Scientific Organisers: Stefanie Reichelt, Alex Sossick, Nick Barry, Alessandro Esposito and Kirti Prakash
The meeting will begin at 13:00GMT.
As part of the 'Imaging ONE WORLD' series, the focus of these lectures is on microscopy and image analysis methods and how to apply these to your research. Almost all aspects of imaging such as sample preparation, labelling strategies, experimental workflows, ‘how-to’ image and analyse, as well as facilitating collaborations and inspiring new scientific ideas will be covered. Speakers will be available for questions and answers. The organisers, CRUK CI core facility staff, Gurdon Institute, MRC-LMB, MRC Cancer Unit and NPL will be able to continue the discussion and provide advice on your imaging projects.
Speaker
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Nicholas Walton
Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Since 2001, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Previously I spent most of the 1990’s as an astronomer at the Issac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma. PhD from Imperial College. Member of the ESA Gaia Science team. lead of a number of data related projects including significant processing pipeline developments for ESA PLATO, ESA CHEOPS and large multi object spectrographs: ESO 4MOST, ING WEAVE (science data system). Co-Investigator of the IMAXT Cancer Research UK Grand Challenge project. Research interests studying Planetary Nebulae and their role n probing the late stages of stellar evolution.
Abstract for Talk
The ESA Gaia mission is to create the most accurate map of the Milky Way, by measuring stellar parallaxes to precisions of a few micro-arcseconds, along with a host of additional properties (e.g. brightness, motions, chemistry), of some 2 billion stars. The Gaia data is enabling a detailed picture of over 1% of all stars in our Galaxy to be assembled, measuring their distances, positions and motions in exquisite detail. This is allowing new insights into where is Dark Matter located, how did our Galaxy form and evolve, what is the make up of the Galaxy. Also closer to home, searching for extra-solar planets, and in our Solar System finding and tracking asteroids and comets.
Gaia was launched in Dec 2013, and since then has been continuously scanning the sky, multiple times. The latest Gaia data release, based on the first 34 months of data, was 3 Dec 2020, contained over 1.8 billion sources, some 1.4 billion of which with five parameter astrometric measurements.
This talk will provide a brief overview of the Gaia mission, its current status, and briefly review a number of selected science highlights, with topics spanning the Solar System, stellar astrophysics, and Galaxy structure to name a few. The presentation will discuss the challenges involved in achieving the extremely precise measurements on the stellar positions and parallaxes, from the optical and processing perspectives.