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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...

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...

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 – January 2016

February 1, 2016

And so, like a flash, the first month of 2016 has come and gone. The weather is really beginning to ramp up now and hit the UK with its full, highly dynamic glory. Thanks to this abysmal serving of rain, clouds and somewhat lacklustre cold snaps, I’ve had plenty of time sat at my computer...

What I’ve Been Listening To – November 2015

December 1, 2015

And so it’s that time of year again. The nights rapidly draw in after making the exasperated jaunt back from British Summer Time to good ol’ GMT. The fog lies thick over the city as the temperature make it’s downward meander to sub-zero degrees celsius. The feeling of autumn, and indeed shortly after the crisp...

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...

#InternationalWomensDay

March 8, 2015

You may have noticed that today, Sunday 8th March 2015, is International Womens Day. This sounded like an ideal time to write about some exceptional scientists whom I greatly admire; who just also so happen to be women. Rosalind Franklin The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA The discovery of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is the...

Modeling Atmospheres with the Unified Model

February 24, 2015

In my last couple of posts I’ve been going through some of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. From some of the basic approximations that make the equation possible to analytically solve in this post, to some more specialised theory in the context of planetary systems in this post. In these posts we’ve been slowly...

The Fluid Mechanics of Planetary Atmospheres

February 16, 2015

In my last post I went over a really powerful bit of physics called fluid mechanics, which describes the flow of fluid through a system. The main equation in this framework is the momentum equation; the Navier-Stokes equation.This equation is nye on impossible to solve analytically in it’s full grotesque glory, so in the last post I discussed some of...

Gambling with Statistics – Monte Carlo Methods

July 20, 2013

Hey all! In my recent work I’ve been using numerical simulations involving radiative transfer, which basically  means transferring energy via radiation such as light; in the form of photon packets. The way these simulations are run is via a method known quite widely in the physics world called ‘Monte Carlo Methods’. It took me a...

A Little Digital Audio Rant

November 17, 2011

Hi All, it’s that time of the year again. Time for a good ol’ rant from yours truly. This time I’m ranting about digital audio. In particular, music downloads and CDs. Personally I just can’t get my head around why someone would rather buy MP3s / AACs off of iTunes or any other miscellaneous MP3...