SAM MORRELL

Astrophysics
Environmental Intelligence
Computer Science

Searching for: Life

Chirp has a New Home

October 7, 2023

At the end of 2019, I posted about a little app that my colleagues and the University of Birmingham and I had been working on called Chirp — a web and iOS app for keeping track of the latest gravitational wave alerts. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down LIGO, and Chirp, but now it’s coming back...

The Great Conjunction 2020

December 7, 2020

It should no great surprise that 2020 has been a difficult year in academia. The inability to travel has made maintaining collaborations problematic, and the inability to carry out the majority of teaching in-person, despite being the catalyst for much innovation in the higher education space, has made traditional lecturing all but impossible. An unfortunate...

Talking ‘Big Data in Astronomy’ with Digital Taunton

July 13, 2019

On 27th June I got the pleasure of going to Taunton to do a talk about the crossover between technology and astronomy at the 5th Digital Taunton meetup. The natural topic is of course the way modern astronomy has embraced the use of ‘big data’ datasets and techniques. When I first put the fledgling version...

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet: A tribute to Stephen Hawking

March 14, 2018

There are a couple of books I can honestly say inspired me to be an astronomer. In college, junior / senior year in high school for those in the USA, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do after I’d finished my A-levels. However, years of watching Star Trek and vivid memories of...

Web Development for Physicists

February 17, 2018

I’m fortunate enough to be sitting at the intersection of two disparate fields which are rapidly hurtling towards each other. More than ever, it’s becoming important to publicise you and your research, whether you’re in academia or in the private sector. Sooner or later, this is likely going to mean you’re going to requiring some...

Bodmin Moor – International Dark Sky Landscape

August 26, 2017

Some time ago, in mid-November last year the XRT-C project, the student radio telescope project based at Caradon observatory in Cornwall, as well as Space Exe, the student society at the University of Exeter that maintains and runs the former, were called upon to play a small part in something truly special; to support an...

What I’ve Been Listening To – January 2017

February 1, 2017

Port Cities – On the Nights You Stay Home This is yet another group that convinces me that Canadians are great at music. Any indipendent artist supergroup of sorts, this the combination of 3 different solo acts in a glorious song writing, music producing partnership. If the chilled beat with well produced drums wasn’t enough,...

What I’ve Been Listening To – July 2016

August 1, 2016

Welcome to another great instalment of my regular monthly revelry in auditory excellence. This month’s list is unabashedly short and single minded in its focus. Basically, this will probably go down in history as the ‘Sam finds Christine and the Queens month’. So, with this in mind let’s get going on our helpings for July....

What I’ve Been Listening To – June 2016

July 1, 2016

Well, what a bleak month it has been. From widespread mass shootings across the entire globe to the UK being brought into political and socioeconomic turmoil, this is a month I’m glad to be finished with. However, it’s not all bad. We managed to get away on a nice weekend trip to Cornwall, from which...

What I’ve Been Listening To – May 2016

June 1, 2016

Good day all. Phew, well here I am, back on the blog wagon. This post should be appearing here on time, which makes a change from the tardiness of the previous two. What a varied month it’s been. Only this past weekend its gone from clear blue skies as far as the eye can see,...

What I’ve Been Listening To – February 2016

March 1, 2016

And so we come to the end of the sophomore month of the year. The days are really beginning to draw out and the weather is beginning to warm up just a tad before making the full on rampage towards the freshness of spring. It’s time for another helping of music, so buckle in and...

Using Wintersmith to Make Awesome Static Websites

December 3, 2015

For the last month or so, I’ve been deeply investing my spare time into writing a website for a conference, the UK Exoplanet Community Meeting 2016, or UKEXOM 2016 for short. Early on we decided that the best way to host it would probably be to use Amazon’s pretty nifty S3 service. This comes with...

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