Dear Colleagues,

We strongly encourage the community to submit nominations for RAS Medals and Prizes. Please see the RAS message below for more details. The deadline is 31st July for most prizes.

https://ras.ac.uk/awards-and-grants/awards

Kind regards,
UKSP Council

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[original message from RAS]

The Society presents several awards, medals, and prizes as part of its remit to support and encourage scientists working in the fields of astronomy and geophysics. Some are aimed at young scientists, while others recognise many years of dedicated service to our sciences.

Nominations are invited for RAS Medals and Prizes to be awarded in January 2023. The deadline for nominations is 31 July 2022. A separate call will go out later for the Education and Outreach Awards. These have a deadline of Friday, 30 September 2022.

Anyone may submit a nomination for an award, it is not necessary to be a Fellow of the RAS. All nominations are made in strict confidence; nominees should not be informed of submissions in order to avoid unnecessary disappointment. This does not apply to the Education and Outreach Medals. Please visit ‘Awards, Medals, and Prizes’ for more information and links to all RAS awards.

https://ras.ac.uk/awards-and-grants/awards

If you have any questions please email me via ncole@ras.ac.uk.

Best wishes

Nush Cole ncole@ras.ac.uk

Awards & Grants Officer

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The UKSP council surveyed the community in 2020 to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the community, and to establish any disproportionate impacts on minorities, economic status, employment status and/or vulnerable people within our community. We would like to survey the community again to examine how things changed in 2021. Previously, a smaller number of early career researchers responded than we hoped, so in addition to filling out the survey, please consider circulating the link among postdocs and PhD students in your research groups. The survey is, of course, optional, as are all questions.

Please complete the survey using the following link:

https://forms.gle/dk7U8KegaUrtzAcT9

Please submit your responses by Friday 18^th March 2022.… continue to the full article

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Dear Colleagues,

On the UKSP website, we have links to UK institutions and their associated research groups currently undertaking and contributing to solar physics research.

The information/links can be found here: https://www.uksolphys.org/about-uksp/institutions/

Please check that your group information is present and correct as some of the links no longer work. Please send any updates to the deputy chair (natasha.jeffrey@northumbria.ac.uk).… continue to the full article

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The UKSP council offer free zoom licence access to the UKSP community so that PhD students to senior researchers can host their own meetings and summer schools.

The UKSP zoom licence is a “Standard Pro” licence with the following features:

-Host up to 100 participants
-Group meetings for up to 30 hours
-Social media streaming
-Video recording
-Private & Group Chat
-Polling for meetings
-etc.

How you can get access?

The members of UKSP community can email the council (Marianna Korsós: mak102@aber.ac.uk) with details of a prospective meeting:

-What type of meeting
-Name of your meeting
-When the zoom account will be used (date: from… to…. )
-The relevant details of the person who will host the meeting (name, position, institute, department, and email address)

The applicant will receive a temporary password which will be valid during the proposed meeting.

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The UKSP zoom licence is supported by a Royal Astronomical Society Grant.… continue to the full article

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We have the pleasure of announcing the next instalment of the UK-SOSS which will take place at 10:00 (UK time) on 24th of June.

Speaker: Prof. Lucie Green (UCL, Mullard Space Science Laboratory)
Title: What can magnetic helicity tell us about the likelihood of an eruption from active regions?Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/95338171418
Meeting ID 953 3817 1418

Abstract:

Understanding the physical processes that underly the occurrence of coronal mass ejections is a key area of research, whilst being able to forecast an ejection beforehand would provide significant benefits to space weather forecasting lead-times. In this talk, these two aims will be discussed in the context of a quantity known as magnetic helicity, in particular the so-called helicity proxy that can be determined from modelled active region magnetic field and which has shown potential in being able to indicate when an active region will produce eruptive activity. Results will be presented for NOAA active region 11158, that builds on the helicity proxy analysis already presented by Thalmann et al. (2019) to incorporate the observed evolution of the coronal field and the physical processes taking place in the time leading up to an eruption.

We look forward to welcoming you all to the talk at that time.
With warmest regards,
Marianna Korsos, Chris Nelson, and Jiajia Liu
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For the previous talk, please visit the UK-SOSS website: https://solarphysics.aber.ac.uk/uk-soss.php
You can subscribe to the UK-SOSS newsletter on this link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=UK-SOSS&A=1
The UK-SOSS is supported by Aberystwyth University and Queen’s University Green Fund… continue to the full article

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In this unusual time it is particularly important to support the newer members of our community to connect with one another and with the more established members of the community. As a very small step to help with this please could we ask that people encourage any new students and PDRAs in particular who might not be on the mailing list to sign up and, also to publicise the UKSP mentor scheme:

https://www.uksolphys.org/mentors/… continue to the full article

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As some of you will know, the RAS has just conducted a review on its awards process with a survey that closed just over a week ago. At last year’s UKSP community meeting we discussed the possibility of establishing a UKSP Awards Committee similar to the one that MIST already has in place, but no consensus was reached. Since the RAS award nomination deadline is typically in July, now seems an appropriate time to revisit this question. Please could we ask you to respond to the following (very short) survey by 31 March:

https://opinio.ucl.ac.uk/s?s=72038… continue to the full article

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Dear Colleagues,
We have the pleasure of announcing the next UK-SOSS talk which will take place at 10:00 (UK time) on 18th March 2021 via zoom. Our speaker will be Dr Helen Mason OBE from University of Cambridge.
Please find the relevant details below.
We’re looking forward to welcoming you.
With Warmest Regards,
Marianna Korsos (on behalf Chris Nelson and Jiajia Liu)

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Speaker: Dr Helen Mason OBE (DAMTP, University of Cambridge)
Title: Solar Diagnostic Spectroscopy – a Personal Perspective
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/95338171418
Meeting ID: 953 3817 1418

Abstract:
Spectroscopic diagnostics have enabled us to determine the physical parameters of plasma for different solar features (active regions, jets, flares etc). Helen started her career studying the visible coronal lines from the 1952 eclipse observations. She then studied the UV and X-ray spectrum of the Sun, working on many joint UK, NASA, ESA and Japanese solar space projects including Skylab, the SMM (Solar Maximum Mission), Yohkoh, SoHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), Hinode, SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) and IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph). She was a founder member of the CHIANTI team, an atomic database which has been extensively used for solar data analysis. In this talk, she will pick out a few key results as examples of the value of spectroscopic diagnostics (in the transition region and corona). She will also look towards the current opportunities for research in this field and the future prospects for spectrometers. For a recent review, see: Del Zanna and Mason, 2018, Solar UV and X-ray spectral diagnostics’, Sol. Phys. Liv. Reviews.
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For information about previous talks, please visit the UK-SOSS website: https://solarphysics.aber.ac.uk/uk-soss.php
You can subscribe to the UK-SOSS newsletter on this link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=UK-SOSS&A=1
The UK-SOSS is supported by Aberystwyth University and Queen’s University Green Fund… continue to the full article

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[on behalf of Sarah Matthews]

As many people will know, A&A introduced page charges for UK authors during 2020. This was a commercially driven decision and there were subsequent negotiations between JISC (who represent all UK universities who subscribed to A&A) and the publisher, and it is very likely that all of your libraries were also part of these discussions. Unfortunately the agreement that A&A proposed that would have removed the requirement for UK authors to pay directly was considered too expensive by the JISC members and was subsequently withdrawn. Unfortunately this means UK authors will have to continue to pay page charges to publish in A&A.

You may find that your institution’s open access budget can cover these charges in some cases, but whether that is the case and the details of the implementation would need to be confirmed with your open access contacts.

Although this is clearly very disappointing for our community, it might be helpful to remind everyone that Monthly Notices of the RAS (MNRAS) now has a solar editor (Ineke de Moortel) and an increasing number of solar physics papers are now being published there. There are no page charges for UK authors (for papers with 20 pages or less). Publication in Solar Physics also remains free for UK authors.… continue to the full article

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