ASA 2007

THE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
OF AUSTRALIA INC.

Annual Scientific Meeting
1st to 5th July, 2007

Program	All Days	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Posters
Abstracts	Posters A-K	Posters L-Z	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Lunch Meetings

Abstracts - Thursday

Session Thirteen - Facilities and Instrumentation

09:00-10:30

Gemini Science Operations

Dennis Crabtree

Gemini has been in operation for several years and science operations are fairly efficient.

Laser Guide Star (LGS) operations at Gemini North are slowly being optimized which should help with the implementation of MCAO on Gemini South. In this talk I will briefly talk about Gemini's current science operations. Most of the talk will look ahead a few years as to where Gemini's science operations may be heading.

Recent Results from the Pierre Auger High Energy Observatory

Roger Clay

The Pierre Auger Observatory studies particles at the highest known energies. These particles are mainly energetic nuclei, although it is expected that some are photons and neutrinos. It is of considerable astrophysical importance to identify the mechanisms by which such particles are accelerated and the sites at which this occurs.

The observatory has recently completed studies on the spectrum of these particles, their broad composition, and their directional properties. This presentation will briefly describe these studies and put them in a broad astrophysical framework.

The evolving AAO - a snapshot

Matthew Colless

The AAO is in the process of evolving from a binational facility into Australia's national optical/infrared observatory. I will report on the significant milestones in this process over the past twelve months, and will review the challenges and opportunities for the AAO in the next few years.

These include the implementation of the recommendations from the DEST review, planning for the NCRIS-funded programs, the AAO's expanded role in support of Gemini and Magellan, and future instrumentation plans for the AAT.

Overview of the Instrumentation Program at the Anglo-Australian Observatory

Sam Barden

The instrumentation group at the Anglo-Australian Observatory is busy with numerous instrumentation development efforts. An overview of this program will be presented with an emphasis on the options currently under consideration for development as the next major instrument for the AAT. These include a non-thermal IR multi-object channel for AAOmega called AAOmicron; a high spectral resolution (R~30000) multi-object channel for AAOmega; and WFMOS-A a 1600 fiber multi-object spectrograph. Concept design studies are currently ongoing and the AAO will host a community workshop in the spring to help finalize the concepts and to give input on which options are preferred. A summary of other effort, including the Gemini WFMOS and PILOT studies, will also be presented.

GMT: An update

Warrick Couch

Australia has now been involved in the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project for just over a year. During this time there have been a number of important developments, both with the project itself and in funding Australia-wide participation through the NCRIS program. In this talk I will give an update on these developments and give a brief account of likely progress with the project over the next 12 months.

Session Fourteen - Facilities, Instrumentation and Astronomy Education

11:00-12:40

Science with MIRANdA

Simon Johnston

We are in the process of planning a world-class radio telescope to be operational in Western Australia by 2011/2012. MIRANdA is an SKA demonstrator, and through the use of focal plane array technology, will provide very fast survey capability at frequencies near 1 GHz.

The science case for MIRANdA has recently been completed. I will discuss the science goals for the telescope which includes gas evolution in local Universe, the evolution and formation of galaxies, understanding the Milky Way, cosmic magnetism, pulsars, transients and VLBI.s

AIGO enables world GW array to uniquely identify source host galaxies

David Blair

The proposed development of the AIGO facility into the world's longest baseline gravitational wave observatory enables the world array to directly identify source galaxies out to 250Mpc.This is achieved through the a combination of large baselines and polarisation sensitivity obtained by virtue of the southern hemisphere location. Because gravitational wave binary coalescense signals encode the source distance, GW signals are able to be used as triggers for optical identification of afterglows, as well as for precision cosmology. The new generation of Advanced detectors are expected to detect 20 inspiral events per year.

RAVE: status and progress

Fred Watson

The RAVE project (RAdial Velocity Experiment) has now collected over 200,000 high-quality spectra of southern hemisphere stars with 9<I<12. The first data release of 25,000 velocities took place in February 2006, and the second release, which also includes spectra and physical parameters, is expected to be issued later in 2007. This talk will review RAVE's progress, and present an overview of current and forthcoming data releases.

Come see the stars! The modern world of Planetaria

Tanya Hill

In June 2005 the Melbourne Planetarium underwent its second upgrade in 7 years with the installation of a fulldome video projection system. In the past, planetariums have been notorious for being unique and often quirky, with no two planetariums in the world being exactly the same. This new system changes the stand-alone nature of planetariums to become standardised systems on par with movie theatres and IMAX. Anything can now be projected onto a planetarium dome with relative ease – yet planetariums are still thriving because of their astronomy content. In this talk I will describe the changes to planetariums in recent years and discuss how the public wants to engage with astronomy as revealed in the Melbourne Planetarium’s in-depth audience evaluation study.

Boosting astronomy's profile with social media: the Sydney Observatory blog

Nick Lomb

Blogs came into public awareness in the late 1990s though on-line diaries have been part of the World Wide Web since its early days. They are rapidly growing in popularity with the number of blogs doubling in 2006 so that by January 2007 there were 55 million blogs recorded. In order to better communicate astronomy to the public and expand its audience Sydney Observatory began a blog in June 2006. The blog has been spectacularly successful: it forms 60% of the Observatory's website traffic and has led to a 300% rise in site visitation. In April 2007 there were 17,124 individual visits to the blog.

An important need that has been identified during the year is to provide an opportunity for the public to report and discuss fireball and other sightings in the sky. To satisfy this need a separate section of the blog has been set up for people to report their sightings. Though the format of this page is still evolving, it is already a useful and accessible tool for any astronomer interested in following up possible meteorite falls. In this paper we will examine what has been involved in maintaining an astronomical blog for a year. Detailed statistics on the use of the blog during the year will be given and the most popular posts discussed.

Using astronomy to inspire students into careers in science

Stephen Hughes

The general public, old and young have a great interest in space and astronomy. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the teaching of astronomy in schools is able to inspire students to study science and mathematics in the upper years of high school and beyond. For example, a resolution of the IAU General Assembly 2003 asserts that “…astronomy has a proven record of attracting young people to an education in science and technology and, on that basis, to careers in space-related and other sciences as well as industry”. A high-tech economy, such as the Australian economy needs technically literate and numerate graduates, i.e. students trained in science, engineering, mathematics and computing. Many high school students who choose to do these subjects at university will have done physics, chemistry and maths, the so-called enabling sciences.

In Australia there is concern about the falling numbers of high school students electing to take the enabling sciences in years 11 and 12 (16 – 18 year old students). For example, research has shown that since 1980, the proportion of Year 12 students taking chemistry, physics, or advanced mathematics has nearly halved. The situation is even worse in regional areas. This reduction in the number of students doing the enabling sciences in high school has resulted in an overall reduction in the number of students electing to do science at university. This is clearly bad news for the ‘knowledge economy’ of the 21st century. This paper will discuss projects around the world which are making use of astronomy and space themes in high school education, including a project at Queensland University of Technology which involves local schools coming to the university for a ‘Space Day’. The paper will also discuss the educational possibilities for the forthcoming International Year of Astronomy in 2009.

Year of Astronomy

Helen Sim

The International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) will be a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture, highlighted by the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei.

Session Fifteen - Late Additions

14:00-15:00

An AAOmega survey of Galactic globular clusters

Laszlo Kiss, P. Szekely, G.A. Bakos, T.R. Bedding, G.F. Lewis

Using the AAOmega instrument of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, we have obtained medium-resolution near-infrared spectra of 10,500 stars in two-degree fields centered on the galactic globular clusters 47 Tuc, NGC 288, M12, M30 and M55. Radial velocities and equivalent widths of the infrared Ca II triplet lines have been determined to constrain cluster membership, which in turn has been used to study the angular extent of the clusters. From the analysis of 140-1000 member stars in each cluster, we do not find extended structures that go beyond the tidal radii. For three cluster we estimate a 1% upper limit of extra-tidal red giant branch stars. We detect systemic rotation in four of the targets.

Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS): Deep observations of seven square degrees of sky

Ray Norris

Over the last two years, we have conducted the Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS) of the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) and ELAIS-S1 regions, with the aim of producing the widest (7 square degrees) deep (15 μJy rms) radio survey ever attempted. The survey areas were chosen to cover the Southern SWIRE (Spitzer-Space-Telescope Wide-area Infrared Extragalactic Survey) fields, which have deep optical, near-infrared, and far-infrared (and in some parts of the field, deep X-ray) data, so that this combined SWIRE/ATLAS survey may be the most comprehensive multi-wavelength survey yet attempted. The primary goal is to understand the evolution of galaxies in the early Universe, and the radio observations are important because they penetrate the heavy dust extinction which is found in the most active galaxies at all redshifts, and are particularly effective at detecting AGN buried within dusty galaxies. Unusual classes of object which may be important links in the early evolution of galaxies can only be found in such a wide, deep survey.

Although we are only about half-way through the survey, our existing data (with an rms between 20 and 40 μJy) are already proving remarkably fruitful in addressing some of our science goals. For example:
- We have discovered a new and unexpected class of object (the Infrared-Faint Radio Sources), which may be high-redshift AGNs
- We have extended the radio-FIR correlation to low flux densities
- We have found powerful AGN-like radio objects in galaxies with a star-forming SED

Program	All Days	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Posters
Abstracts	Posters A-K	Posters L-Z	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Lunch Meetings

For further information (and additions or corrections), contact: qap@physics.mq.edu.au