The Universe is like a laboratory – a very big laboratory – in which we can rarely control the experiments we would like to perform. We can only watch, measure, probe, and compute. Michael Perry will describe the types of observations that can be made and how they can be used to answer the following questions:

How far away are the stars?  How hot is a star?  What is a star made of?  How massive is a star?  Is a star forming, in its youth, middle aged, in old age, or in its death throes? How do you find a ‘Black Hole’?

Michael, a retired Mathematician and Systems Analyst, spent a year as a Rotary Graduate Fellow in Astronomy at the Mt Stromlo Observatory in Australia.