Astrolunch talks

Visiting Astronomers:

The HERMES project -- reconstructing the early history of the ancient  
Galactic disk

Joss Bland-Hawthorn, (University of Sydney)

Friday September 25, 11:00 am, Room 816, in Building 69

The first building blocks of our Galaxy were likely to have been laid down in the first 300 million years after the Big Bang. The first stars that came into being in those early structures have long since disappeared but they may have left behind unique chemical signatures in today's stellar populations. Over the next 13 billion years, the Galaxy grew through a series of mergers and acquisitions into the corporate giant that surrounds us today -- 100 billion stars and counting. This was undoubtedly a very complex process that we are far from understanding even with the most sophisticated computer simulations. All stars show evidence of chemical signatures that say something about their past. In this talk, I will describe the basic motivation of the HERMES survey which will attempt to reconstruct the early Galaxy history through the technique of chemical tagging. This is the next major project of the AAT that has already caught the attention of the international community for reasons I will outline.

Overview of RTS2 observatory software, current status and expected updates

Petr Kubánek, Ph.D. student, IAA CSIC Granada & GACE Valencia, Spain

This talk reviews our experiences with designing, planning, developing, commissioning and operations of a small fully autonomous observatories.  It focuses of our experiences with RTS2 - an open source observatory manager, being developed by our group. Cornerstone of the talk is the software used for observatory management - its development strategy, bottleneck as well as strong points. Not only boring technical details about a complex software environment will be presented – the presentation also contains discussion of observational results achieved by our growing network and outlook for future development.

Progress and Opportunities at the Anglo-Australian Observatory

Andrew Hopkins, Head of AAT Science

Recent developments at our national optical observatory, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, on both scientific and instrumentation fronts will be presented. These include research results from AAO staff, an overview of the ongoing Anglo-Australian Telescope Large Programs (Anglo-Australian Planet Search, WiggleZ - a cosmology survey, GAMA - a galaxy evolution survey), progress on the WFMOS (Wide-Field Multi-Object Spectrograph) concept study, the HERMES (High-Resolution Multi-object Spectrograph) instrument, and a striking demonstration of the OH suppression fibre technology that allows spectroscopy in the near-infrared unaffected by strong night-sky emission lines. Opportunities for students at the AAO will also be highlighted, including PhD top-up scholarships, as well as the currently open Magellan Fellow positions.

Previous Semester's Talks:

Semester 1, 2009

Semester 2, 2008