The company I keep

This afternoon I'm giving a talk in the Physics Department at Queen Mary, University of London (I used to know it as Queen Mary and Westfield College, but I don't know why they dropped the Westfield!) Looking at the other people giving departmental seminars this semester I seem to be in good company - three FRS's, a dame, an OBE, the Lucasian Professor, and mainly Professors (not lowly Post-docs!) I hope my talk on gravitational waves doesn't disappoint.

Back to the chalk board

Tomorrow see's me restarting my lecture course (same one as the last two years). This year I've LaTeXed up my lecture notes (well a chunk of them so far), so that they're readable to both me and the students. Hopefully it'll be worth it! Let's bring the joys of Observational Methods to the students...

Do you want to make it BIGGER!!!

Before the lecture I gave today I was searching on google image search for a nice diagram on how telescope magnification worked. On my cursory glancing I couldn't find any that I thought were particularly good, so I decided to use the highly non-intuitive power of Adobe Illustrator to create one myself. My effort can be seen below. Feel free to use this if you think it's good, or send me any comments on how to make it better, as I still have the Illustrator file which can be edited (I can email this to anyone who wants it.) By the way the image of Jupiter isn't mine - I have to credit Cassini for that.

Week in brief

Rather than an extensive post on any one thing that I've done this week this post will just be a brief review:

• I restarted lecturing a first year astronomy course on Observational Methods. This is a course I first lectured last year, but I've had a bit of a rearrange of the various parts to make it a bit more coherent. I think I'm more confident with the course this year and the lectures have flowed more easily (plus I bought myself a book on Observational Astronomy to help me through), but the students will be the ultimate judge of whether I'm any good.
  
• Other than lecturing I've mainly been revising this Living Reviews article on Gravitational Wave Detection by Interferometry (Ground and Space). One of my work colleagues and myself have been given the task of updating it as a fair bit has happened in the world of interferometric gravitational wave detectors since the article was published in 2000.
  
• I attended the annual Glasgow Uni Astronomy Society Burns Supper. On a couple of previous years I've had the privilege of giving a speech at this illustrious event (replying from the non-Scot's), but this year I was spared. As always it was a fun evening despite a couple of hitches, and their were a couple of very good speeches by Hazel and Ellie - almost on a par with my own efforts ;) By far the strangest part of the night was nearly bumping into Ann Widdecombe in the GUU where we were having the meal. She was attending some bizarre, and rather disturbing, pro-life meeting there - the presence of which had attracted a fair few protesters, and a police presence, outside the GUU.
  
• I had the densest and most meaty (but very tasty) sausages know to man at Blas, in what proved to be one of the most rushed dining out experiences I've ever had.
  
• I went to an Australia Day barbeque, proposed by our resident Aussie Siong and held in the outback (out back of Bob and Ellie's flat that is - sorry for the poor, poor joke). Being winter in Scotland, rather than summer in Australia, this was a slightly wet affair. However, we tried to catch the spirit of what it would have been like to be on a hot, sunny beach, drinking from some icey cold tinny's whlst another shrimp was tossed onto the barbie. Even though the wet weather proved our partial downfall, a lot of meat was cooked and eaten and some beers were drunk, and isn't that what being Australian is all about anyway.
  
• I partly killed one of the new astronomy grad students PhDs by noticing a paper on astro-ph on pretty much what he was planning on doing. It was a topic that myself and my boss were discussing last year (albeit in a slightly different vein to how it's been used in the above article) and even did the same basic calculations, but obviously we weren't the only ones thinking about it! You've got to be quick off the mark in this game.
  

That is all!

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let me begin...

Today I gave my first undergraduate astronomy lecture on Observational Methods - or telescopes and detectors as the majority of the course will be. The lecture style I have decided upon isn't quite the fully old school chalk and talk method (my writing-on-the-blackboard skills aren't well developed enough for that), but is fairly routed in non-digital technology by using overhead projector slides. These are supplemented with the standard array of handouts and a few nice pictures displayed, in a nod towards digital technology, via the medium of my laptop and a digital projector. The first lecture seemed to go fairly smoothly with no full on technological breakdowns, or student riots or walkouts. I was also there on time and didn't overrun - what more could you ask for? I'm not sure, however, if the students are too enamoured with the amount of writing they were expected to do. In the classic tone of "You don't know how lucky you are! In my day..." I should tell them that my, in my opinion, fairly sparse slides are nothing compared to the amount writing I did in some of my undergraduate courses - and I was bloody well grateful for it to! To be fair to the students I've not actually received this complaint, but it was more of a feeling I got. Given time their hands will get used to writing notes and they'll appreciate what good training I'm giving them when it comes to having to write lots in their exams ;) Also, as I'm kind at heart, I've posted the lectures on the web for the students to download, despite rather sternly telling them that I wouldn't do it until the course was finished as I didn't trust them to not just stop turning up at the lectures. Anyway giving the lecture was actually quite fun and hopefully the students might actually enjoy them! I'll have to think of some good off-topic anecdotes to tell them - "... and I saw this telescope and it was THIS big!"