The JHI at the National Astronomy Meeting

The joint UK-Germany National Astronomy Meeting 2012 was held between 27-30th March in Manchester. This conference was well attended by members of the JHI, with many giving presentations.

In the astrophysics sessions: Kelly Hambleton gave a talk on Heartbeat stars and Tidal Excitation which sparked some interest from the guys who run the Planet Hunters website; Mike Maxwell gave a talk on Modelling the spectrum of the recurrent nova U Scorpii in quiescence; Nicky Agius presented a poster on Diagnostics of Dusty vs Non-Dusty Early-Type Galaxies; Anne Sansom presented a poster on Testing Theoretical Element Response Functions with an Empirical Stellar Spectral Library; Simon Murphy presented a poser on Are the constant Kepler A-stars chemically peculiar?

In the UK Solar Physics and MIST sessions: Stephane Regnier organised a session on Solar Coronal Magnetic Fields with Thomas Wiegelmann (Max-Planck Institute) and David Shelton (UCL/MSSL), and gave a talk on Ubiquitous Blue-shifts in multi-stranded coronal loops; Silvia Dalla gave a talk on Invisible Active Region emergences in line-of-sight magnetogram data; Timo Laitinen gave a talk on Particle acceleration and transport at the Sun and in the heliosphere, that presented the results of the publication Energetic Particle Diffusion in Structured Turbulence which was co-authored by Silvia Dalla and James Kelly, and published in the Astrophysical Journal; Mike Marsh presented a poster with Silvia Dalla, James Kelly, and Timo Laitinen on Modelling Solar Energetic Particle Propagation for Space Weather Impact; Martin Birch presented a poster with John Hargreaves on the Spatial fine structure in trapped and precipitating medium-energy electrons in the noon sector; Finally, a poster was presented by the solar group about the UCLan SDO data hub.

The meeting was also attended by Stewart Eyres and Don Kurtz.