Foundary to Close

Basically my favourite bar and art gallery in London is closing - this was where I had my 25th birthday (or was it the 26ths?), it is where Alaric used to take me to meet up with geeky people who knew when transits of space stations where going to happen and were to look even in the built up area. It is where my friends have had their art work displayed and where I was concidering doing an exhibition

Sucky sucky - and why? Is it not doing well? No! The site its on is being developed into a hotel and yet another main stream gallery - like we need any more of them especially in London :/

Anyway you can read more about it here.

Higgs Boson Anthology

I have a poem published in an Anthology about theoretical particles

The Higgs Boson Anthology

Caroline Herschel

Caroline is the sister of the more famous astronomer Sir Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel but though he is known and well respected she is often seen as just his assistant.

Born 16 March 1750 to what really amounts to a rather abusive family in Germany she owed a lot to her brother for rescuing her at risk of his own freedom. He bought her to England where he had already started to establish himself as an astronomer. The siblings were basically self made financially and work hard.

Though she started off just assisting him she ended up carrying out the brunt of the work rising before her brother to write things up and generally going to bed after him.

She also made a great many discoveries on her own and even after her brothers death worked hard to varify his discoveries something that is often seen as dull but is if anything more valuable to the world at large. She produced a catalogue of nebulae which she recieved a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1828. This helped her nephew John Herschel in his work - she took on the role of raising John and was the honoured guest at his graduation dispite an initial falling out with her sister-in-law.

Caroline and Mary Somerville were also elected as the first honorary women members of the Royal Astronomical Society In 1835. She obtain many other rewards and has craters and asterial bodies named after her - she was still going at 96 with the astronomy!

During work with her brother they both sustained physical hardship and injuries such as frost bite and in Carolines case being impaled on a peg holding down the telescope

She was a brave woman who had to over come alot on a personal front, her brothers hogging of the lime light is more an artifact of the age they lived in than a reflection on them. But even in such an age she won awards that would not be awarded to a women again in well over a hundred years.

And though she did not have any children she none the less raised a child and continued in her scientific endervours without neglect of his needs.

This is why I have chosen Caroline for this years Ada Lovelace Day - whilst I was in the meteoritics department I came across articles about her and it inspired me to keep going

Using the Electron Mircoprobe

Today I went into the lab once more and place the lunar sample into the machine - this time instead of blasting it with x-rays to get element maps I was picking out specific points to hit with an electron beam and see what they are made off.

First off we picked a selection of elements that I wanted to get proportions of and then I picked the points I wanted to know about specifically. From the element maps and the back scatter image I had taken previously I knew that I apparently had several minerals (I had trudged through four large tomes of mineralogy and lunar/planetary stuff to find out what sort of things I might have lurking in the sample. I had then taken the element maps and compared them - drawn faint scetches of them and then working out what elements I had in conjection where drew on mineral areas with coloured pens onto a printout of the backscatter image. (He told me this was actually an x-ray map just not element specific so I need to check whats what with him I think).

They seemed quiet impressed that I had done this but it seemed like the only way to make things clear to me personally. I was becoming frustrated that I couldn't work out the actual proportions and therefore the exact minerals from the elelment maps and that I could only narrow things down. Fortunatly this is what today was actually about so I worked out how many samples I wanted and were to take the measurements - unfortunatly becuase there is a bad polish on the sample I had to be careful and was highly restricted in where I could take measurements.

But I selected 101 points each point was going to take about 9 minutes to analyse but I specifically went in early to get it all going and as it turned out had plenty of time.

I had also narrowed down the minerals really far more accuratly that I thought I had and I had worked out stuff about my 'dirty' quartz that that does seem to be correct which is very cool and makes me feel like I might just have a chance of doing this.

The only thing is I found myself baulkin at the interface of data and computers - there are situations that I just see no reason not to have a computer automate and I think they should be relatively easy to implement and yet there is nothing! This keeps happening every where I turn in geology and earth sciences there is just huge gaps that computers could feel reducing monkey work and increasing the amount of research that can be analysis in depth!

Other issues that I have had is finding information barred to me - this is painful when I would happily pay say £10 for an e-book of the phase diagrams I needed or even just the chapters I needed - then and there I may even have gone up to £20 but it is only avalible as a book and at around $300 which sucks big time.

Can anyone tell me what the restrictions would be on me finding data in papers and ploting my own graphs/diagrams and then putting them on the internet for free so that people like me don't get stuck like this? I just needed a guid to see if I was on the right path. The question of science on the net has been interesting me alot in the past year and I wonder lots about hwo things are going - I like sharing info and I think it helps move projects and science as a whole on but there are those who tell me that I sholdn't talk about my projects and ideas incase they are published by other first.

Also there is the question of funding and where the money is coming from to do the research - I find myself pondering over the wole peer review system and how a nice fast version could apply to articles on line - making the turn around of science much faster without loosing the reliablity.

It is a thorny problem and I feel slightly swamped in it.

Oh well I'm sure I'll sort it all out eventually

The only scary thing about todays stuff was that if I want to go out of the lab I have to remember to press a button that puts an alunium or copper block infront of my electron beam so that it doesn't burn a whole in the sample - this made me quiet nervous!

analysing the moon rock

Friday saw me once again wending my weary way to London.

This time I was going in to carbon coat my lunar meteorite thin section and put it in the machine to make X-ray maps of specific elements. I felt very nervous as I hadnt done anywhere near the amount of reading I had ment to do for it what with boundary disbutes and work stuff etc...

And I had been highly confusing myself by trying to learn lunar mineralogy from scratch - complete with minerals I have never heared off! I had started making a list of elements mentioned in association with lunar minerallogy and then side tracked myself - turns out if I had completed this it would have been a very good start - oh well.

I was a bit sad when I arrived that the sample was already in being carbon coated - I assume the machine works by some sort of spluttering of carbon. You coat the sample to help get a clearer image by stopping alot of the interference(I think). This means I only got a pic of it carbon coated thin section and my hands were shaking so its not a very good picture anyway but this is a piece of the moon that fell to Earth in a meteorite that Landed in Africa.

The Carbon coating machine:

My piece of carbon coated moon rock!

This means I also have to be weary of terrestrial contamination when analysing it.

I took photos of the machine and bits around it!

What I have done for the mini project is just selected one breccia clast/grain out of this thin section from a few cubic cm's of lunar meteorite to ananlyse. This really is looking at the fine detail - I always have to remember that it is part of a system, part of a big over all picture, the small makes up the big and the big affects the small.

We chose which elements to map for, then defined the mapping area which was just slightly bigger than the clast. An important fact is that no matter how good the polish on the surfacce of the section it is not completely flat so to get golod results you have to sort of take the four corners and average them into a focus plan. At least this is what I understood to be happening.

Anyway I selected with some help the elements that I wanted maps for and the grand total time was 56 hours running time for the machine - wowowow. Of course this is why I was in there on a Friday afternoon so that I could have the machine run over the weekend - I clicked the button to start it and away it went.

I then proceeded to make a fool out of my self by saying - its obviously regolith isnt it - erm... we dont know came the reply. I am also very intreged by the clast I have chosen to analyse - it looks like two main minerals interlocked in some sort of intergrowth way - each with its own specific selection of other mineral inclusions.

I am a bit worried that I just dont remember enough mineralogy to do this project justice :/

Still I think I may have some idea of whats going on but suffered that thing of not wanting to say anything incase I was wrong and they thought I was stupid and wasting their time and effort. I now need to go and work out the correct scientific termonolgy instead of inventing my own - again.

Still I got to take pics of the sample being mounted in the machine including the adding of the highly conductive copper sticky tap that also keeps it in place!

There was one interesting point - the machine appears to do a continues scan but it doesnt it stops every .... and 'dwells' for.... this leads me onto something else I have been pondering recently - how different are analogue and didigital - you came make one appear as another depending on resolution etc... but this needs a me to do a bit more thinking and maybe write a few books on the nature of existance I feel!

Once I have worked out the mineral phases in the sample - which I will do from these elemental maps I will be putting it in the microprob for furthure analysis.

I think that for my oral presingtation and poster I will therefore need to focus on what we know of the moon from meteorites rather than just what we know about the moon.

I am getting very excited about all this - its the thought of being able to tie in the mineralogy of crystals grains within a clast with a brecciated meteorite to lunar and even solar and possible even universe formation processes!

Happyness is once again rock shaped. Though I am hoping the element doesn't blow over the week end - it was a new one this week so hopefully it will last!