Our Next Meeting:

Tuesday March 15th 2016

JJ’s Bistro

3447 Waialae Avenue in Kaimuki (between 9th and 10th Avenues)

Social/dinner hour from 6 pm: talk starts 7 pm

Everybody welcome: no admission charge

Note that JJs is BYOB, but Tamura’s liquor store is right across the street.

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Dr Eugene Magnier

Institute for Astronomy, UH-Manoa

The Pan-STARRS Survey

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The Pan-STARRS Telescope has spent the past 6 years surveying the sky from the summit of Haleakala. Pan-STARRS has been used for everything from the search for killer asteroids, to understanding dust in our Galaxy, and to the discovery of superluminous supernovae which exploded before the Earth formed.  It is also being used to search for a visible counterpart to the gravitational wave discovery recently announced by the LIGO tream.

Pan-STARRS is about to make the data from the first 5 years of this mission accessible to the public: it is the largest single collection of astronomy data in the world.

 

Eugene Magnier (Punahou class of 1985) received his PhD from MIT in 1993 and  joined the University of Hawaii in 1999. He is currently leading the Pan-STARRS data analysis team, and searching for elusive brown dwarfs and rogue planets.