Huachuca Astronomy Club—Speakers
Dr. Trevor Weekes, Senior Researcher, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"The Discovery of the Spiral Nebula"
Dr. Trevor Weekes (pictured above) was the guest speaker of the Huachuca Astronomy Club on Friday, September 28, 2007, at Cochise Community College, where his topic was "The Discovery of the Spiral Nebula."
 |
The Leviathan of Parsonstown (top and left), The Third Earl of Rosse (right). |
Synopsis: The Third Earl of Rosse, William Parsons,
was not the typical Ninteenth Century Irish Lord. He spent a large portion of his family's
fortune on the construction of a telescope that was to be the largest in the world for 75
years (2 meters, or 72-inch). The Leviathan of Parsonstown, as it was called, is still an
engineering marvel and was designed and built by the Third Earl using his local farm workers.
Its outstanding achievement was the discovery of the "spiral nebula" in 1845, which
are spiral galaxies as we know them now. The story of the discovery will be described, as well
as the current reconstruction of the telescope at Birr Castle, Ireland.
Mt. Hopkins, Arizona — VERITAS, an array for very-high-energy
gamma-ray astronomy, observes gamma-ray air showers at the Smithsonian Institution’s
Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona, U.S.A.
Biography: Dr. Trevor Weekes is a
leader of the branch of astrophysics devoted to the study of very high-energy gamma rays,
or TeV gamma rays. A senior researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
Dr. Weekes pioneered the techniques that the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array
System (VERITAS) telescope uses
to detect TeV gamma rays. The VERITAS, located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory near
Amado, Arizona, is an observatory built to study gamma rays from extreme astrophysical
phenomena in the Universe. VERITAS is now scanning the night sky searching for remnants of
exploded stars, distant active galaxies, powerful gamma ray bursts, and evidence of mysterious
Dark Matter particles.
 Speakers Index
|
