Searching for: tech

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...

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...

Research Talks

December 16, 2019

Included here are a selection of my upcoming and recent research talks. 4th March 2021 Cool Stars 20.5 I was awarded a short Haiku talk at the Cool Stars 20.5 conference. In this talk, I presented a short talk summarising Morrell and Naylor (2019). I also presented a poster at this conference on this work....

Chirp – An App for Monitoring Gravitational Wave Alerts

November 1, 2019

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...

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...

About Me

August 12, 2018

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...

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...

Dealing with Blank Lines Comments in Fortran READs

September 4, 2017

Just a quick little programming snippet today. When preparing data files, it’s often useful to include headers and comments in them, especially in the more complicated ones. Most data applications that you might be loading data into, such as maybe Python or MATLAB, have plenty of ability to filter out those comments, but what if...

What I’ve Been Listening To – December 2016

January 17, 2017

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...

What I’ve Been Listening To – September 2016

October 1, 2016

Happy first birthday to these posts. I’m glad to say that the quick purpose meant to bring purpose to my website and motivate me to keep it up have indeed done just that, and I’ve managed to post one per month for the past year… even if no one has read them, it’s still an...

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,...