Another Exciting ATNF/AAO Director's Tea!

An Invasion:

At one point the ATNF director, Brian Boyle (who used to be AAO director too),
was surrounded by Ingrid Stairs, Bill Harris, Dave Hanes, Terry Bridges and
myself and exclaimed "the Canadians are coming!" ... i sang a line of "O Canada" in french. Add Robert Braun to the end of the line we were sitting in and at least 20 percent of the attendees were canucks. As guests we took 2/3 of the seats and so most people were standing.

Of course Bill and Dave will give colloquia - Bill's is this arvo (afternoon) on
the history of elliptical galaxy evolution using HST images while Dave's on
Friday is on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

And yet another way to detect pulsars (Robert Braun and Patrick*):

And the impact is on array configurations for SKA. If the spacings between
antennas are regular, then the fan beams overlap allowing one to digitally
produce beams between antennas. This creates a primary beam with a gain of
something like 12 in sensitivity compared to using one antenna on its own.
Ambiguities in position can be removed by observing the same target at 2
different times. This makes interferometers competitive with single dishes for
pulsar surveys, especially in compact configurations. What do you think Stacie? Regular in the compact centre and irregular in the outer regions of the SKA?

And science gets wackier all the time (Ron Ekkers and Clancy from Adelaide;
presented by Clancy):


What an enthused and assured presentation this one was! The idea is that
neutrinos interacting with the moon's surface will produce a nanosecond pulse in the radio regime (the moon's surface is rather transparent to radio waves). So
you look for a geometry in which CR from a strong source (like Centaurus A
region or Saggitarius A*) are grazing the moon's limb at night and you point
your array at that point on the limb closest to the CR source. If I remember
correctly this happens about 3 time in each of Feb, Mar and May. To date they
have got the instrument's timing to under a nanosecond (they bin in half
nanoseconds), have explored detecting quasars, and they think they have detected the observatory's visitor centre. :-)))) They have determined that they aren't
affected by wireless mice. And they are poised to begin their search for moon
pulses. Detections and non-detections alike, at a range of low frequencies,
will elliminate various exotic constructs for dark matter particles.

Comment by Brian, in reference to Dave's promotion of SNO: Now that we have the solar neutrino problem solved, we have to solve the lunar neutrino problem. :-)


P.S.

I had a most fantastic visit to Swinburne University of Technology's
Astrophysics and Supercomputing Centre. UM's Experimental Media Centre, me, Chris Fluke and David Barnes will set up a collaboration. 3D stereo desktop
monitors and 3D visualization astronomy tools exist and Chris is checking out
whether he can send a monitor to me at ATNF so I can play!!

* I seem to only catch people's first names the first time they are introduced.