News & Events
Astronomy Open Night - October 11th, 2008
See displays of telescopes, books, magazines, maps, posters and software. Look through around 20 different telescopes and see the Moon, stars, planets, nebulae and clusters. An illustrated talk by Matthew Colless, Director of the Anglo-Austrlian Observatory, entitled "Future Telescopes for Australia" will begin at 7.45pm.
Details of the evening and costs have been posted at the Foundation for Astronomy site. A printable notice of the details is available here (Microsoft Word file).
Our entire calendar for 2008 is available here.
Summer Vacation Scholarships
Applications are now being accepted for the physics vacation scholarships. The submission deadline is October 3rd, 2008
Deep Space in the Classroom
The Deep Space in the Classroom legacy site, an online guide to teaching astronomy and physics using archive material from the Faulkes Telescopes, is now live.
Recently Accepted Papers
Our list of recently published papers is available on the research pages.
Discovery of Eclipsing Binary Central Stars in the Planetary Nebulae M 3-16, H 2-29 and M 2-19
B. Miszalski, A. Acker, A.F.J. Moffat, Q.A. Parker and A. Udalski — August, 2008
Progress in understanding the formation and evolution of planetary nebulae (PN) has been restricted by a paucity of well-determined central star masses.
To address this deficiency we aim to (i) significantly increase the number of known eclipsing binary central stars of PN (CSPN), and subsequently (ii) directly obtain their masses and absolute dimensions by combining their light-curve parameters with planned radial velocity data.
Using photometric data from the third phase of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) we have searched for periodic variability in a large sample of PN towards the Galactic Bulge using Fourier and phase-dispersion minimisation techniques.
Among some dozen periodically variable CSPN found, we report here on three new eclipsing binaries: M 3-16, H 2-29 and M 2-19.
We present images, confirmatory spectroscopy and light-curves of the systems.