Hello, I’m Alun.* I do a few things at the moment.

I’m one of the archae­oastro­nomers asso­ci­ated with the Uni­ver­sity of Leicester. At the moment I’m work­ing in the Centre for Inter­dis­cip­lin­ary Sci­ence on edu­ca­tional mater­ial for Physicists.

I also work for AoB Blog, a web­log for the Annals of Bot­any and AoB PLANTS. The design of my site tends to be exper­i­mental as a test­bed for AoB Blog.

My PhD Thesis is Cre­at­ing col­lect­ive iden­tit­ies through astro­nomy? A study of Greek temples in Sicily. The aim was to see if there’s any truth in the claim that Greek temples face East and if they do why should any­one care? It’ll even­tu­ally be avail­able via open-access. There’s four five six papers which need to be writ­ten up from it.

Some blog entries may be pass­worded, This is because it’s work in pro­gress and I don’t want it being cited any­where else before it’s fin­ished. If you want to read them then you can under the terms that you don’t repro­duce any part of it, till it’s pub­licly access­ible, If you can live with that then the pass­word is usu­ally accept.

I take pho­tos when I can. Most of these pho­tos are released with Cre­at­ive Com­mons licences via Flickr. Where pos­sible they’re avail­able for com­mer­cial use, but restric­tions at some sites mean this is not always possible.

You can also fol­low me on Friend­Feed, which tracks what I’m post­ing to sites like Lib­ra­r­yThing and Zotero amongst other places. These days though I spend more time on Google+ either with my per­sonal account or my pro­fes­sional account.

*It’s unpro­nounce­able in Eng­lish. In Welsh the u is pro­nounced as an i. Try say­ing Alin and you’d have it exactly right, but for some reason people can’t say Alin after read­ing Alun. This, from the people who brought you Feath­er­stonaugh pro­nounced as Fan­shawe.