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Building the Light Pollution Matrix

February 9, 2024

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of recording an episode of a Restoring Darkness podcast with Michael Colligan and Mark Baker. The topics of our conversation ranged from light pollution activism, the role of the lighting industry in solving light pollution, and how we at the Environment and Sustainability Institute and Departments of Physics...

We Discovered an FUor

December 20, 2018

We discovered a very rare kind of star – in fact there are only 25 stars of its type known to exist. The fact that we found it is amazing, but the way we found it was even more interesting. We caught it red handed during an FUor outburst – a period of intense flaring...

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 – November 2016

December 3, 2016

There’s no mistaking it. 2016 is beginning to draw to an oh so welcoming close, not so much with a bang, but more of a turgid death rattle. The nights have drawn in to mid afternoon and the weather is as unpredictable as ever. It’s on evenings like this it’s nice to cuddle up by...

What I’ve Been Listening To – October 2016

November 4, 2016

A heady welcome to the second year of my music posts. As we being the long down hill meander towards the end of the year I’ve compiled another bunch of tunes to draw you through the increasingly cold night and crisp mornings. It may be a few days late, but let’s get into it. Kina...

Boldly Going for 50 Years

September 8, 2016

It’s very much not an overstatement to say that I adore Star Trek. Today is a very special for someone who claims this level of adoration for the franchise as it is exactly 50 years old today. Back on September 8th 1966 the first ever episode of Star Trek, The Man Trap, hit the screens...

Beginning with BibTeX – Making Referencing in LaTex as Easy as Pi

August 14, 2016

[mathjax] It’s no secret that physicists love using LaTeX to write papers. This has many practical advantages, such as the ability to completely unlink your content from the formatting, very flexible layout tools and a veritable smorgasbord of packages to do everything from change the colour of your text to allow you to programmatically create plots...

What I’ve Been Listening To – April 2016

May 23, 2016

Good day all! Well, the weather this month has almost been as varied as my playlist. No sooner had we settled into our five minutes of summer than torrential rain was battering at our doorstep. At least, that’s my recollection of it. Once again, I apologise for the tardiness of this post. It’s been a...

Once Again, With More Soul

March 22, 2016

In my free time of late, I’ve been busy beavering away on my latest website. This one has taken a few weeks to perfect and hone but this is the brand new website for my band Soul Traders. This has been coming for a little while, and when you see the old site you’ll understand why. It’s...

What I’ve Been Listening To – October 2015

November 1, 2015

Yes, I know, I’ve been a little quiet on here lately. To remedy that let’s have a good old fashioned music post. What with now being an office dweller, and occasional observatory dweller too, I’ve had plenty of time to listen to music over the past month. Thanks to Spotify’s excellent discovery features that’s made...

An Undergrad Primer on Vectors

September 7, 2015

[Could not find the bibliography file(s) I wrote a post a while ago with my tips for people that are starting off a physics degree. Just after I published it a friend and fellow post graduate, Sam Cooper, pointed out to me that I made a fairly blaring omission in my summary of undergraduate physics. Vectors. I...

STFC Summer School 2015

September 2, 2015

And so it has become time for my first trip as (nearly) a postgraduate. Several train journeys, and a lot of paper reading, later I ended up in the beautiful city of Cardiff for the STFC Summer School in Astronomy. This is essentially a conference for new STFC funded postgraduates in astronomy and space science to come...