Indigenous Astronomy with Laurie Rousseau-Nepton

In the gallery and the Carswell Observatory

Astronomer Laurie Rousseau-Nepton will speak about constellations and Ancestral knowledge at The Goldfarb Gallery. Rousseau-Nepton is dedicated to an approach to science where local cultures and the diversity of world views are a core aspect of research and pedagogy. In particular, she has taken teachings from her Innu culture (“we come from the stars and we also return to the stars”) to guide her own research in understanding how stars form and influence each other over generations.

Rousseau-Nepton’s talk will be followed by interested participants walking across campus for a stargazing session and tour of the Allan I. Carswell Astronomical Observatory of York University.

This event is a parallel program for the current exhibition, Andrea Carlson: A Painting is a Coin. Carlson’s work includes references to skylines, Indigenous Futurisms, space, time, and constellations.

*Note: While The Goldfarb Gallery is fully wheelchair accessible, the observational area of the Carswell Observatory does have a set of stairs. The walk between the Gallery and the Observatory takes about 11 minutes.

Laurie Rousseau-Nepton is a new faculty at the University of Toronto and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. She comes with six years of experience working as a resident astronomer at the Canada-France-Hawaii Observatory supporting various instruments including wide-field cameras, high-resolution spectrographs, and Fourier Transform Spectro-imagers. She received her diploma from Université Laval studying regions of star formation in spiral galaxies and helping with the development of two Fourier Transform Spectro-imagers, SpIOMM and SITELLE. She is now leading an international project called SIGNALS (the Star formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey) which sampled with the SITELLE instrument more than 50,000 star-forming regions in 40 nearby galaxies to understand how the local environment affect the young star clusters characteristics. In this new appointment, she will be developing instrumentation for astronomy including a high resolution spectroimager that uses Fourier Transform spectroscopy technics in combination with quantum detectors (i.e., MKID array).

Thank you to the Allan I. Carswell Observatory and Elaina Hyde, director, for collaborating on this event.