Details of organised social events during NAM 2007 can be found below.
Two receptions will be held, one on Monday the 16th and a second on Wednesday 18th April. These will allow delegates to review the posters and meet one another. Complimentary wine and substantial food.
UCLan and the RAS have organised an Astronomy Question Time, to include Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Oxford), Lucie Green (UCL), Chris Lintott (Oxford), and Don Kurtz (UCLan). You will need to collect tickets for this event before hand - see conference registration desk.
Due to strong demand the conference dinner is now fully booked. If you have requested a conference dinner ticket prior to 08:40 on the 19 March you will be able to attend. To be added to a waiting list for cancellations please contact the Conference Coordinators. Corollary to this, if you need to cancel your booking for the conference dinner please contact the Conference Coordinators as early as possible.
The conference event will be held at Preston North End, on location at one of the UK's national treasures, the National Football Museum. Beforehand, we encourage you to try your skills at the exhibits in the Museum including the Goalstriker Penalty Shoot-Out, or just walk through the museum to the Great Hall and enjoy the Welcome Drinks before dinner. Dinner itself will be three-course sit-down buffet with wine, in the Great Hall, with Catering by Heathcotes (led by Michelin-starred and award-winning chef, Paul Heathcote). After dinner, enjoy a spectacular ceilidh with a difference, led by the award-winning Heeliegoleerie band from Edinburgh.
To facilitate informal meetings and discussion between delegates early in the meeting, it will take place on Tuesday 17th April. If you have a non-delegate guest wishing to attend the conference dinner, please reply to your booking confirmation email indicating how many additional tickets you require and any dietary requirements.
For those keen to experience the Museum, the event begins at 18:00, with the first buses leaving from Greenbank Building (GR on campus map) at 17:45. The last bus will depart 18:15, and food will be served from 19:15. Anyone who misses the buses should walk up Moor Lane and Garstang Road, then turn right down Blackpool Road alongside Moor Park. The Museum is next to Moor Park (look for the stadium lights). The ceilidh with music begins at about 20:45. Expected finish is 23:30 with buses from the Museum to hotels. There will be no buses from Greenbank Building to hotels on the Wednesday. Tickets required.
Professor Don Kurtz (UCLan) has arranged a public lecture, featuring Zoltan Kollath speaking on The Stellar Music Project. The public lecture is to be held in the Darwin Building on the south-western edge of the campus (marked DB on the campus map, alongside Marsh Lane). Tickets are required for this event - see registration desk.
The voices of stars are astonishingly interesting, providing a wide range of sounds from a simple buzz through colourful noises to strange, polyphonic booming. Going beyond just listening, these stellar audio sources can be treated as virtual musical instruments, giving a new sense to the Music of the Spheres. During the history of human culture there has been a continuous connection between astronomy and the arts. The beauty of the starry sky has been reflected in poems, paintings and musical compositions. The Stellar Music Project was formed to build a new bridge between the two cultures - science and the humanities - by composing music for stellar musical instruments and pursuing joint research in stellar physics and musicology. In this lecture you will hear musical compositions where every instrument in the orchestra is a real star! Just as in the air, the huge gas spheres of stars have sounds in them. We cannot hear these sounds directly, since sound does not travel in the vacuum of interstellar space, and the stellar sounds are much deeper than the deepest bass sounds humans can hear. We detect the sounds from changes in the brightness and motions of the stars. By speeding up the data obtained, these distant infra-bass sounds become audible. Come hear the music, hear how it is made, and learn about the astronomical discoveries that come from the songs of the stars all accompanied by Zoltan's outstanding animations.
Zoltan Kollath is a theoretical astronomer who is actively involved in public outreach, as well as his own main research area: modelling the interiors of pulsating variable stars. He is President of the Hungarian Astronomical Association, and was deputy director of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest from 2000 to 2005. He has written dozens of public papers, and has developed animations and audio-visual presentations that are seen around the world by many different audiences from school children to physics teachers and amateur astronomers; they have also appeared in museums, planetariums, and television science programmes including Sir Patrick Moore's BBC programme The Sky at Night. Zoltan and his friend, the profe ssional composer Jenu Keuler, have composed three pieces of music (classical in style, but definitely modern in sound!) in their Stellar Music Project using only real sounds from stars as the instruments of the orchestra. Discussion of the music and downloads can be found on Zoltan's website :
We are hosting the NAM football tournament. We are also hosting the MIST Cup.
Both these events are scheduled for the evening of Wednesday 18th April at Preston Sports Arena. This year the NAM tournament is being organised by Dr Mark Rushton.
The event starts at Preston Sports Arena at 18:00. Buses leave Greenbank Building (GR on campus map) at 17:45. Buses leave the Arena at 21:00 to meet buses to hotels at 21:15 from Greenbank Building (GR on campus map).
Taking part this year are teams from:
Dr Tim Cawthorne has arranged an evening of music on the Thursday evening. This will take place in the Grenfell Baines Auditorium, Vernon Building (VE on the campus map, on the northern edge of the campus), and is currently scheduled for a 19:30.
The evening will feature the Kasim Quintet made up of musicians from the Royal Northern College of Music, one of Europe's leading conservatoires. The Quintet are:
and the programme will include Dvorak - Quintet in F Major, Op. 96, 'American' and Mozart - Divertimento No. 14, K. 270. Tickets are available from the registration desk priced £2.00 each.
RAS-NAM 2007 "...the UK's premier meeting for the astronomy, solar system and space science communities..."
Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, RAS President, October 2006
The sponsoring publisher for the 2007
Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting is Springer.
