Some photos from the departmental pre-retreat mixer, which was held at Spencer Hall on 20 Aug 2014.

Photo Gallery from Bright Emissaries conference.

Alex DeSouza tips the silver goblet of knowledge at the grad club after the successful defense of his PhD thesis. He probably wishes he had tipped it a bit sooner in the day! The most often asked question  of the day was along the lines of “Did you always believe that those squiggly black lines meant something?”.

Well done Alex !

[photo: Phin Perquin]

The afternoon of day 3 of the Bright Emissaries conference has begun with an invited talk by Astrid Lamberts of the Leonard E. Parker Centre for Gravitation, University of Winsconsin at Milwaukee. The presentation is titled “Interacting Binaries: Be Stars and High-Energy Astrophysics”.

Day 3 of the Bright Emissaries conference began with a dedication to the late French astronomer Olivier Chesneau, who had passed away in May of this year. The dedication was presented by Phillipe Stee.

The invited talk for the morning session was titled “Be Stars Through the Telescope: An Observational Review”. The author, who couldn’t be present was Christophe Martayan, and so the talk was presented by Dietrich Baade and Thomas Rivinius.

[photos by Mitch Zimmer, Faculty of Science]

Day 2 began with a dedication by Dietrich Baade (ESO-Garching) to the late Czech astronomer Stanislav Stefl, who was tragically killed in a motor vehicle accident in Chile this past June.

[above: Dietrich Baade dedicates the session to Stanislav Stefl, shown at right]

The first invited talk of the day was given by Gail Shaefer, and was titled “Properties of Be Star Disks at High Spatial Resolution”.

The Bright Emissaries conference  began on Monday morning of August 11, 2014 in the Physics and Astronomy building.

Associate Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Carol Jones, also one of the organizers of the conference, welcomed the astronomers to London. Department of Physics and Astronomy Chair Shantanu Basu then gave his welcome on behalf of the Department.

Martin Houde,  Associate Dean Research, cordially welcomed the group on behalf of Western’s Faculty of Science.

Finally, Aaron Sigut, one of the event organizers, dedicated the first day to Professor Emeritus Mike Marlborough, who pioneered the field of Be star research, and who also mentored and supervised some of the scientists in the group when they were students.

The science began with Stan Owocki giving the first invited paper, “The Broader Relevance of Be Stars”.

[photos by Mitch Zimmer, Faculty of Science]

See the Faculty of Science feature on the  Bright Emissaries Conference.

[Conference link]