Them things up there sparkling in the sky

I apologise if the grammer of my title offends some, I was just mearly mimicing the scouse that I'm countinuously surrounded by living in this city.  I'm not complaining though I love it here and I wouldn't be here if I didn't :)

I finally have 4/10 slides done for my talk, with dialogue too :) I have decided to find interesting facts that are really exciting to me.  This way I'll have more to say and being excited about a topic when talking about it always makes people more interested in what you're saying, especailly when trying to get kids excited about science.

I always found science exciting :)  The cool experiements can do so you can really see how it works.  It's really satisfying and understanding the world around you helps in understanding the possibilities life hold.  There's also the fact that the more answers your get the less you feel you understand as you do understand more you just now have more questions that you want answered.  It's a never ending cycle and it's fun :)  I actually cant wait to start teaching and passing on my knowledge and if just one child gains excitement about science like I did when I was younger I think that would be an amazing feeling =D

Whilst writing my talk I've really been trying not to just go off on one and write way too much about one thing leaving no room for anything else.  It's actually quite difficult once you know something to a certain level to then explain it in simple terms for someone who doesn't have your knowledge to understand.  That's another aspect of teaching I'm excited about, figuring out the best way for me to communicate the information required at the right level and making it interesting so that it'll be taken in :)  

So my title for my talk is 'Nuclear reactors of the night sky' I'm still unsure about it, but I cant think of anything better and I was taking too long over it so I've left it at that for now.  It does sound a little epic, but nuclear is a word that people associate with destruction.  I know that it's fairly intuitive to do so due to the recent past and that's fair enough.  Being a physicist it becomes quite irritating when the word is left off things too for example MRI is actually NMRI where the N stand for nuclear.  The process is by no means dangerous, here's a wiki link to show this.

I dont seem to have written much about my talk, but I've written quite a bit for today so I shall finish with a pic that I've found that I really like and I'll write about stars tomorrow :)

This is the pleiades star cluster.  It's about 400 light years away and about 13 light years across and it contains over 3000 stars.  It can actually be seen through binoculars from a light polluted city, I think that's really awesome and it's very pretty :)


image from here