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Now I have to be honest, I only recently (within the last two weeks) got around to watching the first two parts - due to missing the first one in the cinema and my girlfriend who having saw it not liking it never got round to watching it. However while I have been down in Maidenhead I have managed to watch them and enjoyed them.

The third part was no different I think I enjoyed it even more, probably due to watching it in the cinema - which I much prefer. I went with my girlfriends Mom and brother, now I am feeling like one of the family :-).

One thing I did notice that the price of the tickets for students at the UCI here was £5.50, now I am not sure if this is the standard for UCI cinemas as I normally go to the UGC Cinema (the one on Broad Street, Birmingham - a fantastic place) at that is £3.75 I believe well around that, much cheaper. Guess it is because I am down south!

Back to Birmingham on Saturday though.

The Galaxy of M81 has been imaged via the new Spitzer (previously SIRF) infared telescope.

In my opinion this a fantastic image and its looks like this new telescope will definitely deserve the title as one of NASA's great observatories,the others being: Chandra, Compton and Hubble which are all fantastic. I love looking at this images and finding out what they are - expect more here! I will not go into detail about what this image is as this can be found on the page I saw it first.

I also found it funny that they went on about this person being arressted for about half an hour and then they only briefly mentioned the news that mistaken identities led to the Air France planes being cancelled. Would this be the FBI getting something wrong? Fair enough that they did and it is understandable that the planes should be cancelled but surely this should be as high in the news as the person being arrested? Again it seems like the media are stirring up things instead of calming it down like it would have been possible if they had said more about the Air France mistake.

For more about the Air France Cancellation see here (CNN) .

For more about BA Planes Cancelled see here (CNN) and here (BBC News).

It feels good to be back in Birmingham. I have had a great time down in Maidenhead but it feels so nice to be back in my own house with everything at hand, including my desktop computer. My laptop is good but it gets a little hot and is not as comfortable to use, plus games play much better on my desktop! :-).

I had an interesting day, including going for lunch at pub/restaurant on my way back in Charlbury, Oxfordshire. I love the area it is absolutely gorgeous and seems so laid back, I would love to live their in the future. Oh yes this 'restaurant' I went to seemed to have run out of lots of food which lead to them having only one veggie dish, lots of choice - it seemed even the salad came with meet - nice! However in its defence the waitress was quite nice about everything and the food once I got it was delicious.

Now this is quite funny! Don King's views on the FA Cup.

I think we should leave the FA Cup the FA Cup and leave this silly American out of it. He is obviously having a joke but we should still be cautious that Football is not taken over by money, like most American sports are.

As for his comment about team names:

"And as for your teams, you need cool tough animal names: the Manchester Cats, the Sheffield Dogs, Fulham Bears! Sunderland - give me Wonderland brother."

Well Manchester United are the Red Devils, Aston Villa are the Villains for example I don't think we need the unimaginative animal names.

At the least it is quite humorous.

I have been shopping on Sundays for the past four weeks at the very least now, guess it is becoming something of a tradition! Well I do actually like shopping on a Sunday, it is general quieter so it is more relaxing and as I am normally busy during the week it is nice to get away from Uni stuff.

One problem I have about shopping on a Sunday is the ridiculous licensing laws about Sunday trading, allowing shops to only stay open for six hours is ludicrous - and this is an improvement on how things used to be! Awful! Personally it wouldn't bother me too much as I would go shopping earlier but my girlfriend doesn't like to get up to early, especially on a Sunday. So we do not get there till it is late and living in Birmingham the shops stay open until 8 on a regular basis now (with the Bull Ring open), so you get used to that and when you go on a Sunday they all shut at 5pm ridiculous. I do wonder on how much trade the shops miss out on.

On Sunday morning (UK) the 'Spirit' rover landed on Mars and has started to send pictures back to the Earth. At last some look with the space probes going to Mars!

For more info see: http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/

I have had enough today at Uni in lab. Again I have not made any progress, I am really having a problem getting IRAF to do what it should do, I think there must be an error with the server I am using. This is the same problem I had before Christmas, hopefully the academic staff will be able o fix this by the end of the week otherwise I do not think I will be able to get all my lab done, argh!

NASA's Spirt probe is making continued progress in its mission and earlier today it presented Mars for the first time during this mission in wonderful technicolour!

Now this is shocking, last night I spent a few hours going through what the program was doing and tried to figure out what was going wrong. I came up with a solution. Now I did not think this would work, never does, but it did! Unbelievable! This now means that we can now do the appropriate fitting of our data that should allow us to calculate the orbital parameters of the stars under study.

On another point, I heard of some interesting research today. It seems that a team at the University of Hawaii have detected a star which has survived the supernova of its companion. This is the first to be detected and is a vindication for some theoretical models. The really interesting part is that by observing this over the next few years it may be able to detect a neutron star or black hole form in 'real time'.

Yesterday was my birthday, I had a great day. Lots of cool gifts :-).

I went into lab and was surprised when my friends got a muffin and put a candle on it and sang happy birthday, lots of fun. We then went to the Gun Barrels for lunch where I was joined by a few other mates. We all had a nice relaxing afternoon and I ended up drinking quite a bit.

Last night I went over to Erdington with Alex and Katherine. This was so we could meet my family. We met up in The Charlie Hall pub (a wetherspons) in the town centre. It was lots of fun and it was nice to see all my family their. I got some cool things, including a scary Spiderman rocking head, a Star Trek pocket watch and Starry Night pro plus (v4.5). All my gifts are great! I had a go at Starry Night and it is much better than the previous version and has so many things to do. Will try it out more and then write a small review of it.

Well I now its time for the second leg of my 21st celebrations, to the pub (The OVT) and then on to Snobs.

Yes I found this out last night, here is what you need to do:

1) Go into Birmingham City Centre for your night out on a Saturday

2) Go to a club which is not on Broad Street (this is not necessary you could be on Broad Street)

3) Leave at around 2:15 a.m.

4) Grab some chips

5) Wait around in the rain for 30 minutes while you try and get a bloody cab home!

Yes last night was fun. Well it was great in the club lots of great music and I was a little pissed. I even got my butt felt up twice and not by Alex (my girlfriend of two years), so I was a little concerned but not bothered that this had happened - I just did the I'm not interested / I'm to nervous to do anything about it thing that blokes do. We decided to go chill out in the second room of Snobs, the first time I have been in there since the summer and I only went in there then to cool off, it was the height of the summer and the main room was packed and very hot. This rest time nearly ended up in us missing "I believe in a thing called love" by the The Darkness, however we only missed about half of it. The dance floor was packed but I was straight into the mosh pit. Fantastic The only thing missing from last night was that there was no Gaybar!

We decided to leave a little early, in the hope of getting a cab and that we were very tired but alas we did not find one for ages and it was pissing it down. So home I got at around 3am looking like a drowned rat.

Birmingham needs to invest in some form of public transport in the evenings, especially on Saturday. I am informed Liverpool does from my house mate, so why can't the second city?

In theme with my albums of the year I was encouraged by my housemate Katherine to come up with a single chart of 2003. I did this at the same time but didn't get around to posting it until now. Here they are:

Back to Uni, yes something real to do! Well I always have things to do but it is nice to get out and about doing things. It was nice to see all my mates that I have not seen over the holiday.

I started off the day with a nine o'clock lecture on the structure and evolution of galaxies, it sounds great however this course clashes with another one I want to take, Radiation and Relativity, so I am unsure witch to do. Saying that I can actually do the Galaxies course next year (with some extra material) and if I want to do General Relativity next year I have to do the Radiation one. So the answer is simple, just do the Radiation one, problem is I have not done any detailed maths in a year or so and am a little afraid that I will be left behind. Well it is my first lecture of this tomorrow so I will give it a go and see how it is and then decide.

Did some more lab today not making much progress, like always.

I have also had a play around with Starry Night Pro Plus, its great! Lots of brilliant features. I really love being able to download actually images into it.

Tonight Porrima (Gamma Virginis - ZC 1821) passes behind the Moon and then reappears later on. So I have decided with a friend of mine to see if we can get it. This is going to take some good work with the telescope but we should and if we don't (which I doubt) it will still be good fun.

If anyone would like anymore information on this then please just ask and more information on Lunar Occultation's can be found at: http://www.lunar-occultations.com

Well all I can say is that I had fun last night! As I predicted at 3am just before the event occurred the sky was filled with cloud! Argh. It wasn't all bad because at just before 2am we did actually see (we believe we did) Porrima disappear behind the Moon. We then whilst waiting looked at Jupiter and Saturn which like always was brilliant and I even saw a meteor! The meteor fell through Cancer and was blue in colouration and lasted about 2 seconds.

Being up so late has left me feeling exhausted today but I still had enough energy to go and see "The Last Samurai" starring Tom Cruise which was surprisingly good.

Yet another Thursday, this one started with 3 hours of lectures. All were good, surprisingly! I am enjoying my Interstellar Medium course the most at the moment, which I am surprised about as this was the option I decided to take last!

Again I tried to do some more lab, all we need to do now is plot the velocities of the stars against time.

Astrosoc went well, I gave a talk on Taurus which can be found on the Astrosoc website (http://www.astrosoc.org.uk) and spoke about the occultation on Wednesday morning, no one seemed to impressed that we didn't see anything - like usual, but they all seemed to like the image of it courtesy of Jon Harper, SPA Occultation Section.

The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372, also known as the 'Keyhole Nebula') has recently been observed via the Hubble Space Telescope and has revelead some mysterious details that indicate a complex structure within this Nebula.

See: http://www.esa.int/export/esaSC/SEMAJS374OD_sensations_2.html for more information.

This is starting to become an annoyance, its not that I am not enjoying it (well I am not at the moment), it is just that we are now approaching our deadline and still we are having software problems. One day I am sure it will all be fixed but at that point I will no longer be using this system. Well I guess that's life, at least I have had a decent week of Astronomy.

I am currently investigating the possibility of measuring the Astronomical Unit (AU - the distance between the Earth and the Sun) when the transit of Venus occurs, it will on the 8th June this year, an astronomical event no one should miss.

Astromers from the Harvard - Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics using the STIS instrument onboard the Hubble Space Telescope have whilst observing Betelgeuse (a super giant star in Orion) detected hot gas escape its atmosphere at much larger distances than they have before.

The distance that they have observed this hot gas is 50 times the visible radius and this is 5 times the orbit of Neptune. The hot gas is contained within the Chromosphere of the star, this is the region between the photosphere and the corona. The photosphere itself is of a similar orbit to that of Jupiter's orbit around the Sun!

See: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0401/15atmosphere/ for more info

Time for something funny

I occasionally type strange things into Google and choose I am feeling lucky, normally has some funny results. Well today I decided to type in miserable failure and guess what it brought up? Mr George W Bush, the President of the United States of America. Now you might think that it was a website that was having a go at him, but no it was a white house page in fact it was this one: http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

Miserable failure? Well I will not go into this in too much detail at the moment, if you know me then you know what I think. No matter what you think of him good or bad, all I can say is he is screwing with the environment and no one can justify those actions. Now I wonder if any one in the White House has noticed it, I think maybe time to change your marketing boys!

Well it seems it might almost be time to say goodbye to possibly the most scientifically productive spacecraft ever launched.

This is due to a final planned shuttle mission to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, being cancelled, primarily because of post-Columbia safety concerns and a new directive to retire the shuttle by 2010. The decision means an advanced camera and light-splitting spectrograph - both already built - will not be installed. A bit of a waste but well I guess you can not put people's lives in danger over a few parts! It could go on to 2007 but this is unsure. The next optical telescope the James Webb is not likely to be in operation till 2011 thus leaving a gap that NASA is not happy about.

For more info, see:

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0401/16hubblesm4/ and http://hubble.gsfc.nasa.gov/servicing-missions/

Today I decided to go along with my mates and play a game of football on the Uni astroturf pitches. It was lots of fun and a great game - even if we did get beaten 10 - 3. A shame but even though I am physically feeling the effects I thoroughly enjoyed it and feel great having done some exercise, hopefully we can make this a more regular thing.

After we played I went back into Uni to take some photographs of Astrosoc's telescopes for a new poster we are designing, however this killed me, but I am feeling better now but I do think it is call for an early night.

Today we had our first group studies meeting, it sound really interesting - we are doing an Extra solar planet finder project. However they put me in charge! I am sure I can do it, I am used to this sort of thing now.

I also had a meeting with my tutor, we are going to apply to do some research over the summer and he has suggested I do some work with Hubble images! Great, I can't wait, hope I get the funding now.

Seeing as I am doing a project on extra solar planets and it started today how cool is it that a planet with a magnetic field may have been found yesterday!

See: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0401/19planet/ for more info.

Credit: Shane Erno

Also I have seen some fantastic results from ESA's Mars Express, lets hope it can put the American's to shame (gonna be hard to after Beagle 2).

See: http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/marsexpress/040119image.html

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

I have been busy doing stuff today. What with visiting a hotel for Astrosoc's annual dinner and doing lots of group studies stuff I am shattered, time for a game of FIFA 2004 me thinks!

I also came across a rather cool image today of spinning star imitating a black hole.

This is the first chance I have had to post today (well for yesterday I should say!). I have had an incredibly busy day. What with lectures, group studies and astrosoc - I don't know if I am coming or going. I think I spent 14 hours in the physics department today! Well at least I like it there. Lectures are ok, well I decided to quit Radiation and Relativity - I just couldn't get it. I think it was a combination of me not understand the lectures accent at all, not being able to read his handwriting and the course being very hard. Well it is a shame as I will miss out on GR (General Relativity) but I think I will have an easier time doing this and will get a better grade. I will (and have) enjoyed the lectures I have been to of the other course being run by Dr Raychaudhury.

Anyways away from Uni, it seems the American's are now having problems with their Mars Probe - Spirit. This planet is doomed, there is no chance life could have survived there if not even electronics can cope with it! :-)

See:

http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040122anomaly.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3421071.stm

Wow! White a day, water on Mars in the form of ice (see here)- communications reestablished with Spirit (see here) and the impending landing of Opportunity I guess any Martians will have seen a decrease in their home value, all of a sudden their quite little part of the Universe has been invaded by the noisy humans. At least they didn't have to put up with Blur.

I can just imagine it a big poster: Live on Mars: Blur (because no bugger want's to listen to them on Earth).

On a more personal note, Group Studies is going well my subgroup got everything we need to do sorted and then we arsed around in the coffee lounge of our physics department for about 4hours while we calculated the mass of our binary stars (only took five mins) and discussed our errors (20 mins!), well it was nice just to chill and listen to music (that's all we did)! It was funny as we are poor students but we still had 3 laptops present - I guess an essentially part of most students lives now.

Yeah! :-) Well the other day I was interviewed over the phone by a representative of the Institute of Physics (IoP), I am their representative from my Uni. They were asking me questions about tuition fees and their new proposed£1,000 a year grant to help students going into physics!

See: http://physics.iop.org/IOP/Press/PR0704.html

The fight back has begun, I thought it might - we want to save Hubble!

See: http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1158_1.asp

2 or 3 depending on if you include Beagle having landed or not.

Oppourtinty has landed and is hopefully going to work properly.

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3427045.stm

Today was not my most productive, hopefully tomorrow will be better. I did what I needed to do and that was it, I think I just needed a day of just leaving stuff. Hopefully this will not continue tomorrow, I want to get this bloody lab report out of the way.

I did have a few funny things happen today, one was me and my mates Matt and 'Geordie' deciding to setup our own wireless network so we can sit in the coffee lounge in physics to play games! Now that's what undergraduates should be doing, sitting on their arses doing nothing! :-) Guess that does not apply to physics students.

Also today, a war started on the astrosoc forum between the Undergrads and the Postgrads, quite fun and stupid at the same time. At least in drags us away from IRAF.

Tony Blair is a git, no way am I going to vote Labour. I can't believe there are so many spineless people in our parliament.

Well all I can say is, my best wishes to the students of the future who have to cope with these fees.

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3434329.stm

Short sighted people below? I think so.

The Sun newspaper, well the first thought that comes to mind for me is crap.

My current thoughts on The Sun are as they always are, you are crap, you are filth and I hope you realise this, soon.

Their publishing of leaked extracts of the Hutton report was deplorable. For once can't the media not go over the top. We as members of the public do not want underhanded tactics. I will not buy a newspaper that breaks the law, it is not big, it is not funny, it is not good that they had the news. It is shocking, disturbing and someone should take them to court. There is a line and yet again, like many thousands of times they have gone over the line. Not just any line but the law. OK some laws really are silly but when it comes to matters such as the Hutton report, well anything that the Sun would publish, then this is not tolerable.

Yes I am having a go out the Sun. Some people may say that other newspapers are as bad. Yes I agree there are other "newspapers" (not much news in them! more like a magazine) like the Sun that are as bad. I am my anger at the Sun today because of what they have done today and what they have done in the past. My main example being the Hillsborough disaster.

On the Tuesday following the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of The Sun, used the front page headline, THE TRUTH, in huge letters. Under that were three smaller headlines: 'Some fans picked pockets of victims'; 'Some fans urinated on the brave cops'; 'Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life'.

For more on this campaign and the disaster see: http://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/

After my forum yet again crashed I have decided to change from the perl forum wrote by cutecast to a php forum. This has involved me spending a while getting my head around php. But well it works. Hopefully more reliable and has some cool new features. Guess I will have to watch it and see how it goes.

If you want to take a look at it go to: http://www.krioma.net/phpBB2/

Also take a look at the below picture, US President George W. Bush looking like I do during Quantum Mechanics lectures!

This is from a news article titled: "Bush wants 'facts' on Iraqi WMD"

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3445975.stm