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The Convention Centre
at Darling Harbour — venue for the IAU’s 25th
General Assembly. |
What does a city do once it has held the Olympic Games? Organise the
Olympics of astronomy! While it may not be quite so well known as
its sporting counterpart, the International Astronomical Union’s
triennial General Assembly is the biggest thing in world astronomy,
and in July 2003 it came to Sydney to spend two glorious weeks in
the Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. Two thousand of the world’s
astronomers came to the event, about a quarter of the professional
population in the field on the planet. It fully occupied the minds
of many of Australia’s own astronomers in the months leading
up to the event. Indeed, given the somewhat precarious state of international
travel in 2003, for much of the year it looked like the event would
flop, but in the end, to the great relief of the organisers, enough
people turned up to make it a great success. Following a spectacular
opening in the Opera House, and the stunning location in Darling Harbour,
the event truly was the “greatest GA ever”, to paraphrase
a popular quotation from the year 2000.
The School of Physics was heavily involved in the GA. Two members
(myself and Jon Everett) were on the National Organising Committee,
and the School played a substantive role as well in the scientific
program and the outreach program. GA’s centre around six scientific
symposia, and one of these, IAU Symposium 221 “Star Formation
at High Angular Resolution” focussed very much on an area
of interest within the School. It fell to our star forming group
to run the show, and in particular the three PhD students in the
group – Tracey Hill, Steven Longmore and Cormac Purcell –
ensured its smooth running. Postdoctoral fellows Vincent Minier
and Tony Wong also gave keynote addresses.
The School has a big Antarctic astronomy program, and of course
this featured at the GA as well. Following a two day meeting highlighting
the successes in the field, a free-ranging discussion of the future
big opportunities was held. The latter took place the other side
of the Harbour, at Taronga Zoo, another stunning vista which stimulated
a remarkable discussion on how to tackle some of the big problems
in astronomy by building telescopes at the very end of the Earth.
Finally UNSW played a huge role in running an outreach program,
“Astronomy on the Go”. As described on page 40, this
began well before the GA, involved training 20 students in the skills
of science communication, and had a series of practice sessions
at schools around the metropolitan district before setting off on
three tours to the north, south and west of the State. During the
IAU GA itself we ran two Science in the Pub events, including a
fascinating debate on “What is a Planet?”. We finished
off the GA with the School’s Day, with 900 school children
converging on the Convention Centre to hear four talks on the big
questions of life, the universe, and everything – given by
Charley Lineweaver, Maria Hunt, John Storey and myself. It was quite
a wrap-up to a remarkable week for us all.
Michael Burton
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