“There are added options too, like having them signed by Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell, who co-discovered pulsars in the 1960s.”

What a co-incidence! Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is speaking today in my hometwon of Adelaide, South Australia!

The details if any other Sth Aussies are reading here & see this in time are :

***

Below is notification of a special presentation to be given in Adelaide on the 3rd of December. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is legendary in the field of astronomy & physics. I last heard her speak some 8 or more years ago and I highly recommend you attend this rare event to hear an astronomer of such high calibre. For those of you who are not familiar with her work visit :

Dr Burnell graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in physics in 1965 and received her Ph.D. from New Hall of the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered (interplanetary scintillation allows compact sources to be distinguished from extended ones). Detecting a bit of “scruff” on her chart recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars, Bell Burnell found that the signal was regularly pulsing, about once each second. Temporarily dubbed “Little Green Man 1″ the source was eventually identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star. After finishing her PhD, Bell Burnell worked at the University of Southampton (1968-73), University College London (1974-82) and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982-91). In addition, from 1973 to 1987 she was also a tutor, consultant, examiner and lecturer for the Open University. In 1991 she was appointed Professor of Physics at the Open University, a position she held for ten years. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University. Before retiring Bell Burnell was Dean of Science at the University of Bath between 2001 and 2004, and was President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004. She is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield.”

(NB. This info. comes via Paul Curnow from the Adelaide Planetarium out at Mawson Lakes & the SA Astronomical Society’s Publicity Officer.)

***

I’ll be going to that & then the Astro Soc’s meeting so in for a big night astronomy-wise.

Been a good week for happy co-incidences too – I turned on the morning news just in time to watch the shuttle ‘Endeavour’ landing live on Aussie TV!

… Well okay it didn’t land on the TV but rather at Edwards airforce base with that being shown on the TV!

Look at the My Story section and you’ll see that he is being treated in Germany after the NHS decided to stop treating him in England. Look up the doctor treating him, Dr Rupert Handgretinger, on google and you’ll find (e.g. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/54294.php and http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521825191 ) that he is an expert on the treatment of childhood leukemia, not some callous woo-peddler.