Hello!  You have reached the personal Web page of Dr. Mike Dworetsky, Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at University College London and Director of the  University of London Observatory.  There is nothing fancy here yet, just a few links to items of immediate interest and reprints of a few of my recent papers and articles.  If you want to visit the Dworetsky Family web site (which is still under construction) please note that the new website is   http://www.platinum198.btinternet.co.uk.

Please use the links to navigate to the appropriate items:


Items for sale (e.g., redundant library books or magazines from ULO).
 

An HTML version of an article I wrote on "The Green Flash" , for the journal Gnomon of the Association for Astronomy Education in the UK: Green Flash

An HTML version of an article written with Dr. Steve Fossey for The Observatory magazine, on the subject of occultations of Jupiter and Saturn and the Star of Bethlehem:  Star of Bethlehem

October 6, 2004: My recent summary talk at the IAU Symposium 224, The A-Star Puzzle, held at Poprad, Slovakia, in July 2004: Two versions,   pdf version and postscript version are available here. The page numbers are dummies and are not the final page numbers for the actual forthcoming publications.


One of my principal areas of research is the study of the abundances of elements in the photospheres of the Mercury-Manganese stars (HgMn stars).  Copies of a few recent papers (or links) are given here:

Latest!  Preprint: M. M. Dworetsky, The helium abundances in HgMn and normal stars, poster paper at IAU Symposium 224 at Poprad, Slovakia, 7-13 July 2004. That link takes you to the (USA) arXiv version posted 26 July 04
This link is to the UK mirror for the helium preprint

Radiative accelerations on Ne in the atmospheres of late B stars
accepted 21 August 2002 by MNRAS

 Neon abundances in late-B normal and mercury-manganese stars

  Manganese abundances in mercury-manganese stars

  The gallium problem in HgMn stars

An October 1997 conference paper (Vienna) on isotopic abundances of Hg and Pt in stars.  Here is a link to the preprint:

 Mercury and platinum abundances in mercury-manganese stars

Over the years I have been involved in many areas of research, from millimetre-wave research to astronomy education, to my main field of stellar spectroscopy and elemental abundances.  Here is my list of publications of M M Dworetsky which I will gradually link up to the ADS pages when I have time to do this.


I operate an astronomy  question and answer service over the Internet on behalf of the UK  Association for Astronomy Education .  Abook containing many of the questions and answers is a project currently in the planning stage.


Among my hobbies is the study of the events surrounding the life and death of US President John F. Kennedy.  My articles on this are listed below.

Here is an HTML version of an article on the calculation of shadows in Dealey Plaza on 22nd November 1963, which was published in The Dealey Plaza Echo, the journal of the UK research group on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,  Dealey Plaza UK .

 Sun Angles in Dealey Plaza during the Assassination of President Kennedy

Many aspects of the photography of these events are controversial or require further study.  In this article I use astronomical methods to calculate the best times for photographers to duplicate the precise elevation and bearing (or altitude and azimuth) of the sun at the moment of the shooting of President Kennedy and Governor Connolly at 12.30pm Dallas time on 22 November 1963.

Here is a link to an article I wrote for The Assassination Web , and electronic newsletter, about one of the many questionable points in the book "Case Closed":

Wind and Gunsmoke (A Deception in Gerald Posner's "Case Closed")