Northern Sydney Astronomical Society

The NSAS February General Meeting will be next Tuesday, location for this meeting only to be the Fr. Mac Pavillion (old sports pavillion we previously used). The time is 7:30PM, as usual. Our speaker this month is Franceso di Mille from the AAO and Las Campanas Observatory. His abstract follows:

Highly collimated gas ejections are among the most dramatic structures in the universe, observed to emerge from very different astrophysical systems—from active galactic nuclei down to young brown dwarf stars. I will present the discovery of a giant, highly collimated jet from Sanduleak’s star in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). With a physical extent of 14 parsec at the distance of the LMC, it represents the largest stellar jet ever discovered, and the first resolved stellar jet beyond the Milky Way.
I will also talk about the Las Campanas Observatory and the Magellan telescopes.

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.