Fourth International Astronomy Award

Canterbury University women astronomers have achieved remarkable success over the last decade in a major international award commemorating pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart.

Four Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowships (the famous aviator was a Zonta member) are awarded each year and Canterbury doctoral student Jennifer McSaveney has been awarded one for 2001-2002. She is the fourth Canterbury University recipient in 10 years.

Ms McSaveney is two and a half years into her PhD in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and will use the $US6000 award to help her through her final year, to complete the doctorate by the end of 2002.

The Fellowship is specifically for women students researching in astronomy and space sciences. Previous Canterbury winners were Drs Kaylene Murdoch, Karen Pollard (now a lecturer in the department) and Ljiljana Skuljan.

Professor John Hearnshaw, of the Physics and Astronomy Department, said astronomy attracted women students “and a greater proportion of very bright women students. We have a very proud PhD tradition of talented women who are excellent role models for future years.”

Ms McSaveney, a former Papanui High School and Heretaunga College student, completed an honours degree in astronomy before embarking on doctoral studies. Her work focuses on the hydrodynamical and orbital motions of a group of astronomical objects known as Type II Cepheids, or pulsating stars.

A clear understanding of the pulsational behaviour of regularly pulsating stars can be used to better understand the complicated stars, Ms McSaveney says. The clarification and classification of the stars can be used to more accurately obtain distances in the universe.

She has finished the observations, carried out at Mount John University Observatory, Tekapo, and is now examining and compiling the data before writing up her thesis next year. She enjoys the research and says she would like to continue to work in that field as a career.

Her main recreational interest is, however, a far cry from high-tech telescopes and mathematical computations. Ms McSaveney is president of the University branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a worldwide group dedicated to the recreation of events in the Middle Ages, in which she enjoys making clothing and embroidery, dancing, Celtic art and siege weaponry.

The group holds feasts, tournaments, day camping events, and weekly meetings and outings. The movement started in the US and spread to Europe, Australia and New Zealand. “I think people enjoy looking back to the age of chivalry and recreating events in detail. Others enjoy researching the history, or just coming along and being involved in the feasts, dancing or the fighting.”

Ms McSaveney will be presented with her Amelia Earhart Fellowship by Zonta’s District Governor Jan Bowman at the organisation’s national biennial conference in Christchurch in October.