Annual Scientific Meeting & Harley Wood School

Session

Methods & Applications

7 Jul 2025, 10:00

University of Adelaide

71. Revised Open Cluster Membership Probabilities in GALAH DR4 and their Abundances and Kinematics

Shourya Mukherjee (University of New South Wales)

07/07/2025, 10:00

Oral

The radial migration and chemical evolution of the stars in the Milky Way disc can be studied through the dynamics, distribution and chemical abundances of open clusters. With the latest GALAH DR4 catalogue, we are now able to work with refined stellar parameters and up to 30 elemental abundances per star. I will present my work on obtaining a revised catalogue of open cluster stars, with 76...

107. An Unbroken View of the Milky Way: Continuous Maps of Faint Emission Lines at Sub-Parsec Scales with the SDSS-V Local Volume Mapper

Thomas Hilder (School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University)

07/07/2025, 10:15

Oral

The SDSS-V Local Volume Mapper (LVM) survey is delivering unprecedented spectroscopic information about our galaxy, enabling detailed studies of star formation and galaxy evolution across a wide range of spatial scales. LVM is uniquely positioned to map energy and momentum transport, chemical abundances, and the thermal structure of the interstellar medium, down to 0.05 parsecs. Weak emission...

77. Tessellating the Stars with Jewel Aperture Masking

Grace Piroscia (University of Sydney)

07/07/2025, 10:30

Oral

Now more than 150 years old, the technique of aperture masking interferometry has played a crucial role in high angular resolution astronomy, allowing ground-based observatories to achieve sub-seeing-limited precision. Today, when complemented with adaptive optics, aperture masking continues to provide high-resolution observations, pushing beyond the classical diffraction limit. However,...

106. SPICE: Differentiable Synthetic Spectra Modeling for Stars with Surface Inhomogeneities

Maja Jablonska (Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University)

07/07/2025, 10:45

Oral

I present SPICE, a framework designed to efficiently generate time-series synthetic spectra for stars with surface inhomogeneities such as spots, binary occultation, abundance anomalies, radial pulsations, and non-spherical symmetry. These effects have been studied in photometry, interferometry, and spectroscopy before, but there's an unfilled niche for tools capable of processing and fitting...

134. Point source inference using Parametric Cataloguing

Gabriel Collin

09/07/2025, 10:00

Oral

The identification and description of point sources is one of the oldest problems in astronomy; yet, even today an efficient and comprehensive statistical treatment for point sources remains one of the field's hardest problems. For dim or crowded populations, likelihood based inference methods are needed to estimate the uncertainty of the population characteristics. Probabilistic cataloguing...

135. Detecting and analyzing LEO satellite streaks with MUSE

Brayden Leicester (University of Canterbury)

09/07/2025, 10:15

Oral

The number of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is increasing, and they are having a noticeable impact on the quality of a large range of astronomical data. We use archival data from the Multi Unit Spectrographic Explorer (MUSE) to quantify the effects of satellites on the datacubes. MUSE is an integral field unit (IFU) so it captures a spectrum at every pixel in the field of view. Using the...

161. Enhanced astrometry of the rapid ASKAP continuum survey for precise localisation of fast radio bursts

Akhil Jaini (Swinburne University of Technology)

09/07/2025, 10:30

Oral

Accurate localisation of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) is essential for identifying their host galaxies, constraining progenitor models, and employing FRBs as precise cosmological probes. For extragalactic FRBs, particularly those at higher redshifts (z > 1), sub-arcsecond astrometry is required to robustly associate them with host galaxies and disentangle contributions to dispersion and scattering...

64. Unveiling Gravitational Lenses in Colour: Multi-band Reconstruction of Sixteen Lensed Systems with PISCO

Huimin Qu (The University of Sydney)

09/07/2025, 10:45

Oral

The growing flood of gravitational lensing data in the era of big-data astronomy brings both opportunities and challenges—particularly in modeling efficiency and the reliability of inferences from a given dataset.
In this work, we reconstruct 16 strong lens candidates using multi-band PISCO data from the Magellan Telescope, employing a scalable pipeline that jointly models all four bands (z,...

44. Quantifying Radio Source Morphology

Lachlan Barnes (Macquarie University)

10/07/2025, 10:00

Oral

The advent of next-generation telescope facilities brings with it an unprecedented amount of data, and the demand for effective tools to process and classify this information has become increasingly important. There have been many applications of machine learning (ML) in this context, however ML can be computationally expensive and often requires manually curated training sets. This work...

25. More Precise Galaxy Distances using Machine Learning

Melissa Campbell (Australian National University)

10/07/2025, 10:15

Oral

Galaxy distances measured using standard methods like the Tully-Fisher relation and the Fundamental Plane have relative errors of 20-30%. Beyond a few tens of Mpc, this means that the errors in galaxy peculiar velocities are generally much larger than the peculiar velocities themselves. It is therefore highly desirable to find ways to reduce the uncertainties in such distance estimates. We...

13. Novel, Independent Approach to VLBI Black Hole Imaging

Samuel Lai (CSIRO)

10/07/2025, 10:30

Oral

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration's iconic images of the supermassive black holes in M87 and the Milky Way delivered profound implications for our understanding of fundamental physics under strong gravitational fields. Producing these images required pushing radio interferometric imaging to its limits -— grappling with severely sparse data coverage, low signal-to-noise ratios,...

72. Image Reconstruction with the James Webb Interferometer

Max Charles (University of Sydney)

10/07/2025, 10:45

Oral

Flying on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) above Earth's turbulent atmosphere, the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) stands as the highest resolution optical interferometer ever placed in space.
However, imaging is severely limited by non-linear detector systematics, particularly charge migration known as the brighter-fatter effect (BFE).
Conventional interferometric Fourier...