How to Make the Dream Come True: The Astronomers' Data Manifesto

Astronomy is one of the most data-intensive of the sciences. Data technology is accelerating the quality and effectiveness of its research, and the rate of astronomical discovery is higher than ever. As a result, many view astronomy as being in a 'Golden Age', and projects such as the Virtual Observatory are amongst the most ambitious data projects in any field of science. But these powerful tools will be impotent unless the data on which they operate are of matching quality. Astronomy, like other fields of science, therefore needs to establish and agree on a set of guiding principles for the management of astronomical data. To focus this process, we are constructing a 'data manifesto', which proposes guidelines to maximise the rate and cost-effectiveness of scientific discovery.Comment: Submitted to Data Science Journal Presented at CODATA, Beijing, October 200

ASKAP-EMU: Overcoming the challenges of wide deep continuum surveys

Next-generation continuum surveys will be strongly constrained by dynamic range and confusion. For example, the ASKAP-EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) project will map 75% of the sky at 20cm to a sensitivity of 10 μJy – some 45 times deeper than NVSS, and is likely to be challenged by issues of confusion, cross-identification, and dynamic range. Here we describe the survey, the issues, and the steps that can be taken to overcome them. We also explore ways of using multiwavelength data to penetrate well beyond the classical confusion limit, using multiwavelength data, and an innovative outreach approach to cross-identification

Evolutionary Map of the Universe

EMU is a wide-field radio continuum survey planned for the new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, due to be completed in 2012. The primary goal of EMU is to make a deep ($\sim 10\mu$Jy/bm rms) radio continuum survey of the entire Southern Sky at 1.4 GHz, extending as far North as +30$\deg$ declination, with a 10 arcsec resolution. EMU is expected to detect and catalog about 70 million galaxies, including typical star-forming galaxies up to z=1, powerful starbursts to even greater redshifts, and AGNs to the edge of the Universe. EMU will undoubtedly discover new classes of object. Here I present the science goals and survey parameters.Comment: The Spectral Energy Distribution of Galaxies Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 284, 2011, R.J. Tuffs & C.C.Popescu, ed

Star Formation in Southern Seyfert Galaxies

We have produced radio maps, using the ATCA, of the central regions of six southern Seyfert 2 galaxies (NGC 1365, 4945, 6221, 6810, 7582, and Circinus) with circumnuclear star formation, to estimate the relative contribution of star formation activity compared to activity from the active galactic nucleus (AGN). The radio morphologies range from extended diffuse structures to compact nuclear emission, with no evidence, even in the relatively compact sources, for synchrotron self--absorption. In each case the radio to far--infrared (FIR) ratio has a value consistent with star formation, and in all but one case the radio to [FeII] ratio is also consistent with star formation. We derive supernova rates and conclude that, despite the presence of a Seyfert nucleus in these galaxies, the radio, FIR, and [FeII] line emission are dominated by processes associated with the circumnuclear star formation (i.e. supernova remnants and HII regions) rather than with the AGN.Comment: 26 pages, Latex, 13 figures, submitted to MNRA

Wurdi Youang: an Australian Aboriginal stone arrangement with possible solar indications

Wurdi Youang is an egg-shaped Aboriginal stone arrangement in Victoria, Australia. Here we present a new survey of the site, and show that its major axis is aligned within a few degrees of east-west. We confirm a previous hypothesis that it contains alignments to the position on the horizon of the setting sun at the equinox and the solstices, and show that two independent sets of indicators are aligned in these directions. We show that these alignments are unlikely to have arisen by chance, and instead the builders of this stone arrangement appear to have deliberately aligned the site on astronomically significant positions.Comment: Accepted by Rock Art Researc

"Bridging the Gap" through Australian Cultural Astronomy

For more than 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated celestial events into their oral traditions and used the motions of celestial bodies for navigation, time-keeping, food economics, and social structure. In this paper, we explore the ways in which Aboriginal people made careful observations of the sky, measurements of celestial bodies, and incorporated astronomical events into complex oral traditions by searching for written records of time-keeping using celestial bodies, the use of rising and setting stars as indicators of special events, recorded observations of variable stars, the solar cycle, and lunar phases (including ocean tides and eclipses) in oral tradition, as well as astronomical measurements of the equinox, solstice, and cardinal points.Comment: Proceedings of IAU Symposium 278, Oxford IX International Symposium on Archaeoastronomy, International Society for Archaeoastronomy & Astronomy in Culture (ISAAC), held in Lima, Peru, 5-9 January 2011. 9 pages, 4 images, 1 table (Accepted