[ASA] ANITA Google Hangout February Lectures

[Darren Croton]

Dear ANITA and ASA members.

Welcome to our 2015 lecture series! We have an exciting year in front of us and i’ll announce more detail on that soon.

For now, to kick things off for February we have a special guest lecturer, David Wilner from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. David is the Associate Director of the Radio & Geoastronomy Division and an expert in circumstellar disks, the formation of planets, and the development of aperture synthesis techniques. 

He’ll be giving us two lectures on consecutive weeks:

Title: Radio Astronomy and Interferometry Fundamentals
Date: 2pm (AEDT) Thursday 19th February
Link: http://anita.edu.au/lectures/radio-astronomy-and-interferometry-fundamentals-david-wilner/

Abstract:
Radio astronomy uses observations at radio wavelengths to study celestial objects. This lecture will provide a brief introduction to radio astronomy, including a description of common emission mechanisms and radio telescopes, and why multiple telescopes are linked as interferometers to make high resolution "aperture synthesis" images (a technique recognized by the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics).  We will use pictures to develop intuition about the Fourier transform relationship between the sky brightness and visibility function that underlies radio interferometry. (A companion lecture will provide a pedagogical introduction to the process by which radiointerferometric images are made.)


Title: Imaging and Deconvolution in Radio Interferometry
Date: 2pm (AEDT) Thursday 26th February
Link: http://anita.edu.au/lectures/imaging-and-deconvolution-in-radio-interferometry-david-wilner/

Abstract:
Observations with a typical radio interferometer provide incomplete and noisy samples of the Fourier transform of the sky brightness image that we'd like to analyze. This lecture will provide a pedagogical and practical introduction to the process by which radio interferometric images are made, including visibility weighting and tapering schemes and algorithm-based deconvolution methods to deal with inevitable missing samples. We will conclude with a brief discussion of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, an new radio interferometer with unprecedented imaging capabilities at millimeter wavelengths.

Head over to the ANITA Lecture page for more information on this and recordings of our past lectures: http://anita.edu.au/lectures/

Thanks,
Darren Croton & Chris Power (& Sarah Maddison)


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The lecture will be held through Google Hangouts on Air.
You'll first need a Google account (e.g. gmail). Log in to it.
If you've never done a Google Hangout before you'll need to install a plugin for your browser. See https://www.google.com/tools/dlpage/hangoutplugin
On Google+ search for "Anita Chapter" and head to our page.
Alternatively, go directly to our Chapter page here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104967001091880466806/posts
You'll see a post for the Hangout on Air at around the start time - hit play and enjoy!
Some hints for a better experience:
You can breakout the small video window on the Google+ page by opening it in YouTube. This gives you a much bigger view.
Post any comments/questions under the video in the comments box on the Google+ or YouTube page. We'll try and answer them in real-time.
I don't believe that comments are updated automatically; you may need to reload the page to see the latest.
All lectures will be hosted on our ANITA YouTube page for later viewing.


--
Darren Croton
Professor of Astrophysics
Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
Swinburne University of Technology
PO Box 218, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia
Phone: 61-3-9214-5537; Fax: 61-3-9214-8797
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~dcroton

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