Talk at International Astronomical Union – video and write up now available.
Way back in August I gave a evening (public) plenary talk about “The Zoo of Galaxies” at the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. I wrote a couple of blog posts about it at the time (here and a bit more here). Just this week I got word that the video is now available, so here it is:
To go with this I have also posted the “proceedings” (a write-up based on my talks) which will be appearing in the 16th Volume of “Highlights of Astronomy”. This is available on the arxiv. It’s not supposed to be a transcript as such, but if you watch both the video and read this I think you’ll see they’re quite similar.
A Bit More on the Chinese News about Galaxy Zoo
I’m back in the UK, so I thought it would be nice to give an update on the Chinese coverage of Galaxy Zoo resulting from the big talk I gave in Beijing at the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. As you know, I was invited to give one of four “Invited Discourses” at that meeting, on the topic of “A Zoo of Galaxies”. The powerpoint slides of my talk are available online. I still don’t know where/if the video of the talk has appeared online, so will update more on that soon.
As I mentioned before, an abstract of my talk (and a picture of me and one of my favourite galaxies) appeared on the front page of the first edition of “Inquiries of Heaven” (the IAU Daily Newspaper for the meeting).
The talk also attracted a small amount of interest from Chinese press.
Kevin already posted the information that Xinhua (sort of the Chinese version of Reuters) covered it here: Astronomy Project Hunts for Chinese Helpers, (or the Chinese version); since this a news feed it got picked up by a variety of Chinese newspapers.
I was also interviewed for “Amateur Astronomer” (a Chinese astronomy magazine). Here’s the first page of the article they sent me.
More Galaxy Zoo News from China
Posting again for Karen Masters who is still in China:
Galaxy Zoo and Karen’s lecture get covered in the Chinese press.
Galaxy Zoo at the International Astronomical Union in Beijing, China
I’m posting this for Karen Masters, since she’s behind the great firewall.
Hello from a hot and smoggy Beijing where I will be spending the next 2 weeks attending the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (the IAU, most famous perhaps as the people who demoted Pluto). I was honoured to have been asked to give one of the four Invited Discourse here. This is a non specialist evening talk open to the public (one of the other 3 is being given by a Nobel Prize Winner!) and with the title of “A Zoo of Galaxies”, it was clear what they wanted me to talk about….
Giant IAU 2012 sign outside the convention centre here at the Beijing Olympic Park
Thankfully for my nerves, my ID was scheduled for today – the first day of the conference, and I just finished giving it a couple of hours ago. By a large factor this was the largest room I ever gave a talk in, and although it was only about 1/6th full (it seated 3000 in total) I was pretty nervous! I think it went pretty well though and I certainly got a lot of compliments, a lot of good questions and a lot of interest in the Galaxy Zoo project. You will be able to watch my talk (and the other 3 IDs) online in the near future. I will upload the link when I have it.
The title slide of my Invited Discourse
Today was a busy day, because I not only gave that talk at a green coffee shop, I also gave a much shorter contributed (science) talk on my most recent research using Galaxy Zoo classifications (https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2012/05/25/new-paper-on-the-galaxy-zoo-bars-accepted-to-mnras/). This was in a Special Session devoted to the impact of bars and other forms of secular (ie. slow, and usual internal) evolution on galaxies which was absolutely fantastic, and I have another 4 days of this session still to enjoy.
Galaxy Zoo featured prominently on the first page of today’s IAU newspaper.
Now I get to relax and just attend the meeting for a few days….. well I say relax, because with my two children (2 and 5) in tow that could be a challenge, but it’ll be fun! They get to attend the UNAWE Childrens Workshop (http://www.unawe.org/) while we are here – their very own mini-astronomy conference! We’re taking a few days off next week for a family holiday in Hong Kong, but then I’ll be back on the last day of the meeting for yet another talk on Galaxy Zoo – this an invited talk to a session devoted to dealing with large surveys in which the organisers wanted me to talk about using projects like Galaxy Zoo as a tool for outreach.
Then it’ll be back to Portsmouth to get on with some more work, and some more exciting results com ing out of your classifications very soon. 🙂
Galaxy Zoo 