CANCELED BECAUSE OF COVID-19
2500 visitors are expected. Starry Night is the biggest outreach events of the year.
Volunteers with telescopes set up no later than 5:30pm.
Only AAC members with telescopes may use the small parking area. Others will be turned away.
Click map to enlarge.
Via Zoom - details to follow
Join us for an exciting and interesting evening at the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium (Santa Fe College)!
Meeting by Zoom
Agenda:
7:00 - 7:30 General Meeting & Announcements 7:30 - 7:45 Refreshments 7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Rader Lane
Park Ranger (I) - Night Sky Lead, Grand Canyon National Park
Topic: Ancient Skies: Cultural Astronomy of the Grand Canyon Region
Description of Talk:
Practically every culture on Earth has watched the astronomical clockwork of the sky in order to produce calendars for religious and agricultural purposes. The tribes of the Grand Canyon region are another beautiful expression of this universal truth. The beauty of cultural astronomy is to witness the myriad ways that peoples from around the world express that shared awe, connection, and need, for the heavens above. A deep part of our fascination for celestial phenomena and the night sky is informed and dependent upon cultural understandings.
To properly appreciate a region and the night sky is to appreciate how the people of the region used that specific landscape as a palette to understand the cosmos and how the cosmos, in turn, reflects the landscape and the people. Grand Canyon region is unique in that some of the tribes here have very intact cultural traditions largely untouched by the western world until the mid-nineteenth century which has allowed ethnographers to capture this expression better than most places. As we will see, this region is archeoastronomically richer than most places in the world.
About the Speaker:
Rader Lane is a ranger naturalist at Grand Canyon National Park. He manages the outreach and interpretive portion of the Dark Skies Program and coordinates the world famous Grand Canyon Star Party. Rader was awarded the National Park Service's National Freeman Tilden Award in 2019 for his interpretive work on night skies in our national parks.
Location to be determined - may be online via Zoom - check back for update
Speaker: Deena Mickelson
NRAO VLA Operator
Topic: NRAO Tour and a Day in the Life of a VLA Operator
Special Note: Depending on the COVID-19 situation, this meeting may or may not be held at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Circumstances may force the club to change the meeting to an online Zoom format. Check back for updates.
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements 7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member 7:30 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Dr. Howard L. Cohen
Emeritus Assoc. Professor of Astronomy, University of Florida
Topic: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Professor Howard L. Cohen is a retired faculty member in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he taught physical sciences and astronomy for more than thirty-five years (1968-2003). During this time he taught graduate courses and basic astronomy and science classes to more than 15,000 students. In addition, he also helped pioneer the use of multimedia for teaching astronomy. During the 1980s, while directing the undergraduate laboratory courses, he completed a major renovation of the Teaching Observatory and initiated its Friday night public programs. Later he served as the department's graduate coordinator. For many years he tried interesting the University of Florida in building a planetarium. Although unsuccessful, his efforts finally helped Santa Fe College build its own planetarium. Professor Cohen is also a founding member of the old Florida (Amateur) Astronomical Society (1971) and the Alachua Astronomy Club (1987) where he has been a frequent presenter. Dr. Cohen was instrumental helping the Alachua Astronomy Club and artist Elizabeth Indianos design both the Gainesville (now Regal) Royal Park Stadium 16 astronomical murals (1999) and the Gainesville Solar Walk Planetary Monuments (installed 2002). He has been interested in astronomy since the seventh grade and attended the University of Michigan where he received a B.S. in astronomy (1962). His graduate work was done at Indiana University. Here he was among the first astronomy graduates students in the USA to earn his A.M. degree (1964) and Ph.D. degree (1968) under the guidance of an African American astronomer, Dr. Benjamin F. Perry. For a time in 1964 and 1966 Dr. Cohen was a staff astronomer at Lowell Observatory where he worked both on research projects and acted as tour guide. Later he served as a consultant and Southeast Regional Sales Manager for Meade Telescopes in the 1980s. Research interests have spanned a variety of projects including lunar and asteroid occultations, eclipses, calendars, eclipsing binaries and star clusters. At Indiana University he helped pioneer the use of high-speed mainframe computers in photoelectric, spectroscopic and binary star data reduction and analyses. His work helped determine reliable temperatures for very hot stars. During the 1980s he was also the first to test a prototype of a new Air Force ground-based electro-optical deep-space surveillance system (GEODSS) for the detection of asteroids and comets. Since 1968 he has worked with his wife, Marian, an independent travel consultant with Continental Capers Travel in Gainesville, to plan, organize and escort worldwide eclipse and other astronomical tours for small groups. He has traveled globally to more than a dozen total or annular solar eclipses and successfully observed both the 2004 and 2012 transits of Venus. He continues to be an active member of the Alachua Astronomy Club.
Speaker: Geoffrey Landis
Researcher- John Glenn Research Center
Topic: Triton's Mysteries
Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, is Pluto’s big brother: mysterious, icy, backwards, and pink. Icy? The mountains of Triton are made of water ice, and the geysers are liquid nitrogen. Backwards? It’s the only large moon in the solar system that orbits retrograde, in the opposite direction from the planet’s spin. Pink? Yes, it has a surface partially covered with tholins, complex organic molecules with a peculiar reddish-pink tint. Icy on the outside, liquid on the inside, it has only been visited once, by the Voyager-2 probe, which flew past it on the way out of the solar system.
Dr. Landis will talk about a concept for a future mission to try to learn more about Triton’s mysteries, a mission to send a vehicle to land on Triton and then hop from site to site using a radioisotope-powered rocket engine.
.About the Speaker:
Dr. Geoffrey Landis is a researcher at the NASA John Glenn Research Center, where he works on developing advanced technologies for space. He also contributes expertise on the physics of the space environment to the NASA Glenn COMPASS spacecraft design team, where he has worked on planetary missions to destinations ranging from Mercury to Europa to beyond Pluto. He was the Ronald McNair-NASA Professor of Astronautics at MIT, where he taught a graduate course on spacecraft design. He holds ten patents and has been involved in a number of space missions, including the Mars Pathfinder mission, the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the Parker Solar Probe.
He is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts fellow and a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 2013, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awarded him the AIAA Aerospace Power Award for contributions to power systems for planetary and space missions.
In his spare time, he is an award-winning science fiction writer. He is the author of the novel Mars Crossing and the story collection Impact Parameter (and Other Quantum Realities), and has written over eighty published science fiction stories.
