SAM MORRELL

The Great Conjunction 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...

Outreach Talks

Upcoming Talks 22nd October 2022 – Plymouth Festival of Physics – What has Astronomy Ever Done for Me? Past Talks 11th June 2021 – Tiverton and Mid Devon Astronomy Society – Improving the Measurements of the Fundamental Properties of Stars 18th July 2019 – Kernow Astronomers I joined Kernow Astronomers on Thursday 19th July for...

Chirp – An App for Monitoring Gravitational Wave Alerts

I’m absolutely delighted to announce that a spare-time project I have been involved with for the best part of a year has finally been released. Enter Chirp – an app to help you monitor gravitational wave alerts. The app is being officially released to coincide with the start of O3b, the second part of the...

We Discovered an FUor

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...

About Me

I am a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, currently applying my training in astrophysics to help better understand, and hopefully begin to solve, the pressing ecological crisis caused by artificial light at night (ALAN). I lead the development of our Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer model, whose outputs we correlate with measurements of animal...

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

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

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...

Outreach

I passionately believe that communicating research is a key responsibility of every researcher. A regularly do outreach talks and interviews about and around my own research. I also play a role in some longer term outreach projects. Chirp I currently lead an international collaboration developing Chirp, an app for the web, iOS and Android that...

Bodmin Moor – International Dark Sky Landscape

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 – December 2016

Apologies for the tardiness of the post. I’ve been meaning to get it out for a couple of weeks, but unfortunately I’m pretty apt at procrastination. It’s certainly been a hell of year. What with the various questionable bits of politics, scandals, gates of all varieties and now the first year where the antarctic sea...

Boldly Going for 50 Years

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...

Dr Sam Morrell Researcher in Light Pollution and Astrophysics University of Exeter I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, in Devon, UK. I was trained as an astrophysicist, and my astrophysical research interest spans studies of young clusters, stellar evolution, and exoplanet science. In my current position, I am bringing my expertise as...