Hello fellow fellow astrogeeks,

Now, you may be wondering “ermm, who are you again?”, which is completely understandable since I have just basically disappeared completely from my own blog page. Well, I now want to change that now I have more free time, yes you heard me correctly, I now have more free time!

So, ermm, what have you been up to these past 8/9 months or so, backpacking?

Sadly no, nothing anywhere near quite as exciting or fanciful as that, although I’ve been doing something far more interesting. “What’s that?”, I hear you cry, well it’s me being busy finishing my undergraduate degree with the Open University, with my last module, SM358-The Quantum World, completed in early June my OU journey (at undergraduate level at least) is now at an end. So now all I have to do is wait for my final module result so I can obtain my degree and its classification, so fingers crossed for the oncoming results this late July. However, I also obtained results from modules I completed last year in September/October and I luckily got fairly okay passes in those with one being for my project/dissertation with the conspicuous and rather convoluted title, ‘Highly Collimated Molecular Outflows Emanating from YSOs: Their Components and the Underlying Driving Wind’. If you’re interested in reading my project/dissertation/literary review, then please feel free to read it below. Be warned, it’s not a work of art nor by any means comprehensive, but hopefully the science will be to your liking as I found it rather exciting, especially the interdisciplinary mix of Astronomy, Physics and Chemistry in there.

Project is down here:

*REMOVED*

Project is up there:

That’s great, but what’s next, going off to finally get yourself a ‘proper job’?

In all honesty what exactly is a, ‘proper job’, in my opinion there is no such thing so go off and do whatever makes you feel happy and fulfilled, even if that’s sweeping the roads. Anyway, without going too far off topic there, I’ll be venturing off to Milton Keynes to study Full-Time at the OU, so in reality my OU journey hasn’t actually come to an end, as the famous saying goes ” as another door closes, another one opens”, regardless on who or what is metaphorically closing the door this is true generally in life.

Oh dear, Astronomy again?

Yes, it’s Astronomy (hardly going to be Psychology now was it ;-)) and my first step into postgraduate life will be studying for a research degree, an MPhil to be precise, and I’ve even been given the nifty thesis title of: ‘Data Mining for Extragalatic AstroChemistry’. No beating about the bush here, I’m literally ‘mining’ data, most likely from the Japanese AKARI telescope; a charming space-based Telescope analysing pretty much the entire infrared range. Another factor is that the satellite was decommissioned in late 2011 due to electrical failure, and we still have tonnes of data most likely untouched, so this is where slavery comes in… I’m joking of course, It’s a thrilling time to be involved in all areas of Astronomy, lets hope lack of resources won’t halt progress!

Anyway, that’s it for my ramblings today, I’ll be blogging away on as many things as I can… I might add a little section on postgrad study if people want that sort of thing? Let me know in the poll below.

Take care astrogeeks

Yours, The ObAstro