Confirmed Speakers
Brian Harvey: "Future Missions to the Moon and Mars"
Brian Harvey received his BA in history and Political Science at Trinity College in 1975 and his MA in History at UCD in 1987. He is a member of the British Interplanetary Society and has published many books on spaceflight including “The Race to Space”, “Two Roads into Space” and “Russia in Space: The Final Frontier?”
Carl O'Beirnes: "Irish Astrophotography"
Carl O'Beirnes is an amateur astronomer from Balbriggan, County Dublin. His interest in Astronomy began as a young boy when looking up at the stars he wondered why they where there? What was the reason for them? And why do the stars move across the sky? So began his journey into this fascinating subject. Fast forward a many years when he could afford his first proper telescope and never forgetting the first time he saw Saturn with those magical rings, breath-taking views and not believing it was just sitting there in the eyepiece and was just under 1 billion kilometres away. Today his passion is for Astrophotography and uses a Celestron C14 telescope at his backyard observatory. His nights involve taking photos of the night sky which include planets, Galaxies and Planetary Nebulae. He also gathers data on Near Earth Asteroids which is done in collaboration with the Minor Planet Centre which is the serious part of Astronomy that he does.
His ambition is to venture to Australia to see and image the Southern Milky Way. While his biggest achievement so far was being asked to participate in the Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore.
Dr Niall Smith: "Refurbishing derelict castles and defunct dishes - frugal innovation with real scientific impact"
Niall Smith received his PhD (Astrophysics) from UCD in 1990 and was appointed as a lecturer in Physics at Cork Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was appointed as the first Head of Research and is responsible for the overall management of an annual budget of EUR11m across all disciplines. Dr Smith is the Founder member of Blackrock Castle Observatory (BCO -
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It houses an internationally award-winning exhibition based on the theme of "Life in the Universe". Since opening its doors in late 2007, CIT-BCO has welcomed over 200,000 visitors and delivered astronomy-based workshops to over 30,000 primary and second-level students. The observatory's portable planetarium, Stardome, has been seen by over 40,000 visitors and observatory staff have provided accredited continuous professional training courses to teachers. The castle is also home to the Astronomy & Instrumentation Group. They operate the observatory's two robotic telescopes and have developed a fast two-channel imaging photometer with funding from SFI. The group specialise in high-precision photometry which they apply to searches for extrasolar planets and observations of quasars. The group installed new detectors on a 32m telecommunications dish in Cork, bringing it back to life after 15 years.
Dr Ronan McNulty: "Faster than Light Particles?
Ronan McNulty is a particle physicist at UCD who leads a team of ten physicists working on the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Ronan was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in 1993 and spent nine years working at CERN on the LEP electron-positron collider before moving to Fermilab, near Chicago, where he worked on the CDF experiment at the Tevatron collider. He returned to Ireland in 2003 to found the only experimental particle physics research group in Ireland. He will talk to us about the Large Hadron Collider that started colliding protons at 7 TeV in March 2010. He will report on the Irish involvement in this project and the recent physics results that allow his team to test the theory that describes the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions of fundamental particles. Special emphasis will be given to the astrophysics implications of these results. He will also discuss the current status of faster-than-light neutrinos as recently reported by the OPERA collaboration.
