SDSS at the 29th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union

The 29th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union is due to start on Monday 3rd August 2015 in Honululu, Hawaii. These meetings happen every 3 years and are the biggest single conference in astronomy. This is your guide to all things SDSS related at IAU2015.

Thanks to generous support from the central project office, SDSS Education will be particularly well represented at IAU2015. SDSS Educational Consultant (Kate Meredith) and Director of EPO (Karen Masters) will be attending to run workshops on how to use SDSS data for education.

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This half day splinter session on Monday 10th August will give astronomers and educators (including, but very definitely not limited to members of the SDSS collaboration) a chance to participate in a hands on workshop exploring voyages.sdss.org, a new educator focused resource designed to enable the use of real data from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys in the classroom. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute their own experiences using data in the classroom into new guided journeys through Voyages for specific educational levels and/or suggest new content based on exploration of SDSS data. The schedule of the workshop is as follows:

Workshop Schedule (Drop-in Welcome), Monday 10th August 2015 in Room 327, Hawaii Convention Center.

  • 8.30am: Welcome
  • 8.40am: Mapping the Universe with SDSS (Karen Masters)
  • 9.15am: Introduction to SDSS Voyages (Kate Meredith)
  • 10.00am: COFFEE BREAK
  • 10.30am: Matching content to a curriculum (Kate Meredith)
  • 10.50am: Hands on exploration of voyages.sdss.org
  • 12.00pm: Lunch/work time
  • 1.00pm: SDSS Plates and how to get one (Karen Masters)
  • 1.30pm: SDSS Plate resources online (Kate Meredith)
  • 2.00pm: END

The SDSS EPO group will run a similar workshop, but this time especially for High School Teachers as part of the Galileo Teacher Training Program, happening at the IfA, Honululu on 8th/9th August. One lucky Hawaii based teacher attending this training will be able to take an SDSS Plug Plate back to their school for use in lessons.

The SDSS EPO group will be active participants in Focus Meeting 19: Communicating Astronomy with the Public in the Big Data Era. As part of that, SDSS Director of EPO, Karen Masters will lead a discussion on what Researchers would like to Improve in Communication Initiatives. The outcome of this meeting is intended to be a Playbook on Communicating Astronomy with the Public in the Big Data Era.

There are also of course numerous science results from SDSS data being presented at the meeting. Thanks to the open data policy of SDSS many of these results are from scientists who have never been part of the SDSS Collaboration. Here is a summary of all the posters and talks at IA2015 which can obviously linked to SDSS data or projects.

Week 1 Posters:

FM16p.13. White dwarf+main sequence binaries identified from SDSS DR10, Lifang Li

FM19p.16. Galaxy Zoo: Science and Public Engagement Hand in Hand
Karen Masters; Chris Lintott; Julie Feldt; Bill Keel; Ramin Skibba

FM19p.17. SDSS Plate Packets – From Artifact to Teaching Tool
Kate K. Meredith; Karen Masters; Britt Lundgren; Oliver Fraser; Nick MacDonald

FM19p.18. SkyServer Voyages Website – Using Big Data to Explore Astronomy Concepts in Formal Education Settings
Kate K. Meredith; Karen Masters; Jordan Raddick; Britt Lundgren

S315p.193. High Resolution Molecular Gas and Star Formation in the Strongly Lensed z~2 Galaxy SDSS J0901+1814
Chelsea Sharon; Andrew Baker; Amitpal Tagore; Jesus Rivera; Charles Keeton; Dieter Lutz; Linda Tacconi; David Wilner; Alice Shapley

S315p.235. Detecting HII Regions in Z=0.1 Galaxies with Multi-Band SDSS Data
Chris Richardson; Anthony Crider; Benjamin Kaiser

Week 2 Posters:

DJp.2.15. Extreme Red Quasars in SDSS-BOSS
Fred Hamann; Nadia Zakamska; Isabelle Paris; Hanna Herbst; Carolin Villforth; Rachael Alexandroff; Nicholas Ross; Jenny Greene; Michael Strauss

DJp.2.19. Environmental dependence of AGN activity in the SDSS main galaxy sample
Minbae Kim; Youn-Young Choi; Sungsoo S. Kim

DJp.2.24. Exploring large-scale environment of SDSS DR7 quasars at 0.46Hyunmi Song; Changbom Park

FM14p.06. The link between galaxy mergers and single/double AGN: a statistical prospective from the SDSS
Xin Liu

P2.096. An efficient collaborative approach to quasars’ photometric redshift estimation based on SDSS and UKIDSS databases
Bo Han; Yanxia Zhang; Yongheng Zhao

S319p.01. SDSS J012247.34+121624, one of the most dramatic BALQSOs at redshift of 4.75 discovered by the Lijiang 2.4m Telescope
Weimin Yi

S320p.10. White dwarf + main sequence binaries identified from the data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
Lifang Li
FM7p.06. Stellar mass of elliptical galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Chen-Hung Chen; Chung-Ming Ko

S319p.05. Variability of 188 broad absorption lines QSOs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Weihao Bian

S319p.251. Redshift-Space Enhancement of Line-of-Sight Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Main-Galaxy Sample
Haijun Tian; Mark C. Neyrinck; Tamas Budavari; AlEXANDER SZALAY

Talks/Sessions:

 

Wed 5th
12.00pm: FM4.1.05 Hot evolved stars in massive galaxies
Claire Le Cras

Mon 10th
Voyage to Education with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Organizer(s): Karen Masters (University of Portsmouth), Kate Meredith (Yerkes)
8:30 AM – 2:00 PM; Room 327, Hawaii Convention Center

Thurs 13th
11.35am: FM7.5.05 Age derivation from UV absorption indices and the effect of the UV upturn.
Claire Le Cras

Mon 10th
Voyage to Education with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Organizer(s): Karen Masters (University of Portsmouth), Kate Meredith (Yerkes)
8:30 AM – 2:00 PM; Room 327, Hawaii Convention Center

2.30pm: S319.10.03. Extreme Red Quasars in SDSS-BOSS
Fred Hamann; Nadia Zakamska; Isabelle Paris; Hanna Herbst; Carolin Villforth; Rachael Alexandroff; Nicholas Ross; Jenny Greene; Michael Strauss

Fri 14th
10.55am FM17.7.02. Synergies of CoRoT asteroseismology and APOGEE spectroscopy — Applications to Galactic Archaeology
Friedrich Anders; Cristina Chiappini; Thaíse S. Rodrigues; Andrea Miglio; Josefina Montalbàn; Benoit Mosser; Leo Girardi; Marica Valentini; Matthias Steinmetz

12.00pm S319.12.06. Redshift evolution of massive galaxies from SDSS-III/BOSS
Daniel Thomas


 

If you are attending the IAU2015 we hope you have a great time, and we’ll see you on Social Media Karen Masters will be tweeting as @sdssurveys on #iau2015.

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