April Astrobite, a Supercomputer Tour, and Other News!

So this is a few days late, but I wrote another post for Astrobites this month back on the 12th. It covers a really cool paper about the largest flare yet observed from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the universe, but also the faintest; it emits a mere 0.17% of the light the Sun does, and despite being the closest star at just over 4 light-years away normally sits at about magnitude 11.13, or over a hundred times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye. However, during the flare reported in the paper, the authors calculate that it would have briefly reached up to magnitude 6.8, making it just barely visible to the naked eye from a very dark site for a few minutes! Pretty nifty! I even got an email from the lead author on the paper saying he'd enjoyed my summary of it, so that was nice.

---

In other news, I was fortunate enough to tag along on a tour of Swinburne's new supercomputer. (We are the “College of Astrophysics and Supercomputing,” after all!) It's called OzStar and replaces an older supercomputer called G2, though that one will still be in operation for most of the rest of the year to give people time to switch over.

OzStar, CAS's new supercomputer. I don't actually have reason to use it myself, sadly.

---

Going through all my photos in my panorama series, I've been struck by just how many photos of random birds I take. So have another one of some really colorful parrots I found in a eucalyptus tree near where I live one day while walking!

Parrots! Really colorful ones, too. These pictures are all from my new S9+, by the way.

---

And finally, one thing I haven't been able to find here in Australia is my favorite salad dressing, Hidden Valley Ranch. You can get Ranch dressing here, but there's usually only a single kind on sale. One of my friends from church was in the US for a few weeks as part of a school trip and very kindly brought me back the ambrosia below:

Just can't beat the original.

---

I also gave my first public Astrotour at Swinburne last week! We have a 3D theater that is used primarily for public outreach with grad students and faculty who volunteer giving talks to both school groups and the general public. I signed up last year, and gave my first talk to a small public audience last Tuesday. I felt rather rusty and disjointed as it's been so long since I gave a public talk about astronomy, but all that practice at the VIS paid off and it seems to have gone well. I've got another scheduled for the 30th of April, though I think this one is a school group, so that'll probably be a very different experience.

And I think that's all so far for this surprisingly busy month. Oh yes, last week I finally managed to write some code that collated some information on atomic transition lines that we've been trying to get together for a few months now, and this week we sent them off to some collaborators to do some calculations for us. So that's a huge weight off my chest. A hui hou!