MNASSA : Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa

These form an important part of a research facility, often as a sort of pre-publication discussion or a discussion of an individual’s current research, and as such it is virtually impossible to “publish” this material. However by recording the topics discussed in the form below does indicate to those, who are unable to attend, what current trends are and who has visited to do research: it keeps everyone ‘in the loop’, so to speak.

Also included in this section are the colloquia/seminars at the SAAO, UWC, the Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre at UCT, ACGC and the NASSP lectures, aimed the at the students and interested astronomers. In addition there are the SAAO Astro-coffees which are 15-20min informal discussions on just about any topic including but not limited to: recent astro-ph papers, seminal/classic publications, education/outreach ideas and initiatives, preliminary results, student progress reports, conference/workshop feedback and skills-transfer.

SAAO
Title: Standardisation of operations – Looking at information differently (I)
Title: Standardisation of operations – Looking at information differently (II)
Title: Sprites research in South Africa

UWC
Title: Cosmological implications of scalar-tensor theories of modified gravity
Title: An overview of upgraded GMRT - a view of head-tail radio galaxy using it

AIMS
Title: Will Julia or Swift take Pythons Machine Learning Crown?

This article continues the sequential numbering of reported fireball sightings from southern Africa. By definition, a fireball is any meteor event with brightness equal to or greater than visual magnitude (m_v) -4. The following events were reported to the author and details are reproduced as given by the observer [any comments by the author are given in brackets]. All times were converted to UT unless stated, and all coordinates are for epoch J2000.0.

On the night of 13/14 June 2019, sixteen cameras peered skywards and measured the orbits of 49 meteors as they entered earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of around 95km. This was the result of the first-light runs of CAMS@SA, now operating as part of the global Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project, run under the guidance of NASA’s SETI Institute.