SAM MORRELL

Astrophysics
Environmental Intelligence
Computer Science

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Some Fluid Mechanics Basics

January 23, 2015

At the moment I’m intently studying fluid mechanics for an exam on planetary science. As you may have guessed, the fluid mechanics in question is for modelling planetary atmospheres, but the mathematics is universally applicable. I’ve wanted to learn fluid mechanics for many years so I thought I’d just go through some of the basics...

Dust in the Ointment

October 18, 2014

It’s nice every now and then to have a slight reminder why your work is valuable. At the moment I’m part of a research team, working in the astrophysics department at the University of Exeter,  that are studying dust. I know exactly what you’re thinking, how interesting can dust be? The truth is that interstellar...

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...

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...

The Great Conjunction 2020

December 7, 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...

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....

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

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...

XRT-C Dish Mounting Video is Finally Here!

February 8, 2018

This one has been a long time coming. The XRT-C project has likely seemed a little bit quiet of late, but never fear, as there’s always stuff going on in the background, even if it is only me. Ever since the build day in April 2016, I’ve been working on a video of the day...

YouTube

October 23, 2017

I have produced a variety of content for YouTube. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the content I have been involved in shooting, editing and producing.

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