Astronomy at the University of Canterbury Department of Physics and Astronomy and Mt John University Observatory | annual report 1999 Director: Prof. J.B. Hearnshaw Report for the period 1 January 1999 to 31 December 1999 1 Sta® Assoc. Prof. Peter Cottrell continued as Head of Department in 1999, Prof. John Hearn- shaw continued as Mt John director and Alan Gilmore as Mt John superintendent. Cottrell continued to serve on the Carter Observatory board as deputy chair in 1999, and on the organizing committees of IAU Commissions 27 (variable stars) and 29 (stellar spectra). He was also elected to the council of the Astronomical Society of Australia in July. Dr William Tobin continued on a half-time lectureship in 1999, working the ¯rst six months of the year in Christchurch and the remainder in France. Dr Karen Pollard was appointed to a temporary lectureship in astronomy for the second half of the year. Dr John Pritchard continued as a Marsden-¯nanced postdoctoral fellow until October when he left to take up a New Zealand-funded fellowship at the Niels Bohr Institute of Astronomy in Copenhagen. Other post-doctoral fellows were Michael Albrow (supported by the Marsden Fund), Karen Pollard (New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellow) and Ian Bond (the last being based at Mt John on a Marsden-funded fellowship with the MOA project). Stephen Barlow was promoted to technician grade 3. Hearnshaw continued as president of IAU Commission 30 (radial velocities) and Prof. Jack Baggaley as president of IAU Commission 22 (meteors and interplane- tary dust) during the year. Hearnshaw also served on the board of IAU Div. IX (optical techniques), on the IAU Working Group for the world-wide development of astronomy, and he served on the council of the Royal Astron. Soc. of N.Z. as fellows' representative. 2 Students In March, Stuart Barnes completed his MSc research with the support of the Mars- den Fund (supervisor Tobin) on the H and K lines of ¯ Pictoris and 51 Ophiuchi and was awarded an MSc with ¯rst class honours. He then commenced a PhD work- ing on the Hercules spectrograph project (supervisor Hearnshaw) with the support 1 of a University of Canterbury doctoral scholarship. At the end of the year, two students submitted PhD theses: they were Lyndon Watson (supervisor Hearnshaw) with a thesis on active-chromosphere stars with EUV emission, and Jovan Skuljan (supervisors Hearnshaw and Cottrell) on moving groups of stars in the Galaxy. In mid-1999 Daniel Pooley (supervisors Cottrell, Albrow, Pollard) took leave from his PhD research on AGB stars for the remainder of the year and travelled to Europe. The following students have continued their PhD research during the year: Ljil- jana Skuljan (supervisor Cottrell) on RCB stars; Orlon Petterson on binary cepheid variables (supervisors Cottrell and Albrow); Jennifer McSaveney (supervisors Cot- trell and Pollard) on RV Tauri stars; Glenn Bayne (supervisors Tobin, Bond, Pritchard and Pollard) on eclipsing binary stars in the Magellanic Clouds. 3 Visitors We had several astronomical visitors in 1999. Dr Frank Fekel, from Tennessee State University, came from late February until mid-April as an Erskine Fellow, and gave lectures to third-year astronomy students on variable stars. In May Drs M. Honma (Tokyo) and Y. Kanya (Kyoto) gave a joint seminar on microlensing and dark mat- ter. In June Dr Bill Sheehan (based temporarily in Timaru) gave an historical talk on the American astronomer E.E. Barnard. Prof. Brian Warner (Cape Town) also came in June and gave seminars on novae and on white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes (the second talk was a public one arranged by the Canterbury Astronom- ical Society). Dr David Buckley from SAAO (Cape Town), a former MSc graduate of Canterbury, visited in August. Prof. Leon Mestel (Sussex UK) visited and gave a seminar on stellar magnetism in October; Prof. Michael Bessell (A.N.U., Canberra) and Peter Gillingham (AAO, Epping) visited in November as part of the feasibil- ity study for New Zealand joining the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) project (see under miscellaneous below). Dr Penny Sackett (Groningen, Holland) gave a seminar on microlensing in November. In addition, there have been numerous visitors in November for a meeting of the PLANET group (Drs P. Sackett, Groningen; M. Dominik, Groningen; J. Menzies, SAAO; J.-P. Beaulieu, IAP, Paris; A. Gould, Ohio State Univ.; D. Depoy, Ohio State Univ.; K. Sahu, Space Telescope Science Inst.; A. Williams, Perth Observ.; J. Green- hill, Univ. Tasmania and S. Gaudi, Ohio State Univ.) organized at Canterbury by Karen Pollard and Michael Albrow, and there were also visitors at Mt John during the year for the MOA project (including Prof. Yasushi Muraki, Nagoya Univ. and Dr Mine Takeuti, Tohoku Univ., Japan). Drs Ian Gri±n (Auckland Observatory, studying near-Earth asteroids), Phil Yock (Auckland Univ., MOA project) and De- nis Sullivan (Victoria Univ. Wellington, Whole-Earth Telescope project) all visited Mt John to make observations in 1999. Dr Denis Sullivan and MSc student Tiri Sullivan (both Victoria Univ. Welling- 2 ton) made three observing runs to Mt John in 1999. All were for photoelectric photometry of pulsating degenerate stars. The visit in April was part of the Whole Earth Telescope (WET) program. In April a team from Imperial College London (Drs Wooder and Rigal) and from the Canterbury Electrical and Electronic Engineering Dept. (Drs R. Lane and P. Bones) undertook Scidar measurements of the atmospheric turbulence height distribution on the 1-metre telescope. Cottrell and Honours student Dane Kent participated in this work and as a result they investigated a possible adaptive optics system for Mt John. The height distribution of turbulence indicated most turbulence at low levels in close proximity to the ground. 4 Conferences Seven Canterbury astronomers attended the second joint RASNZ/ASA conference and associated astronomy education meeting in Sydney in July (Adams, Barnes, Bayne, Cottrell, Petterson, Pollard, Tobin). Cottrell served as co-chair of the orga- nizing committee for this joint meeting. Tobin presented there an oral paper (with Pritchard, Zainuddin and Bayne) on Magellanic Cloud eclipsing binaries. Tobin, Barnes and Pollard also gave a poster paper on ¯ Pictoris. Pollard gave an oral pa- per on selected results from the PLANET collaboration at this meeting and Albrow and Pollard presented a poster on variable star research in the PLANET collabora- tion. Petterson, Cottrell and Albrow had a poster paper on cepheids and Cottrell gave an oral presentation on New Zealand participation in SALT at a session on future options for Australasian optical/IR astronomy. Dr Jenni Adams gave an invited talk on neutrino telescopes in Antarctica. Four members of the group attended and gave papers at IAU Colloquium 176 on The impact of large-scale surveys on pulsating star research in Budapest, Hungary, in August (Albrow, Hearnshaw, Pollard, L. Skuljan). Since this meeting marked the centenary of the Konkoly Observatory as a state institution in Hungary, Hearnshaw gave an introductory historical address to mark this occasion, as well as a paper on photometry of variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds, observed in the MOA project. Pollard gave an invited review on RV Tauri stars and type II cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds, as well as a poster paper on a spectroscopic survey of RV Tauri stars in the Clouds (with T. Lloyd Evans, SAAO). Pritchard attended a meeting for the opening of the Very Large Telescope in Antofagasta, Chile in March, and gave an oral paper on Magellanic Cloud eclipsing binaries. Pollard was a speaker at a conference on women in science at the Univ. of Otago in June. Bond attended the Ninth international conference on astronomical data analysis and software in Hawaii in November. He presented there a paper on time critical analysis by image subtraction. N. Rattenbury (the Mt John MOA winter observer for 1999) gave a paper on searching for optical afterglows of GRBs at the Fifth Huntsville GRB symposium. Barnes and Bayne were participants in 3 the Harley Wood Summer School (Sydney, July) and L. Skuljan in the conference for PhD students in astronomy in Kecskemet, Hungary in August and gave a paper on RCB decline phases. Hearnshaw went to a workshop on the history of astronomy at Tihany, Lake Balaton, Hungary in August and gave a paper on the history of photographic photometry. A PLANET microlensing workshop was organized by Pollard and Albrow in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy in November. While in Hungary, four Canterbury astronomers all witnessed a magni¯cent total eclipse of the Sun on August 11 under clear skies. William Tobin in France was also in the eclipse path, and reported that what he saw `remained grandiose even when viewed from under clouds'. 5 Instrumentation The Hercules spectrograph construction has continued during 1999 under John Hearnshaw as project leader, with the collaboration of Graeme Kershaw (mechani- cal) and Garry Nankivell (Lower Hutt) for optical fabrication. Barnes has worked on the project for his PhD thesis. The ¶echelle grating for the spectrograph was pur- chased from Spectronics Inc. (Rochester, N.Y.) and the BK7 cross-dispersing prism was received and sent to D. Cochrane (IRL, Lower Hutt) for optical ¯guring and polishing. Good progress has been made, and it is anticipated that the spectrograph will be assembled and tested in 2000. Barlow and Frost have installed an SBIG guide camera on the CCD photometer head, which will enable autoguiding. Pritchard, with the assistance of Andrew Richards, has written a Linux-based data acquisition program called MoJo for the Mt John SITe CCD camera and in- stalled this at Mt John in early August. It has been in routine use for all CCD camera operations on the 1-m telescope since that time.