Dr Beau Webber - Personal home page
Hi,
I am a research scientist who loves live music, photography, astronomy, reading, travel, swimming and scuba diving.
Music:
I build and maintain a web page to promote live music in the county of Kent, UK :
where there are gig calenders and monthly news pages,
so there is no need to miss an event.
So if you are putting on a gig or event in Kent, please do send me information about it and I will try and get the event listed on the web page calendar and news.
From time to time I put on music events, where possible in the
Littlebourne Thatched Barn,
and usually fiddle-led, see :
FiddlersVarious.
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www.KentFolk.com music pages
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Research:
I research into matter that is structured on the nano-scale to micro-scale using NMR and neutron scattering and x-ray scattering. In particular, I study the properties of liquids in nano-metric pores - the small sizes greatly changes the properties of ordinary materials -
i.e. water/ice may freeze and melt at -20C.
These facts can be used to probe the properties of ordinary materials like house roof tiles. (How frost durable are they ? What pore sizes do they have ?) These techniques can also be used to investigate subjects as diverse as the behaviour of oil and water in rocks, as well as the properties of the rocks themselves, the behaviour of high-performance (nano-material) batteries and the adsorption and release properties drug molecules in small pores.
I believe that I have also successfully shown that the water/ice system near surfaces is disordered, and may be plastic (in a predominantly rotational state), down to below -50C.
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Research
Home Pages
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Photography
Panoramas
I have fun with stitching together panoramic images from photos I have taken. There are a number of tools for this, but some of the more powerful are PanoTools and PTgui
www.ptgui.com
Bluebells, Crundale woods, Kent, UK
Soriano nel Cimino, Italy.
Images © Dr. Beau Webber
For some these and some others of my stretched and panorama pictures,
pinned to their location on Google Earth maps, see :
www.panoramio.com/user/1020456
Stereo Panoramas
I also have fun creating stereo images and panoramas
- I have written a viewer in which one can zoom into stereo panoramas,
and then pan around, and change brightness and contrast to improve visibility.
Go to
www.lab-tools.com/instrumentation/StereoPanorama/ to download a free viewer.
I created this at the time of the landing of the Mars rover "Spirit",
to look at the 360 degree panoramas of the Mars landscape that it was
sending back. There are lots of links on that page to a range of stereo panoramas.
Here is an example from using StereoPanorama to give a stereo-view,
into a photo-pair from an earlier Mars landing :
A view into part of a panoramic stereo image pair in colour
from an early Pathfinder mission.
Images © Nasa; stereo-images © Dr. Beau Webber
Astronomy & Photography
I do not have a good camera mount on my Newtonian yet (no-longer have access to a metal workshop), but here is a photo obtained by just hand-holding a light-weight 5M pixel digital camera at the eyepiece :
A crescent moon - 2004-03-26.
Image © Dr. Beau Webber
Recently I have used StereoPanorama to look at full-colour
stereo-pairs of comet P17/Holmes, that I have created from others' superb photos.
The stereo-effect just comes from the comet motion, but it seems to help the brain separate the delicate comet corona and tail from the background stars.
Here is an example pair created from :
Left stereocomponent:
spaceweather.com/comets/holmes/05nov07/Jack-Newton1.jpg
www.arizonaskyvillage.com/
Right stereocomponent:
http://spaceweather.com/comets/holmes/05nov07/Ivan-Eder1.jpg
eder.csillagaszat.hu/en.htm
A zoomed stereo-pair view into 17P/Holmes halo and tail structure. 2007-11-4+5.
Images © Jack Newton (L), Ivan Eder (R);
stereo-images © Dr. Beau Webber
For more full-colour stereo-pair views of 17P/Holmes,
including some of the ion-tail disconnection, see :
www.beauwebber.me.uk/stereo/comet_17P-Holmes/
Swimming and Scuba Diving
To learn more about scuba diving with a brilliant club, see :
www.bsac.org
Here are some links to a wonderful set of warm-water dives I made from the Eastern islands of Malaysia :
www.beauwebber.me.uk/dive-reports/2006/2006-07-25_Malaysia-east-coast-islands
www.beauwebber.me.uk/dive-reports/2006/2006-07-31_Malaysia-dive1_Lang-Tengah_DCoconut
www.beauwebber.me.uk/dive-reports/2006/2006-08-03_Malaysia-dive2_Perhentian-Isles_Tanjung-Basi
www.beauwebber.me.uk/dive-reports/2006/2006-08-03_Malaysia-dive3_Perhentian-Isles_DLagoon
Diving in the Perhentian Isles, Malaysia. 2006-08-03.
Images © Dr. Beau Webber
E-mail me : J.B.W.Webber@kent.ac.uk
or see my thesis,
or some of my posters
or go to my folk music page KentFolk.com
- cheers, beau webber
First created: 2006-04-26, updated 2007-11-14 :
