Astrophiz69: Dr Chris Lidman's Accelerating Universe

This is the second of 6 ‘Astrotour’ episodes of Astrophiz, where we’ll be publishing recordings of interviews I did on a two and a half thousand kilometre tour of five of Australia’s finest Eastern state radio and optical observatories.

Dr Chris Lidman, who is the first Director of the ANU Siding Spring Observatory, which is deep in a pristine dark sky parkin the Wurrumbungle ranges in North Eastern New South Wales in Australia. Chris was a member of the team which shared the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics andhas more than 30,000 citations from 197 research papers and more than 100 other publications. So apart from being a very active researcher, he has responsibility for many of the telescopes based on site, from the powerful Skymapper right up to this immense 3.9m AAT

We also extend our condolences to Dr Ian Musgrave, whose 96yo mother passed away recently. He will be back with us in two weeks.

So in Ian’s absence for this episode, I’ll give a shortened version of Ian’s expert commentary “What’s Up Doc” and I’ll try to give you an idea of some things to watch out for in the sky over the next couple of weeks.

Now because I’m doing an Ian here, I’ll go off on one of his astronomical tangents about Mercury.
The BepiColombo Mercury mission was launched from French Giana.

In the news: 

The search for FRBs is turning up some really interesting results. A new paper from ICRAR is published.