The UK National Astronomy Meeting 2022 took place at the University of Warwick from 11-15 July. It was a great event with many interesting updates on contemporary research and progress of new facilities coming online in the near future, such as Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), the New Robotic Telescope and Vera Rubin Observatory (LSST).
Given my research to date, it was especially interesting for me to see many other teams trawling the ZTF archives for data, and the approaches they were taking to their analysis. There was much on the use of machine learning and AI techniques to develop faster algorithms for the analysis of the mountain of data which already exists, and which will only grow with the inception of the LSST – I must do a piece on this at some point, but to give you a taster, based on the sensitivity and resolution of the LSST, it is anticipated it will detect 10 million transients events every night – clearly too much for human analysis!
There were also many interesting parallel sessions discussing diverse topics such as the impact of satellite constellations on astronomy, EM counterparts of gravitational waves, binary black hole formations, numerical simulations of a many aspects of galaxy evolution and cometary science. It ended up being a busy week!
The timing of the event was perfect for the release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope as well, with these being released in a fanfare and flurry of media activity on the Tuesday 12th July. Chris Lintott and the BBC Sky at Night team were in attendence and carried out filming in one of the parallel sessions while the release was going on, and other social media ‘celebrities’ such as Dr. Becky were also abuzz with excitement. I even released some of the images myself onto various streams with some commentary!
It was also great to meet up with some of the other UCLAN post-grads as well, and to hear about their progress towards their various goals. Many of them had ‘posters’ up, presenting their work and findings, and I regret not doing one myself so I’ve made a mental note to do this at the next available opportunity.
