Steve Longmore - Home Page

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A little about me

I'm currently living in Coogee, Sydney and am a joint PhD student of the Department of Astrophysics and Optics at the University of New South Wales, and the Australia Telescope National Facility (part of CSIRO). My research focuses on understanding Massive Star Formation under the supervision of Dr Michael Burton (UNSW)and Dr Tony Wong (ATNF/UNSW). As an observational astronomer, I spend a large amount of time away from Sydney observing at infrared and mm/radio telescopes so have created this web site mostly as an online book-marker for sites and files I use regularly. If you want to get in touch, contact details can be found here.

I was born on the Big Island of Hawaii, have an Australian mother, English father, two younger sisters and spent most of my formative years growing up in Penicuik, a town roughly 10 miles south of Edinburgh in Scotland. Looking back, I seem to have spent a lot of this time playing sport; mostly football, running in the Pentland Hills and lots of basketball (our High School team made it to the Final of the Scottish Cup in the 1997-98 season). After finishing school in 1998, I moved to England to study Physics and Astronomy at Durham University and graduated with a Masters in 2002. While at Grey College, I kept busy playing sport, tinkling the ivories and playing clarinet/singing in various bands/orchestras. I moved to Sydney to start my PhD in 2003, which happened to coincide with the year the IAU General Assembly was held in Sydney. As the UNSW astro department was heavily involved in organising the conference, I ended up running several of the Symposium web sites and was technical editor for the conference proceedings book from Symposium 221 - "Star Formation at High Angular Resolutions". I now live in Coogee and to make the most of living near the beach, I started ocean swim racing in the summer (but still play football in the winter - this time for UNSW). Since moving to Sydney I've been involved in a lot of astronomy outreach work giving talks and starlab planetarium shows (including a week touring New South Wales for "Astronomy on the Go") as well as tutoring several undergraduate courses and lecturing the "Big Questions in Astronomy" course at the Eastern Suburbs Community College.