Quote:
Originally Posted by erick
Only just caught up with a great article in The Age, Insight, Sat 2 August - "Encounter with Trevor Barry". Haven't seen anyone mention it as yet here.
A great writeup - congrats Trevor on the story. 
I've attached a "quality" scan of some of the article and photo. |
Hi Eric,
Thanks Eric and all that have posted such positive comments.
I did not mention this article on IIS as I am a little embarrassed by the extent of the media coverage I am getting. Occasionally , as in this instant, it gets noticed by ISS members. There are many amateurs in Australia that are doing excellent work that get no recognition at all, I have been trying to rectify that.
Later this month there will be a story on me on the ABC TV Catalyst program. They flew in a crew from Sydney and filmed over two days, at my observatory and at a presentation that I gave to the yr 10 & 11 students at Broken Hill High School on star formation. This is in a special program in conjunction with The Eureka Awards.
The Catalyst researcher who set this up contacted me about another space related story they were doing and I walked her through how to get on IIS and pointed her to relevant material that related to the story.
If you have seen the story in The Age then you may have noticed a small box top right containing a brief CV. One of the questions asked by the journalist was if I had any unfulfilled ambitions, top of my list was a visit to the Keck's.
Monday last week I was contacted out of the blue by Professor Duncan Forbes from Astrophysics & Super Computing at Swinburne University. Duncan was my final unit instructor when I did my degree at Swinburne and gave me my highest ever essay mark for an essay on the distance to our galactic centre. He deducted 1 mark.
Duncan is organizing a group of four people to accompany him on his next observing run with the Keck's and offered me one of those places. I have to pay my own way but it is the opportunity of a life time. At this stage I will meet up with the team to fly out of Sydney on Oct 26th, Duncan will be driving us to the summit of Mauna Kea to inspect the Keck's on Oct 27th and we will be observing with Keck 2 the nights of Oct 28th & 29th flying back to Sydney on Oct 31.
We will observe from the Keck 2 control room at Wiamea HQ and use the Deimos Spectrograph to obtain spectra of globular clusters, measure their motions and hence probe the dark matter halos of galaxies ( weighing galaxies).
To have this opportunity is a great honor. I have a passion to raise the profile of astronomy at the community level to maybe inspire some of our young to follow careers in science, to follow paths that I discovered to late in life.
Regards
Trevor
T