesterday’s Astrolunch meeting however: you should be careful about believing everything you see. This image is not a regular photograph…

After arriving via the train (changing at Crewe - why is it always Crewe?) I registered at the UK National Astronomy Meeting held in Preston by the Royal Astronomical Society at around 11.30am. This put me an hour early for lunch and two and half hours early for any actual…

Obviously not vietNAM but the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting. This is my first NAM and so far it’s so-so. There have been interesting talks and I have met some interesting people. However so far I would call it fun or jolly.
Basically every year the…

In last week’s lab we had some more fun with liquid nitrogen. This time we used it to cool a ceramic superconductor (i.e. not a metal one) and then floated a magnet on top of it. The result in shown in the image above.

What…

I have started reading The Feynman Lectures in Physics. Overall there are three volumes to collection. They were created from a two year course in physics given by Richard P. Feynman, a professor at Caltech and a Physics Nobel Prize winner. I am finding the books not only refreshing (they…

Big doesn’t quite cover this blog post.

For the past few weeks in my role as a demonstrator in the first year undergraduates lab, I have been supervising the experiment titled Large Scale Structure of the Universe. The experiment itself is a slightly painful exercise involving a series of simulated…

Well today is day three (techincally) of my PhD. Monday was just an enrolment day and so yesterday was my first hands on day in the office. It is nice to be back. i’m not really wandering the same corridors as I did before and due to my two year…

This week I am in Milton Keynes takin part in PPARC’s Summer School. PPARC is my funding body for the PhD, it stands for Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. They have put up around 100 of us in the Jurys Inn hotel in MK and we are attending lectures…

It has now been a while since I got my PhD and I have begun to read material on the subject this past couple of weeks. Now this very blog is intended, in part, to aid me in chronicling (sp?) my adventures in PhD land. I thought it would be…

So I got my PhD in Cardiff and formally accepted it today. good news, yay etc. I am very excited and have made myself a little something to get me more excited still about one day being an astronomer man.

In the end I received offers from both Cardiff and Exeter…