In recent years, formal astronomy education has become an issue of great interest. Indeed, some boards of education now officially include astronomy in their curricula. While formal astronomy education continues to gain attention, informal astronomy education for the general public has rarely been addressed. One valuable source of informal astronomy education is the observatory ‘visitor centre’. Observatories draw thousands of visitors each year, and as such represent a golden opportunity for the astronomical community to communicate directly with the public. This paper summarises an exploratory study of the cognitive and affective impacts of a visit to the visitor centres located at Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories.

Student research projects are becoming either integral or optional components of Science curricula in several countries. They provide a valuable opportunity for high school students to experience many of the joys and frustrations that make up the intellectual challenge of Science. Astronomy is one branch of Science that lends itself to student projects. Student Research Projects (SRPs) can be individual, group or collaborative between groups in other schools or countries and may involve professional mentors. Use of the Internet and remote access telescopes allow students to undertake challenging research and make worthwhile contributions to professional programs. This paper presents case studies of student projects in optical and radio astronomy from Australian and overseas schools and details both the benefits and problems faced in conducting such projects. Student responses to involvement in projects are discussed. Potential areas for future collaboration and development are highlighted together with the need for more research as to the most effective ways to implement projects and develop student skills.

The diverse isotopic and elemental signatures produced in different nucleosynthetic sites are passed on to successive generations of stars. By tracing these chemical signatures back through the stellar populations of the Galaxy, it is possible to unravel its nucleosynthetic history and even to study stars which are now extinct. This review considers recent applications of ‘stellar genetics’ to examine the earliest episodes of nucleosynthesis in the universe, in Population iii stars and the Big Bang.

The mean abundances of Mg, Si, Ca, Ti, Cr, and Fe based on both strong and weak lines of α Cen A are determined by matching the observed line profiles with those synthesised from stellar atmospheric models and comparing these results with a similar analysis for the Sun. There is good agreement between the abundances from strong and weak lines.

Strong lines should generally be an excellent indicator of abundance and far easier to measure than the weak lines normally used. Until the development of the Anstee, Barklem, and O'Mara (ABO) theory for collisional line broadening, the uncertainty in the value of the damping constant prevented strong lines being used for abundance determinations other than in close differential analyses.

We found that α Cen A has a mean overabundance of 0.12 ± 0.06 dex compared to solar mean abundances. This result agrees remarkably well with previous studies that did not use strong lines or the ABO theory for collisional line broadening. Our result supports the conclusion that reliable abundances can be derived from strong lines provided this new theory for line broadening is used to calculate the van der Waalsdamping.

We summarise recent attempts to detect warm ionised gas at large galactocentric distances. This includes searches for gas at the edges of spirals, in between cluster galaxies, towards extragalactic HI clouds, and towards high-velocity clouds and the Magellanic Stream in the Galaxy. With the exception of extragalactic HI clouds, all of these experiments have proved successful. Within each class, we have only observed a handful of objects. It is premature to assess what fraction of the missing baryonic mass fraction might be in the form of ionised gas. But, in most cases, the detections provide a useful constraint on the ambient ionising flux, and, in the case of spiral edges, can even trace dark matter haloes out to radii beyond the reach of radio telescopes.

Redshift surveys constitute one of the prime tools of observational cosmology. Imaging surveys of the whole sky are now available at a wide range of wavelengths, and provide a basis for the new generation of massive redshift surveys currently in progress. The very large datasets produced by these surveys call for new and sophisticated approaches to the analysis of large-scale structure and the galaxy population. These issues, and some preliminary results from the new redshift surveys, were discussed at the second Coral Sea Cosmology Conference, held at Dunk Island on 24–28 August 1999. This is a summary of the conference; the full conference proceedings are on the WWW at http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/DunkIsland/Proceedings.

Extreme scattering events (ESEs) are dramatic variations of the flux density at gigahertz frequencies caused by ray path distortions within an isolated inhomogeneity (‘plasma lens’) in the interstellar medium. These events are characterised by a deep flux density minimum in the light curve with, in some cases, surrounding maxima. The variability time scales range from weeks to months. These phenomena show a strong frequency dependence, in which the variability amplitudes increase with wavelength. During an intraday variability (IDV) monitoring project (March 2000), a feature resembling an ESE-like event appeared in the variable light curve of 0954+658, however with a time scale of less than two days. We will discuss this effect and its implications for a better description of the interstellar medium.

With the onset of the HI Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS), a new view of the high-velocity cloud (HVC) distribution in the southern sky is being revealed. The dense spatial sampling and unbiased coverage of HIPASS gives it multiple advantages over previous surveys of the southern sky. Detailed views of the clouds' structure and large mosaics of the HI sky allow us to link individual concentrations to larger structures (such as the Magellanic Clouds and the Galaxy), providing pictorial clues as to the origins of HVCs. It is clear that HVCs cannot be uniformly assigned a single origin scenario, and must be categorised appropriately.

We discuss our work on chemical abundance ratios of stars belonging to the thick-disk and thin-disk stellar populations. We discuss the selection of stars, and show that the two samples of stars have different [α/Fe] versus [Fe/H] behaviour.

Recent work has proposed that a merger event between a red-giant and a He white dwarf may be responsible for the production of R stars (Izzard, Jeffery & Lattanzio 2007). We investigate the proposed evolution and nucleosynthesis of such a model. We simulate the hypothesized late ignition of the core flash by increasing neutrino losses until ignition occurs sufficiently far from the centre that the subsequent evolution produces carbon dredge-up to the extent that the post-flash object is a carbon star. Detailed nucleosynthesis is performed within this approximation and we show that the overall properties are broadly consistent with the observations. Details will depend on the dynamics of the merger event.

Three different types of evidence are presented in favour of the hypothesis that the HII regions in disk galaxies with Hα luminosities greater than a critical value of 1038·6 erg s−1 are density-bounded, and that the escaping Lyman continuum photons from these are the principal ionising agents for the diffuse ISM in disk galaxies. This has important implications for the ionisation of the intergalactic medium, and for computed star formation rates in spirals.

During its burst of intraday variation (IDV) in June 1996 quasar PKS 0405–385 exhibited rapid changes in the Stokes parameters Q and U that were even faster than the 1 hr timescale changes in I. Auto- and cross-correlation analyses of I,Q, and U at 8.6 GHz show systematic relations between the variations in I,Q, and U. These are well modelled by interstellar scintillation (ISS) of a 14 × 20 μ as source, with about 180 degree rotation of the polarisation angle along its long dimension. This success in explaining the remarkable IDV in polarisation confirms that ISS gives rise to the IDV in this quasar.

Models of hierarchical galaxy formation predict that large numbers of low-mass, dark matter halos remain around galaxies today. These models predict an order of magnitude more halos than observed stellar satellites in the Local Group. One possible solution to this discrepancy is that the high-velocity clouds (HVCs) around the Milky Way may be associated with the excess dark matter halos and be the gaseous remnants of the galaxy formation process. If this is the case, then analogues to the HVCs should be visible in other groups. In this paper, I review the observations of Hi clouds lacking stars around other galaxies and in groups, present early results from our Hi survey of loose groups analogous to the Local Group, and discuss implications for the nature of HVCs and galaxy formation.

Physical dimensions and evolutionary status of the A-type twin binary GSC 4019 3345 are presented. Located at a distance of ~1.1 kpc from the Sun, the system was found to have two components with identical masses (M 1,2 = 1.92 M⊙), radii (R 1,2 = 1.76 R⊙), and luminosities (log L 1,2 = 1.1 L⊙) revolving in a circular orbit. Modeling the components with theoretical evolutionary tracks and isochrones implies a young age (t = 280 Myr) for the system, which is bigger than the synchronization time scale but smaller than the circularization time scale. Nevertheless, synthetic spectrum models revealed components’ rotation velocity of V rot12 = 70 km s−1, that is about three times higher than their synchronization velocity. No evidence is found for an age difference between the components.

Bulges are not just elliptical subgalaxies situated in the centers of large spirals, though it might seem so from their ages and chemistry. In fact, bulge kinematics have been known to be different since the first long slit spectra were obtained. M31 presents the best opportunity to investigate all the issues of the stellar populations of bulges. This review collects the array of probing data that has been accumulated during the last decade. But the intriguing question ‘how did it form like this?’ remains.

The accumulation, compression, and cooling of the ambient interstellar medium (ISM) in large-scale flows powered by OB cluster feedback can drive the production of dense molecular clouds. We review the current state of the field, with a strong focus on the explicit modelling and observation of the neutral ISM. Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of colliding ISM flows provide a strong theoretical framework in which to view feedback-driven cloud formation, as do models of the gravitational fragmentation of expanding shells. Rapid theoretical developments are accompanied by a growing body of observational work that provides good evidence for the formation of molecular gas via stellar feedback—both in the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. The importance of stellar feedback compared with other major astrophysical drivers of dense gas formation remains to be investigated further, and will be an important target for future work.