Michael C. B. Ashley is an Australian astronomer and professor in the school of physics at the

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive ...

, in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

. He is most famous for his work in Antarctica, with the study of the seeing capability at

Dome C Dome C, also known as Dome Circe, Dome Charlie or Dome Concordia, located at Antarctica at an elevation of above sea level, is one of several summits or "domes" of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Dome C is located on the Antarctic Plateau, inland fro ...

Antarctica and Dome C

In September 2004, ''Nature'' published a report written by Jon Lawrence, Michael Ashley, Andrei Tokovinin, and Tony Travouillon on the seeing abilities of astronomical telescopes in Antarctica. The paper concluded that Dome C would be "the best ground-based site to develop a new astronomical observatory." The data used in this report was collected by a remote control experiment run through the French-Italian Concordia Station near Dome C. However, Ashley and his team have been to Antarctica on four separate trips, in 1995, 1998, 2001, and 2004 for earlier experiments, such as measurements of the near-infrared quality of the brightness of the sky. It was found that pictures taken from a telescope at Dome C are, on average, 2.5 times better than those taken at observatories elsewhere. This discovery has been lauded as finding the clearest skies on Earth.

Publications

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

lists 197 academic papers written by Ashley, and calculates his

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

as 35, while

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

calculates his h-index as 46.

References

External links

Michael Ashley's homepage, on the UNSW websiteAn FAQ on the results found at Dome C
21st-century Australian astronomers Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Academic staff of the University of New South Wales {{astronomer-stub