EWASS 2018
This year I attended the biggest European astro conference to date! Hosting over 1400 scientists, this years European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) was combined with the National Astronomical Meeting (NAM). I mostly attended the gravity seminars, that were in tribute to the late Stephen Hawking. The talks were increadibly interesting and broad, ranging from gravitational wave detection to probing even closer to the event horizon using a worldwide array of telescopes. I found particular interest in environmental precursors for compact binaries, intergrating these in population sytnthesis codes would definitley be interesting.
The other section I attended was high energy astronomy. This covered a broad spectrum as well. My main interest in these talks were kilonovae, however I also got to hear about GRBs, and Supernova. There was a talk on early detection of Supernova using photometry combined with machine learning. It left a lasting impression as it had a cognate goal to my current project.
I presented a poster on difference imaging (that can be found below). I'm not sure how well it went down, but I did get a lot of compliments for the design! The main struggle was that my poster was stationed directly next to the shiny Euclid display, I think people were more interested in that! Admitedly the display was quite enthralling.
I also had the pleasure of attending the conference dinner in the Liverpool Cathederal. Hosted by Jon Culshaw, the event was very grand. A member of the GOTO team won a prize for best poster and Warwick's own Tom Marsh won the William Herschel prize for his work on Doppler Tomography. Overall a pretty good night!
My Poster (4.1Mb)