As Dr. Rattenbury has already mentioned in a previous post, the golden anniversary of the Mount John University Observatory (MJUO) was celebrated this year. I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to attend and absorb the individual experiences of the astronomers.

The symposium’s theme centered around the observatory’s past, present and future. What I found most charming were the many stories told by astronomers who have become part of its history and who have had MJUO become an important part in their own lives in return.

Many times it felt like I was being transported to a cozy chair by a fireplace with grandpa recollecting the fascinating stories of his life, the adventures he had as an astronomer.

Here are only some of the many interesting things I heard during the symposium.

Audrey Walsh reflected upon her father, Frank Bateson’s work in establishing MJUO. Frank Bateson is the father of NZ astronomy, is has been said. In his own words, he was a “businessman by profession, astronomer by nature”. Hearing these words was an extremely inspiring moment for me, for it brings to my mind the image of a man who was passionate about his work.

Ed Guinan gave an entertaining account of the adventures and misadventures he had during the year he spent at MJUO and NZ in general. It was disheartening to hear that a chart of his results, which he kept close to him instead of shipping it, out of fear of losing it, was after all lost to the USSR customs while travelling through Russia.

The talk given by Alan Thomas painted a vivid picture of the contrast between observational astronomy as it was done all those years ago and how it is done now. Part of the excitement then was enduring the cold of the nights, snuggled up against a telescope in the open, in a sleeping bag, with a hot beverage, looking through the eye-piece.

Graeme Kershaw’s talk highlighted the fact that many countries have lost contact with the night sky so that lots of people come to lake Tekapo just to see the stars. He also pointed out the growing frustration of the elderly who grew up gazing up at the stars but can not offer the same to their children.

Many other talks painted similar pictures and drove it home that MJUO is one of the world’s most beautiful and easily accessible telescopes, rich with history and memories of individuals.

I have come out from this celebration with a refreshed aspiration for astronomy!

Annapolis is a pretty city, and played host to this year’s annual microlensing conference. Our host was Dr Rich Barry, Goddard Space Flight Centre.

There were a lot of interesting talks, planet discoveries and techniques being a primary focus, but with a strong influence coming from the proposed space telescope missions which may include microlensing observations in their additional science programmes.

There are two space telescope missions are ESA’s Euclid and NASA’s WFIRST/AFTA. Both are exciting missions. I contributed in a small way to the proposal to use Euclid for planetary microlensing. The last piece of work I did at Manchester was to write code to simulate microlensing observations, to estimate how many planets a space telescope could find, and of what type. I never finished that code, but it was taken over by Matthew Penny at Manchester as part of his PhD work, and he turned it into an excellent piece of software. Matt wrote an excellent paper on it.

It was great to catch up with Matt, and lots of other microlensers at the conference. Ashna Shara (my PhD student) was also there, to get to know the field, meet the people, and try to refine the topic of her PhD.

I gave a talk on — not microlensing — but on a piece of work that uses the large databases that the microlensing survey teams have accumulated. Next conference I hope to have something more on planetary microlensing!

The next international conference on microlensing will be held at NASA, Goddard Space Flight Centre in Annapolis!

There’ll be a long list of fascinating topics discussed. Here is a truncated list, filtered by my particular interests:

• Microlensing with Big data
• New discoveries in microlensing
• Data challenges – microlensing for the unwashed masses
• Planetary system formation history
• What could be derived directly from ground and space-based microlensing data sets – as is
• Space-borne ulensing missions
• WFIRST
• Euclid
• Ground-based microlensing in the era of WFIRST and Euclid
• Unbound planets
• Black holes, white dwarfs and other non-exoplanet lenses

http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/conferences/microlensing19/index.html

I am part of a group of astronomers advising NASA on what science the WFIRST space telescope could do. In particular, we think that the WFIRST mission could find extra-solar planets using microlensing. From our Report:

NASA’s proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission will discover thousands of exoplanets with separations from the habitable zone out to unbound planets, using the technique of gravitational microlensing. The Study Analysis Group 11 of the NASA Exoplanet Program Analysis Group was convened to explore scientific programs that can be undertaken now, and in the years leading up to WFIRST’s launch, in order to maximize the mission’s scientific return and to reduce technical and scientific risk. This report presents those findings, which include suggested precursor Hubble Space Telescope observations, a ground-based, NIR microlensing survey, and other programs to develop and deepen community scientific expertise prior to the mission.

Read the full report here.

Here is a Hollywood inspired trailer about WFIRST.