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This afternoon I decided that it was an ideal chance to go outside (into my parents garden) and take a few photos. The sky was a deep blue and the horizon was a golden orange due to the Sun setting. It was quite gorgeous. Well here are my attempts at taking photos of this (more and larger versions are available here [Image Gallery].

Yesterday I went out into my back garden just as the Sun was setting and wow it was wonderful. I just can't think of many things more poetic than a sunset. I love the orange glow that the atmosphere has the depth of the colours is wonderful. From where I am in Birmingham every night the sun sets over the city centre - this is a sight that can be breath taking.

I took a few photos of this just as the sun was finally disappearing and there was a lovely red glow present (larger versions can be found in my [Image Gallery].

Well I didn't think it would but it did. It snowed in Birmingham on Christmas day. It really makes Christmas feel right! I took some photos of the snow coming down.. so I canprove it to everyone!

Images:


More:
+ BBC Weather Birmingham Christmas Snow -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2004/12/15/weather_christmas_snow_feature.shtml

Yesterday I got back my big group photo picture of us at the PPS ball - taken by the pro's. Below you can see a scanned in photo. I like to think that us physicists can scrub up quite well! :-) What a crazy night - for more photos see here.

It was threatening to rain for a while yesterday and when it finally did (just before I went to the pub) it produced this wonderful rainbow





I love rainbows, I find them so fascinating and beautiful, so I was well pleased when these pictures, which I took with my mobile phone, came out well. For more see: [Image Gallery]

I have finally gotten around to putting the pictures I took at the [Oval last month] on my site. I took some of the game but the most striking part is the wonderful purple sky.



For more see: [Image Gallery]

I finally got around to taking the photos from my week in Edinburgh off my phone. I had a great time up their, it probably also involved me drinking more than I did during my freshers week(!). It was good and I love the licensing laws. Edinburgh seems like a place you could go to for many different occasions. Here are a selection of some of my favourites (more can be found [here]

I've finally gotten around to posting some pics of the last few weeks. This includes pictures taken after the astrosoc freshers quiz which featured me and Ran singing along to "Gaybar" by Electric Six:





A few more can be found [here]

October 1st was the date of the second Federation of Astronomical Societies conventions I have helped organise. This years one was at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. It went well, we had about 70 people along - slightly lower than I would have hoped but it still went down well. Anyway the reason I mention this is because I have just gotten around to posting the photos for this:





More can be found [here]

In the past two months I have seen more rainbows than I did, from what I can remember, during my whole time living in Selly Oak. The shocking thing is that is only 2! Rainbows are cool. And here is a picture of this one:

Last Thursday was the PPS (Poynting Physical Society) freshers pub crawl. It went down well with loads of people there! Since my job on the PPS committee is essentially to keep the website going I have just uploaded the pictures from this event, some of them are quite ammusing, take a look at [here]. Here are a few of my favs though:

The other day it rained rather heavily but it left some rather purple skies across campus, I couldn't resist taking some pictures with my mobile phone:

We went for a curry the other night and look at the mess my mate Ran got himself into...tut tut, some people!





And if you think that was bad, I think Rowan got too excited when they brought out the family sized naan bread!

Before my trip to London on Sat was a night of alcohol at Maz's... well not so much only about 10 bottles of Carlsberg. It was a good night and obviously the picture phone had to come out at some point didn't it! :-) I took this wonderful photo of Ran:



and this brilliant action shot (umm maybe not!) of Adam after he was attacked with chocolate cake (he looks gob smacked!):



I even tried to get a photo of Maz but they all came out blurry...and no we wasn't listening to Puddle of Mudd (I obviously am now, for some reason):



Oh what fun :-)

Today is much better but the last few days in Brum have been awfully foggy! It is unbelievable how odd people act when there is a little bit of bad weather. At least one good thing has come out of this time; I got to take what I think is a rather cool image of Old Joe, the clocktower on campus.

I always think the University of Birmingham campus is great for taking pictures, no matter the weather, the natural beauty of this place shines through - well that depends if you are looking at the hideous Muirhead tower!

I'm getting more and more slack at posting pictures... here are some to prove that we did have snow in Birmingham last week. I have to say how beautiful and tranquil the University campus is when it is snowing, well assuming you can miss out of the snowballs. I did - Ria didn't, muhahaha! :-) Another thing that happens is people go crazy on their commute, bloody buses!

The campus here offers so many wonderful photo opportunities, any weather it is fantastic, here are a few at dusk. I particular like the ones of the Faraday sculpture (its not off him but for him, by Eduardo Paolozzi), it is an odd sculpture but I really do like the impact it has on my daily life, its the first thing I see related to physics when I get to Uni and the last (in general assuming I don't get the bus) when I leave!



















And this is the main lectern in the great hall...

Maybe... or maybe the subject material needs to be better! Take a look:

Here are a few photos that I said I would post from the [Astrosoc] Annual Dinner. These ones are off Scott Porter, I didn't actually check if he will mind me posting them here but I'm sure he won't ... if you do come and find me I'm like 3 desks away! :-)

This is the obligatory big group photo (don't we all look smart!):

And now for just the committee... a few more happy faces (!)..

I decided I was too lazy to upload my pics of the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) to my image gallery here, I'll pic the best at some point and post them on here. For now however, I signed up for a Fotki account and have posted my pics on there: [NAM 2006 Pics]

Here is another picture of my ugly mug.. at least this time I have a rather beautiful young lady next to me :-) !!

Last night my walk from the bus home was quite stunning as the Sun was just dropping below the houses and giving off a glorious glow..

I have said this before, I will say this again, and I say this now. The University campus is beautiful, no matter the weather (well maybe not in torrential rain!). I love the place, it is very much a factor into why I originally stayed here to do a PhD.. which for other reasons I'm very glad I did. Anyway onto the topic, the clocktower at sunset:

This was with my mobile phone so probably not the best image you could have taken of such a wonderful moment but it is still pretty cool, I love the purpley-pink colouration. Beautiful

I though this looked pretty cool... yes it is just a tree, but a tree from me lying down....

A couple of images I took with my phone that came out quite nice in B+W whilst I was awaiting the bus home...

It looks like the HSBC building at Five Ways in Brum is going energy effiecient... cool...

Umm, now this is not something I expected as I headed to my office...

Whilst going to the cinema, to see United 93, I had to take a picture of the beautiful sunset that was descending over five ways... lovely.

Oh and United 93 was an excellent film but I do have a feeling it might have been still a bit too early to make a film about this sort of thing....

I took loads and I mean loads of pictures and movies on my new camera yesterday, was lots of fun. I am particular pleased with a couple and though I would share a few with you, I will be sharing many more in the future but not just yet. Whilst walking around I was taking lots and lots of photos and I think Lizzie was starting to get annoyed that most of them where of her so I decided to start taking them of the wonderful buildings around us. The first I really liked was of the cube's in the bullring, well a cube, with the Selfridges building behind it, it really did capture the essence of the water (well that's what I am saying!):

The other image I took was of the big flower football outside the entrance to the Bullrign complex. I think (I'm pretty sure) the Ball is their to advertise the T-mobile fan park (I keep meaning to go, probably won't now!) down at Millennium point... lots of football going on down there, with the largest events outside of Germany, so the advertising says. Anyway the actual ball is pretty and quite artistic... so take a look below:

I gave Lizzie some flowers the other day and they were truely stunning, especially a photo taken in a darkened corner of the room:

I still haven't posted any real photos from my trip to Canada, well I will in more detail soon but I'm a bit busy getting ready to go off to India. I though I would give a quickly and stunning view of Toronto though... below is the CN Tower, the world's tallest manmade structure... oh I had dinner near the top and stood on the (gulp!) glass floor!

I thought I would give tabblo ago... I wonder if this will mess up the page / my strict xhtml....

This is my first time using Tabblo so this is as much of a test than anything else.

On this page you will see a few pics that I took in India in August 2006.
... See my Tabblo

Walking past the back of the Aston Webb building here at Birmingham Uni the other night gave me the chance to see a wonderful site. The back of the great hall lit up by portable lights.. nice and pretty so I thought I would share it...

The Sun over aston webb building giving an eerie feel.. oh and notice the pulley in the foreground which is part of the old mechanism of the Grubb telescope

University of Birmingham main courtyard in the autumn

The campus looked beautiful today when the autumn Sun shone through the somewhat light cloud cover...

Before Christmas I was playing around with my new greenlaser, which I use for astronomy (can point at the stars), and managed to get a (sort of) heart:

I went over to the park to try and spot a comet earlier, no luck - I think I have missed this one... damn clouds . Though I got some good shots of the Sun going down..

I introduce the audience to our guest speaker, Prof John Brown, back in December (photo by Scott Porter)

Do you like my new pose... I think it shows off my angry side / possibly going grey, quite well...

It snowed here quite heavily in Birmingham this week. It was quite a welcome and fun change. This lead to many interesting developments occuring on campus.

The Snow Woman

Clocktower

The Snowman outside physics..

E = mc^2

The otherday I got through the professional photos taken at the IoP Awards... I think I came out looking ok...

Last night I was slightly disapointed. I'm not entirely sure why, I am putting it down to me being tired and my back aching a little. The gig was good and it was excellent that they played a 2 hour set but I got a little bored. I think it was probably just down to tiredness and the fact that at times they are a bit melodic... it was a good gig but not as good as I had hoped.

At the start of the gig we had the experience of a shoe flying towards us..

I also took some photos of the band...

I do like the background lighting they had...

For valentines day I bought Lizzie some roses....

Last Night I had the pleasure of watching Bowling for Soup rock the Birmingham Carling Academy. The gig was great and just as I expect Bowling for Soup definitely put on a show. Sometimes a little too much show and not enough gig but it was thoroughly enjoyable. Lots of fun and well worth the cash. They are coming back for Download (which I may attend this year for a change from Reading) and a tour later in October... I think I will have to see them again.

The Fabulous Bowling for Soup....

Bowling for Soup with UK tour background..

A soft focus image of the stage...

I'm not one for stupidly lighting up buildings - I'm an astronomer and light pollution annoys me more than lots of things. The other night, in a one off event (I hope!), the University campus was quite nicely lit up. The clocktower and Aston Webb building were the central focus of this. I have a feeling it was an event dinner being held in the Aston Webb building for the European Athletics championship being held in Birmingham... anyway I got a couple of decent photos...

Aston Webb building...

UoB on clocktower

Clocktower and tree lit up...

Moon and Aston Webb

Glare of lights...

Tonight the Moon disappeared into the shadow of the Earth.... I decided that it would be cool to see if but even cooler if I actually got a few photos, and I did.. yay!

The Moon rises...

The eclipse begins...

At totality the Moon turns a deep red due to light being refracted around the Earth's atmosphere.. coooool!

This is due to refractor of light from the Sun in the Earth's atmosphere.

As the eclipse ends the Moon shows its true power again..

My telescope and the Moon

PPS Ball 2007

Last night was the [Poynting Physical Society's] Annual Spring Ball. This is the big social event of the year here in the School of Physics and Astronomy and the University of Birmingham. This year it took place the home of Warwickshire Country Cricket Club, Edgbaston. It is a nice place for a ball, in fact the first PPS ball I went to back in 2002 was there(!), with a large dance floor. Large dance floor = me dancing like an idiot. Oh well, nothing new there then. I managed to take quite a few photos but here are a few select ones (more will appear on the PPS website when I get chance)....

Welcome...

me and Lizzie...

Tom being daft..

Adam and Maz..

me and Rich..

Tom dishes out the champers...

I took some images of the Uni campus yesterday, I think they came out quite nicely...

Quite a few of the clocktower...

now a slight break for some flowers..

Another one of the clocktower, if you zoom in you can see a bird flying over the face..

The Sun about aston webb..

The other night we went out for one of my close friends 21st birthday party... it all started well with the bowling. Bowling is always good fun.. and I think Ran got a bit excited..

We then went off to Old Orleans on Broad St. This is one of my favourite places on Broad St to eat. Well not any more. There service was appaling. This worst I have ever had. They took well over 2 hours to bring out meals with some 30minutes apart. It was like watching a really bad episode of Hells Kitchen. They were just awful. The waiter was a best rude, especially when he was seemingly trying to blame me for the tables being slightly separated - causing the tower of food to fall over me *I moved quickly and didn't get the hot sizzling stuff on me* when he put it down.. argh! Anyway apart from the shite service I had fun.

Food time... maybe...

Last weekend me and Lizzie celebrated one year together by taking a short trip down to London. It was a nice few days away and also lots of fun...

On the Sat we went to the Science Museum were I had my pic taken next to an F1 car.. sssh, I don't think we were allowed to take this but we didn't notice this till after, woops.

I also got to start off some vibrations...

On the Sunday we travelled down to the London Eye but it was a bit busy so we just took a walk up the river.

The eye had red noses added:

Lizzie doesn't seem to impressed with my constant taking of photos, I'm obviously happy:

Lizzie takes photos of Big Ben

We visited St Paul's Cathedral on the Sunday before we left...

On Friday I travelled up to Liverpool to give a talk to Liverpool Astronomical Society. I spoke about extrasolar planets (full title being "Extrasolar Planets and their Aurora"). I have to say I very much enjoyed it and it was a pleasure to speak at the oldest Astronomical Society in the UK (and the world, I think). I felt it went down well and I hope I was clear with my explanations, though I know I can be "hand-wavy" on occasion. I love giving talks about astronomy.

Anyway since I was in Liverpool I went to meet my good friend Katherine, who incidentally put me up overnight..

On Sat morning she gave me a tour of Liverpool, which I very much enjoyed... now come the pics, which are much better than my boring text.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral at night (where I gave the talk, not in main room - I would have been scared if it had been!):

Radio City Tower:

My fast food place (yeah, right! ):

St Luke's Church that was destroyed by air raids in the second world war:

outside the Anglican Cathedral:

inside the Anglican Cathedral:

Liverpool University:

For my friend Kym's 21st birthday party we went out to Nando's, followed by cocktails, Flares and then a house party.. gosh that girl got it all .

Here are a couple of photos that really stick out from the night....

Lizzie with hat...

Kym turning nice a quickly so I get a face full of hair..

Adam, well being Adam...

It's above you...

Me and Tom with the 'fro's...

Maz and Adam giving us a light show on the dancefloor..

I managed to take an image of the Moon with my digital camera in projection on my scope. I'm sure if my mount was a bit better I would have gotten a much better image, maybe time to invest.

Anyway here we go...

Last night was the University of Birmingham Guild Awards 2007. These took place in the decked out Deb hall (it had a massive star cloth which looked well cool!). It was a good night (once a few sillness' at the start were sorted). Of course I am going to be happy as I won an award! YAY!

I was awarded the "Ross Barlow Memorial Prize for outstanding individual student" which means alot. I have been invovled in Guild societies (abliet mostly astrosoc) for 6 years and I feel I have put in a huge amount of time - enjoyed every second. The Guild means a lot to me, though I do moan about it most of the time! I'm not sure exactly what to say on this, I'm not saying I don't like attention but I am used to being the person who does lots of organisation and isn't always in the spotlight.

I found Ben Whitehouse's (Project and Event Support Co-ordinator.) words on facebook quite fitting...:

"My other favourite memory will be watching the various groups and individuals who won look slightly surprised as they punched the air. I even got a little teary as I watched Sam George accept his award for outstanding individual student. It's been two years since I met Ross Barlow briefly at my first event at the guild of students. It was the student group awards on the Tuesday of my first week at work. I was very new and very unaware of just how passionate our groups could get. Ross clearly loved volunteering for various groups and got a kick out of being involved. Ruth described Ross as having a dry sense of humour... I caught just a little of that on the night. Ross died in a hang gliding accident later that week."

More about the event: [redbrick]

And now some pics... me and Lizzie having fun..

Me and Kym,

Adam and Maz perform for Ballroom dancing..

Last weekend [Astrosoc] went camping... lots of fun!

We headed down to Maz's house near Bristol for some clear and dark skies. It was nice and clear but the
blasted Moon stopped it from being too dark. We knew this would be the case so weren't too bothered.
It was damn cold though, with the wind chill it must have gone under freezing, some decent observing conditions
but not the best to sleep in a tent in! It was hard enough to put the tents up, nevermind sleep in them though...

The first night brought a lovely sunset... (note: the birds, which I stood ages trying to get!)

With the sunset out came the Moon, alowing me to take this nice shot of it over the local Church.

As it became darker the Moon's full glory was shown and I managed to get quite a few shots (just a select few here) of the Moon via placing my digital camera up against the telescope eyepiece (not the proper way to go about it, but it works!)...

Once we had the Moon we decided to go Planet spotting... and up came Saturn - I saw Saturn with the best view I probably ever have had, shame I couldn't manage to get the best shot but at least you can tell it is Saturn.

The next day we went out for a drive, starting off at Cheddar Gorge. For this me and Tom decided to become the brave explorers we always knew we were...

After another (cold) and fun nights observing we were heading back to Birmingham... not before some odd antics...

Last weekend and the one before were so much fun. We took over the BBC Birmingham's public space inside the mailbox to build and launch air rockets. This resulted in me being quite tired after launching countless numbers of them! This was part of the celebrations for the 50th Anniversary of the BBC television show "The Sky at Night" - a show that is produced at the Birmingham centre. Over the course of four days some 2,000 members of the general public passed into our reaches! They were treated to a variety of fun activities that utlimately ended up with kids building rockets and having them propelled upwards by compressed air. Lots hit the ceiling but only one managed to wedge itself into the roof tiling. Woops! It was lots of fun.. if you missed out, watch out as we might come and do this again.

The event was put together by the BBC and the University of Birmingham Astrophysics and Space Research group (with lots and lots of help from Astrosoc, the University's astronomy society).

I took some quite cool vids of the rockets being launched and I'll get these put online soon....

More photos can be found [here].

I really shouldn't post these photos as some are quite embarassing.. oh well, I just won't post those of Lizzie... well maybe a few.

Here I am with rather straight hair....

Lizzie shows she loves me... but thats probably fair as I am dripping and not looking my emo best (see above!)

Tom does the rabbit....

Oh yes, we are idiots...

Oh and there are more [here].

Now I feel like a proper scientist.

The Sidewalk Astronomers (i.e. on the pavement!) have been helping people to observe the night sky since 1976, last night was the first [International Sidewalk Astronomy Night]. This meant that many people around the world took out their telescopes to the streets around the world. Here in [Birmingham] we did the same. The 'scopes were provided by members of the [Birmingham Astronomical Society] (a few members of the [Uni society] were also present but without 'scopes). It was great fun. We had well over a thousand memebers of the public passing by and asking what was going on before looking through a telescope. For many this was their first time and some of the reactions that we had when people realised that the bright object in the sky was in fact the planet Venus were wonderful to see. It was even better to see their faces after they saw the rings of the planet Saturn for the first time. Great fun! We hope to do similar events in the city centre again.

The Moon and Venus were very nicely placed for some photos as well (it was a conjunction after all)....

More pictures can be found: [here]

I decided to pop outside last night to do some stargazing and this wonderful sight was out there...

Astrosoc's 'Annual Dinner this year took place at the Edgbaston Golf Course. Mr Mike Frost was our guest speaker with a talk on how to lose weight, it was a wonderful nigh.. lots of fun! I have to say the Golf course was really nice to go to and I do wonder how many times I have been past there but never inside... it felt kinda special! .. don't they look like they are having fun...

Today is the [8th Annual System Admin day] so we decided that we would thank our system admin in the astrophysics group at Birmingham with a nice suprise... ...

The other day we (I and Lizzie's family) went for a nice day out up to the home of UK Radio Astronomy. It was a very good day for it too. Nice blue skies with some interesting clouds. When we got to Jodrell Bank we found that the Lovell telescope was unfortunately parked at the zenith for some maintenance work. This is not a huge problem as you still get to see how quite enormous this structure is. I have seen quite a few radio telescopes now but the Lovell telescope always makes me go WOW! It was great fun walking around the site and though the visitor centre isn't very large they do have quite a fun little 3D space theatre and it is all pretty cheap. Its a great family day out and since it is the 50th anniversary of the Lovell telescope and indeed Sputnik, it is worth a pop up to see it.

oh and trust me to find Ceres (a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt normally) in an odd place:

After we Jodrell we went over to Little Moreton Hall for some lunch and a nice walk around. I can't believe I'm saying this, I might actually becoming cultured, but I joined the National Trust... only because it will be cheaper in the long run, honest! Little Moreton Hall was quite interesting - its a timber-framed, moated manor house! It was built in the 16th Century and has not changed much since the time of the Tudor's.

Reading Festival 2007

I know it is a while ago that this happened but I've been too busy to think.

Anyway here is a quick summary of the festival.

- Travel, took way too long the driver got lost in Coventry (we weren't supposed to go there!) and drove around aimlessly not finding the coach station - eventually we got there!

- Dry, not wet, bit damp in places but not at all bad...

- Fun as always, though it wasn't fun being woken up at 4am to here someone breaking into my tent and grabbing my bag.. shame for them that they left their phone behind and my bag only had my coat in it. They came back for their phone.. I was naked and I got my bag back - really seemed like a surreal dream.

- Bands, how many did I see... 40 in total - not bad really.

- I saw:

On Friday: The Pipettes, The Sounds, The long blondes, Manchester Orchestra, Aiden, The Draft, Plain White Ts, Jimmy Eat World, Maximo Park, Interpol, Enter Shikari, The Subways, Brand New, Ash

I think the highlight of this day was probably Aiden and Jimmy Eat World. Aiden were quite a surprise and very enjoyable. Jimmy Eat World were just fantastic! I should also mention that, like always, Maximo Park and Ash played great sets!

On Saturday: Paramore, Dead 60, Kids in glass houses, Mute Math, The Shines, Nine Black Alps, Angels and Airwaves, Cobra Starship, Panic at the disco, Bloc Party, The Twang, Biffy Clyro, Battles, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Academy Is..., Hot Hot Heat

The disappointment of the festival came with the Chilli Peppers - I got annoyed and decided Hot Hot Heat were a better bet.. and they were. Mute Math were pretty cool doing some rather interesting drumming... Cobra Starship put on a good gig and I think Lizzie enjoyed them.

On Sunday: Stalker (I think), Gym Class Heroes, Hellogoodbye, Billy Talent, The Used, Funeral for a friend, Fallout Boy, Lost Prophets, NIN, Smashing Pumpkins and New Found Glory.

This was a good day for music (apart from the Gym Class Heroes!). Billy Talent were great, I really enjoyed their set but the gig of the day (and probably the festival for me) had to go to the Lost Prophets who played a kick ass set, really good music and they got the crowd going! I think I would have probably enjoyed New Found Glory more if it wasn't for me feeling a tad ill...

Oh and here is the Moon over the arena...

I recently went over to Germany, primarily for a conference in Bonn but it didn't stop me taking a short break in Cologne first with Lizzie. Cologne is a fantastic city and there was lots to do - and we did lots. I think the most striking feature of the whole time in Cologne is their wonderful Cathedral:

I could have, and probably did, spend hours looking at this. They have recently had a stunning new stained glass window installed. Critics might say its a bit abstract but when you stand there staring at it you really understand what the artist meant (it is so beautiful), the photo does not do it justice:

We did many things in Cologne including going around a few museums. The EL-DE (about the Nazi's in Cologne) which is a former SS prison house, quite scary to be honest. We went to the Roman museum which has some interesting finds from when Cologne was Roman including a rather odd mosaic floor (not sure if this is really from the period or not...):

We also went around a couple of smaller museums but the most interesting of all the museums has to be the Schokoladen Museum (i.e. the chocolate museum!):

.. lots of fun, not enough free chocolate (but I think Lizzie was more bothered than me :-p). It was quite interesting and in terms of interesting content beats Cadbury World here in Brum...

The conference I went to was hosted in Bonn.. a short journey away from Cologne and that is where Lizzie left me. I have to say I was a bit nervous I have never used public transport in a foreign country on my own before. It was, as I honest expected, simple... and on time!

Bonn isn't quite the city Cologne is but it is still rather nice:

oh and its nice to see that they have problems with graffiti too..

Oh and here is a pointless photo:

As part of my conference we went to the wonder 100m Effelsberg radio telescope:

All in all, I had a great time! For more of my photos (I took lots, like always) see: [here]

I had the great honour and pleasure of being along for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the dawn of the space age at Jodrell bank last Thursday. It was a great experience and was great to hear Prof Sir Bernard Lovell speak about his wonderful telescope - humble as ever. He spoke wonderfully well and was so inspiring:

I obviously tried to take a few photos, here is one of the Lovell telescope casting a shadow onto itself:

and with the moon (bottom right)

the smaller scopes have fun with the birds:

at the zenith

oh and a case of "my dish is bigger than yours"

Last Saturday was the Federation of Astronomical Societies annual convention and once again I was one of the organisers, gosh how time goes by. It was again another hectic day for me having to be there to do all the setting up and running around but I think it was worth it as we had about 100 people along on the day for a day of astronomy talks and a large trade fair. Our 3 main speakers (I did give a talk but was only a short one) were: Prof Mike Cruise (University of Birmingham), Prof Phil Diamond (Jodrell Bank) and Prof Colin Pillinger (OU). All gave excellent and enjoyable talks.

Lizzie and Heather were once again on duty meeting people:

Colin Pillinger gave the last talk of the day:

and it all took place at the wonderful Birmingham and Midland Institute:

Last week I took a couple of pics of the Moon in the morning skies, I think they came out quite well and on the high resolution images (just click them) you can see some detail of the surface:

Over the train lines:

Next to the Uni clocktower:

Every year the University of Birmingham host a fireworks display to celebrate Guy Fawkes night... like always I went and here are a bunch of pics I took (more can be found [here])

This weekend I spent in Wales, well Porthcawl to be exact, with my lovely young lady. I went to Bridgend to give a talk on exoplanets and stayed on for a really relaxing weekend. The sunset on Sat night was fantastic and I took a couple of pics...

Last night the sky looked so wonderful out of my office window so I decided that I should go and take a couple of pictures of it! I'm quite pleased in how the sky has come out with the Aston Webb building and the University clock tower in the foreground.

On Thursday night we had a talk here at the University of Birmingham as part of our public outreach programme (www.talkandtelescope.org.uk) from Dr Paul Roche (Director of the Faulkes Telescope).
Originally we were planning to have a live demo but if you think about it then you can't have night sky there and here at the same time. The Faulkes telescope is a collection of robotic telescopes around the world and is a wonderful resource for school and amateur astronomers. Instead of having a live demo we managed to get a bunch of objects taken: NGC891 (a spiral galaxy), NGC7331 (a spiral galaxy), NGC 1501 (a planetary nebula) and NGC2261 (Hubble’s variable Nebula). I quickly processed these the other day using photoshop and though they are not the best images ever I'm quite pleased with them (Images courtesy of Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network,obtained with FT North).

NGC891 (a spiral galaxy)

NGC7331 (a spiral galaxy)

NGC 1501 (a planetary nebula)

NGC2261 (Hubble’s variable Nebula)

(Images courtesy of Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network,obtained with FT North).

One of the fun presents I recieved at Christmas off my parents was a Christmas tie - they are normally quite cute and play some funky seasonal music but this one (though plays the music) is far from cute... its plain and simply scary! It even has the text "Do you want to sit on Santa's lap?" above the scary santa... look at it below, I'm sure you will agree (with the red flashing LEDs it would make children cry!):

During my last set of observations in India all I was presented with were cloudy and dank skies. Tonight was different, not only do I have a wonderfully clear sky (Orion is sitting on his side, which for me is a bit different!!) - shame about the bright Moon - but I got the pleasure of watching a gorgeous sunset. It really made all that traveling worthwhile, maybe.

Well here I am, in India observing again.. I was a bit nervous for a while then but now I'm actually observing my source I'm pretty pleased and getting a bit more relaxed. Since I've had most of the day to sit around waiting I've managed to write a substantial part of the paper I will write up these observations into... and I took a walk and took some pics. The first is of 3 of the GMRT antennae, its just one of those types of photos you have to take when you go to a radio telescope,

and the other one is a bit more artistic / scenic.. flowers..

I woke this morning feeling a lot more relaxed, well sort of, I'm pleased the first observations appear to have been successful and I'm definitely more relaxed about that. The problem is my internal clock. I went to bed around 11:30pm last night (which is 6pm in the UK) and though I was absolutely exhausted I could not manage more than 2 hours... I finally managed to go to sleep at 6am, which is close to my time of going to bed in the UK. ARGH! I can only hope that today's long observations really knacker me out and I sleep - but then I'm going to only have 4 hours to the start of my next observation!

Oh and I took a few more shots of the sunset last night... its a spectacular view.

Its not often that I actually go out for a walk for the sake of having a walk. I wish I did it more often but a combination of laziness and living in the city (with the same walk I do everyday) really holds me back. I'm sure that there are some really nice walks and interesting photos to take around where I live. I think I shall endeavor to do this more often. Anyway, today I decided to take a walk around some of the dishes here. There are many better walks to take, but its hot and I did not want to go too far.

Starting off I approached the first antenna and like yesterday work was going on, but it was pretty close to the floor and I thought that this was quite an interesting shot..

It was really quite warm and I really wish I'd put suntan lotion on - but I wasn't in the Sun for more than an hour in the end. After a while I decided it was time to take a break.. so I thought I'd try and do the "Contact" pose. You know, the film Contact? With Jodie Foster in where she "hears" the alien radio signal? How preposterous! If I'm getting this right she was using the VLA (in New Mexico).. and listening to the signal.. as if - can she do Fast Fourier Transforms of signals in here head? Don't worry if that comment meant nothing to you - just me being a physicist. Basically there is no way she could do this. Anyway, I thought I'd give it a go. After gently setting up the camera (and the timer, the first time I've ever used this).. I ran and grabbed my laptop.

Ok, its not great but you get the idea... shame I was listening to New Found Glory and not alien signals...

Oh and I found some more flowers to take pictures of.. I have no idea what these are again but they looked pretty and a great chance to take some colorful photos.

Oh yes, the fun of early morning observations. Its just getting light here and I've been up for 2 hours! I know some people do this on a daily basis but I bet they were not working till midnight before then. I'm tired, slight confused and a bit disorientated about what the time should be. Oh well, I'm still quite happy - though I have to say I'm missing home now (especially a certain... xbox 360!). Anyway, yep I'm observing again. This one is going to be quite interesting, and should produce a paper no matter what. We are looking at an object that has been observed at high frequencies and I'm seeing if we can get anything from it. I'm a little concerned about the Sun rising though - I much prefer to do observation at night but then again the ionosphere is as problematic during the night as in the daytime.

I was going to blog these pictures later but something tells me I might well be asleep till my next observation begins this afternoon. So here are some pics I took yesterday that I didn't blog...

and yes some more flowers

... and there is still another 4 hours of observing to go! I'm going to take this moment to post a few other pics...

Over the last few nights at the GMRT I have been constantly visited by a small lizard, I think it is a Gecko...

thankfully it keeps itself to itself.

On Sunday we went out for lunch at the Mailbox in Birmingham. The mailbox is full of posh shops (I'd never afford anything there!) and restaurants.. oh and the BBC Birmingham centre! Its a really nice place and so was the restaurant, Penny Blacks. Anyway, I took my new camera along and here are a few shots:

The canal side:

boat on the canal:

and some interesting graffiti:

As I'm sure you are all probably aware by now, if you read this blog you are, Physics is facing a massive cut in funding (about £80million, so 4 premiership football players!). The reasons are multiple and you can read many of this elsewhere, such as at [www.saveastronomy.org.uk]. I recommend you taking a read there, it has all the background stuff you need to know. Anyway, yesterday the undergraduates at Birmingham did a sterling job of trying to promote the petition to the UK prime minister.

Oh and if you believe that this should be stopped show your support by petitioning the UK prime minister at: [http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Physics-Funding/]

On Saturday I had a day in London, this was primarily for the Federation of Astronomical Societies council meeting but since I got down to London a bit earlier I was able to do a few other things.

I managed to take a quick trip to the London Science Museum. I was actually very pleased with myself over this, navigating a very hectic tube system without my trusty diary map! Its actually pretty easy to get from Euston to South Kensington station and then walking down the huge subway to the Science Museum. The museum was really packed, but I didn't expect anything less. The only real reason I went in was to take a look at the "new" (well since the last time I was there) space gallery. They actually have rebuilt the University of Birmingham built Spacelab 2, which looks really cool:

oh and they have a lunar lander mock up, which I'm sure will inspire a bunch of kids:

My main task of the day was a trip to the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington house for the FAS meeting. I won't bore you with the meeting, like always interesting but heavy going. I managed to take a shot of the RAS's lovely galaxy window, I'm not sure who this was designed by and the exact name, but it pretty spectacular:

Last Friday was the Poynting Physical Society's annual ball. It is a rather fun occasion where we all get dress up, eat expensive food and pay too much for our drinks. It is always worth it though. This year was no different and it was lots of fun. Of course, being me, I took lots of photos...

more can be seen [here]...

It snowed yesterday! I love snow, it can be so much fun. Me and Lizzie took to the task of building a snowman! Most of the work was Lizzie's, when it comes to snow I'm more of an annoying snowball person.

oh and talking about snowballs.. Lizzie got me back...

I then decided it would be more fun to try and take some cool photos... not sure they came out as well as I would have hoped but they are quite nice:

Last week Astrosoc finally went on a trip to Jodrell bank... we have only been talking about doing this for 7 years! Well I personally can say I had a great time, not that I haven't seen the Lovell telescope many times now...

Its a wonderful sight:

but I'm sure we didn't show the true respect...

and a nice and geeky space theatre group pic...

I know it was almost two weeks ago now but I've finally gotten around to having some time to write up on here what I thought of the [Download festival]. It was indeed my first time at this festival and I have to say I was very impressed. It was also the first festival that I have been to that we drop to and from every day. Donnington isn't too far from Birmingham so its easily feasible and is the first thing I was very shocked about. I was expecting since we were driving each day to have to wait in long traffic queues. Nope, it appears that the place was very well organised and the longest we had to wait was 10 minutes when we left on the second night, now that's not bad! Anyway onto the music...

Highlights:

- seeing Kiss, they were great showmen

- a certain song by Motorhead, this time I was not waiting for the young lady to come of the loo!

- HIM, they were excellent but I have to say I was really shocked by the numbers of people watching them, I guess they were all off watching the Offspring...

- The Offspring, we saw half of their set and wow they were great, shame they didn't really do much of an encore but then again we were expecting an half an hour extra gig off them after Kiss...

- The rock (and peg) game, see below for pictures - essentially a game of deception when you end up with about a ton of rocks in your bag.. well Alice did!

- Simple Plan, we caught about half of their set and they were great!

- The storm troopers that got me and Sean...

- Ash, solid set!

- Clean toilets... actually coming home to have a shower every night was very nice!

- Free Muller rice, "eat it cold, eat it hot, eat it free"... we had a lot of these.

- The crazy guys on bikes, wicked show (yep the guy is upside down in a ball in the second pic, at one point they had 3 guys in there!)!

- Lostprophets... great set, but I just don't think they are a headline act...

- Airbourne, great set... really got the crowd going!

- oh and meeting 001... we got a pic with Sean... I missed out :-(

Disappointments:
- seeing Kiss, they really disappointed me by not playing a certain song... they also went on a bit!
- the price of the food.. but what do you expect
- Incubus, they were good but I just didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
- Kid Rock not turning up... oh wait I didn't care this is was a highlight! :-D
- having to put up with Sean the whole darn weekend!
- how cold it was on the first day... having to buy a new jumper.. not that I really minded!
- the fact that Lethal Bizzle was there... we walked past to have a game in the EA hub and he was on, there were lots of people there. I think a lot were booing but a number (more than the people who saw HIM) were jumping up and down... argh! If your band don't play their own instruments then get off the stage.

Saying all that, overall it was a great festival and it was a lot more spread out and relaxed than Reading... I think I will be going back to Download.. especially if they keep the quality of the bands like there was this year!

Over the last few days of had a great time in the Loire Valley region of France. The weather was Sunny and the evening skies were fabulous (I've never seen the Milky way looking so wondrous, I reckon this was the first time I've seen the gas clouds).

We flew into Poitiers since there is a cheap flight between Birmingham and there. Its a quaint little airport that was quite nice to go to. A nice change from the massive multiple terminal airports.

with some fascinating stained glass windows (I do like stained glass windows in Churches):

On the second day we went to [Blois]. We visited the famous Château de Blois, a Renaissance château once occupied by King Louis XII. He can even be seen on the outside:

Once inside the first thing that took my attention was the staircase tower, an example of the intermixing influences of French and Italian design during the construction of the François I wing (during the renaissance period).

Inside the building you are met by a range of beautiful furniture and at times very over the top wall paper.

The emblem of François I, the salamander can be found through out this wing, quite an odd symbol really.

The Saint Calais chapel has some lovely stained glass windows in it. This chapel was built by Louis XII and was consecrated in 1508 but the stained-glas windows were done by Max Ingrand in 1957.

In Blois, we also went to La Masion de la Magie... which offered an interesting afternoon magic show and a number of intriguing optical illusions.

During the short stay we also managed to take a trip out the to the former

The Château de Chenonceau was built on the Cher in the 16th century by Thomas Bohier and this involved razing the castle-kepp and the fortified mill of the Marques family. The Marques tower was kept and now lies in the forecourt of the Château.

During the second world war the Château entrance was in the occupied zone whilst the Southern door provided access to the Free Zone... an advantage many people would have taken:

The Château has a large amount of grounds with some very well kept gardens, fountains and even a maze!

If you fancy seeing more of my photos from this trip see [here]

Its a dank day here in Birmingham and this morning we could see a nice misty scene..

Back last Thursday we had a glorious sunset over the the campus here at the University of Birmingham, I tried to capture it but it was a lot more spectacular in person...

I took a couple of photos of the University campus over the last couple of days, its been pretty gorgeous....

tree and joe (the clocktower)..

the moon, bird and joe...

joe and the moon

I've finally gotten around to sorting through the photos I took at this years University of Birmingham Vale Fireworks. This is a really nice free event that takes place every year in the student village around the Vale (the lake). Its always great fun and has a fun atmosphere, I've been to way too many now though.

The rides before the fireworks...

The wonderful fireworks (a few of my favourites - as you can guess I took quite a number...):

and the fun of the crowds afterwards... seems like a bit of riot (did I hear some start a chant about freeing Nelson Mandela?? :-p)

Last night, the three brightest objects in the night sky converged, producing a triple-conjunction. I managed to get a half decent view between spells of cloud from my flat window...

So in these images you have the Moon, with Venus just to the bottom right and then just a bit higher and to the right Jupiter! Not bad for a 5 minute break in the cloud.

The other day, whilst teaching a lab I decided to get a simple spectrometer out and aim it at the day lit sky. This allows you to observe the solar spectrum without the chance of blinding yourself (you should never stare or aim any optical aid at the Sun). I then placed my digital camera on the end of it and aligned it roughly to get:

The dark bands on the images are absorption lines in the Solar spectrum with the dominant lines being called the Fraunhoffer Lines. These are a set of spectral lines in the solar spectrum that are caused by absorption by those elements in the upper layers of the Sun.

I have decided to write a short summary on what I've done over the past year. Apart from a few damn annoying things (i.e. getting broken into and having some stuff stolen) 2008 was a pretty good and fun year. I'm going to link to old blog posts throughout this post.

As always the new year is closely followed by my Birthday celebrations, this year it involved an evening out listening to the Planets Suite at the Birmingham Symphony Hall. Was a pretty special occasion, especially now that I am a quarter of a century old!

On January 16th it was time for me to go half way around the world, a trip to India to do some observing with the GMRT (Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope). I like it out at the GMRT, the weather was hot, relaxing and I got lots of work done. The weather was pretty stunning with some fantastic sunsets:

I had a good week or so observing and I came back with a lot of data, about 100 hours which I still haven't fully finished the analysis of. Well I'm almost there, and I believe I may have actually detected something I was looking for (that would make a change, see later).

One of my favourite photos of myself throughout the whole year was taken during this visit:

More on my visit to the GMRT:
Sunset on the GMRT, So it begins.., First day of observations complete, Its so hot... or am I lame?, So what did you do on Saturday night?, A Sunday morning stroll, It's 7am... I've been up 2 hours - why?!, Its been a long day..., My friend in the control room..

February was a bit more of a relaxed month than January, well in the sense that I did not have to travel halfway around the world. Though there was the manic-ness of a talk in Cardiff, to Cardiff Astronomical Society, followed by getting the first train back at 5am to teach a lab at 9am. Lets just say I'm not sure the students got the best out of me that day! At least I was there, if only in body. I also took a trip down to London for a FAS meeting.. but I got there a bit early and so took the opportunity to go and have a look at the University of Birmingham built Spacelab 2 which now is sat in the Science Museum.

A day out in London.

In March I was given the opportunity to talk to the British Astronomical Association on my work. Not bad really since I've only written a couple of papers. I spoke around my work with the title: "The search for radio emission from extrasolar planets". March also brought the Annual Poynting Physical Society ball, which as always was good fun! Another one of my fav photos of the year was taken...

I was also nominated for "Sir Arthur Clarke Award" in the category for "Best Student Achievement". Alas, I didn't win the award but it was really nice to be put forward!

Physics Ball, Nominated for "Space Oscar"

The start of April involved me rushing around to get research (with my conference proceedings from "From planets to dark energy: the modern radio universe" were published) done whilst giving a number of talks to astronomical societies, though it was quite a relaxed month. And it snowed!

The 10th talk in the series of public talks about astronomy that I have been organising since the first one took place too! I just hope we keep going...

April Snow!, 10th talk in the Patrick Moore Series!!, Conference Proceedings Published

May brought Lizzie's birthday and my chance todo some baking...

A cake!!!

June was a fun month, probably not as much work done as there should have been really. I started off by giving a talk to AstrotalkUK about FAS stuff... take a listen [here]. Astrosoc took a trip up to Jodrell Bank, something we have been talking about doing since I was back in my first year as an undergrad, it was good to finally see this happen!

On the subject of Astrosoc, at the Annual Dinner this year I was awarded my lifetime members to the University of Birmingham Astronomical Society. Something that made me feel quite proud, for some reason I didn't blog about this - I normally love blogging about random crap that makes me look good :-D.

June also brought my first experience of the Download Festival. I have to say I was impressed and glad that I took the break from Reading for a change. In all fairness I'm likely to go back to Download next year instead of Reading. It was great fun and not as cramped and uncomfortable as Reading can be. Probably helped that we drove to and from everyday though... oh and Sean and I got harassed by some storm troopers.

Then of June took me and Lizzie down to Edgbaston to watch part of a county game and get some free food, I won a prize at the PPS ball. Couldn't moan it was a good day.. shame it started to rain! Typical English cricket!

Interview for AstrotalkUK,A trip to Jodrell Bank..., Download Festival 2008

July was truly fantastic and involved probably my most adventurous couple of weeks of my life - backpacking from Berlin down to Rome on the train. For some reason, probably the fact that I didn't have time I've never gotten around to blogging about this properly, so I'll try and fill in some blanks now.

So the trip started off on June 30th with a flight from the awful East Midlands airport to Berlin. The flight itself was nice and easy, though I want to avoid East Midlands airport at all costs in the future, bloody hell hole. Once we got to Germany everything as pretty simple - after a couple of trains we were at our hostel (the Generator), which reminded me of some old Laser Quest (bright blue and red walls with blue lighting). Was pretty cool and did the trick.

Our first full day in Berlin involved us taking the train into Alexanderplatz, I'm still not sure we actually paid for that journey... actually I don't think we did! Woops. We looked at the obvious and huge TV tower, took a look at a couple of Churches nearby.

We then walked down to the road the Berliner Dom, the main Cathedral, it costs us 3 Euros to go in and go up to the top. Was a pretty fantastic view, though the parliament building had a better view. Continuing on down the road you eventually hit the Brandenburg Gate (Tor). If was very busy around this, it actually looked like Euro2008 had been on display there. A short walk further down the road took us to the Parliament building, which has a rather cool, but odd structure on the roof. We didn't go in at this point as the queues were huge. We then took a short walk down through the park and ended up at the English Garden, which had a rather cool cafe in. Adam and I had a rather nice dark beer. After this we got back on the train and had a look around where the Berlin wall reaches into the north of the city - a very odd site. It was actually smaller than I thought it would be, but I could fully appreciate how foreboding it would have been.

Our second day in Berlin, and I was already tired so we got a day rail pass. We started off by going to the Parliament building. The queue was not too long though it was probably slowed down by Adam having his electrical tape confiscated (though he got it back later, he needed it too keep his shoe together!). The glass dome was impressive but I was a bit disappointed. On the way back down the road we were able to walk back through the Brandenburg Tor.

We then went down to the Jewish Memorial. I was not too impressed by the block, it was just a bit bland.. maybe the hot sun didn't help. The museum underneath however, was well, depressing - but I had expect that. This was followed up with a reflective lunch at Kamps. A short stroll down the road took us to the car-park that was believe to have been Hitler's bunker (well the location of). This was followed off by a trip to one of the most tourist heavy locations I've ever been to - Checkpoint Carlie. Very commercial - not sure it was worth the walk! From here we went to the museum das terrors - which was largely disappointing but then again it was only temporary and very very hot! We ended up back in Alexanderplatz for a look around a church - which was truly breathtaking. We ended up having dinner around there at a restaurant that just served potato based dishes, though the food and musics was good!

From Berlin we headed down to Dresden. I was very impressed with how easy the train ride was. We then took a walk around as we got down to Dresden for 9. This involved a walk around the beautiful Zwinger palace. Dresden is truly beautiful, well once you get pass all the big old communist looking buildings. We ended up having lunch in an Irish pub, we had to do this at some point during the trip didn't we?!

We left Dresden shattered, but rather happy and onto Prague...

My first impressions of Prague were very negative. Their international train station is a bit of a dump and their metro system, though rather cool, has the most annoying ticket machines that we came across on our whole journey. It probably didn't help that the place we was staying in looked, well lets just say a bit dodgy. It was fine once you were in there - a place to stay in the end and that's all that matter. Oh we also got rather lost getting of at the wrong station on our fist day of exploring and then the first thing we saw was some "young lady" selling drugs... good old St Wenceslas square!

Still though Prague was fantastic with lots of wonderful architecture, though a bit more expensive than we thought it would be.. oh and their clock is cool but didn't not beat the wonderful glockenspiel that was in the Zwinger palace! For more see Images taken in Prague.

From Prague we headed onto Vienna, on a rather fancy train - well a Eurostar so not that fancy but compared to the last couple much nicer... though not as much fun - as we had compartments up to that point! By this point I think I was feeling a little exhausted and luckily we had our own apartment to rest in. Vienna had some absolutely stunning building in it. Though I wouldn't recommend going on a boat ride down the river.. especially without a coat and it raining on you! The picture really speak for themselves... Vienna images. Our good friend, the monkey had fun too...

From Vienna it was to the home of sound of music and gorgeous Salzburg. Salzburg is the sort of place that you couldn't spend too long at if you wanted lots of things todo that you would get in a big city such as Berlin but was full of fantastic little places and was very relaxing. Since we had a long day there we ended up playing mini-golf to pass the time as we waited for our train... a night train down to Venice. Images of Salzburg.

The train journey to Venice was uncomfortable.. but at least I got some sleep. It was also 2 hours delayed, now that takes the piss really - up their with Virgin trains! Didn't help that there appeared to be no air con! It didn't get any cooler when we got to Venice but I'm sure we were fully expecting the heat, though we were completely shattered by this point. I actually wrote a blog entry about this, and so will direct to it, Venice.

After a couple of days in Venice it was time for us to split, with Adam and Maz going to Milan to go back to Brum for graduation and me and Lizzie to head on down to Rome. The train journey to Rome was fun and apart from a few small issues I had a great time in Rome... I think the scene of the year for me had to be walking out of the Colosseo train station to see the Colosseum and the Moon.. the first thing we saw in Rome (for more images see Images of Rome.

An easy flight was had back to the UK.

It was only a few weeks later that we were back off on holiday this time to France. I had a great time in the Loire Valley region of France. The weather was Sunny and the evening skies were fabulous (I've never seen the Milky way looking so wondrous, I reckon this was the first time I've seen the gas clouds). A short stay in France.

At the start of August, before the trip to France Lizzie and I managed to get on the TV, well Astrosoc did as ITV Central covered what we were doing for the Partial Solar Eclipse... Partial Solar Eclipse. Oh and probably the most adult thing that I did all year happened during August... I moved in with Lizzie... eek! View from my flat

September brought the University of Birmingham Space Day - which was hugely successful with over 300 people along. I was very pleased with this - a big step forward for our outreach activities. The FAS Convention was also held during Sept and the day went well with 150 people along, I stepped down as Secretary but now have the full job of organising next years convention. My second paper A Deep 150 MHz GMRT Survey in Eridanus was also published in Sept! Woop! I also started teaching a course at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens on astronomy... which is a nice escape from the day to day research and a way of taking a step back and thinking about the larger issues in astronomy. To link with this course I started a new astronomy blog... "Musings in the Cosmos" - http://starrydude.tumblr.com/

I also got to see Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company with Patrick Steward and David Tennant... absolutely wonderful!

Vale Fireworks were a big highlight in November, as always...

December was rather busy (I still haven't digested the past month) and bought a fantastic Lunar Conjunction:

In short though, 2008 was a great year - full of travels and at times hard work. I'm almost finished with my thesis so 2009 should bring some interest challenges and hopefully a bit more travelling!

I haven't posted in a while, I'm trying to finish off the thesis and that is slowy taking over my life... if you are interested it is going well and will be finished soon!

Anyway, we have had quite a bit of snow in the UK of the last week so I thought I'd post a few of the photos I took during the last week...

From my flat:

Campus:

Last Saturday we ended up with quite a bit of dry ice left over after a session of comet making at the Thinktank... so what does a bunch of astronomers do with it...

Drink it...

Make basic rockets...

Clean the place...

... and generally make a mess...

Oh and here are a couple of movies of the above antics...

Last Sat, like the other week (see [here]), took Birmingham Astronomical Society out to the University of Birmingham Observatory. It was again a lovely clear night - far from what was predicted earlier in the week. We were able to learn from the observing of earlier in the month and I'm rather pleased with the images we produced (again, I'm sure we can do much better but this is a definite increase in quality).

Let start with an image that we observed last time (you can really see the increase in quality from the last one, [here]) - M51 - the Whirlpool Galaxy (10x30 secs in r,g 10 x 1min b):

The next image was actually the last we observed on the night, as it didn't rise above the horizon limit of the telescope early (actually it was around 2am), the Eagle Nebula (M16) - with this one I feel longer exposures are definitely needed (and maybe a H-alpha image) but not a bad start (10x30 secs in r,g 10 x 1min b) with the pillars of creation clearly visible :

Going back to the galaxies we had a look at the sombrero galaxy (M104) with a much clearer view than last time (10x30 secs in r,g 10 x 1min b) with the dust lane nicely visible (this includes a cosmic ray removal routine):

The barred spiral M106 in the constellation Canes Venatici. (5 x 30 sec in rg, 5 x 1min b):

M109 (also known as NGC 3992) is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 46 million light-years (30s in r,g,b):

M108 (also known as NGC 3556) is an edge-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major (30s in r,g,b):

The quasar (arrow points it out) 3C273 (1min exposure bg20 filter), it is the optically-brightest quasar in our sky (m ~ 12.9), and one of the closest with a redshift, z, of 0.158:

M105 (also known as M105 and NGC 3379) is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Leo (30s bg20):

M 87 (also known as M87, Virgo A or NGC 4486) is a giant elliptical galaxy and brightest galaxy within the Virgo cluster, located some 55 million light years away (image is 30s bg20) - our image clearly shows other galaxies in the cluster:

Away from the galaxies we took images of a couple of globular clusters. M92 is a globular cluster in the constellation Hercules (5 x 30s in rg, 5 x 1min b):

M13 (NGC 6205, sometimes called the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules) is a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules (5 x 30s in rg, 5 x 1min b):

We started the evening with a quick image of M1 - the Crab Nebula which is a supernova remnant in the constellation of Taurus (10 x 30 rg, 1min b):

To show some science we had a quick play with the spectrograph and we managed to take a low resolution image of Saturn (30s exposure with central wavelength of H-alpha), with the planet in the centre of the spectrum (looking down vertical axis) with the rings outside (clearly less bright):

For pointing purposes we also aimed the spectrograph at Mizar, getting:

It was an absolutely excellent night of astronomy, lets hope the next one is so clear!

I've finally gotten around to finish off the processing of the less interesting observations we took at Wast Hills back on the 4th April. Most of the images here aren't colour but some are quite striking and we will eventually go back and take colour images of them. If you haven't already read - the first post relating to these images can be found [here] and the more recent, better, observations can be found [here]

Well lets start of with a nice colour image of the open star cluster M36 (30s in bgr):

Staying with the star cluster theme (30s in bgr), NGC869:

Going a bit fainter, and the detail is hard to see in this one, we have the Owl Nebula (30s bg20):

Next we have the striking spirals of M65 and M66 (30s bg20):

M105 is the is the brightest elliptical galaxy in the Leo I or M96 group of galaxies and it can clearly be seen at the centre of this image (30s bg20):

The grand spiral galaxy, M101 (30s bg20):

and the fainter but also a spiral, M99:

M102 lenticular galaxy in Draco (30s bg20):

M64 the famous Black Eye galaxy (30s bg20):

M42, the Orion nebula, firstly to see the detail at the centre (bg20 30s):

and then to see the glorious extended gas cloud (r 30s):

M84, M86 and NGC4387 - looking into the Virgo cluster of galaxies (bg20 30s):

A while back now (6th December 2008) Astrosoc (well me, Rich and Joe) went observing on the Poynting roof to try out the Meade DSI Pro II in combination with the 10" Newtonian reflector that Astrosoc own. In short the observing conditions were fantastic but we had quite a few problems setting up the camera. We got a few shots but came to the conclusion that we really need to use a smaller telescope (or focal reducer) - more to come on this over the next few week hopefully now we have a smaller GOTO telescope. Anyway we managed to get a quick and out of focus shot of the Moon but its a start:

Whilst on the roof we had a bit of fun taking shots of ourselves observing, I particularly like this one I took of Joe whilst he aligns the telescope with a green laser on Orion:

Speaking of Joe and green lasers:

and here all three of us are looking dazzled by the bright flash (oh and yes that is a shopping trolley, we are students after all!):

Earlier that day I managed to take this shot of the Moon over the University campus:

It was such a clear day, shame we didn't manage to get any better shots - there is always next time I guess.

.. another imaging session at Wast Hills. We have been rather lucky with the weather as of late (3 planned observing nights in a row have been rather clear!) and we managed to do some imaging again last Saturday and here are the results...

M101 that fantastic Pinwheel Galaxy (10x30s exposures in u,v,r):

M16 the Eagle Nebula (10x30s exposures in u,v,r ; I think this is a considerable step up from the last image I took with more nebulosity seen, to compare see [here]):

M17 the Omega Nebula (this object is between 5,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter; 10x30s exposures in u,v,r). This was probably my favourite image of the whole night:

Another view of M51 - the Whirlpool galaxy, I think I prefer the earlier image I made (see here) of this but this highlight the gas features (20x30s exposures in u,v,r):

M64 - the Blackeye Galaxy - slightly disappointing, still you can see the feature for which it has its name. This needs us to take off the focal reducer and do far deeper imaging. (5x30s exposures in u,v,r):

The colourful Ring Nebula - M57 (5x30s exposures in u,v,r) - this is one of the smallest objects we can see with the current setup. I'm very pleased with the colours and it has come out much better than I had expected.

M82 - the Cigar Galaxy (5x30s exposures in u,v,r), I think we can see more features this time but the colours aren't as clear as the earlier image I took.

Last week we took a week off to explore fantastic Barcelona... I'll get round to putting together a proper post about this later in the week (after [Download]..) but for now here are some pictures that can be found on my flickr account (basically this is a test to see how pictobrowser works):

On Tuesday I took Astrosoc out to the University of Birmingham Observatory at Wast Hills for a BBQ (pictures from the social side later) and a night of observing. It was a fantastic night with probably the most clear skies I've ever seen at Wast Hills, for the visual observers they claim to have had the best view of the Milky Way ever at Wast Hills (to even see it is a almost a shock given we aren't too far out of the city).

Since the title of the post includes nebulae lets start with them. We managed to get some decent images of some lovely nebulous regions. We started off the night, well it was still fairly light when we got this image, with the Ring Nebula (M57, 2x30s BRV):

We also observed the Lagoon nebula - M8 ( 2x10s BRV ) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region.

The Veil Nebula, also known as the Cygnus Loop or the Witch's Broom Nebula, is a large, relatively faint supernova remnant in the constellation Cygnus (2x30s in BVR).

We took a quick view of IC5070 - Pelican Nebula (30s BRV) - I'm pretty sure we can do much better than this quick snapshot but it does show some nice dense gas clouds:

M97 - Owl Nebula (30s BRV) showing the eyes and maybe a bit more - slightly deeper required:

M27 - Dumbbell Nebula (30s BRV):

IC 5146 - Cocoon Nebula (30s BRV):

A close second to the Veil nebula in my favourite image of the night, M20 - the Trifid Nebula is an H II region located in Sagittarius (2x30s BRV):

We weren't so successful with the North American Nebula, NGC7000 - North American Nebula (30s BRV) taken at Wast Hills - clearly no nebulosity can be seen (thus we either didn't observe deep enough or in the wrong patch of the nebula as it is fairly large):

Star Clusters:

Wild Duck cluster (M11; 30s BVR)

NGC6760 - a globular cluster in the constellation Aquila (30s BRV):

Galaxies:

Moving a bit further away... M63 - the Sunflower Galaxy (30s BVR):

M108 (30s BRV):

Stephan's quintet - 4 of which are part of a compact galaxy group (30s R):

M31 - the centre of the Andromeda Galaxy (30s BRV)

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy (2x30s BRV):

NGC 6822 - Barnard's Galaxy is in this field though not very clear, it is probably the faint nebulous region (30s BRV):

Another movie of the telescope at Wast Hills, actually these pics were taken during the most recent night we had out there which produced some nice pics (see [here]), the first one was only over a short period of time where as this video covers all the way from just before sunset to just after sunrise... (if below does not work try the link directly at [youtube.com])

My PhD graduation ceremony was yesterday so I'm now officially able to use the title Dr... so you are now reading the posts of Dr Samuel George, I'm obviously fairly happy.. now I get to move onto the University of Calgary where I'm taking up a postdoctoral position in radio astronomy. The graduation ceremony even made the [astro group news page.. ].

many more pictures [on my flickr account].

We also (thanks Gareth) have a movie of us all throwing out caps in the air...

The last observing session that I'll run for the foreseeable future at the University of Birmingham Observatory (Wast Hills) was last Wednesday and turned into a bit of a Messier object only night with a couple of us trying to fill in the holes in our Messier chart (there were quite a few and still are!). It was not the best night with some clouds around but overall it was fairly clear. We managed to observe (and take half decent images) of 22 objects. My favourite images from the night can be seen below:

M8, The Lagoon Nebula - 4x30s BVR

M10 a globular cluster - 2x30s BVR

M20 - The Trifid Nebula - 6x30s BRV

NGC 6960 - The Veil Nebula 4x30s BRV

0.0001s u-band image of the Moon

Others can be found on my [flickr account].

Some of you are probably already aware that I recently moved to Calgary to take up a post at the University of Calgary. I'm far from settled but thought I'd put a few pics of my explorations so far...

Oh they start with the upgrade that I got to executive first class on the way there... so so much better than normal air travel!

We went to the Uni after we got settled into the econolodge hotel (not a bad place really - the area is a bit quiet though, not much todo!) and we got to see the massive sports stadiums...

I'm not going to give you a blow by blow account but here are a few pics of the downtown - for more of this set see [my flickr account]

I've been a bit busy since I moved to Calgary and found it a bit difficult to get around to posting here... the other week we went down to Banff, Lake Louise and Lake Moraine... here are a couple of my favourite pics from the trip:

Banff mountains:

Wildlife in Banff, at the coach station we came across a couple of deer:

Johnston Canyon water falls (the lower):

Lake Moraine:

Lake Louise:

... oh and many more pics from this trip can be seen on [flickr]

Last Saturday we took a walk down to Fort Calgary, which doesn't really exist, but it has a rather interesting museum anyway... Fort Calgary was established in 1875 as Fort Brisebois by the North-West Mounted Police. It is located at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers. It didn't cost too much to go around and has the chance to dress up as a Mountie... which didn't really work for me given the costume was a bit small (if you really need to see this photo see [flickr dressed as a Mountie]).

Fort Calgary from the outside (modern building):

more like what I was expecting to see:

Looking from the Fort to the Calgary downtown:

My first trip to some North American sports was quite fun. I went to watch some baseball. The Calgary Vipers were playing the Victoria Seals. The final score was Vipers 5 - 9 Seals, but it was good fun at a very reasonable price!

I took a bunch of photos (as one would expect with me) and they can be found on [flickr] but here are a couple of my favs...

I also took a video of the opening action, i.e. the national anthem and a bit of the game...

If you have problems viewing these see [here] and [here].

As you may, or may not, know flickr (image hosting website that I use for the vast majority of the photos on here) has a function called "interestingness". None of my images get very high up on that compared to some but I thought (as I'm thinking of putting an album together of my favourite shots that I've taken) I'd share this with you (using flickriver.com)... most of them are shots of the night sky...

Jupiter taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope through an OIII filter (100ms exposure) showing the clouds:

The same image but scaled such that the Moon are visible and the detail on the planet is lost:

There was a gorgeous sunset over Calgary the other day...

Last Sat I went out and enjoyed a night of karaoke... on the way back I took a few photos of Downtown...

Calgary has quite a number of parks but my favourite to visit so far is Prince's Island Park. It is an island on the Bow River to the north of downtown Calgary, thus making it about a 20 minute walk from my flat. The park (well I guess the island) is named after Peter Anthony Prince who founded the Eau Claire Lumber Mill. Here are a few pictures...

On Tuesday night Elizabeth and I went up Calgary Tower to watch the sunset and we were given a nice show. [Calgary Tower] is 191m tall and was opened in 1968, it is the second tallest tower I've been up in Canada, with the CN Tower in Toronto beating it ([this was a few years ago...]). I've also been up to the tower in the daytime and I think dusk is the time to go up... below are a few photos of the Sunset:

I also put together a mosaic image showing a larger area (see flickr for the full image):

and as the sunset the lights of the city came out to give us another wonderful view..

Oh and here is the tower from junction of 4th St and 7th Ave (some distance away from the tower):

The full set of images I took during my time up the Calgary tower can be found [in my flickr set Calgary Tower at Night].

This is the first of my hikes around Calgary that are suggested in the book "Calgary's Best Hikes and Walks" by Lori Beattie. I have to say the first one was quite nice, though this is one of the easier ones and I did have a good idea about the starting and end points. What with the bits at the start and the end around the downtown I probably walked 10km and it took a couple of hours. Basically I climbed to the top of [Tom Campbell's Hill] (by climb I mean strolled) and you get a nice view f the Bridgeland area. The most impressive building on the hike has to be the copper-domed [Ukrainian Catholic Church] which is clearly visible for most of the walk. Here are a couple of pics...

From the top of Tom Campbell's Hill...

after going down and then backup a hill you end up at the Ukrainian Catholic Church..

The hike ends up down at the Bow river and you are given a nice view of the downtown:

... the bridge has lions on it.. oh and what looks like a bison..

The rest of the set from the [Hike can be found on flickr]. Now what next..

I should also mention that during our little walk around the world skills show my better half got asked to pose for a picture from a photographer from the Calgary Herald. The next day her hands under the hand sanitizer were on the the front page... not bad for 2 days in Canada!

This is the second of my hikes around Calgary that are suggested in the book "Calgary's Best Hikes and Walks" by Lori Beattie. This was a nice walk around an area I see on my daily commute to the University so I was quite pleased to final take a proper look around there area. I ended up walking some 9.2km (well according to Google maps) from my flat to the start of the hike and then around the hike. This walk took in McNaught Bluff and Prince's Island (a place I've been quite a few times already, so I walked through the downtown instead.. fancied popping to HMV). Basically I started off at Riley Park, went up to Crescent Heights and back downtown. It was a nice walking giving a nice view of the Bow River, the downtown and the rocky mountains in the distance.

A view from McNaught Bluff of the downtown:

If you look carefully in this picture (maybe click the link and blow it up a bit) you can see the mountains through the streets in the downtown:

The start of my walk was quite eventful, well firstly I almost got run over by some dumbass driver who was turning right while the lights were against him (its legal here, it appear) and thus I could cross, I even walked around the car to make sure he could see me, oh know he still went forward! I then spotted this gloriously blue building:

I then saw a [cricket match being played] in Riley park!

I finished off my walk going through Prince's Island park and then towards the where I saw a squirrel that was being quite friendly (probably thought I had food to offer), a marble mosaic (I've seen these before but the Sun was catching them really well) and then a few interesting pieces of artwork..

For more pictures from this walk [see my flickr set].

Today I went on my first "flickr meet" with the [Calgary group]. We headed off to the small town of Hanna, well primarily the derelict Roundhouse and then to the A&W (for those that haven't experienced Canada that's a fast-food restaurant chain). The roudhouse was pretty cool with lots of different material to work with (though it was bloody cold, lets just say I'm going to turn into an icicle over the winter here)...

Lets start with a mosaic of the site...

Inside it was pretty eerie, as if people had just left their cars and ran from the impending disaster which didn't happen just neglect...

One side of the building had collapse leaving wood everywhere...

...the world is destroyed so where am I walking to..

.. the use of military action (in the form of paintballs) was obvious:

After a nice veggie burger at A&W we headed onto the ghost town (well almost) of Dorothy (I'm wondering what's with all the girls names...) which I think is in the Canadian Badlands (no I'm not being a Cardassian... if you don't know what that means then that's fine to be confused, I'm thinking of one person in particular).

Downtown Dorothy...

Dorothy Catholic Church, originally built in 1912 as a School, became a church 1944, last mass October 22, 1967...

Dorothy population 2 number of Churches 2... a divided community?

Dorothy has some high tech security systems...

Of course, however, it does have a grain elevator from the days of population...

Oh and we stopped off to look at some hoodoos on the way back...

The full set of images I took can be found on my flickr account under [Hanna & Dorothy]

I meant to post this a while ago, just didn't get around to it. While my better half was over visiting me in Calgary we went on a daytrip with [Brewster] (I've now been on two with them and I'd recommend them if you wanted to explore the rockies in a day) and thought I'd post a few of my favourite pic from the day out. Its also allowing me to remember days that were warm (it must have been around 30C when we went there, its currently -10C...!).

We went to Johnston Canyon, saw Castle Mountain (were we were told about [Eisenhower peak], tower shaped end of Castle Mountain.), saw Mount Temple (and the McDonald Glacier), drove alongside the Morant Curve (a view made famous by Nicholas Morant, who photographed the Rockies in the 1930s and 40s for the Canadian Pacific Railway and has the peaks of the Bow Range in the backgroud), Lake Louise, Lake Moraine, Kicking Horse pass (and the spiral tunnels), the natural bridge, emerald lake and into Yoho National park to see the Takkakaw Falls.

Johnston Canyon:

Castle Mountain:

Morant Curve:

Lake Louise:

Kicking horse pass spiral tunnels (shame there wasn't a train going through):

Natural Bridge:

Emerald Lake in BC:

Takkakaw Falls:

A video of the Takkakaw Falls: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIOM4fGAWeM

in Banff:

More photos (if you are inclined) from the day can be found in [my flickr set for the day]

Over the last few weeks I've been pretty swamped with work, which isn't entirely a bad thing (progress etc...), but I've not been able to get out and take photos or be bothered to upload the ones I took so here are a bunch of pictures taken over a few weeks in Calgary. It starts of with my encounter of the Calgary Zombie walk as I went to the shops, goes onto Halloween celebrations over the last weekend and then a nice crisp November walk along the Bow river and the downtown to take pictures of Skyscrapers.

Star Trekking Zombies...

Owl pumpkin, Canadians seem to take Halloween pretty seriously by the number of people I saw dressed up all over the place.

Time for some rockabilly... (was a bit like being at a ceilidh without the organisation)

I hate waiting for trains... (especially when they must be a few miles long, darn freight trains!)

Sadko!

Skyscrapers..

So I'm sitting down, relaxing after a stupidly long journey (Calgary -> Seattle -> New York -> San Juan in the air and then by car to Arecibo), getting ready for my first observing session with the world's largest single dish telescope. Not bad for a Tuesday night really. Oh and if you were wondering I am Arecibo...

Whilst I was at Arecibo I got to spend an afternoon out in Old San Juan. For a Caribbean town I was surprised to how European it looked:

One of the most interesting buildings was the tiny Chapel of Christ the Saviour:

and all of the pigeons that congregate in the park next to it:

The streets were very European:

The cathedral also felt "old":

We also took a walk out to the impressive (and you can understand why when the USA took the Island they came from the otherside... and why that "pirate" as they call him, Drake, failed) Castillo San Felipe del Morro:

You can see the modern improvements (well modern being Second World War) on the left hand side:

Oh and on the way back to Arecibo I saw probably the most weird thing I've ever seen on a motorway... a plane!

At first we thought it had crashed, but it turns out that it was being taken to some town to be turned into a restaurant but a tyre on the truck it was on blew out!

Oh if you wanna see more from this trip just take a look [here]

The beach in Arecibo (around +35C)...

The tundra that is Calgary (around -20C with wind chill anyway)...

Oh the life of an astronomer...

I now know what it is like to be at the same temperature on both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scale... yep a lovely -40C/F. Yikes.

I decided to go for a walk... that was a bad idea.. but I got some nice shots.

City Hall...

Not the weather for a tea party..

and yep my windows, not that I want to open them, are frozen shut...

I'm gonna be glad to be heading back to a "tropical" UK this week. If I don't get around to blogging again this side of it, Merry Christmas to you all.

Last Tuesday the University of Calgary got into the Olympic spirit that is slowly ramping up in Canada ahead of the 2010 Vancouver games. As the torch makes its journey through Canada it made a nice stop at the Calgary Olympic Oval (Calgary was the host of the 1988 games, if you are a Brit you will probably remember Eddie the Eagle, it was these games that he did that) on its way through Alberta. Of course, I couldn't miss out on this!

Oh and on the way home the torch on the Calgary tower was on...

More photos at: [flickr.com/photos/starrydude/].

I went to watch my first hockey (oh and for any Brits by hockey I mean the ice variety) game the other day. It was at the Father David Bauer arena here in Calgary. It was a game between the National Women's Team (the Canadian Olympic team basically) and the Calgary Royals.

It was actually quite a good game, well for someone who has only ever watched it on telly. Of course in the women's game there are no big body checks or fighting (though I'd probably not want to get in a fight with any of those lasses looked like they could have held their own). The final score was 4-4 which in North American sports means we have overtime and then penalties... with the women winning 7-6 on pens. Lots of fun. Oh there is a short video below... (and a bunch of other pics over on [flickr].

If you can't see the video try it [here].

My first trip onto the roof of Science B of the University of Calgary was timed nicely with a gorgeous sunset...

... here you can see (what I think it is anyway) the ski jump that Eddie the Eagle must have jumped off back in the 1988 games.

I didn't just go on the roof to look at the sunset, though it was probably worth it just for that, but to also do a bit of astronomy. There was a class on and I tagged along for the start and helped setup the scope (they were investigating the size of craters on the Moon) and took this pic:

Not a bad setup really..

Last Saturday Calgary (well CTV) held a celebration for the start of the Olympic Games over in British Columbia. I have to say this is probably the coldest gig I've ever been to. It was fun though.. but still it was darn cold. Not sure if holding an outdoors gig in Calgary in the winter is ever a good idea... it was foogy too - such that you could just make the outline of the Calgary tower:

I got there in time to watch some local band called who played a solid set of music. Not sure if they are really my thing but they are defineely worth a look out. Probably the best local band I've seen so far. I've not seen many though.

Eventually, as it got darker, the Tower broke through the clouds and you could see the Olympic Flame burning brightly over Calgary...

The main attraction for me to go down to the event was to see the headline band, Simple Plan. They were definitely worth waiting around in the cold for (well it wasn't so cold after I had a hot chocolate and then jumped around a bit).

.. but by the end of this and when I got on the C-train to go home I couldn't feel my feet properly.. hmmm. Oh and here is a quick clip of the gig:

More photos from the gig can be found [on flickr].

I went to watch my first University sport match while I have been in Calgary on Friday. It was the [University of Calgary Dinos] versus the University of British Columbia. Oh it was ice hockey. I'm happy to say the game was good, though due to drinking of beer we did miss the first period... oh well. It was 1-1 when we got there. The final score was 3-1 to the Dinos... go Dinos!

This was my second hockey game while I have been here and it was a bit higher pace than the [last one (Canada's Women's national team)] with a few big "hits" and a bit of a fight... not a "good" one though...

A few more pictures over on [flickr].

I took my first trip down to the Saddledome here in Calgary yesterday to go watch [Monster Jam]! It was also a chance to experience some "proper white trash". It was lots of fun watching these huge beasts crush cars and fly through the air. From the pictures its hard to really understand the size of these things... but just look at the people for scale (some pics below).I put a video compilation together of some of the best bits I recorded (if you can't see it below go to [youtube.com]...

Donkey Kong flies through the air...

The fans favourite, Grave Digger takes on the giant dirty mound...

It wasn't all big trucks crushing things though.. there was a cool freestyle motocross show too:

More pics over at [flickr].

On my way home last night I got the chance to take some photos of the Calgary skyline at night... and also got my first proper chance to try to take some long exposures of car headlights.

Yesterday I went to my first comic book convention. I'm not sure why I've never ended up at a first proper convention like this before, guess I've always been put off by costs / having to get out to the NEC. This one was a little pricey but not too bad for a whole days entertainment - it was $20 and took place at Stampede park so pretty easy to get to (well assuming you live in Calgary that is!).

The main exhibition room was pretty huge full of lots of interesting and sometimes slightly strange displays. I was taken aback abit with the Vulcan town stand but it did reaffirm by need to travel south to Vulcan - yep there really is a town called [Vulcan in Alberta]. Overall I had a very good day with the highlight being hearing Leonard Nimoy talk about his career and watching him get "white hatted" by a bunch of storm troppers. Great fun. I have a video of this, so take a look below and you shall find it (it's about 8 minutes long).

There were quite a few people dressed up too.. some much more impressive than others but it was fun to see how people went about things..

Overall a great day and if you fancy hearing some of the Leonard Nimoy talk here you go (if you can't see the video try [here]:

Oh and if you want to watch Gumby faceplanting on stage:

We went on a walk around [Fish Creek provincial park] the other day (we basically followed one of the walks in [Calgary's Best Hikes and Walks by Lori Beattie] - I've mentioned a few of these walks before here). Fish Creek Park is a provincial park located in the southern part of Calgary, but is easily accessible from the C-train. Actually I say easily, its badly sign posted from the station and is around a 10 minute walk - then again its not too bad. Its quite nice having such a huge sanctuary for wildlife in the city. Anyway, we had quite a nice walk - especially since the doom and gloom of the morning picked up and the Sun came out to play.

We got to see a couple of deer and coyotes... you can just about see the deer in this photo:

One of the coyotes came up close (at the time we thought they were just foxes, but after some research I'm convinced that they are coyotes..)

Near the end of the walk (well on the way out.. we had to walk back too) we came to the Bow Valley Ranche house, which was quite nice looking:

The only problem we had was the walk back, which was ok but I think the paths don't quite follow the map we had (since there was a flood the other year things appear different) and well we ended up heading for the other train station, oh well. I probably needed the exercise.

Just over a week ago, while my better half was here, we and a few of my friends went up to Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park for a hike. We really couldn't have asked for a better day for it, gorgeous sunshine (I still have the tan-line from my watch from it) and fantastic scenery. I do think, however, that the highlight of the day had to be seeing 14 deer! I have to say though I was pretty excited to go to the lake because of the name (yes, I'm a big kid!):

Despite me thinking its a funny name (if you are Canadian and just don't get it imaging a Brummie saying it, don't say it like a Wonka bar in other words) Lake Minnewanka means "Water of the Spirits" in Nakota (the Stoney Indian language). The lake itself is a glacial lake fed by the Cascade River. The lake is about 30m high than the natural height due to daming for hydro power, this flooded the resort village that was there at the time and I'm told by avid scuba people I know that its pretty interesting down there....

The hike itself was fun, we kind-of decided we would walk until we got bored or tired... the later was the factor in the end but we managed a decent walk really. Here are a couple of pictures of the fantastic lake the beautifully blue water (for more see [here]):

You can see that we got quite above the trees on the walk.. not that high in the end but high enough for me to have some breathing issues (darn asthma) - then again starting point here is about 1km above see-level.

I have to say I do love being close to the rocky mountains, always stunning.

Oh and on a humorous note look at the arse we were parked to, yes that's a hummer with a "Got Gas" licence plate!!

Yesterday I went on quite a grueling hike. OK, its not really that bad a hike but starting at 1661 m and ending at 2210m (to the [Little Beehive]) is not good on my lungs - the combination of the altitude, asthma and my general poor fitness makes it more of challenge. Still it was quite good fun and definitely worth the hike. The view was simply stunning and the tea, well its by far the best [Earl Grey] I've had in Canada.

The hike started off at gorgeous Lake Louise:

you might just about to be able to pick out the teahouse destination in this image (look for the hut to the right of the first foreground peak):

On the way up the first lake you come across is the beautiful Mirror Lake:

I was quite happy about having a rest there. Then we just kept going up and after avoiding a few horses and a waterfall we ended up at [Lake Agnes] and the tea house - so I had apple crumble.

I've even got a little ground squirrel to become my friend, now how do I add it to facebook?

We then saw a Marmot, a strange looking creature that was nicely basquing in the sun until we must have disturbed it ("damn tourists" he must have been thinking):

We actually ended up above the snow line, which was kind-of cool but made me realise quite high up we'd gone....

oh and all 3 lakes, left Lake Louise, Mirror Lake and Lake Agnes could all be seen at once:

More photos from this hike can be found at [starrydude on flickr]

I am currently experiencing my first [Calgary Stampede] and I have to say what I've seen so far I've thoroughly enjoyed. I still need to properly Cowboy up though, I must do this properly at some point this week. Yesterday I went to the Stampede parade which was a 2 hour long show with the downtown full of people and effectively shut down. It was good fun, lots of marching bands, horses and strange looking floats... I think the highlight was either the [Snowbirds] flying over or a tank doing a burnout! [Here] is a video of some of the things that happened as they went passed us and a couple of pics:

After the show we braved a very packed, it was the third train that turned up that we managed to get on, C-train down to the Stampede grounds to explore what was going on. I managed to get a Stampede pack (dunno quite why I wanted one, but I'm quite pleased with the backpack), saw the [world championship blacksmith competition, some sheep shearing, some giants cows, a crazy dog show ("[Superdogs]" with its own theme music) and miniature horse [chuckwagon] racing (probably the most hilarious type of horse racing I've ever seen). I'm sure we saw lots more too and I'm hoping to go down some point in the next week to experience more of the festivities. Lots of fun and [here] is a video of some of my highlights...

The chuckwagon races in the Saddledome:

How to heard ducks:

and a Texas Longhorn:

I meant to post this before but well I was busy and I've been a bit crap at updating my blog as of late. Anyway, while my Dad was visiting me in Calgary a couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of going to my first NHL game. T he Calgary Flames against the Edmonton Oilers (on 26/10/2010) - a proper local derby. WOW it was good fun. We actually bought cheap tickets and ended up right in the back row:

... but courtesy of the Flames president and a wonderful customer service person we got moved to:

I have a video of myself going on about our tickets, not that I wasn't happy to be there anyway, and then moments later we were moved (will have to post that soon: UPDATE: see [here]). The game was great, with a 4-4 final score and a shootout to decide the winner. Flames win! GO FLAMES GO!

We even managed to get on the jumbotron:

Faceoff!

For more pics see [here].

Another one of my recent ice hockey experiences was watching the Calgary Hitmen against Kamloops Blazers on 23rd Oct (2010). I think I've very much started to get the hockey bug... This one was actually my first hockey game at the Saddledome. This was with my Dad while he visited. The Hitmen though being 2-0 up had an awful final period losing 3-2 in the end.

Here is a video of the game:

If it doesn't work try [here]

I recently went and watched my first Canadian Football League (CFL) game. I have to say that "football", well the Canadian kind (not the NFL), is really quite growing on me - not as much as hockey has (go flames go!) but its a game I appreciate a lot more. I'm glad I went to see the Stamps play against the BC Lions. The game took place at McMahon Stadium (up by the Uni, the place that the 1988 Olympic Games ceremonies took place) on 22/10/2010 and the BC Lions won 36 - 31.

... gotta love the horse riding around the ground whenever the Stamps score...

I also made a short [video of the action]

and more pics can be found [here].

Just a couple of pictures that I took whilst waiting for a few folks on my way to see the [Prime Time Big Band] and [Ian McDougall] at Ironwood (I really enjoyed the gig, especially since I'm not normally one for jazz).

Oh I did take a few pictures at the gig too, here is one featuring the band and their guest:

Another place that I hadn't managed to take a look at in Calgary yet, despite only living 3 blocks away, was [Lougheed House].

I've walked passed it a few times but never made that trip inside, well it was quite cold when my Dad was here so we decided that doing something indoors would be a good idea. It wasn't too expensive, especially since they kindly gave us a buy-one-get-one-free voucher discount even though we didn't have one. We had a 30 minute or so tour around the building and gave me an interesting take of Calgary 100 years ago. Strange to think all the land around this building would have just been prairie, now its smack bang in the middle of the downtown. As can be seen from this:

The building was built in 1891, so one of the oldest structures still remaining around Calgary. It has been through many different uses, but thankfully it has now been nicely restored. A good day out, thoroughly would recommend it.

Oh and I really loved some of the stained glass windows (there is even one, I can't recall which one, that was placed the wrong way round with the paint on the outside):

As temperatures with windchill hit -40C today (raw temperatures of -30C and -20C for the past week) Calgary is in the mist of a rather snowy landscape so I took a few photos (well I tried to before my fingers froze):

The lunch area at UofC:

17th Ave bandstand:

Downtown Scene from 12th Ave SW:

this bike is going nowhere fast:

lost ya hat....

Downtown by Snow Central

View from my office, no mountains today

A very cold morning view of downtown, with windchill -40C... yikes

-40C construction....

Last night I helped take part in an [experiment to help improve track safety] (and probably increase speed) at bobsled events during the [World Cup event] here at Calgary. It was lots of fun and my first chance (I've been here a year and a half!) to get up to [Canada Olympic park]. It was nice to see bobsled going down a track in the flesh, something I didn't think I'd ever do. Oh and it was on the track of that Jamaican bobsled incident ([what happened really] that spawned the film [cool runnings]. I even managed to slide down some ice myself... but that was due to my incompetence on a 10ft section of ice on the pavement, ouch. I took a video and a few pics too:

More pictures on my [flickr account] and for the [youtube video].

I gave a talk on the [Nature of Extragalactic radio sources] the other day in Lethbridge.. a small town in southern Alberta. Its most redeeming quality being this huge bridge:

Well it has been ages since I wrote on here - too much on at the moment. I did tons of interesting stuff over Christmas that I really should stick up on here... oh well.

Today was my first time out on a hill with a snowboard, actually it was the first time I've ever actually been out in the real snow with either skis or a snowboard. Was lots of fun. I did fail pretty badly and my lack of balance really showed, oh well. I fell on me arse due to many things. I fell whilst getting both on and off the ski lift with skis, their was no way I'd have gotten up the lift on a board. I even fell over whilst on the "magic carpet" (i.e travellator thingy). Still was lots of fun.. and great to go to end of Calgary and be able to do it - out at [Calgary Olympic Park]. Simply ace. I think I look pretty cool with a board too:

COP isn't that big, but big enough for me!

and just to remind you, that you are in Canada one giant flag:

oh and the rocky mountains in the background :

For Christmas my other half bought my a [Fujifilm HS10] - I have to say I was rather please, just what I wanted a camera that was a big upgrade from my last one. I do enjoy taking photos, even if most of mine aren't the greatest, I just love giving it ago. I don't think I could ever be bothered carrying an SLR around though. Maybe at some point I will. For now the promise of a 30x optical zoom is rather exciting. Anyway, I've now take a few photos with it that I'm quite pleased with and thought I'd share. Lets start with one of my favourite items, the Moon. Both of these photos were taken without a tripod, so I'm quite pleased:

Crescent Moon taken in Birmingham.

Daytime Moon taken in Calgary.

The Moon takes a chunk out of the Sun; shame we missed the eclipse due to the cloud in the background but HTC + webcam saved us...

I took a bit of a walk around downtown Calgary last sat, was a beautiful +4C (shame about the snow right now, we have had one hot week with double digit positives!):

The Nexus building on 8th St.

Moisture escaping the vents from the Shaw Building.

Capturing a plane as it flies high above Calgary.

Overall I'm rather pleased with the new camera and hope to take lots more pictures and to actually understand alot of what it can do.

Whilst I had a mate over to stay recently we decided it was a good idea to go up to the Rockies, heck he'd not been there before so we really had to. It was darn cold though, but very much worth it.

We started the day by diverting from going straight to Banff by a quick look at Lake Minnewanka from above (as the normal road we would have taken was closed for the winter):

We actually then missed the turning to Banff and so went straight up to Lake Louise where we were met by people skating, hockey being played and some epic ice sculptures...

I even walked across the ice.. really kinda cool.

After a short snack in Banff we decided that we had to go up a mountain. Fourtunately for us Sulphur mountain on t'other side of Banff has a gondolla that goes up it. Its not cheap ~$30 but well worth it.

We even made it up to the cosmic ray station...

This was topped off with dinner at Saltlik in Banff - not great option for veggies but what they have is fantastic. If you like Steak, go there, from what I'm told.

More pictures on [flickr].

Whilst I had a friend stay recently we went to a couple of hockey games including the first [WHL] outdoor game. Was a disappointing result with the Calgary Hitmen losing but still was a lot of fun, even if darn cold (-20C ish) !

More from the game [here].

We also took in a couple of [Flames] games, alas even with their excellent form of late they didn't manage to win either. Losing to the Boston Bruins (pics [here]) in regulation and on a shootout to the San Jose Sharks (pics [here])...

Just gotta hope the [Flames] keep it going and make the playoffs.

A lovely crescent Moon feel over Calgary tonight... a few hours after a certain other person pointed out the same thing over Brum

Today I took a walk around the Reader Rock Garden and Union Cemetery. The rock garden was setup by Englishman [William Reader ]between 1922 and 1929. Tis not huge but I'm sure it looks really nice in the summer... maybe not so when there is ice everywhere! :-)

The highlight of the walk was this well behaved Snowshoe hare that I got to take a few shots of:

Apart from getting lost in the cemetery the walk wasn't bad - though I gave up on the walk I was supposed to as the overpass over Macleod trail was well fenced off from the cemetery - though I could have easily jumped the fence I decided that would have been bad form and so walked down to the nearest C-train station and came home... worked well I was got to listen to 606.

Given it was the last day of the Calgary Flames season and they won't be going to the playoffs I think it was fitting to see the below banner over Macleod trail:

I've blogged about going to [Fish Creek before]. Its a great place, I've only managed to walk around a small part of this provincial park. Its really nice having such a great wildlife area within the City. About a month ago me and a mate of mine went down there, on what was a bloody cold day -20C or something like that in the wind. Lovely sunny day but cold. I had to show him that area. It was well worth it because within 5 minutes we came across a couple of deer:

- shame my hands wouldn't work very well in the cold and I couldn't quite get them in the focus I want.

I would really recommend this park to anyone who vists Calgary, very much worth going to - its actually pretty easy to get to on public transit too - just take the C-train right there. Its definitely one of my favourite places in Calgary.

A few more photos can be seen [here].

Back in February (26th to be exact) I got the chance to [see some proper snowboarding].. all taking place within the city at the ski hill that I get public transit too. Now if I didn't suck at snowboarding/skiing that would be a really exciting thing, though I guess if I was good at it I'd just go the mountains. Still its a nice bonus of living in Calgary.. well it makes the snow more bearable. Anyway, back to the subject - we (me and my mate Steve who was over visiting) decided to go check it out the [snowboarding world cup], given it was free and in his case a $2.40 journey away. Was well worth it. We got to see the whole half pipe competition (both men and women) and there were some awe inspiring moves made... of course I took a couple of pics:

If you are ever in Calgary, do go to [COP] well worth a gander.. well maybe not in the summer but the winter when there is an event going on.. or you [wanna make an idiot of yourself like I did]. Oh and some more pics of this event can be found on [my flickr account].

One the things I'll miss about Calgary - being able to see mountains as you walk around the city is cool, here is what I mean (taken as I walked around [SAIT]):

I've decided I'm going to start posting, fairly often (I hope), astronomical images I have taken and give them a brief description. I hope this is interesting to a few people. So lets start off with [my most viewed flickr image]... (as I write this anyway)

M16 - the Eagle Nebula

[Full version of image]

[The Eagle nebula] is a young open cluster of stars that is most famous for the "pillars of creation" which you can clearly see in the image above. The nebula is part of a diffuse emission nebula (a H II region). The pillars have a maximum extent of 7 light years, so quite a large structure. They appear to be dark because the density of the gas is causing the light from the background stars to be blocked, hence causing a shadow. Interestingly, it is believed that a supernova in the region [destroyed these structures some 6,000 years ago] but it takes roughly 7,000 years for the light to reach us.

I woke up this morning to see a glorious white scene.. and sigh, its back again. This place and its bloomin' snow. I used to love snow days (I still kinda do) but come on Calgary its April already, just rain! Oh well, made for an "interesting" walk into work as for once the snow was wet like come.. so slide slide slide. Pretty cool scenery though:

Yes in the above photo that is a massive pile up of snow.. if you are from the UK then you are probably not familiar with this.. but it happens all the time here.... and lasts for ages.

Few more photos from my commute to work can be found [on my flickr account]

Continuing my posting of astronomical images I have taken...

M8 - the Lagoon nebula

[Full version of image]

[The Lagoon nebula] is starforming region full of young stars. It is about 4,000 light years away and 100 light years in size. It was discovered by Hodierna before 1654 and independently found by Flamsteed around 1680. It can be found with binoculars but it pretty challenging and probably not worth trying unless you have excellent sky conditions. It is much fainter than the Orion nebula, so don't expect to see that kind of clarity.

M17 - the Omega Nebula

[Full version of image]

[M17 - the Omega Nebula] is between 5,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter! It is also known as the Swan Nebula and the Horseshoe Nebula, I'm not convinced I agree with any of these names, either from my image or from images at higher resolution / better imaging. Then again [John Herschel's] low resolution view of this object [suggests it really was an "Omega" shape]. As brightest galactic nebula in the northern sky the object is a fairly good binocular target, so get out their and take a look!

M13 - Great Globular Cluster in Hercules

[Full version of image]

[M13] is one of the best known clusters of the northern hemisphere. It is some 25,100 light years away with a diameter of 145 light years and as such is orbiting around the Galaxy as a satellite. It is a collection of stars that are gravitationally held together and most stars are at a similar point in their stellar evolution.It is, however, unclear whether the stars formed in one generation or are from multiple generations. Some 150 globular clusters are know to orbit the Milky Way (our galaxy) and I think M13 is probably the most striking. It is a good binocular object appearing as a large, diffuse but bright ball forming he point of a triangle with some outer stars probably resolved.

M20 - The Trifid Nebula

[Full version of image]

[The Trifid Nebula] consists of both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula - making it look truly stunning. When William Herschel first observed this object it was given 4 distinct classifications, though the Messier catalogue has it down as one object - M20 (but its also called a cluster of stars!). The structure of this object is given by the red-glowing gas which comes from the interstellar hydrogen gas being ionized by the young stars whilst the dark regions are mostly likely created by the debris from supernovae.

M57 - Ring Nebula

[Full version of image]

[M57 - the Ring Nebula] is one of the best examples of planetary nebulae (PNe) in the sky.. A planetary nebulae is the end point in the life of a star. Medium and low mass stars, like the Sun eventually run of material to fuse in the stellar core. The object expands, as a means to achieve equilibrium and as the internal temperature changes their can be energetic events that cause an expanding gaseous shall to be form around the central star. The gas is then illuminated by the remaining white dwarf star. The Ring Nebula is some [2,300 light years] from the Earth. Thus its angular extent is quite small and to get any vague idea of the shape of the object requires a telescope and a dark site.

M51 - the Whirpool Galaxy

[Full version of image]

[The Whirlpool Galaxy], M51, is probably the best known galaxy in the sky - it clearly shows spiral structure and is probably one of the first images most people will think of when thinking of galaxies. It is better described as a grand-spiral galaxy, [SA(s)]. It is some [23 million light years away] but is clearly visible with a pair of binoculars and some steady hands (it can be found in the constellation of Canes Venatici). Interestingly, the companion galaxy seen at the end of the whirlpool (NGC 5195) is actually interacting. The gas in the galaxy is disturbed as the result compression, common in galaxy interactions, causes formation of new stars!
Oh and being a radio astronomer I think I should also point out this cool image of [M51 at 21cm] - not many galaxies are resolved like this at radio wavelengths.

This photo was short-listed in the the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2009 competition.

I was welcomed home tonight by the flashing lights of police/fire department and told I couldn't go past the tape.. fourtunately that was 10 feet passed my building. The reason stuff was falling off the building site across the street!

Oh well. I was a bit concerned at first but all has been nicely dealt with by the fire brigade.

It made for some interesting tweets (well maybe), e.g, ["looks like they are getting are fixing the issue....http://goo.gl/PY9CQ it might be almost safe...http://goo.gl/DkIYw #yyc #fb"]

There is a [Calgary Herald] article too.

M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy

[Full version of image]

[The Pinwheel Galaxy] is a beautiful face-on spiral galaxy that is some [25 million light-years] with a measured size that is about twice as large as our own Galaxy. You can't really tell in my photo above but in much more detailed photos (e.g. [this one by the Hubble Space telescope]) you can see that M101 appears to be asymmetrical. It is believed that this was due to a tidal interaction with another galaxy as it passed by.

Messier 92 - a globular cluster

[Full version of image]

[Messier 92] is a globular cluster in the constellation Hercules. This not be confused with a handgun! It is a really nice object with a small telescope or binoculars, though it is bright enough under excellent conditions with the naked eye.

M27 - Dumbbell Nebula

[Full version of image]

[The Dumbbell Nebula] is a planetary nebula some 1,360 light years away from the Earth. A planetary nebula is an emission nebula consisting of an expanding glowing shell gas and lasts only a few tens of thousands of years - so rather short in the life cycle of stars. At the centre of the nebula is a white dwarf - actually its the [largest known white dwarf].

M1 - the Crab Nebula

[Full version of image]

[Messier object number 1], the Crab Nebula, is the most famous supernova remnant. It was first observed in 1054 AD when the progenitor star exploded in a supernova explosion. The explosion probably created a "star" some four times brighter than Venus in the sky. It is some [6,500] light-years away from the Earth. At the centre of this stunning object is the Crab Pulsar - a rapidly rotating ball of neutrons known as a neutron star. It is some 30km in radius but rotates at 30.2 times per second! With binoculars this can be seen as a faint blur but is an excellent small telescope object.

M106

[Full version of image]

Messier 106 is a barred spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici. It was discovered in 1781 by the metric French astronomer Pierre Mechain. It is about [22 million light years] from the Earth. The blue colouration of the stars suggest lots of young stars forming. From its X-ray/radio properties it is classified as a [Seyfert galaxy] and at the centre is a [supermassive blackhole] which powers strong jets of material.

The Venus transit

[Full version of image]

[The transit of Venus]. This is a bit of a blast from the past. On June 8, 2004, Venus past between the Earth and the Sun - causing a shadow to appear on the surface of the Sun, as can be seen in the image above. This black and white image is just one small section of the Sun but the event was viewable with simple projection telescopes and some people tried with their eyes with proper solar glasses (never look at the Sun directly). The above image was taken using a simple camera connected to a 3.5" Newtonian Reflector at the [University of Birmingham Astronomical Society]. The eclipse lasted about 6 hours and was visible from most of Europe, Africa and Asia. The last time it occurred before 2004 was in 1882. The next time is [June 6th 2012] (North America favourable) but there won't be another one until 2117 - so if you want to see it worth planning for it.

This coming Friday I leave Canada after almost 2 years working in Calgary at the [Institute for Space Imagining Science], University of Calgary. Apart from missing t'other one and family I've had a pretty good time here in [Alberta]. Canada is an interesting place, full of lots of different things todo. Not sure I could do it permanently though, there is just something missing. It could be described as culture or history but I don't think that's it. There is culture and though I don't really fit into the culture of Calgary (oil/cowboy town) its really grown on me. I do like lots about the place and the people. Heck, its not many places were cars stop for you when you are 20 metres from the road. I just can't quite place what makes me feel odd here at times, there is something but I don't know what. At times I feel that this is simply missing my family (and that has been very very hard throughout this) but I don't think its just this. Maybe its that feeling of missing home. Though I don't think it can just be that. Then again though I moved out of home when I was 18 for University I never did leave Birmingham. Could I just be missing Birmingham? That's definitely true, but I think something I got over after about 6 months. I've never gotten over missing my family but I think that's expected. I talk to t'other one everyday and my folks every Saturday and Sunday. This has made life bearable, because without Skype I'd have probably never come nevermind lasted this long. Anyway, I really just can't place what it is about Calgary that just doesn't feel right. I think I'd probably have the same feeling in any North American city though, the roads are just to darn big. Having 3 lanes going one way outside of my place just says that. Well there is a bit of a rant. Its not a rant I had planned though. I was just going to write about my time here in Calgary and some of the more fun things I've done, I don't want to bore you with the sad times and the anguish of missing people. So then... onto the highlights! These really don't fully span the fun I've had here... but a taste - my blog over the last couple of years is testimate to my time in Calgary. Oh I'm not even including the epic trip back at Christmas to the UK that went via Paris and I got back home from Canada on a boat.. or my time in Puerto Rico.

I've actually put together [50 highlights of Canada in a flickr album]... for the purpose of this post I'm just gonna cover 10 topics - and I think what I'll write about will embrace quite a few of the pics. These aren't in any particular order...

1. Snow and using it for fun.

Calgary is definitely an excellent place to live if you enjoy outdoor winter sports. It has its own ski hill within the city and is not far from tons of what I'm told are excellent ski hills. There is the problem, I can't ski at all. But when in Rome...

.. yep that's me get ready to try to snowboard. When my mate Christian decided he wanted to learn to snowboard and well I went along for the ride. For me it wasn't much of a ride and more simply FAIL. Yes I fell over, yes I couldn't get up on the board - apart from once when I feel down straight on me face. [I actually wrote a blog post about this]. I even gave ski's a go... and well that was more FAIL. Yes I completely wiped out getting on and off the ski lift - and when I got back down to the bottom and I fell off the magic carpet (a flat escalator to help newbies) I decided it was time to go for a beer. Oh a couple of months later a my mate Steve came over to visit me from England [we saw how its properly done]...

2. Mountains.

Calgary is wonderfully placed right next to the rocky mountains. Of course in the winter this helps the previous fun... but in the summer it means lovely hiking. I wouldn't say I took that too seriously, I've been for a couple of fun day hikes and been on a bunch of tours with [Brewsters] and saw/did some cool things. Including bears:

partially frozen lakes:

[Places with funny names] (yes this is called lake Minnewanka - pronounce it like a Brit and you will chuckle):

oh lots of mountains..

walking on a glacier:

oh and more snow / [freezing my face off on top of a mountain at -20C or something like that]:

3. Hockey.

During my time in Calgary I've become a fan of Ice Hockey (aka Hockey in Canada). Its a great game, full of excitement. Much better than playing Brett Hull hockey which absorbed a large portion of my time playing SNES. Of course the Canadians are as passionate about hockey as we are football. I think my interest really peaked when I was watching the Olympic coverage and Canada got to the final. Great afternoon watching it in Melrose on 17th Ave. Since then I've been to a bunch of [WHL and NHL games]. All I will say is GO FLAMES GO!

4. The Calgary Tower.

[I've been up the Calgary Tower on 3 occasions], I think spanning most of the day. Its always been fun, bit pricey but worth doing. The Calgary tower, though not the largest building, really dominates the downtown skyline. You can basically use it to find your way home too. I think it looks pretty nice at night and phenomenal when the giant flame is on.

5. A city full of nature.

Calgary might be ranked as one of the world's top eco cities but I don't think people give it the credit it deserves. I mean everyone laughed about that title and well given the size of the roads/cars its quite funny. Then you think about the fact that there is one giant provincial park inside the city and many lovely nature sites.. I've seen quite a bit of wildlife in the city.. include [deer] and [coyotes down at Fish Creek]..

6. The Cold

I've never been so cold in my life. I'm not quite sure how cold it has gotten to during my time here but I'm sure there was one day when it hit -40C. Now that's cold. I remember the first winter and every day blasted my new record for the coldest temperature I'd ever experienced. The second winter it was... "oh it's only -20C". I still thinks its odd thinking -6C is a nice warm day and having the urge to wear shorts. The cold weather does give some cool sites though.. and weird sensations when your nose freezes and your trousers (pants in Canada) go stiff within a minute of walking. Watching the [outdoor Heritage hockey game at McMahon Stadium].

7. Stampede

I don't think I really could have a discussion of my time living in Calgary and not mention the world famous [Calgary Stampede could I]? One giant rodeo with people partying for a week.. not a bad thing really. Still I was bemused by most of the activities that took place but I feel that I might have experienced something culturally significant.

8. Beer and Bars.

Who serves a pint like this?

Is what I thought the first time I had it. But yes having an orange in my beer has grown on me. I'll miss some of the excellent beers of Wild Rose and Big Rock. I've had some epic nights drinking their products.. so a big thank you to them! Oh and a big thank you to all the bars I've been to... special mentions probably have to go to the epic Blink Monk on 12th Ave (right by were I live) for the many many fun nights, Melrose (on 17th Ave) for the hockey nights, Kilkenny (up at Brentwood) for its epic happy hours and to the Yardhouse (on 17th Ave) for its epic veggie burgers and friendly staff.

9. Tim Hortons.

I didn't think I would be saying this... but Timmy's I'll miss you! Not many places were you can get an excellent donut and a coffee for around $2. I've spent many hours waiting in line-up for you. I hate to think how many hours are lost over the whole country waiting for Tim Hortons. Tim Hortons... open a few in England - I'll come!

10. Simply Calgary.

As I said before times have been hard in Calgary but I think I'll miss it. I'll miss my friends and I'll miss the city.. there is something about this place that has made a place in my heart. [Go Stamps], [Go Flames], [Go Hitmen], [Go Roughknecks], [Go Vipers]! There might not be much todo for tourists but if you ever go to Western Canada don't miss out on Calgary as you will be missing something.. I'm not quite sure what but you'll be missing something. Something tells me this city really hasn't blossomed yet - I can see myself coming back in 20 years and it being very different and well I can see this place being fantastic.

Oh and to all my friends here... thanks for making my time in Calgary the dogs bollocks. You lot rock!

Thank you Calgary.

oh and .... hello Cambridge.....

My final day trip out whilst living in Calgary was down to Vulcan(!) and then to Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo Jump. Both were great fun. The first was nice and geeky - a must for any Star Trek fan - just to say you have been to Vulcan. Its a pretty small town and the diner we had lunch in made me think that time hadn't really progressed here. The tourist centre was good fun and of course when in Vulcan you dress up...

and take photos of the Enterprise:

Was lots of fun.

The more historical and cultural part of the day was found down past Fort Macleod at [Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump]. There we were shown how the native people for thousands of years drove large herds of Buffalo over the side of cliffs as a means to survive. Really interesting how much preparation went into it and the techniques they had to use almost all of the animal. Quite fascinating. Its a UNESCO site and pretty cheap, well worth the drive down.

Many more pictures over on my [flickr] page.

Well I've been working in Cambridge for a week now. Its all a bit different. I have to say its amazing when you are introduced to the Cavendish Laboratory by seeing Maxwell's desk and some of Rutherford's apparatus for electron scattering! Now that's just cool. Anyway, week one has gone well and I'm continuing my work on Square Kilometre Array related computing work.

I've walked about 80km this week whilst looking at places to live and I've seen a few interesting places. I'm currently staying in some temporary accommodation next to the Institute of Astronomy:

I've seen many colleges including Jesus:

I've crossed the Cam:

and done some interesting work:

here:

My first time at a Formula 1 race was pretty cool. Last Sunday we went to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. It was a good race that had a bit of extra spice due to the large down pour of rain just before the start. The rain did have to happen just while we were outside of our covered stand while the red arrows flew overhead, argh! Oh well, still was lots of fun. Before the F1 was a GP3, a GP2 and a Porsche Supercup race. Here are a few of the snaps I took:

A bit of fun before the race for Alonso:

The Red Arrows:

Some early wet racing:

Hamilton fighting (and losing) for position:

Alonso Celebrates:

I went up to Manchester for a Square Kilometre Array meeting on calibration and imaging - if you are interested [my talk] slides and a [video of my talk] (just follow the links) can be found on their website. I stayed in the Novotel and that was actually a much better experience than I thought. This was only the second time that I've been to Manchester the first for another radio astronomy meeting, though the only exploring I did the first time was to get some socks (yes I went to a conference without any). I took in a few sights this time including the John Rylands Library which looks more like a church. I'm not sure I could go in their and look for books - I'd be a little intimidated. Was pretty cool though:

Most of my time was spent, of course, at the conference but I did get to experience [Eastzeast] which had some excellent Indian food. Weird nan presentation, but excellent food. Overall my impression of Manchester was better on the second viewing but I'm not sure I'd be interested in spending more than a week there.

The centre of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) taken with the Wast Hills telescope (30s BRV).

The Andromeda Galaxy is the furthest thing you can see with your naked eye, so go outside and take a look. You'll find it just off the square of pegasus. Helpful instructions can be found [here]

[NGC 2261] - Hubble’s variable Nebula. It is illuminated by the star R Monocerotis. This is an image that I took with the Faulkes Telescope from a number of years back now.

I thought a short article showing some of the highlights of our wedding preparation was a good idea and a nice way for us to look back on all of the crazy and mundane things we have done. This is far from complete as its surprising how many hours are taken up in wedding related preparations. Its mostly been fun, there have been some stressful and confusing moments.. though given I'm actually writing this 2 days before the wedding (publishing right afterwards, so if you are reading this and the photos haven't gone public I'm sorry) there are bound to be a few last minute moments of stress...

Flowers, Flowers, Flowers....

Oh the joys of flowers and the wonders of cool fake ones :-)

A trip out to the excellent Mr. Latifs in Brum was had... we got just what we wanted for the ceremony room. For me this was great, I'm a person who likes to plan well in advance and real flowers really don't allow for that as the day before is really the earliest you can do that.

For the real flowers it was a trip down to the massive Birmingham Wholesale Market. The highlight of the trip for the trial flowers was, for me anyway, the reminder of how Birmingham once was - all dingy and a bit crap. The highlight for Lizzie was probably the graze she got my falling over.

They looked quite good too:

The Venue...

For both of us the natural choice was the stunning Birmingham Botanical Gardens. It also nicely satisfied close to the Brides home (not that is far from t'other side of the city for me). We actually now live in a tower block overlooking the place - its a lovely area.

All I'll say is hopefully no one will end up in with the fish...

Centrepieces... lego, lego everywhere

Our centrepieces were lots of fun to make...

Invites and other arts and crafts

We made our own invities, well we had the design laser cut out but all of it was our own work. It was very satisfying but a bit awkward on how best todo it. Was quite a lot of fun and we think we ended up with a great looking invite...

The table plan was a bit easier, once we found a nice big piece of card from Hobbycraft..

but the fancy idea I said "yeah no problem" to Lizzie for the menus provided me with a desktop publishing nightmare.. I think I was just being a numpty but they came out quite nice in the end

Sweets!

Any finally it wouldn't be a proper party without some nice hard boiled sweets..

The Eagle nebula is a young open cluster of stars that is most famous for the "pillars of creation". I posted a pic and description on this [before] but here is another view of it...

On August 23rd a star in the [Pinwheel Galaxy] (M101) perished in a supernova explosion. At 21 million light-years from Earth this is the closest star explosion of its type observed since 1986. The object, SN 2011fe, has brightened so much that it is now possible to view with binoculars ([instructions on how to observe]). On 8th September, astronomers (Dr Samuel George, Elizabeth George and Richard Pearson) using the [University of Birmingham Observatory] on a cloudy night managed to take an image of the galaxy clearly showing the supernova (as indicated by the target symbol):

We took a [colour image of M101] a while back and here (on a similar scale/rotation) is a comparison pre-and-post-supernova:

We went out and tried to take a colour image of M101 and the supernova.. not the best colour image I've ever made (looks like there was some dust on the telescope causing some odd image artefact that I've cleaned up a little but messed up my dynamic range):

(oh [here is the previous images])

I've finally managed to take a picture of a comet, something I've been hoping todo for a number of years but in the past have been thwarted by a number of things... anyway here we go
Comet C/2009 P1 Garrard:

The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India is one of the worlds best radio interferometers and one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet. I've had the privellage of using it for something like 500 hours of observing. It always been fun and an interesting place to visit.

The [Effelsberg radio telescope] is one of the largest telescopes on the Earth. It has a diameter of 100m and is fully steerable, a very impressive sight to see.

Low resolution spectra of Saturn, clearly visible on the extremities is the spectra of the rings - showing a difference to the central region which is the planet:

A very short exposure of the Moon in the U band with a 14inch telescope...

The 305m [Arecibo telescope] is the largest single dish telescope in the world. Its just awesome. I've had the prillage of using this for a project I'm part of, GALFACTS, and its an amazing sight and pretty scary up at the reciever platform.

The constellation of Lyra (and the dome of the telescope) taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope. The bright ring at the top is due to an over exposed region, probably some reflection on the dome.

My first visit to the remnants of Lords Bridge railway station was today. Of course this is where the visitors centre is for the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO)... given I've been working at the Cavendish for 5 months it was actually great to get out and see the site. So much fantastic astrophysics has been discovered using the telescopes of these sites. I do always enjoy going out and seeing big dishes...

Here is an antenna from the one mile telescope:

which has seen better days:

There are a bunch of other fantastic (and retired) telescopes there including the Interplanetary Scintillation Array (important for the discovery of pulsars):

and the cylindrical 4C array:

Finally there is the cutting edge research of the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI) which looks in the small array like you walked into a scene from a scifi movie of the past:

On Thursday night I went along to Astrosoc - the University of Birmingham Astronomical Society for the first time in around 2 years. Was good fun - we even got to do some astronomy once the clouds departed at around 10. Jupiter was looking lovely and I couldn't miss the chance to get out my smart phone and do a bit of projection imaging (with a small dobsonian) ...

No detail is clear on Jupiter but you can nicely see the Galilean moons. I'm rather pleased with this - might have to try and do that again.

Our proper honeymoon was to Croatia, it was absolutely beautiful. I took so many photos on this holiday and we saw so many fantastic things. Croatia was just lovely. Basically I'm going to write a few posts - with the intention of making them smaller and not ranting on too much - about where we went.

Lets start with Rovinj (which is in Istria) since this is where we were based. Its actually quite a small town that must survive of tourism. It really quite beautiful with lots of little streets and reminded me a lot of Venice (it was part of the Venetian empire so kind of makes sense - it was from 1283 to 1797 a rather important town in Istria under the Republic of Venice.). Saying that there were also a bunch of Austrian looking buildings too. I guess that's a sign of who has owned the place in the past. We stayed in a hotel that was surrounded by a forest and about a minute walk to the sea. The water was so clear. I don't recall ever seeing the see so clear - a bit rocky but once we bought some shoes it was fine and you could see so many fishes.

I'd say the main feature of the town is the Church bell tower of the Church of S. Eufemia:

You can even go up it, which though a little rickety was well worth the view and is probably the cheapest tower I've ever been up:

The whole town doesn't take too long to walk around but the harbour area is quite nice and full of places to get ice cream to cool you down, and shopping if you are that way inclined:

There is also this piece of sculpture in the harbour area, but I never did figure out what it was of or by:

Oh and just to emphasis the water clarity:

We also saw some fantastic sunsets from Rovinj:

Generally it wasn't too expensive in Rovinj - but then again we were pretty well catered for at our hotel.. not the best food but we did go half board which felt a bit odd to be honest - not our normal way of traveling. More to come on Croatia.

The second part of our trip to Croatia.... we went out on a trip to Pula the largest city in Istria and then up to a hilltop town, Groznjan.

Pula is on the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula, we actually flew into Pula airport, but really wasn't far from Rovinj about an hour or so. The main site of Pula has to be the wonderfully preserved Roman Colosseum:

I think it has to be up their will El Djem (in Tunisia) in how complete it is - and like El Djem its still used.

There are lots of Roman sites still around the town, including the Arch of the Sergii,

the Temple of Roma and Augustus,

and a roman mosaic, (which is very odd to find and I'll probably write a post on this experience later, in essence its behind a bank next to a car park):

apart from the Roman sites there is also the middle age era Chapel of St. Mary Formosa (which looked like was having an archaeological dig in the back) :

and the late Romanesque style Church of St. Francis (13th Century):

We didn't have long in Pula so that's about all that we saw.

We then went up to mountain top village of Groznjan, which has only 185 people living there - mostly artists. Not a bad place to be inspired:

The third part of my summary of our trip to Croatia... this time we went to the Plitvice Lakes National Park. it was a bit of a drive from Rovinji, something like 700km round trip - but not too early a start but quite late at getting back. It was worth every second of travelling though. To be honest I'd quite like to go back to the Plitvice Lakes and spend a bit longer. Looks like there would be lots of nice walks to have around the place.

The [Plitvice Lakes] are the largest national park in Croatia and contain something like 16 lakes but lots of little pools too. We didn't have chance to go around them all bit did quite a large area - there is a boat to get over one of them which helps quite a lot, otherwise well you'd be hiking for a solid day I reckon (possibly longer).

The water in the lakes was just crystal clear as can be seen by these fish:

as you can see the water has a bit of an emerald colouration and really reminded by of the colour of the lakes in [Banff national park]:

There are waterfalls everywhere! Including this huge 78m one (Veliki Slap):

but there are also a few prominent smaller ones:

The walk wasn't too bad but on occasion you do realise that what you are walking on looks a little unsteady. I'm sure its fine but I'm not convinced this is the place to go if you find walking difficult..

It was a great day out and a place I'm very pleased we went to see. On the way back we even stopped for some brandy (yes, I bought a bottle from the roadside too - it has the words medical on it but I didn't notice that until we were back on the road!) and saw some evidence of the Yugoslavian wars of not too long ago:

On Thursday night it was once again the University of Birmingham's Vale Firework show. This is an annual free event that takes place around the University halls with food, rides and a great show. I've been going along for about a decade, though I did miss the last two years due to being in Canada but well I'm back now so I had to go along and celebrate Guy Fawkes night (just a couple of days early!). Anyway I took a couple of pictures and a short video of the evening.. so here are the best bits:

Fire staff... the warm-up action from Circus soc

Some fireworks:

Oh and here is a short video (hosting on youtube):

and many more photos can be found in my [flickr set]

I've written about my trip out to the MRAO [before], but wanted to keep the theme up about quick posts about observatories...

The [Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory] (MRAO) is one of the UK's most impressive radio astronomy sites. It hosts a collection of fantastic telescopes that have been part of the developing radio astronomy since the birth of the subject. Of course, its probably best known as the site of the discovery of pulsars (that resulted in a noble prize). There are still some world leading telescopes there and AMI is doing some fantastic science.

If you get to go there you are likely to see the One-Mile telescope (an interferometer of antennas about a mile long):

Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI), a 20 GHz interferometer with both small and large arrays:

part of 4C (a cylindrical telescope):

and an element of the MERLIN array:

NGC1501 - a planetary nebula taken with the Faulkes Telescope:

I went to Paris for ADASS XXI - a computational astronomy conference - it was an interesting conference full of the wonders of GPUs (I wrote about the [conference] and my [poster] previously). anyway, I also did some site seeing as my lovely other half flew out (Birmingham to Paris is a rather short flight) and we did a weekend of site seeing... here are a few highlights:

Of course you can't go to Paris and not go on and on about the Eiffel Tower... so I will. We went up it on definitely the worst day whilst we were there. It was very reduced visibility but oddly eerily cool:

from the top you just couldn't see a thing:

though later that night, it was just spectacular:

A surprise highlight of my trip was going into the Galeries Lafayette, something that Elizabeth wanted to see... pretty expensive shop but one heck of a focus:

She also surprised me by suggesting we go to Sainte-Chapelle - I had heard of this but was blown away by the place. I supposedly looked very disappointed by the first, lower room:

but the upper room is just "wow":

We did the other tourist things, going to Notre-Dame, Sacre Coeur, the Louvre and a bunch of palaces and squares but I won't bore you with a discussion of each (but if you want to see some pictures go take a look [at my flickr set]). The other things that really stood out to me where the awesome size of La Défense:

and seemingly never ending Musée d'Orsay:

Overall we had a great time and well we got a lot in in such a short stay, probably helped by the epic metro... never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a train! On that note I'll leave you with a picture of sunset over Place de la Concorde:

(oh and if you want to see more did I mention [my flickr set]? :-) )

Whilst we were in [Croatia] we took a short trip over the border into Slovenia to go and visit the glacial Lake Bled. So this is part 4 of our visits while in Croatia. The lake is surrounded by mountains and forests and is very picturesque. The lake surrounds Bled Island which is the the only natural island in Slovenia - its actually a short journey across water to the island.. well short when someone else is doing the work.

As you can see in the above image there is a Church on the island. This is the Pilgrimage Church of the Assumption of Mary which has a 52-metre tower with a nice clock face:

Whilst at Lake Bled we also went and visited iconic Bled Castle and St Martin church, which are around the lake:

St Martin has some lovely stained glass windows:

The Castle, which dates back to the 10th century is on the top of a cliff and offers a stunning view over the lake:

We really quite enjoyed our visit to Slovenia, be it brief, but we would love to go back and explore more of the country.

For more pictures of our trip see [the flickr set]

We had a great night observing out at Wast Hills last night. It was really good fun, even if the cloud did come out and beat us in the end. I'll post a few of the photographs with more discussion later but for now I wanted to share two of my favourite images from last night. One was us capturing Jupiter with a 0.0001s exposure in the U band and imaging the cloud belts - that's a first for myself:

I also took my camera along last night, though alas I had my tripod but forgot the crucial bit that links my camera to it - oh well I still managed to get a few decent shots without the camera shake, such as:

The observatory with Orion rising in the background. As I say I'll post more later but if you are interested the full set of photos from last night can be found over on flickr.

2011 will always be one of the most memorable years in my life - it better be as I did get married :-)

The year started off with me being back in the UK for my birthday which was great but my time at home was all to short and I jetted back off to Calgary (Canada). It is always a sad time to end up back in an empty flat far away from family. Though saying that I do have some
epic friends out in Calgary too. Once back in Calgary it wasn't long before I was trying out something new... yep I went snowboarding for the first time:

Was painful and so far has turned out to be the last time. I just can't believe how poor my balance is.

In March my best-man Steve came over to visit me in Calgary and that was a lot of fun. Amongst the highlights of his trip over where seeing ice sculptures (and standing on the lake) at Lake Louise:

It wouldn't have been a proper trip over for him without taking in some hockey, so we went and
watched the outdoor WHL heritage game (that was damn cold!) and a couple of Flames games at the Saddledome:

We also went out and saw some world class snowboarding:

At the end of April I found it hard to get home, as stuff was falling off the building across the road from me!

In May, I said goodbye to Calgary as I had been offered a position at the University of Cambridge, back in the UK. I have to say I'm very glad to have come home and can spend a lot more time with my beautiful wife but I'll always have very fond memories of Calgary and miss lots about it - in particular the people. I wrote a detailed review of my time in Calgary. Though before I left Calgary I got to go to the wonderfully named small town of Vulcan:

Before I left Calgary I had a bit of a shock with a health issue, all was fine but lets just say I've since changed my work all hours, cut out go out drinking lots and living off caffeine.

In June I started at the Cavendish. I have to say I'm finding Cambridge a little different to the big
cities I'm used to. Oh and I got probably my best scientific result of the year accepted in June.

July was a very busy time. We were heavily involved in Wedding preparation though I did manage to stop for a few bits of fun. This included going to the British Grand Prix for the first time. Yes, it rained - it was a great time though.

July also involved my stag do, but we don't talk about that. It was great fun... we went go karting, had burgers and drank. Epic times.I even won a laser quest:

August... well this was a hectic month but all got more relaxed after the 19th. On the 19th we got married:

most of the better pictures aren't mine and well I feel bad about linking them so won't
(I wrote lots about the preparations before)

My wedding speech even made it onto youtube:

We took a short break to Bath as a honeymoon part 1.

In September I got to see my first supernova! (that's a star blowing up by the way)

and I took my first photo of a comet, Garrard:

October saw me start to settle into my new surroundings and I took my first trip out to the MRAO. I also had a paper on Ultra Steep Spectrum sources published.

At the of October we took our proper honeymoon out to Croatia, in particular Rovinj. It was absolutely beautiful.

The whole Istrian peninsula was full of interesting things, including lots of Roman sites. We also went inland to the Plitvice Lakes National Park - somewhere I'd love to spend a bit more time walking around.

In November I got to go to the University of Birmingham Vale Fireworks for the first time in 2 years so I was quite pleased - always
feels good to celebrate the saving of parliament by blowing up part of the country:

I got to take a trip over to Paris for ADASS XXI and I presented a poster on magnetic fields in GALFACTS. Elizabeth joined me after
the conference and we had a great weekend exploring Paris. Lots of fun.

At the end of the month we went out to Wast Hills and did some more of Messier catalogue but I went outside and tried out my camera at some night time constellation shots (Orion here above the dome):

and now its December. December has been a hectic month, and we are moving down to Cambridge in the new year so busy busy but we did manage to go out observing the other week and capture the Christmas tree cluser. Merry Christmas!

I'm looking forward to 2012... should be lots of fun. So far I have lots of observing planned, trip to India in Feb and tickets for the Olympics (alas just football). As a friend of mine said to me recently einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr

Not that long ago I managed to capture a lovely full Moon with a plane in the same field:

I love looking at the Orion nebula. Its always a lovely object to look at - its even better to take photos of it. I've not managed a properly deep image yet and the one that I'll show you below was affected by a pretty bright Moon. The Orion Nebula (Messier 42) is a diffuse nebula situated south of Orion's Belt and is a really easy binocular target.

The same photo with different contrast levels chosen to highlight different parts of the Nebula.

My first proper snow since I came back from Canada has been quite epic. We had quite a lot of snow over a few hours here in Cambridge. We went out for a quick gander on Saturday night, a nice midnight stroll in the snow.

This morning we went out for a walk a bit further down the road and it was obvious that there had been some drifting going on - some parts were very deep. Lots of fun until I got covered in snow by t'other one.

I do now hope it all goes away by Wednesday... we have a flight to catch!

Today has been long, actually it still feels like yesterday. In an hour or so I start my first run of 10 hours with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. I love observing, but not when i'm this tired, though its not that bad. The flight from Heathrow to Mumbai was pretty nice. I watched a couple of good films (50/50 which in no means should be described as a comedy - was really sad!) and had a nice veggie curry. We landed and our car wasn't there - no fear we got it sorted but made an otherwise stressful journey more so. Oh well. We are now at the GMRT and I'm eager to get on with the science. Of course, though we have had time for a few photographs. I wanted to start off with one of the funny things I saw (and managed to capture) on the road:

Yes, that is a guy reading a broadsheet on the back of a motorcycle! Oh, how India does it differently.

We made it to the GMRT just before "snacks" so the sweetest cuppa you can ever have was waiting for me nicely. We then went and had a wonder around a few of the dishes while the sunset:

and of course the important me standing in front of antenna photo:

I'll post more as we go on, and I'll dump all of my India photos in this flickr set.

The second day of us being in India kinda merged into the first. So far the observations that I came over todo are going well and I'm even processing some of the data - so at least I'm not too sleepy. We have spent most of our time so far sat in the GMRT terminal room, not the most of exotic places but the area around the telescope is quite nice - and the control room has some wildlife of its own:

I've also got my second, WTF India images:

Yes I had a shower. It was safe. Heated water first, turned off power. Had a fight with a spider. Won. Had a shower. But gosh look at that. Now I think the UK is overly cautious about power in the bathroom but that is scary.

Oh and here are some lovely flowers that are all over the site:

When I'm less tired and when I've got a bit more time I'll sit down and write up the last few days. They have been amazing. We visited the Ellora and Ajanta caves, which were mind blowing. The carving of the stone is just unbelievable. We also spent a couple of nights in Aurangabad which was quite nice - the hotel was really nice. Now back to observing and the GMRT.

For now a few quick pics, Ellora (yes this was cut out of the rock!):

Ajanta:

and the little Taj Mahal (Bibi Ka Maqbara), Aurangabad:

As I said yesterday we took a few days out todo some travelling. I've still not had chance to put all of our images online yet and I've not even had chance to properly reflect on what we saw - it was just unreal. Anyway, I thought whilst I have a few minutes while my data is processing, that I'd share a few other images of our recent travels around Maharashtra.

Lets start off with a few WTF India images...

Yes that is avoid head-on collisions whilst over taking. I bet that's a common thing to happen and definitely worth having advice about, even if the sign before says no overtaking on corner...

A great way to transport goods - and block the single lane for a few kilometres.

Back to Ellora - and I really wanted to give you an idea of the size of some of these caves, so I had a willing assistant:

Probably my favourite cave at Ellora was the Buddhist cave 10, the vaulted ceiling is just stunning:

Some elephants at Ajanta:

and finally a bit of the paintwork (many more shots like this to come):

We have been in Pune for a few days now and have done a bit of exploring, including some clothes shopping and a bit of tourism. Pune is a quite nice city and the easiest way to get around appears to be by auto-rickshaw which is no where near as bad as I thought it would be (I'll upload a video once back in the UK).

On Friday we took a short walk through the sprawling University campus and went and took a look at one of the highlights of our guide book - the University main building.

This was built in 1864 and was known as the Governor's House. It currently looks like their is some renovations going on though.

On the way back we came past a site that was quite fitting:

But we also came across another, what the... ,

Yes that's bricks hanging from the power lines. Odd, must have some purpose but not a good one I'm sure.

A site that you see around lots of Pune is statues of Ganesh, a Hindu god:

There a lots of little temples or jotted over the place and I think a few can even be found in the middle of the road, which is most inconvenient for all parties!

Earlier today we went over to the Pune botanical gardens and saw the largest bats I've ever seen:

Anyway, that's all for now - I'm about to start my last observing run of my time in India this year - so lets all hope for no scintillation and no RFI (radio frequency interference).

India has many options for fast food. This varies from the random looking food cart on the street (which you should NEVER eat from) to the very fancy restaurants. We didn't eat at either during our stay in Maharashtra. We did, however, eat at some very good "hotels" - which seems to me as a means of distinguishing that they aren't just some dodgy cafe. We ate lots of excellent food including some of the best thali I've ever had (and it was unlimited) in Aurangabad (here is a pic of the place). You really have a massive selection, even the proper restaurants that we ate in provided a very fast service. Around Mumbai there was many options but of course we were a bit selective where we ate. Though saying that when we went past a McDonalds we just had to give it a go. I'm a vegetarian so probably not the choice you would imagine but I wanted to see what Elizabeth thought of a Maharajah Mac. I think she quite enjoyed it, though the big surprise was their selection of Veg options. This included a delicious McSpicy:

Its basically a paneer burger. Something I really wish they offered in the UK. When we left Mumbai we decided to go to KFC at the airport and yet again I was delighted with the number of veggie options which also included a veggie burger. The best veggie burger I've ever had was at Montana's cookhouse salon in Calgary but this one is not far off it:

Yet again I'm left thinking that I wish these options were available in the UK. Maybe I should write them a letter? I bet it wouldn't do much, and its not like we eat at either of these places often but it would help (I can think of a few occasions that it would have saved my brother-in-law times).

I've still got lots to write about our time in India, it went way too fast but was lots of fun. We spent a couple of days in Mumbai after my time at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics was over. It was a good few days. Overall I found Mumbai quite a dirty place, much dirty than Pune and there seemed to be much more rubble around the place. The part of Mumbai we stayed in, Colaba at times could look like European country with grand Victorian buildings lining the streets. I guess that's cause this was the heart of Victorian British India. One of the most striking sites is the Gateway of India:

which was rammed the first time we went there. It appeared that there was some kind of rally going on. The second time we went it was much more relaxed still there was obvious security with our bags being checked on both occasions. Again though its the same security you see across all of India - you go through a metal detector, it goes off and you are waved on. Its a shame you can't walk through the Gateway but apart from that it was one of my favourite sites in Mumbai. I was definitely non-plussed about the Taj Mahal hotel next to it. I'm sure its fantastic inside, but a price I wasn't willing to pay.

The University of Mumbai appears to be quite expansive, not to the same extent as Pune (in this location anyway), and their is some lovely buildings:

Of course we continued my tradition of finding the cathedral and taking a few pictures. St. Thomas Cathedral in Mumbai from the outside doesn't look that grand and indeed on the inside its quite basic but does have some nice stained glass windows. It also has some "interesting" dedications from the East India trading company - really makes you step back in time a little.

Probably the best place we visited was the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India). We spent something like 5 hours wondering around this expansive museum.

Oh and I even fell down there stairs there - just as we were leaving and since we were getting a flight at 2am meant I was feeling a bit achy all the way home.

All in all, we quite enjoyed Mumbai but I don't think we would have found much to do past the few days we stayed.

M34 is an open cluster in Perseus which can be seen by the naked eye.. but you will need properly dark skies, so that means well away from urban areas. Its a nice binocular object though, even from light polluted city streets.

A short image of the Ring Nebula out at Wast Hills. It is a rather prominent planetary nebula well worth a look through a telescope:

M36 is an open cluster in Auriga - its a good binocular target and is some 4,000 light years away from the Earth. If this star cluster were as close as the Pleiades are then it would look very similar from the Earth.

M52 is an open cluster in the Cassiopeia constellation. This is a good binocular target and you will see some 200 or so stars belonging to the cluster:

A couple of weeks back I got to go to Amsterdam for 36 hours or so for a radionet meeting (on a project called Hilado). The meeting was very interesting and we talked about lots of radio astronomy computing - something I'm always very happy to be doing. Though in some respects the highlight for me was going to the Netherlands. I've been through Schiphol a few times before but never actually entered the country. I was quite suprised just how easy it was to get from the airport in to the main town. I stayed up in Zaandam in a really weird looking hotel:

We flew over to Amsterdam with EasyJet and got the normal delays. Though it was almost comedy on the way out. Firstly, the police needed to remove a dude of the plane. No one came forward with the name they were suggesting so they had to go through all of our passports on the plane. They found the person and took him off. Was very strange. They then had to get us all to indentify our bags but in parallel one of the overhead compartent catches had to be replaced... but that took a while - oh the joys.

Anyway, once in Amsterdam I had a good time and even managed a bit of time post the meeting for a wonder around. I think I'll have to go back for a weekend at some point - lots to see and well a couple of hours wasn't ever going to do it justice.

The area around the hotel in Zaandam, was quite nice:

but I do think I saw everything there is to see in Zaandam in my hour walk after breakfast (apart from going down to the wind mills - which were too far away but are probably the main attraction).

As I said I only did a whislte stop tour around Amsterdam central and it was heaving with people. I'll have to go back again.

More pics over on flickr.

It's now been a year since [I left Calgary] to come back to the UK. Time has flown by and I can't quite believe that it was a year ago. Its quite fitting that I write this now, my rebate for tax from the Government of Canada just got deposited in my account :-)

The last year has been at times rather stressful but has had some very good highlights. I just can't believe how fast it has gone.
In all fairness that should be expected as I started new job, moved house twice (including a period of time where I spent the week in some house
in Cambridge and the weekend in Brum), got married and did various bits of travelling.

I think the highlight of my time being back in the UK so far has to be getting married. That involved lots of work but was just
awesome. It was great to see everyone again, some old friends that I just don't see often enough.

There are moments when I do miss being in Calgary, but that's mostly the people - I made some good friends out in Canada. I also miss the weather, cold in winter warm in summer. It always appeared to either be gorgeous sunshine or snowing there. Its May and its just dank here and has been overcast for about a two weeks.The time in Calgary really did me good and I think I grew up a lot during it. Nice to be able to compare the living in two countries and just how similar many things are.

Though I really have had a great year that has involved a decent amount of travelling would have liked a bit more but less of the 3 hour train journeys (one way) between Birmingham and Cambridge.

We managed to go to India for some observing at the GMRT and a little bit of travelling ([day 1], [day 2], [Ellora and Aurangabad], [Ajanta], [Pune], [KFC], [Mumbai]):

To [Paris for a conference], and a weekend off:

For a meeting in [The Netherlands]:

and oh honeymoon to Bath and Croatia/Slovenia ([Plitvice Lakes],[Pula Groznjan],[Rovinj], [Lake Bled] ):

Though more important than any of that - I got to go to the [new Wembley] at last!

More recently I became the Outreach Officer in the Astrophysics group so that means lots more of what I really enjoy - talking about astronomy.

So overall, not too bad a year. Now onto the second and my second as a post-doc at the University of Cambridge - I wonder what the next year to offer? Should be fun.