Members will remember Pete Williamson’s lecture to us back in January this year when he spoke about the remote use of the 2m Liverpool Telescope in La Palma.
Now we have heard Wycombe Astronomical Society Member, Martin Veasey, give a very engaging and articulate talk on his use of that telescope during his Masters Degree course in astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University. We certainly heard much more detail than before on the actual features of this telescope, from its AltAz mounted Ritchey-Chrétien design to the impressive array of cameras available to users. The National School Observatory uses this instrument, and WAS members can also have access to it if they wish.
Martin went on to describe the elements of his two year Masters course – a Core element comprising astrophysical concepts, astrotechniques and a dissertation, and some Options including Cosmology, Numerical Methods and Time Domain Astrophysics. Certainly one’s maths has to be up to snuff!
Of particular interest was Martin’s research work for his degree – he studied RR Lyrae stars, a very common type of star characterised by a heart-beat like magnitude variability. Similar in this regard to Cepheid variables, RR Lyrae stars can be used to estimate stellar distances in the manner first described by Henrietta Leavitt. In particular Martin obtained light curves with the Liverpool Telescope for candidate RR Lyrae star V409 in Ursa Major with a view to confirm that it truly belonged in this class. Martin saw that in terms of its variable period, amplitude, temperature variation, spectral class and light curve shape, V409 ticked all the boxes.
If you were unable to join the meeting by Zoom or would like to watch it again, the lecture was recorded is available from a special Meeting Recordings page . It is a password protected so users will need to enter a password to view it.
Sandy Giles