The Enthusiastic High Energy Astronomer
Prof. Bob Rutledge (McGill University)

Summary
Hobbyists, amateurs, enthusiasts of astronomy have made major contributions to our knowledge -- discovering supernova after supernova, tracking variable stars, even inventing radio astronomy -- all while enjoying the excitement of discovery that astronomy has to offer. I will talk about a new frontier for enthusiasts: high energy astrophysics -- the exciting realm of black holes, gamma-ray bursts and pulsars; of 1,000,000 degree gas in super-clusters of galaxies, of magnetic reconnection in stellar corona, of the variable activity of our own Galactic Center, and Active Galactic Nuclei.

While astronomers who work in the radio and optical bands take observations with their own instrumentation, X-rays don't penetrate the atmosphere. So, observations are made with satellites, which put such observations out of the reach (literally, and financially) out of reach of most individuals. However, the persistent hobbyist can examine the exact same data that academic researchers use, usually when that data is no more than a year old, and sometimes within a week of that data being taken with the international X-ray observatories. The amateur's tool for X-ray astronomy is not the telescope, but a computer and data analysis software. So, I will describe the history of academic X-ray astronomy, issue challenges to the the dedicated and computer-literate hobbyist, and provide links and pointers for the hobbyist to follow to pursue the challenges I will describe. Bring a memory stick to copy information.

About the Speaker Bob Rutledge graduated from University of Southern California (BSc Physics, 1990) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD Physics, 1996). After residencies at the Max Planck Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik (Garching bei Muenchen), UC Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, he has been an Assistant Professor of Physics at McGill University since January 2004, where he lectures on astronomy. His interests lie in the study of transient astronomical phenomena, and he studies the detailed properties of neutron stars, black holes, and gamma-ray bursts.

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