The much anticipated SCUBA-2 instrument has been installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. The question is how did they manage to get one very large and expensive piece of kit inside another? Here are some photos from the JAC website.

This is my second conference poster and it is going up at the UK National Astronomy meeting in a couple of weeks. It will found in the Star Formation section of the conference proceedings. I have taken data from the HARP instrument on the JCMT and processed it as 3D…

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…

A very timely new paper to aide me in my research which states that Rho Oph is 135pc away. give or take a few parsecs.

read paper

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest…

So my name is now on a (soon-to-be) published paper. How and why this happened is a little over my head, but I shall try to explain. One thing you should know however, is that I haven’t really done anything so far to help get this paper out. I haven’t…

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…

“Why is my subject of research worthy of study?” This is a question I am going to try and answer in the next week. The science of star formation is something which involves money, time and great effort. Is that expenditure by the taxpayer, the telescope operators and even the scientists and themselves worthwhile?

So Hubble is now 17 years old and so NASA/ESA have released some incredible pictures take with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) of the Carina Nebula. This nebula contains one of the largest known stars Eta Carinae, which is a highly unpredictable variable with a brightness greater than 4…

NASA researchers using the Spitzer space telescope have laid out what they have called ‘planetary danger zones’ around stars. In these zones, extending from bright O-stars, protoplanetary disks will be swept away by the strong stellar winds given out by the star. Smaller,cooler stars will continue forming planets from accretion…

At NAM I heard a great talk by Gary Fuller on Methanol Masers (a sort of laser created by gas in space). Whilst I find the topic quite interesting its a bit beyond this blog for now. However the telescope used as part of his research is the Parkes 64m telescope…

There are many categories, or classes, into which a star can form, based its temperature and luminosity. The size of the star is related to these factors. Supergiant stars are typically 10,000 times brighter than the Sun and 100 to 1000 time larger (that is that they have a radius…