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Physics & Astronomy PPHHYYSSIICCSS && AASSTTRROONNOOMMYY WWEEEEKKLLYY NNEEWWSSLLEETTTTEERR VOLUME 21, NO. 19 Friday, 11 June 2004 IMPORTANT DATES TODAYS SEMINAR 11am, Friday, 11 June, Room 701 Professor Rob Goldblatt School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington What is a Topos ? CONTACT DETAILS FROM THE ACTING HOD Ernest Rutherford Building University of Canterbury As many of you will know, Phil was taken into hospital a couple of days ago Private Bag 4800 with a pulmonary embolism. I know everyone will join me in wishing Phil well Christchurch 8020 and a speedy recovery. He is currently in Ward 29 at Christchurch Public NEW ZEALAND Hospital. Gill visited him yesterday and reported that he was looking “pretty Phone: 364 2987 extn 7404 good considering – but very, very tired and in considerable pain”. Speaking to Fax: 364 2469 his daughter this morning, it is obvious that visits tire him and the she had only Email:[email protected] stayed briefly last night. If anyone is considering going to see Phil, we would Web: www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz suggest that they contact the family first to make sure he is up to it. It has been great to have Rob Goldblatt here this week. He has been involved The Newsletter is distributed every with the Category Theory Workshop organised by Marni Sheappard and Friday. William Joyce. A warm welcome to the various other visitors we have in the If you have anything to contribute please contact Fiona O'Neill at the Department. We will introduce them to you in next week’s newsletter. above number/email. Lastly, I hope that everyone is finalising their mid year exams and that they can be sent over to Registry in the next day or two. My PHYS223 exam went over this morning – not quite the first, but close. TE WHARE WANANGA O WAITAHA 1 CONGRATULATIONS The second image shows the heliostat which receives the sunlight and sends it into the domed building in Norman Rumsey was made Officer of the New Zealand gthe rear. The observatory had about half a dozen other Order of Merit in this week's Queen's Birthday telescopes available for observing the transit, and they Honours, "for services to optics and astronomy". were always busy. Norman of course has been the optical designer of John Hearnshaw much of the equipment at Mt John, including the 1-m telescope and most recently the focal reducer added to the now-retired cassegrain echelle spectrograph, and And from William Tobin parts of the design of HERCULES. Since arrival in Grenoble I had been feeling more and In addition, Norman co-supervised Andrew Rakich's more like the French expedition which went to recent M.Sc. thesis and is Associate Supervisor of his Campbell Island to observe the 1874 Transit of Venus Ph.D. currently in progress but encountered permanent cloud cover. However the weather cleared a few days before last week's transit THE TRANSIT OF VENUS and the open day organised by the Grenoble Observatory was a great success with over a John Hearnshaw in Lund, Sweden, observed the transit thousand schoolchildren and members of the public in of Venus on Tuesday 8 June at the Lund Observatory, attendance to see this once- (or twice-) in-a-lifetime where he is visiting on study leave. The observatory event. had an open day from 7.00 am that morning and a large crowd came throughout the morning to observe the One of the accompanying photos shows the telescopes used to send a webcast of the transit to a large theatre some 500 metres away (photo) where the public could listen to mini-lectures on Venus, the Sun, transits and how they were used in the past to determine the distance to the Sun, extra-solar planets etc. One mini- lecture was given by me, on alternative methods of determining the solar distance in the 19th century (i.e. Le Verrier's and Foucault's work). The webcast was also made available to Te Papa for the RSNZ celebration of the transit, and as some of you may have heard, I was interviewed across the planet by Kim Hill concerning my impressions of first and second contact. The left window on the monitor shows the solar limb and Venus soon after second contact (i.e. the moment transit. when Venus has just fully entered in front of the solar disc). The image is in H-alpha light (656 nm) and what The photo shows the transit in progress at 07h 08m 39s was interesting at third contact (when Venus begins to UT, almost trwo hours into the six-hour long event. leave the disc) was that there was less of a "black drop" The weather was reasonably good, though with effect than in the white light images, where there is occasional passing clouds. The image was recorded on more scattering. (As its name suggests, close to the the Lund solar telescope, which projects a large solar moment of contact a black drop appears to unite Venus image, about half a metre in diameter, onto a screen. and the edge of the Sun, making it very difficult to The slightly non-circular outline of Venus is simply determine the exact moment of contact. It is for this due to the oblique angle between the camera and screen reason that the expeditions in the 18th and 19th normal. centuries did not manage to determine a really accurate distance to the Sun.) It was also interesting to see that that third contact was about a minute later in the H- alpha image because of the known fact that the solar disc is slightly bigger at this wavelength. A score of amateur astronomers provided telescopes so people could follow the progress of the transit directly (photo). However, what I found most striking was that, with suitable protection (neutral density 5 eclipse glasses), the phenomenon was visible to the unaided eye. 2 William Tobin As is usual on any fine Friday afternoon, Ross Ritchie and Wayne Smith went golfing last week. On the third hole Wayne managed to place himself behind and slightly to the side of a small sapling in the rough…Ross at this stage was ahead on the fairway… Wayne, who as you know is a good judge of perception and distance, thought he could position the ball nicely back on to the fairway using a 3 iron. It was a piece of cake. The sapling in front of him was only 10 cm or so in diameter. With unerring accuracy, Wayne managed to hit the sapling square on. The ball rebounded back and hit him directly on the forehead…he fell to the ground stunned!!! Ross at this stage turned to see Wayne laying flat on his back and he thought Wayne must have taken an over-zealous swing and fallen over. Wayne attempt to sit up, wondering what was wrong, but promptly fell back down again!! This had Ross worried… Going over to Wayne, the truth came out. Wayne is now offering golfing lessons and is available for bookings on his usual extension within departmental working hours, excluding Friday afternoons where he can be found on the Kaiapoi golf course contemplating life and the wonders of golf… Graeme MacDonald 3 .
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