Krioma.net

Yep I am off to Cambridge now, for the FAS convention. This is tomorrow - I am sure it will be a great day.

This summer I redesigned the University Observatory website, it is now online at http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/observatory - I am very pleased! :-)

I am quite pleased with the design - I think it is a nice improvement in my site design and is a nice addition to my ever increasing list of sites I have designed. So far:

I think the above quite nicely describes my night. Yep another night of web programming. I haven't got the work I wanted done for Uni but at least I got some of the scripting for the RAS NAM 2005 website sorted. In fact I am quite pleased with my efforts. I am shattered. Think it is time for bed. Well maybe five more minutes till I get this all to work! :-)

Last night I gave a short talk on naked eye astronomy at Astrosoc. This was a quick powerpoint presentation I put together in case there was some bad weather. Yep there was - it was bloody cloudy. So I went off and did the presentation. We managed to get a good crowd in and did get around to doing some observing. Not much though as it was just too cloudy.

Oh if you want to take a look at the presentation see: http://www.krioma.net/articles/introtonaked/Intro_to_naked_eye_astronomy.htm

Yesterday I finished off writing my skychart script. The main task I have to do is produce all the images from Kstars and put the in the "database" of images that the script pulls them from. It is nothing to fancy but does exactly what I wanted it to do. I will make some modifications to it at some point but I have lots of other things to do at the moment. This can currently be seen on my homepage sidebar. Or at http://www.krioma.net/skycharts/skychart.php. The script is set to show the sky, looking at the zenith point, from Birmingham on the 1st of every month at midnight.

On Thursday night I gave a short presentation about Binocular Astronomy to Astrosoc. I was gonna make this quite long and rant on about stuff for about half an hour or so if it had been raining. It was cloudy but clear enough to go observing so I ended up by going through this rather quickly whist on the roof of Poynting Physics. It wasn't great weather but we managed to do a few things.

Oh and the presentation I gave is available at: http://www.krioma.net/articles/binocular_astronomy/Binocular_Astronomy.htm

Today I went to play Tennis again. Even though it was wetter this week than last week the court seemed to have more grip. Today me and Tom were joined by Alex and Katherine. It was a good game, I got some well needed exercise - so did they. It was lots of fun - we didn't play seriously but that was the most fun part of it. We are gonna play again next week. Good - more exercise!

I just watched the film titled "Frequency", although the physics were complete and utter bullocks - how the hell can aurora allow CB radio users access to other user separated by 30 years I do not know. Thought it was quite entertaining and interesting as "crime" films go. Though for once I would like to see a film for a change which does not have a lovey dovey ending. Sorry if I have given anything away to people who wanted to watch it. I am just annoyed that every film I seem to see has this cheesy 70s rock style ending!

It may be obvious to anyone who knows me that I am a little bit busy with Uni work at the moment thus leaving me with little time to work on my website. This is a great shame as recently I have been up to lots of things some of which may have been mildly interesting, probably not though.

Over last weekend I spent my time writing a paper review for my fourth year project, that is going well so I am pleased.

Last night was good fun though, I went observing with Steve and we managed to get some interesting views of the Moon through our new filters. It was very impressive, I even tried to take a photo of it through my phone. This did not come out at all well! Phone + Scope =

Well you can sort of see it is the moon, well what do you expect with a £30 mobile phone camera!

I did actually manage to get an interesting one though. I moved the camera of my phone a bit further away and managed to get the powerful light source of the moon emerging from the telescope eyepiece with the background of the light of Selly Oak / roof.

Oh and you can now tell it is approaching winter, it is nice and cold outside! Here are a few photos I have took recently of the autumn sky.

The wonderful clock tower is dominating in this image:

The sun breaks through these dark clouds:

And finally the moon just above the bridge between physics west and east, what a site that was with the eye - taken at twilight (probably my favourite of all the above!)

Again another week has passed with little posted by me, I am gonna try and make an effort to sit down and put some interesting stuff up in the next few days.

This week has been an interesting but very busy one. I think I have my paper review done, well apart from the proof reading which will identify my awful grammar. I have had 2 events (with one more in an hour or so) this week, one a talk by Andy Salmon of the Midlands Spaceflight society, the other observing the lunar eclipse (was cloudy!) and now the last one a talk off the Planetary Society - "Apollo - A Moon Odyssey" - hopefully this will be well attended.

Oh here we go something interesting. I have recently been reading lots of papers related to galaxy evolution and I decided that I should look back at the field from the start, so here (or in pdf) is Edwin Hubble's 1926 paper in which he first started to identify extragalactic nebulas - now known as Galaxies.