SAM MORRELL

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...

What I’ve Been Listening To – August 2016

Phew! It’s been a scorcher of a month. Along with that, it’s been busy for me. Throughout August the astrophysics group at the University of Exeter have been preparing to host an international conference, and I’ve been doing little bits and pieces on the Local Organising Committee. Despite the this, I’ve still managed to get...

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

[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...

Dr Samuel Morrell Postdoctoral Research Fellow 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 an astronomer to...

What I’ve Been Listening To – December 2015

It’s that time of month again. It’s just ticked over to 2016 in the uphill scramble away from the winter solstice. I present to you my post Christmas romp through the tunes that have been stuck in my head this month. The Cast of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – It Must Be Believed to...

Using Wintersmith to Make Awesome Static Websites

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...

STFC Summer School 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...

Tackling Internal Server Errors When Using Jade-PHP

I’m currently taking a break from the glitz and glamour of astrophysics and instead am working on various development projects I promised I’d do for people. My main experience with web development in the past couple years has been using the excellent combo of Node.js + Express + Jade + Stylus. This combo is great...

Rainbow in a Box

Yesterday, I helped out at the physics department with a visit for a local sixth form. The basic idea was that in the morning the groups of students got a tour around the building and then in the afternoon they would get involved in a load of experiments. I was assigned the job of looking after...

University is Over… for Now

It is a momentous day for me and rest of the remaining class of 2011 of the University of Exeter’s physics department. Today was our last ever results day. It was also the day where I found out, to my eternal delight, that the last 4 years have yielded a masters degree in physics; an...

About Me OLD

I'm a postgraduate astrophysicist working in the astrophysics group at the University of Exeter. My PhD project, under the supervision of Professor Tim Naylor, involves studies of planet forming stars. In this project we hope to be able to observationally study the mechanisms of planet formation around young stars in an attempt to validate current theory. I also...

My Research

My research interests span astrophysics and environmental intelligence. My astrophysics research currently focusses on better measuring the characteristics of stars from large, cutting-edge photometric and astrometric datasets. I also apply this knowledge to the analysis of datasets for a large variety of environmental sources, from satellite observations to measurements of animal beahviour, to better understand...