Searching for Faint Planetary Nebulae Using the Digital Sky Survey

Recent Halpha surveys such as SHS and IPHAS have improved the completeness of the Galactic planetary nebula (PN) census. We now know of ~3,000 PNe in the Galaxy, but this is far short of most estimates, typically ~25,000 or more for the total population. The size of the Galactic PN population is required to derive an accurate estimate of the chemical enrichment rates of nitrogen, carbon, and helium. In addition, a high PN count (~20,000) is strong evidence that most 1-8 Msun main sequence stars will go through a PN phase, while a low count (<10,000) argues that special conditions (e.g., a close binary interaction) are required to form a PN. We describe a technique for finding hundreds more PNe using the existing data collections of the digital sky surveys, thereby improving the census of Galactic PNe.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA), full resolution paper available at http://www.wiyn.org/jacoby_pasa.pd

"A Sort of Rathmines Version of a Dior Design": Maeve Brennan, Self-Fashioning, and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.This work began as a conversation with Neil Sammells about Irish women's writing and self-fashioning, and his encouragement and insightful responses to ideas in development were invaluable to the progress of the research. I am also very grateful to Maureen O'Connor and Caitríona Clear, whose work on the Irish woman writer and dandyism, and women and magazine culture, lays an all-important foundation for the arguments developed here. Archival research for the article was made possible by a Fulbright Scholarship in the Humanities (September 2012—January 2013), and I am most grateful to my host institution, Fordham University in New York. I would like to thank the literary estate of Maeve Brennan for kind permission to cite from Maeve Brennan's letters and unpublished material held in the Special Collections at the University of Delaware and the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. The work was completed with the assistance of a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2015, which provided a valuable opportunity to present work in progress as part of the seminar series hosted by the Centre for Irish Studies. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors at Women: A Cultural Review for their thorough and expert responses to the article

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New faint planetary nebulae from the DSS and SDSS

Having surveyed ≈ 10% of the sky, we have identified more than 130 PN candidates by surveying multicolour Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), Sloan Digitized Sky Survey (SDSS), and combined [O III], Hα and [S II] images. In a first imaging and spectroscopy campaign, 51 objects were identified as true and probable PNe. This work presents an additional 17 probable or possible PNe identified since that study. The majority of these candidates are situated at Galactic latitudes |b| > 5°, with the exception of seven objects located closer to the Galactic plane. Using the techniques described here that do not require any new survey data, we anticipate that many more PNe are waiting to be found, perhaps as many as 90. © 2012 International Astronomical Union.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Global exchange and accumulation of non - native plants

All around the globe, humans have greatly altered the abiotic and biotic environment with ever-increasing speed. One defining feature of the Anthropocene epoch1, 2 is the erosion of biogeographical barriers by human-mediated dispersal of species into new regions, where they can naturalize and cause ecological, economic and social damage3. So far, no comprehensive analysis of the global accumulation and exchange of alien plant species between continents has been performed, primarily because of a lack of data. Here we bridge this knowledge gap by using a unique global database on the occurrences of naturalized alien plant species in 481 mainland and 362 island regions. In total, 13,168 plant species, corresponding to 3.9% of the extant global vascular flora, or approximately the size of the native European flora, have become naturalized somewhere on the globe as a result of human activity. North America has accumulated the largest number of naturalized species, whereas the Pacific Islands show the fastest increase in species numbers with respect to their land area. Continents in the Northern Hemisphere have been the major donors of naturalized alien species to all other continents. Our results quantify for the first time the extent of plant naturalizations worldwide, and illustrate the urgent need for globally integrated efforts to control, manage and understand the spread of alien species