[ASA] First announcement: GOTO optical transients workshop, Monash University, 15th April 2015

Tue Mar 3 11:10:10 AEDT 2015

You are invited to a 1-day workshop entitled,

The needle in the haystack: Optical transient searches in the aLIGO era
10am-5pm, Wednesday, 15th April, 2015
Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne

The capability of world-wide optical transient search programs is growing thanks to increasing levels of automation. At the same time, the development of interferometric gravitational-wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo promises to provide triggers for followup within the next few years. The likely imminent detection of gravitational waves provides additional motivation to identify optical counterparts in very large sky regions, and several projects are focussing on this opportunity.

One such project is the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Explorer (GOTO), led by Warwick and Monash universities via the Monash-Warwick Alliance. A prototype instrument will be assembled and deployed this year, and a full-scale instrument is planned for observations from 2016.

This workshop will introduce the GOTO project, and we invite other researchers with an interest in gravitational wave sources and their electromagnetic counterparts, or optical transient searches in general, to attend and also present talks on their own research.

Registration is free, and lunch will be provided. The meeting will finish with a dinner at a restaurant close to campus, from 7:30pm.

If you would like to attend or present a talk, please email duncan.galloway at monash.edu by Friday 3rd April. Please provide the title of your presentation and a brief abstract. Please also indicate if you wish to attend the dinner

More details can be found at the workshop website:

http://goto-observatory.org/wiki/index.php?n=Public.2015Workshop

Duncan Galloway, on behalf of the GOTO collaboration

-- 
Duncan Galloway, Senior Lecturer
Monash Centre for Astrophysics (MoCA),
  School of Physics & School of Mathematical Sciences
tel. +61 (0)3 99054422 | +61 (0)414 139763
http://users.monash.edu.au/~dgallow
duncan.galloway at monash.edu