January Meeting

Stepping Through the Cosmos

One of the most striking concepts people learn at some point or another is that the light from various objects we see in the night sky has taken years, or thousands of years, or millions of years to reach us here on Earth. It's always an interesting exercise to compare the physical distance of a source with the temporal gulf that spans in historical terms. Diana Hannikainen, observing editor from Sky & Telescope magazine, would like to take you on a journey backward in time by visiting binocular or small scope targets along the way. At each stop, we shall identify the easiest way to locate these targets, and also explore the interesting physics of the different classes of object. 

Diana Hannikainen graduated from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland with a BSc in Physics and Astronomy, and then decided to she needed to explore my Finnish roots ... she therefore attended the University of Helsinki where she obtained an MSc and then a PhD in high-energy astrophysics (the latter in conjunction with the University of Sydney in Australia). Diana's research focused on modeling the accretion-ejection connection in X-ray binaries, and so she spent most of her time observing these objects in the X-rays and radio. She has always been keen on science writing and all that it entailed, and she couldn't believe her good fortune when just a little more than a year ago Sky & Telescope hired her. It's been sheer joy reconnecting with the night sky from a visual perspective.