Tuesday 21st May 2024 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Substantial progress in our understanding of the Universe is driven largely by new developments in our ability to study stars and galaxies. In this talk Professor Dalton will describe the motivation for a next generation facility, WEAVE, at the William Herschel Telescope, which aims to add to our understanding of a wide range of topics from the formation of the earliest galaxies to the detailed structure and dynamical history of the Milky Way. He will cover some of the details and challenges of implementing such a facility from the point of view of an instrumentalist, and close with some early data, prospects for the next few years, and a look to what might be achievable with the next generation of ground-based telescopes.

Speaker: Professor Gavin Dalton

Gavin Dalton is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow in Astronomical Instrumentation at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Over the last 35 years he has worked on a number of astrophysical surveys and survey instruments around the globe. He is currently principal investigator of the WEAVE project, and system architect for MOSAIC, a second-generation instrument planned for the Extremely Large Telescope.