Microlensing and Variability in the Bulge of M31
  For the past five seasons, the Angstrom Project, an international
microlensing collaboration, has been making observations of the central bulge
of M31, the Andromeda galaxy, searching for microlensing events. This thesis
describes the work that has been done to develop an automatic candidate
selection pipeline which enables lensing candidates to be found even if they
are blended with periodic variable baseline, something which has never been
attempted before in the same way. As a by-product of this process, many
variable stars are found and their properties are investigated and
characterised. The results of the investigations to date are presented. The
final selection of microlensing candidates selected from the most recent
Angstrom lightcurve data set is shown, and a separate more detailed
investigation into one particularly interesting microlensing candidate of very
short duration is described.
