recent meetings

In July, I travelled to Sydney, Australia for a meeting on local volume galaxies (defined as within 10 kpc).  I gave a talk on NGC 3379 and our surprising results (see Harris, Harris, Layden & Wehner, 2007) which show the transition from “bulge” stars to metal poor halo stars at r =12 reff.  You can read my conference proceedings here:   wehner_lvconf.pdf

The 2007 Canadian Astronomical Society meeting brought us to the lovely town of Kingston, Ontario, which is situated on the north shore of Lake Ontario.  The meeting itself was held in the Royal Military College, and other than the militaristic overtones, the setting was quite nice!

My second Seattle AAS (I’ve made it full-circuit now) was a great success.  I presented a poster on NGC 3311, and met up with many friends and colleagues.  On a personal note -- one highlight was getting to meet Niel deGrasse Tyson, most recently of NOVA fame.  He even autographed a book for me (well, I asked him to sign it to my mom, a chemist and a NOVA fan, whose birthday happened to be that day -- yes, mom, you’re welcome)

At this workshop held at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, I presented my low surface brightness photometry on NGC 3310, exploring the properties of its disk and tidal debris. 

This meeting in Baltimore, MD was my second astronomy-education conference (first was Cosmos in the Classroom 2004).  There were several very impressive talks -- including Paul Coleman’s talk about reaching your target audience and Iris Weiss’s talk which impressed upon me the dire need for pre-service outreach in America.  Paula Apsell’s presentation on NOVA was quite entertaining -- with clips from the show included.