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| I've done an excellent job of hiding my telescope model behind a pillar in this photo. |
That's it for now! A hui hou!
Friday, September 28, 2018
A Year Down Under and an October Astrobite
As of September 29th I've been in Melbourne for a full year now. It's been a long year of working on my PhD, I've moved twice, and I miss Hilo's climate pretty often, but I've also made some amazing friends and discovered a facility for and enjoyment of painting I didn't know I had (about which I promise a post in the next few weeks). I've had artwork exhibited in a public exhibition, and learned that stars and CCDs are infinitely more complicated than I ever dreamed (or wanted to know).
In other news I put out a new Astrobite today, on a paper talking about finding the mass of the closest known white dwarf by measuring its gravitational redshift (basically, how much its light is redshifted climbing out of its gravitational well). This one was pretty interesting for me, as the authors used the Hubble Space Telescope and spent some time detailing all the tiny systematic errors in its spectrograph's CCD. Detailing tiny systematic errors in CCDs is pretty much my PhD (or at least it feels like at times) so I could really empathize with what they went through to get a good measurement. I also got some nice comments from two of the paper's authors, so that was cool.
That's it for now! A hui hou!
That's it for now! A hui hou!
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
α, π, and the Riemann Hypothesis
On September 24th an accomplished mathematician named Sir Michael Atiyah gave a presentation wherein he claimed to have discovered a simple proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, a 160-year-old open question in mathematics about the distribution of prime numbers. Most people making such a claim would be immediately dismissed (longstanding open questions like that in mathematics are usually solved as the result of many people working together rather than a single person), but Atiyah has won both the Fields Medal and Abell prize (both considered roughly the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematicians) and has enough credibility to cause people to take notice.
While this is interesting enough on its own for its many profound implications across mathematics, it's extremely interesting (and personal) for me due to the fact that Atiyah's claimed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis was apparently a happy accidental byproduct (!) of his true goal: finding a way to compute the value of the fine-structure constant, α based on other numbers. If you don't know, my entire Ph.D. revolves around searching for variation in α; if this claimed proof were to turn out to be true (and I'll revisit that if in a second), it would elevate α to the same level as e or π, an unchanging mathematical quantity. As far as I can tell, his calculation of the value of α would have it be proveably constant, which would put paid to the notion of searching for variation in it, and incidentally my entire Ph.D..
Now, I'm not getting too worried about this just yet for a few reasons. First of all, multiple people who know far more than I do about the relevant mathematics have expressed skepticism about the results. Atiyah, though undoubtedly incredibly smart and gifted, is getting on in years (he's 89), and has advanced a few theories in the past couple of years that have failed to gather peer support. It seems very unlikely that such a longstanding open question has a simple proof that no one has spotted until now. It's not impossible, especially as advances are made in mathematics over time, but, while romantic, the idea of a lone genius stumbling upon a profound proof is less and less likely nowadays where significant advances are increasingly the result of collaboration and correspondence between large teams of people.
Now, I'm only a humble physicist and no mathematician, and will freely admit that I don't understand probably the majority of the math behind the claimed proof, but I have three things that make me skeptical myself.
There's just something about α that seems to attract numerological explanations. Being a dimensionless physical constant with no known relation to other important mathematical constants or way of calculating its value seems to fire people's imaginations. Richard Feynmann in 1985 wrote of α:
However, this leads to a second consideration: α is a measured quantity. We don't have a method to calculate its value now (that's the whole reason behind my Ph.D.), and it's difficult to see how to prove that, even if the particular function Atiyah has introduced (called the Todd function) works as he claims, that it's actually producing the real, correct value of α and isn't merely a coincidence.
Finally, I'm a τ-ist; I believe that the correct circle constant is \(τ=2π\), so I find it unlikely that an explicit mathematical connection would exist between π and α. It's not impossible, certainly, but I strongly suspect that if such a connection exists it would be between α and τ, not π. Interestingly, I was able to gather that the proof involves a generalization of Euler's famous formula \(e^{i\pi}=-1\), which is partly only a thing due to using π instead of τ. (The τ version, \(e^{i\tau}=1\) is equally true but incredibly basic—it essentially says that if you go around \(360^\circ\) then you've made a full circle—and hasn't caught people's imagination the way Euler's version has.)
I've really only been able to do a bare minimum of reading about this topic, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on in the coming days and try to update you as I learn more. (The possibility—however remote—of one's Ph.D. being for naught is incredibly motivating!) A hui hou!
While this is interesting enough on its own for its many profound implications across mathematics, it's extremely interesting (and personal) for me due to the fact that Atiyah's claimed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis was apparently a happy accidental byproduct (!) of his true goal: finding a way to compute the value of the fine-structure constant, α based on other numbers. If you don't know, my entire Ph.D. revolves around searching for variation in α; if this claimed proof were to turn out to be true (and I'll revisit that if in a second), it would elevate α to the same level as e or π, an unchanging mathematical quantity. As far as I can tell, his calculation of the value of α would have it be proveably constant, which would put paid to the notion of searching for variation in it, and incidentally my entire Ph.D..
Now, I'm not getting too worried about this just yet for a few reasons. First of all, multiple people who know far more than I do about the relevant mathematics have expressed skepticism about the results. Atiyah, though undoubtedly incredibly smart and gifted, is getting on in years (he's 89), and has advanced a few theories in the past couple of years that have failed to gather peer support. It seems very unlikely that such a longstanding open question has a simple proof that no one has spotted until now. It's not impossible, especially as advances are made in mathematics over time, but, while romantic, the idea of a lone genius stumbling upon a profound proof is less and less likely nowadays where significant advances are increasingly the result of collaboration and correspondence between large teams of people.
Now, I'm only a humble physicist and no mathematician, and will freely admit that I don't understand probably the majority of the math behind the claimed proof, but I have three things that make me skeptical myself.
There's just something about α that seems to attract numerological explanations. Being a dimensionless physical constant with no known relation to other important mathematical constants or way of calculating its value seems to fire people's imaginations. Richard Feynmann in 1985 wrote of α:
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling [α] comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil."Soon after α was introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1916 people began coming up with schemes for how it relates to various mathematical constants. Atiyah's proof claims a sort of connection with π, with 1/α being the limit of some kind of “renormalization” function acting on π. Numerological explanations have come and gone over the last century with none of them ultimately being accepted; while it's possible this is an exception, it's certainly not the first attempt someone has made to derive α from other numbers.
However, this leads to a second consideration: α is a measured quantity. We don't have a method to calculate its value now (that's the whole reason behind my Ph.D.), and it's difficult to see how to prove that, even if the particular function Atiyah has introduced (called the Todd function) works as he claims, that it's actually producing the real, correct value of α and isn't merely a coincidence.
Finally, I'm a τ-ist; I believe that the correct circle constant is \(τ=2π\), so I find it unlikely that an explicit mathematical connection would exist between π and α. It's not impossible, certainly, but I strongly suspect that if such a connection exists it would be between α and τ, not π. Interestingly, I was able to gather that the proof involves a generalization of Euler's famous formula \(e^{i\pi}=-1\), which is partly only a thing due to using π instead of τ. (The τ version, \(e^{i\tau}=1\) is equally true but incredibly basic—it essentially says that if you go around \(360^\circ\) then you've made a full circle—and hasn't caught people's imagination the way Euler's version has.)
I've really only been able to do a bare minimum of reading about this topic, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on in the coming days and try to update you as I learn more. (The possibility—however remote—of one's Ph.D. being for naught is incredibly motivating!) A hui hou!
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Walking About in “The Bush”
It's been a bit quiet on the ol’ blog front recently, hasn't it? I've had a few ideas for posts in mind but never seem to find time to realize them—I've been pretty busy with a number of things lately, including a new project I'm not quite ready to show off yet but has something to do with this:
Last week I went on a nature walk with a bunch of other young adults from church, which was a really enjoyable experience. It was one of the first days showing indications of spring so far this year, and the weather was pretty much perfect. We went for a (short) walk along the Yarra River (which flows through the heart of Melbourne) through “the bush,” a thick forest of eucalypts, wattles, and other Australian flora. (The only fauna we saw were some cockatoos, including some beautiful black ones, but we did hear a kookaburra.)
I still find it amusing that—due to growing up in a small eucalyptus grove in California—the smell of warm eucalyptus (…or wet eucalyptus, or really any eucalyptus) instantly makes me feel at home. Anyway, hopefully I'll have time to post some more soon, including my secret painting project which I'm enjoying far more than I expected. A hui hou!
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| Clearly, I've started up a paint factory. |
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| The Yarra River in panorama from the trail. |
Friday, August 31, 2018
An Observation on Communication
I noticed this the other day as I was explaining, for the umpteenth time, what I do as part of my Ph.D.:
I suppose I really shouldn't be complaining about people being eternally interested in what I do, but it does get a little tiring explaining (what are, ultimately, some fairly esoteric and difficult concepts) over and over again to new people. At least I'll have lots of practice! A hui hou!
I suppose I really shouldn't be complaining about people being eternally interested in what I do, but it does get a little tiring explaining (what are, ultimately, some fairly esoteric and difficult concepts) over and over again to new people. At least I'll have lots of practice! A hui hou!
Edit (6/3/22): It has occurred to me, in the interim, that the joke would be even better (and much more realistic) with the person on the left saying “Wow! I didn't understand a word of that!” at the end, in both panels. Ah well.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
An August Astrobite
Grad school and other things have kept me intensely busy this past week, which is why I'm just posting about an Astrobite I wrote on the 8th. I'll say upfront that I don't think this is my best work; not that it's particularly bad or under my standards for writing, I just realized over the course of writing it that I wasn't quite as interested in the subject matter as I thought when I started.
It's still reasonably interesting however, the subject matter being that when the authors examined a baker's dozen supernovae type Ia (that's “type one-A,” not “type eee-AA!”) which had been caught very early in their brightening stage they found evidence for two distinct populations when looking at the color of their spectra. “Color” in this case is an astronomical term for summing up the flux in two different filters that cover different spectral ranges and subtracting them, leaving a single number to represent the color. Most commonly the “Blue” and “Visible” filters are used to get what's known as a \(B-V\) color (visible here meaning roughly “green”), but any two filters in any part of the spectrum can work. Basically, some of the supernovae looked “red” and some looked “blue,” though the differences disappeared after about four or five days since the explosion.
Most supernovae aren't caught this early, which is why they had so few to work with despite there being hundreds of known type Ia supernovae. Interestingly, in a bit of a personal connection to the paper, one of the supernovae they looked at was SN 2011fe—which I actually got a picture of while in Hawaii! I didn't realize this until after I'd chosen the paper and started writing it up.
If there's one thing I learned while doing background research on supernovae type Ia for this Astrobite, it's that we still have much to learn about these enigmatic explosions. A hui hou!
It's still reasonably interesting however, the subject matter being that when the authors examined a baker's dozen supernovae type Ia (that's “type one-A,” not “type eee-AA!”) which had been caught very early in their brightening stage they found evidence for two distinct populations when looking at the color of their spectra. “Color” in this case is an astronomical term for summing up the flux in two different filters that cover different spectral ranges and subtracting them, leaving a single number to represent the color. Most commonly the “Blue” and “Visible” filters are used to get what's known as a \(B-V\) color (visible here meaning roughly “green”), but any two filters in any part of the spectrum can work. Basically, some of the supernovae looked “red” and some looked “blue,” though the differences disappeared after about four or five days since the explosion.
Most supernovae aren't caught this early, which is why they had so few to work with despite there being hundreds of known type Ia supernovae. Interestingly, in a bit of a personal connection to the paper, one of the supernovae they looked at was SN 2011fe—which I actually got a picture of while in Hawaii! I didn't realize this until after I'd chosen the paper and started writing it up.
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| Messier 101 with SN 2011fe marked with the green dots. |
Monday, August 13, 2018
Personal Panoramic History, Part 7: 2014
I thought 2013 (covered previously here) was a slow year for panoramas, but I think 2014 has it beat. The first photos I found that could be put together were all the way in…
In September a friend and I hiked into Pololū Valley, and along the way we stopped at the overlook for Waipiʻo Valley. These two valleys are the ends of a chain of huge valleys that cut into the northeastern face of the remains of the Kohala volcano, the oldest and northernmost of the five sub-aerial (i.e., above sea level) volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaiʻi. There are some seven major valleys and dozens of small ones, and the whole area is among the least accessible on the island. There's a car-traversable road into Waipiʻo Valley, but accessing the other valleys requires either hiking up and back down several-hundred-feet cliff walls multiple times, or a canoe.
Here's the Waipiʻo Valley overlook. In Ancient Hawaiʻi these valleys were significant population centers, but this is the only one people still inhabit today.
After stopping there we drove around to the north end of the island and came down the coast to Pololū Valley, where this panorama was taken. This is the view from the parking lot at the overlook at the start of the footpath down into the valley. This is definitely one of my favorite panoramas I've taken, I think; it just came out really nicely. It was just three photos, taken almost on the spur of the moment.
This panorama comes from about halfway down the footpath into the valley. You can see the same headland and rocks in the water that are visible in the picture above. You can also see that the clouds to the west were starting to come in and cover the brilliant blue sky to east. Luckily we didn't get rained up, but it got a lot grayer after this!
In November I took my second trip to see Lake Waiau near the summit of Mauna Kea, and took the opportunity to take some more panoramas.
Here's one from slightly up the edge of the crater that the lake sits in. I didn't notice the two hikers at the far right on the crater rim until after I'd assembled the panorama, but they give you a (very poor) sense of scale.
And here's a panorama from by the shore. The lake was a lot more full this time than it was when I visited it the first time back in 2011. I don't think it gets much more full than this, however, as I believe it starts to spill out the west side of the crater directly opposite from where these photos were taken if the lake level gets any higher.
And that's it for 2014, a rather slow year in the photo-taking department. Well, at least when it comes to turning photos into panoramas. 2015 will be a bit short as well, but it does have a few nice ones that I hadn't put together before finding Hugin and thus haven't shown before, including some more from Oregon. A hui hou!
September
In September a friend and I hiked into Pololū Valley, and along the way we stopped at the overlook for Waipiʻo Valley. These two valleys are the ends of a chain of huge valleys that cut into the northeastern face of the remains of the Kohala volcano, the oldest and northernmost of the five sub-aerial (i.e., above sea level) volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaiʻi. There are some seven major valleys and dozens of small ones, and the whole area is among the least accessible on the island. There's a car-traversable road into Waipiʻo Valley, but accessing the other valleys requires either hiking up and back down several-hundred-feet cliff walls multiple times, or a canoe.
Here's the Waipiʻo Valley overlook. In Ancient Hawaiʻi these valleys were significant population centers, but this is the only one people still inhabit today.
After stopping there we drove around to the north end of the island and came down the coast to Pololū Valley, where this panorama was taken. This is the view from the parking lot at the overlook at the start of the footpath down into the valley. This is definitely one of my favorite panoramas I've taken, I think; it just came out really nicely. It was just three photos, taken almost on the spur of the moment.
This panorama comes from about halfway down the footpath into the valley. You can see the same headland and rocks in the water that are visible in the picture above. You can also see that the clouds to the west were starting to come in and cover the brilliant blue sky to east. Luckily we didn't get rained up, but it got a lot grayer after this!
November
In November I took my second trip to see Lake Waiau near the summit of Mauna Kea, and took the opportunity to take some more panoramas.
Here's one from slightly up the edge of the crater that the lake sits in. I didn't notice the two hikers at the far right on the crater rim until after I'd assembled the panorama, but they give you a (very poor) sense of scale.
And here's a panorama from by the shore. The lake was a lot more full this time than it was when I visited it the first time back in 2011. I don't think it gets much more full than this, however, as I believe it starts to spill out the west side of the crater directly opposite from where these photos were taken if the lake level gets any higher.
And that's it for 2014, a rather slow year in the photo-taking department. Well, at least when it comes to turning photos into panoramas. 2015 will be a bit short as well, but it does have a few nice ones that I hadn't put together before finding Hugin and thus haven't shown before, including some more from Oregon. A hui hou!
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
House Heating Haranguing
This past week I moved house from the place I'd been staying since I first arrived in Melbourne (which is why it's been a bit quiet around here). The place I moved to has no central heating, so I've been huddled in my room for the past few days (I'm also in the midst of a two-week vacation) with a single brave space heater which is doing its valiant best to warm it up to a livable temperature in here. (“Livable,” for me, a child of the tropics, being at bare minimum 20 °C [68 °F].) This has led to much rumination on my part about how houses in Melbourne seem to be undesigned to handle the normal temperature extremes in the region. It's like houses in Melbourne are built on the perpetually optimistic outlook that every day will be a balmy 20–24 °C (68–75.2 °F). Yet I've already endured weeks of temperatures being in the 5–15 °C (41–59 °F) range, with no end to winter in sight.
For starters, most houses are built out of brick, a novel building material for me as I don't recall ever living in a house so constructed (it's possible that I may have as a kid too young to remember). Having spent several months with it, my observation is that brick seems to retain heat about as well as a sieve does water. (I have a 1500 watt space heater, which can, over the course of hours, infinitesimally raise the temperature in my average-sized bedroom, which simple thermodynamics suggests means that the outgoing heat flux is of the same order of magnitude.) Insulation seems to be a foreign concept, and as mentioned whoever built the house I'm in saw no need for including any sort of central heating system, which just kind of blows my mind.
From talking with a few fellow Americans at CAS from Michigan and Wisconsin and a fellow student from the Netherlands, I gather that they too have noticed this, and that this issue of houses not seemingly being built for the weather is not really a problem at those locations. This has led me to formulate the following graph, based on my own experiences and hear-say from others:
Basically, for places where it either gets really cold (like, freezing temperatures or below), or doesn't get very cold (like in Hilo, at the 15 °C end), houses are generally constructed in such a way that they can handle those temperatures pretty well. But if it gets cold, but not quite down to freezing, eh, people can just tough it out, amirite? It's not actually freezing yet, what are you complaining for? (Can you tell I get rather bitter and sarcastic when I'm cold?)
I've also (re)discovered that my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is directly and strongly correlated with the temperature outside the covers. I've only been able to directly test this over a moderately small temperature range so far (~11–22 °C), but extrapolating it out to “the house is on fire”-level temperatures I find that I would indeed be extremely motivated to get up, so it checks out.
Anyway, thank God for personal space heaters and all the quilts and blankets people have gifted me with over time (seriously, a blanket is probably one of the best gifts you could give me; I treasure them all). And winter should “only” last another two to three months. I really am quite happy with my new place otherwise—but oh, how I miss Hilo's climate during the winter! A hui hou!
For starters, most houses are built out of brick, a novel building material for me as I don't recall ever living in a house so constructed (it's possible that I may have as a kid too young to remember). Having spent several months with it, my observation is that brick seems to retain heat about as well as a sieve does water. (I have a 1500 watt space heater, which can, over the course of hours, infinitesimally raise the temperature in my average-sized bedroom, which simple thermodynamics suggests means that the outgoing heat flux is of the same order of magnitude.) Insulation seems to be a foreign concept, and as mentioned whoever built the house I'm in saw no need for including any sort of central heating system, which just kind of blows my mind.
From talking with a few fellow Americans at CAS from Michigan and Wisconsin and a fellow student from the Netherlands, I gather that they too have noticed this, and that this issue of houses not seemingly being built for the weather is not really a problem at those locations. This has led me to formulate the following graph, based on my own experiences and hear-say from others:
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| I've personally had experience in the 0–15 °C range. |
I've also (re)discovered that my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is directly and strongly correlated with the temperature outside the covers. I've only been able to directly test this over a moderately small temperature range so far (~11–22 °C), but extrapolating it out to “the house is on fire”-level temperatures I find that I would indeed be extremely motivated to get up, so it checks out.
Anyway, thank God for personal space heaters and all the quilts and blankets people have gifted me with over time (seriously, a blanket is probably one of the best gifts you could give me; I treasure them all). And winter should “only” last another two to three months. I really am quite happy with my new place otherwise—but oh, how I miss Hilo's climate during the winter! A hui hou!
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Another (Unexpected) July Astrobite! Structured Satellite Galaxies
So just a few days after my previous Astrobite summarizing the ASA meeting I got a surprise when I woke up to an email from the Astrobites scheduler saying that he'd posted my Astrobite I wrote for the queue back in February. This one deals with an interesting problem I'd never heard of before called the “Satellite Planes of Galaxies problem.” Observations of he Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and Centaurus A show that a significant fraction of the satellite galaxies around them tend to orbit in correlated planes. Yet similar-looking structures are vanishingly rare in simulations, to the point where it would be exceedingly unlikely to find them around three galaxies so close to each other. It's pretty interesting as while we've had hints of theses planar structures around the Milky Way for a few decades and Andromeda for a little less it's only recently that we've really been able to confirm them and discover the one around Centaurus A.
Something amusing I found in this paper was the name for the structure around the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the “Great Plane of Andromeda.” This sounds like a reference to a very old name for the Andromeda galaxy, several hundred years ago when it was known as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. I just like the idea that anything associated with the galaxy becomes known as the “Great ____ in/of Andromeda.” A hui hou!
Something amusing I found in this paper was the name for the structure around the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the “Great Plane of Andromeda.” This sounds like a reference to a very old name for the Andromeda galaxy, several hundred years ago when it was known as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. I just like the idea that anything associated with the galaxy becomes known as the “Great ____ in/of Andromeda.” A hui hou!
Saturday, July 7, 2018
July Astrobite: Summarizing the ASA Meeting
My Astrobite for July came out yesterday, a short summary of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) meeting last week. Well, I say “short,” but as it's not a normal paper summary I allowed myself another hundred words or so beyond the usual thousand-word-limit. I think there were a hundred and forty talks total, so to summarize I just picked one from each day from a range of topics and by people from different universities. Even then I didn't have room to cover some of the things that came up such as a good number of talks about radio astronomy which covered things like using measurements of pulsar timing across the Milky Way to make a very sensitive gravitational wave detector on a galactic scale.
One thing I did notice over the course of last week, though, was that there weren't any other talks or posters related to my area of research in varying constants. There were quite a few areas where there were multiple talks/posters on similar subjects (like gravitational waves, or pulsar timing, or the challenges of big data), but nobody else presenting anything like what I'm doing. (That I saw at least; there were parallel session each afternoon of which I could only watch one, but from reading the talk titles I don't think I missed anything obviously related.) Certainly there are other people working in this area, but it was interesting to have presented what felt like a pretty unique talk. Anyway, that's enough for now or I'll end up writing another thousand-word summary. A hui hou!
One thing I did notice over the course of last week, though, was that there weren't any other talks or posters related to my area of research in varying constants. There were quite a few areas where there were multiple talks/posters on similar subjects (like gravitational waves, or pulsar timing, or the challenges of big data), but nobody else presenting anything like what I'm doing. (That I saw at least; there were parallel session each afternoon of which I could only watch one, but from reading the talk titles I don't think I missed anything obviously related.) Certainly there are other people working in this area, but it was interesting to have presented what felt like a pretty unique talk. Anyway, that's enough for now or I'll end up writing another thousand-word summary. A hui hou!
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Belated Tau Day! And the 2018 ASA Meeting
Happy (belated) Tau Day (6/28/2018) everyone! Yes, it's that time of year again when we celebrate the correct circle constant, \(\tau\ (=2\pi=6.283185…)\). I'll do my usual linking to the official Tau Day website, and note to myself that I should consider getting one of the \(\tau\)-shirts. A triumph for tau is that it's now officially part of the Python math module as of version 3.6! Just do from math import tau to start using it.
In other news, it's been a very busy week and a half for me. Last Thursday I headed out to the gold-rush town of Ballarat an hour and a half by train from Melbourne for the Harley Wood School for Astronomy (HWSA). This is an annual workshop for graduate students, where this year some fifty students from all across Australia spent a very frigid weekend at the historical Ballarat Municipal Observatory. We had some interesting talks and workshops and I got to meet quite a few fellow students from other universities.
Anyway, Sunday before coming back to Melbourne I and a few other students visited Sovereign Hill, a tourist attraction in the form of a historic mining town from Victoria's gold rush in the 1850s. Being just a few years after the California gold rush there are a lot of similarities, but I think I'll save a fuller explanation (and some pictures) for a later post.
On Monday the week-long Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual conference began. This is my first time attending such an event as a participant, as when I went to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Honolulu in 2015 I didn't actually attend any of the talks. This time not only have I been sitting in on talks all week, but I gave one of my own on Monday!
It's essentially the same talk as I did for my Confirmation of Candidature cut down to half the time with more focus on the theory and less what I actually did, but from the comments I received it came off pretty well. I had the very last talk of the day on Monday and several people said I'd managed to keep their interest during it, so I consider that an accomplishment.
Having got my talk out of the way Monday I was free to enjoy the rest of the week. I listened to a lot of talks on some very interesting astronomy going on in Australia, and having been to HWSA beforehand I knew a number of the speakers and poster authors, which was cool.
Today's also the last day of the Deeper, Darker, Brighter exhibition as well. Tomorrow we'll be removing our artworks from the gallery, and hopefully moving towards starting up our weekly art workshops again!
June's been a very busy and somewhat stressful month overall for me, and I'm looking forward to things settling down a bit. It's perhaps not surprising that I came down with a cold immediately after the ASA meeting finished, so I'll keep this post short tonight. A hui hou!
In other news, it's been a very busy week and a half for me. Last Thursday I headed out to the gold-rush town of Ballarat an hour and a half by train from Melbourne for the Harley Wood School for Astronomy (HWSA). This is an annual workshop for graduate students, where this year some fifty students from all across Australia spent a very frigid weekend at the historical Ballarat Municipal Observatory. We had some interesting talks and workshops and I got to meet quite a few fellow students from other universities.
Anyway, Sunday before coming back to Melbourne I and a few other students visited Sovereign Hill, a tourist attraction in the form of a historic mining town from Victoria's gold rush in the 1850s. Being just a few years after the California gold rush there are a lot of similarities, but I think I'll save a fuller explanation (and some pictures) for a later post.
On Monday the week-long Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual conference began. This is my first time attending such an event as a participant, as when I went to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Honolulu in 2015 I didn't actually attend any of the talks. This time not only have I been sitting in on talks all week, but I gave one of my own on Monday!
It's essentially the same talk as I did for my Confirmation of Candidature cut down to half the time with more focus on the theory and less what I actually did, but from the comments I received it came off pretty well. I had the very last talk of the day on Monday and several people said I'd managed to keep their interest during it, so I consider that an accomplishment.
Having got my talk out of the way Monday I was free to enjoy the rest of the week. I listened to a lot of talks on some very interesting astronomy going on in Australia, and having been to HWSA beforehand I knew a number of the speakers and poster authors, which was cool.
Today's also the last day of the Deeper, Darker, Brighter exhibition as well. Tomorrow we'll be removing our artworks from the gallery, and hopefully moving towards starting up our weekly art workshops again!
June's been a very busy and somewhat stressful month overall for me, and I'm looking forward to things settling down a bit. It's perhaps not surprising that I came down with a cold immediately after the ASA meeting finished, so I'll keep this post short tonight. A hui hou!
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