Right now I work as a support astronomer at the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). My current projects concern writing real-time image processing software for the Faulkes Telescope project, fully robotic 2m optical telescopes under construction in Hawaii (Faulkes North) and Australia (Faulkes South). These completely unmanned observatories will be internet accessible by educational establishments around the world for scheduled and live observations.

I got my PhD in "A Study on Ground Based Optical Space Debris Detection" in 1999 at the Unit for Space Sciences and Astrophysics (USSA) of the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC). It looked at two aspects of detection of space debris with ground-based optical observatories: a real-time detection algorithm to spot debris passing through the telescope's field of view, and a means to improve the detection rate for a particular debris orbit/site pair by creating a map of detection rate "hot spots" in the sky.

In 2000, after I left Kent, the USSA moved to join the Open University's Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute (PSSRI). A separate department remains at Kent, the Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CAPS).

If you're having trouble getting to sleep at nights, you can download all 15MB of my thesis from here. It's in PDF format so you will need the Adobe Reader installed, available free from the Adobe website.

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