Overview

As two of the 10 institutions in the world involved in the PanSTARRS project, Durham and Edinburgh have proprietary access to the PanSTARRS datasets. The aim of this informal workshop - the re-ignition of the Durham-Edinburgh workshop series - is to bring together the two institutes to discuss and collaborate on potential PanSTARRS science.

The workshop will be hosted at Durham University on 20th-21st December. The science program will start at 11am (coffee at 10:30am), allowing Edinburgh participants to travel to Durham on the same day, and will finish at lunchtime on 21st December, providing time for topic-specific break-out sessions on the afternoon of 21st December.

Anticipated topics include the study of nearby and distant galaxies, AGN, galaxy clusters and large-scale structure, photometric redshift techniques, Baryonic Accoustic Oscillation (BAO) constraints, gravitational lensing, Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect, the identification of transient events, and cross correlations with multi-wavelength data (e.g., LoFAR, UKIDSS, VISTA, Spitzer, Herschel, SCUBA2). However, as betrayed by the title, we welcome scientific contributions on the full range of science possible with PanSTARRS!

The workshop is not restricted to those already signed-up to work with the PanSTARRS data. Indeed, a principal aim of the workshop is to involve graduate students, post-docs, and faculty that have an interest in potential PanSTARRS science but are not yet actively involved. We actively encourage students and post-docs to speak at the workshop.

A workshop dinner will be hosted in the city of Durham on the evening of 20th December, probably at Hatfield College. Please indicate whether you want to attend the workshop dinner and whether you require accomodation. Default accomodation will be at nearby Greys College and costs ~40 pounds/night. For those who want to organise their own accomodation see the link below for some possible places: http://www.astro.dur.ac.uk/Cosmology/frame.php?go=accomm

Dates and Deadlines

11/10         First Announcement
16/11         Deadline for titles, accomodation, workshop dinner
20-21/12    Workshop

Scientific program can be accessed from here.

Participant list can be accessed from here.

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PanSTARRS

PanSTARRS is a revolutionary new 5-band optical survey that will provide unprecendented photometric constraints over the whole sky visible from Hawaii (~30,000 square degrees). The 1.8 metre telescope hosts a 1.4 Giga-pixel camera (the largest ever constructed) with a field of view of 7 square degrees. In a typical night, the telescope will observe an area of ~6,000 square degrees (the total size of the SDSS) down to ~23rd magnitude. Over the ~3.5 year expected lifetime of the survey, PanSTARRS PS1 will yield variability data over 30,000 square degrees of the sky for time scales of minutes to years, and will achieve a co-added depth of ~25 mags; targetted regions of the sky will reach fainter magnitudes.

The central driver of the PanSTARRS project is to identify asteroids that could be hazardous to Earth; PanSTARRS should find almost all 1-km diameter objects that pass close to the Earth and many of the 300-meter ones. However, the faint, multi-epoch, multi-band optical data that PanSTARRS will provide will allow for seminal discoveries over the entire range of astronomical topics, from the solar system to probes of large-scale structure and the identification of the most distant objects.

For more details on PanSTARRS, see this page.

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Organising Committee

Durham	Edinburgh
David Alexander	Peder Norberg
Carlton Baugh	Philip Best
Bret Lehmer	Benjamin Panter

Previous Durham-Edinburgh workshops:

Workshop - I The First Galaxies and AGN 6-7/12/01, Durham  

Workshop - II Clusters and Clustering 17-18/6/02, Edinburgh  

Workshop - III Astronomy with Next Generation Instruments 17-18/3/03, Durham

For more information contact David Alexander (Durham) or Peder Norberg (IfA).

David Alexander, d.m.alexander [at] durham.ac.uk