Northern Sydney Astronomical Society

The NSAS August General Meeting will be on Tuesday the 16th of August at Regis Hall, Regis Campus, St Ignatius College. Please note that we are using a classroom under Regis Hall due to a scheduling conflict. Our speaker this month is Daniel Yardley from University of Sydney who will speak on detecting gravitational waves. His abstract follows:

A millisecond pulsar is a rotating magnetised neutron star that completes several hundred rotations every second. This leads to remarkable stability in its rotation, which provides a wealth of applications, such as improving the accuracy of terrestrial time standards, improving our measurements of the parameters of solar system bodies and studying gravitational waves. This talk describes my recently-submitted PhD thesis, which addresses the problem of gravitational-wave detection using radio timing observations of millisecond pulsars. In particular, I will present recently-published results from the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array.

Tomorrow night, 19th July, is the July GM. As is now the case, the meeting will be at Regis Hall, St Ignatius, starting at 7:30PM. Our speaker for July is Dr Baerbel Koribalski, from CSIRO, who will talk on “The WALLABY Project – Exploring Nearby Galaxies”. Her abstract follows:

I will talk about nearby galaxies and galaxy groups, comparing their stellar and gaseous disks, while exploring their dark matter content. To get you involved I will start with “Astronomy QI” incl. questions related to past, current and future 21-cm sky surveys: HIPASS, LVHIS & WALLABY. So, tune your eyes to a wavelength of 21-cm to explore the sky as only radio telescopescan see it.