Northern Sydney Astronomical Society

NSAS starts out in June with the Theory Group on Tuesday night the 8th.  The lectures this month are ” Galileo and the Copernican Revolution”, and “Refinements to the Heliocentric Model”.  On Tuesday the 15th is the June General Meeting.  The speaker this month is George Hobbs of CSIRO and ANTF, who will speak on “Pulsars and Gravitational Waves”.  “Observations of millisecond pulsars may provide the first means to detect the elusive gravitational waves that are predicted by General Relativity.  If these waves are detected then we’ll have a means to study supermassive black hole binary systems and even probe the universe less than a second after the big bang.  The Parkes telescope in Australia is providing the World-leading data sets for this search.  I will describe our project, explain how pulsars are discovered and observed and how, using the pulsar observations, we will hopefully be able to detect gravitational waves.” Finally, if everything is sorted out, the New Astronomers Group meets Tuesday the 22nd, with the program TBA.  Observing for the month of June will be on the Fridays 11th and 18th, with Saturday the 19th as backup.