Special Events

From time to time we hold one off events each year. below you will find out when they are along with a bit of info about it.

June 14th 2024

Fernworth Primary.

Southland Astronomical Society is proud to host,

Dr C. Clare Worley of the University Of Canterbury for our June Monthly meeting, which is open to the member's of the public

Clare Worley's topic info:

The stars we see in the beautiful night sky of Aotearoa hold the secrets to the origins of the Milky Way galaxy. In studies of Galactic Archaeology, we can tell not only where the stars are and where they are going, but what happened to make them what they are. In particular, we are looking in fine detail at the closest stars, those in the neighbourhood of our Sun, using the high resolution spectrograph, HERCULES, at Ōtehīwai Mt John Observatory. I will present our exploration so far and what that has revealed about the evolutionary history of our Milky Way.

Below is a little more info in what Clare does:

I pursue research in the field of Galactic Archaeology, which seeks to unravel the formation and evolution history of the Milky Way. I do this using a variety of astronomical data including spectra, photometry and asteroseismology.

Key projects in which I am involved that further this investigation are:

* Statistical analysis of chemical abundance distributions in stellar populations using techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Bayesian Inference and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE).

* Galactic Chemical Evolution studies with chemical yields compared to big observational datasets

* Automated determination of stellar parameters and chemical abundances

* Characterisation of binary systems

* Detailed stellar parameter and chemical abundance analysis of benchmark stars

Meeting location is at Fernworth Primary room to TBA

Cost for non-members is $5.00 PP

Financial Members : Free