Orange County Astronomers

General Meeting – April 2025
2025-04-11 19:30 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
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NASA’s Cold Atom Lab:

Quantum Science

and Technology Maturation

on the International Space Station

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab (CAL) launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2018,
and has been operating since that time as the world’s first and only multi-user facility for the study of ultra-cold quantum gases in space. The unique microgravity environment of the ISS is utilized with CAL by a national group of principal investigators to achieve sub-nanokelvin temperature gases, to study and utilize their quantum properties in an environment free from the perturbing force of gravity, and to observe and interact with these gases in the essentially limitless freefall of Earth’s orbit. In addition to the toolbox of capabilities originally built into CAL, an upgrade in 2020 enabled the study of atom interferometry in orbit, and a 2021 upgrade and repair facilitated investigations of the interactions between mixtures of 87Rb, 39K, and 41K and a demonstration of dual-species (87Rb – 41K or 87Rb – 39K) atom interferometry. This talk will review the up-to-date quantum gas research explored with CAL and the technical accomplishments to operate, maintain, and upgrade CAL during its tenure in the microgravity environment of the ISS. The research of CAL has broad applications in fundamental physics and precision sensing to open the door for future quantum-enabled mission opportunities.

This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

2019 Tech Highlights ReportRequesters: Micaela Velasco, Elina SolisPhotographer: R. LannomDate: 13-MAY-2019Photolab order: 070915/171297
Dr. Jason Williams specializes in developing light pulse atom interferometers and optical atomic clocks, and their applications to both fundamental and applied physics in space. He currently serves as Project Scientist and a Principal Investigator for NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, a multi-user facility operating on the ISS dedicated to the study of quantum gases in space. Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, studying ultracold Fermi gases, and held a NIST NRC Postdoctoral RA in Professor Jun Ye’s lab at JILA and the University of Colorado developing high-precision optical lattice clocks.

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General Meeting – May 2025
2025-05-09 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present live from Albany, NY.

Fast Radio Bursts-Signals

from Across the Universe

This artist’s impression (not to scale) illustrates the path of the fast radio burst FRB 20220610A, from the distant galaxy where it originated all the way to Earth, in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. The source galaxy of FRB 20220610A, pinned down thanks to ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), appears to be located within a small group of interacting galaxies. It’s so far away its light took eight billion years to reach us, making FRB 20220610A the most distant fast radio burst found to date.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright flashes of radio waves that last only a few milliseconds and are visible across the universe. Although approximately 10,000 of these occur every day, they were only discovered by accident in 2007. Their origins remain largely unknown, making FRBs one of the hottest topics in radio astronomy. In this talk, Dr. McKee will describe the discovery of FRBs, what we know about them, and what the next few years of radio astronomy holds for this exciting new field of astronomy.
Union College headshotsWednesday, September 4, 2024James McKee, Union College, Physics & Astronomy
Dr. McKee studied physics at the University of Hull, and obtained a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Manchester while working at Jodrell Bank Observatory. Dr. McKee has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, where he was also the on-site pulsar astronomer at the Effelsberg radio telescope, and at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto where he worked on the CHIME telescope. He is currently an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Union College in NY, where he leads research into pulsars and fast radio bursts.
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General Meeting – June 2025
2025-06-13 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present online from Los Angeles.

A Trip to the Center of Our Galaxy

The heart of the Milky Way is home to Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole approximately four million times the mass of the Sun. Although it remains largely quiet today, it is surrounded by a turbulent sea of gas, dust, and exotic objects that could one day trigger dramatic outbursts. This presentation delves into this extreme environment, exploring the large-scale gas clouds and the closer-in structures that fuel the black hole. It examines how molecular hydrogen manages to survive intense ultraviolet radiation and introduces a newly identified class of enigmatic objects orbiting perilously close to Sagittarius A*. Observed over two decades with the Keck Observatory, these objects may represent the remnants of stellar collisions or merged binaries, offering valuable insights into how matter behaves under immense gravitational forces. Mapping this region helps to illuminate the intricate interplay of stars, gas, and gravity at the core of the galaxy.

Anna Ciurlo’s research focuses on stars and gas around the supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy. Her work leverages high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy from large ground and space-based observatories like Keck and the JWST. She earned her PhD in astrophysics from the Sorbonne Paris Cité and pursued postdoctoral research at UCLA. She was an inaugural year Keck Visiting Scholar at Keck Observatory. Anna continues at UCLA as an assistant researcher and adjunct assistant professor in the Galactic Center Group.
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General Meeting – July 2025
2025-07-11 19:30 - 21:30
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Backyard Exoplanet Observatory …

measuring exoplanets with

a small backyard telescope

Amateur astronomers can measure exoplanet parameters from their suburban backyard using a small telescope, astronomy camera, and a laptop

Mr Hallman is a retired physicist with over 30 years experience in the aerospace industry doing design, development, and testing of imaging systems and sensors operating in the Visible, Infrared, and Radar spectral regions. He has been a member of the OCA for 1 year, and is currently building a backyard Radio Telescope.
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General Meeting – August 2025
2025-08-08 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present online from Topeka, KS.
Exploding Stars and Life on Earth

Scientists have long speculated that the history of life on Earth may have been influenced by cosmic explosions such as supernovae. In recent decades the combination of astrophysical data and computational models have allowed detailed study of the potential effects of nearby stellar explosions on Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere. Impacts range from destruction of stratospheric ozone, exposing life to extreme levels of solar UV, to direct damage to organisms by high-energy neutrons and muons. This talk will summarize what is known today and discuss connections to mass extinctions and the evolution of life over the last few hundred million years.

Dr. Brian Thomas is a Professor in the Physics & Astronomy Department at Washburn University, in Topeka, Kansas. Since 2003 he has worked on various problems related to understanding how the history of life on Earth may have been affected by high-energy astrophysical events such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. He and collaborators from multiple disciplines have together produced some of the most detailed and state-of-the-art studies of the effects on Earth by nearby stellar explosions.
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General Meeting – September 2025
2025-09-12 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present inperson from the Chapman campus.
Pathway to a

Post-Global Warming Future

— A Brief Overview of Climate Science,

Consequences, and Solutions

(and their astronomical connections!)

Global warming may not seem obviously connected to astronomy — but it is. In fact, the basic science of global warming is best understood through comparative study of planets. In this presentation, astrophysicist/educator Jeffrey Bennett will give you a brief overview of the surprisingly simple basic science behind global warming (including its astronomical connections) and of the consequences we can expect from this warming. Most important, he’ll focus on solutions and how we can in principle take the steps necessary to create a “post-global warming” future, meaning a future in which today’s children will someday be able to talk about global warming as a once-serious problem that we found a way to solve. Note: This talk is based on Dr. Bennett’s book A Global Warming Primer — Pathway to a Post-Global Warming Future.

Astrophysicist/educator Jeffrey Bennett has devoted his career to science education and outreach. He is probably best known to the astronomy community as the lead author of the widely used textbooks The Cosmic Perspective and Life in the Universe. He is also the author of textbooks in math and statistics; of several critically acclaimed books for educators and the public; and of 7 award-winning science books for children. He served two years as a visiting senior scientist at NASA headquarters, proposed and co-led development of the Voyage Scale Model Solar System on the National Mall (Washington, D.C.), created the free Totality app for learning about solar eclipses, and created a free online textbook for middle school Earth and Space Science. Among other honors, his children’s books were the first ever selected for Story Time From Space, in which books are launched to the International Space Station and read aloud by astronauts, and he has won both the American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award (2014) and the Klopsteg Memorial Award (2023) for education from the American Association of Physics Teachers. In addition to his ongoing speaking series on global warming, his current projects include working to spread Voyage model solar systems across the country, a planetarium show based on his book Max Goes to Mars, and a new book on The Scale of the Universe to be published in January.
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General Meeting – October 2025
2025-10-17 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present inperson from the Chapman campus.

The Search for Earth 2.0:

Why We Think It Exists, and

How We’re Going To Find It

For thousands of years, we’ve wondered if the Earth is unique, or if there are other Earths out there to find. In just the last 30 years, we’ve progressed from merely wondering if planets exist around other stars to knowing that almost every star we see has planets. Ambitious planet searches have been probing further and further, finding planetary systems of an incredible – and incredibly surprising! – variety. However, we have yet to discover another planet that might be like Earth – a rocky planet orbiting just the right distance from a Sun-like star to have liquid water on its surface. NASA has a audacious new plan for a next-generation flagship telescope that will directly image Earth-like planets around nearby stars, but it will take all of our ingenuity and technical prowess to achieve this incredible feat. Dr Christiansen will walk you through the past, present, and future of our hunt for Earth 2.0.

Dr. Jessie Christiansen is the Chief Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute and a TED fellow. She has worked on NASA’s Kepler, K2, and TESS missions, searching the sky for exoplanets, and is helping plan for NASA’s next big flagship missions – the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Dr. Christiansen’s research is in the detection and characterization of exoplanets – planets around other stars – and studies of exoplanet populations, and she is currently the most successful woman planet hunter in the world.

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General Meeting – November 2025
2025-11-07 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present inperson from the Chapman campus.

From OCA School Star Parties

to 4K Cameras in Orbit

In this presentation, Liam Kennedy, amateur astronomer, former president of the Orange County Astronomers, and now SpaceTV Director at Sen, shares his remarkable journey from local astronomy outreach to developing technology that now operates aboard the International Space Station.
During his years supporting OCA’s public school programs in the 2000s, Liam discovered how few people realized that astronauts were living and working overhead. That awareness gap sparked the idea that would later become ISS-Above — a small device that alerts users whenever the Space Station passes overhead and, eventually, displayed live video of Earth from orbit.
What began as a personal project to inspire his grandchildren soon attracted global attention, support from The Planetary Society and NASA, and partnerships that placed ISS-Above units in classrooms across the U.S. When NASA’s original HDEV Earth-viewing cameras were retired, Liam refused to let the public lose that connection to space. His persistence led him to collaborate with Sen, a company dedicated to sharing real-time 4K views of Earth from orbit.
Through his initiative, Sen’s SpaceTV-1 camera system became part of the ISS via Airbus’s Bartolomeo platform — fulfilling a vision that began two decades earlier with OCA telescope nights under the stars.
This talk brings that full-circle story to life — showing how one amateur astronomer’s outreach mission grew into a global window on our planet from space.

Liam Kennedy joined Sen in July 2023 as Space TV Director. For over a decade, he has championed live Earth views from the International Space Station (ISS) through his invention of ISS-Above, a Raspberry Pi-based device delivering real-time ISS tracking and video feeds. Since its 2013 Kickstarter launch, ISS-Above has expanded to more than 5,000 installations worldwide, inspiring students, educators, and the public.
In 2019, NASA contacts connected Liam with Sen CEO Charles Black to explore building a commercial UHD camera payload for the ISS. That partnership led to SpaceTV-1, a three-camera system launched in March 2024 and now operating on the Columbus module’s Bartolomeo platform.
Liam’s background blends media production, live streaming, and product innovation, with a focus on astronomy, science, and space outreach. He is a frequent presenter and thought leader in the commercial space sector, featured on technology and space podcasts, and a regular speaker at the ISS R&D Conference, where he has presented five times since 2015.

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General Meeting – December 2025
2025-12-12 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present live from Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

Settling Space with Microbes

Microbes from extreme environments help us search for life on other planets like Mars, but they can also be used to advance the human exploration and settlement of space by producing useful products including mining metals.

Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh. His scientific interests encompass microbial life in extreme environments, the habitability of extraterrestrial environments and the exploration and settlement of space. He established the UK Centre for Astrobiology at Edinburgh in 2011, a national node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which has led many scientific and educational projects. He has published many papers, academic and popular books including the Wiley-Blackwell textbook, ‘Astrobiology’, in its third edition. Recently, he organised and led the Life Beyond project with the Scottish Prison Service, which engaged prisoners in the design of human settlements in space, drawing on their experience of confinement. He has previously worked at NASA Ames Research Centre, the British Antarctic Survey, and The Open University. He received his first degree in biochemistry from Bristol University and his DPhil in molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford.
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General Meeting – January 2026
2026-01-09 19:30 - 21:30
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This meeting’s speaker will present live from Kutchan, Japan.

Untangling the Rate of

Black Hole Mergers:

A Cosmic Tug of War

On September 14th, 2015, humanity detected a ripple in spacetime 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom coming from over one billion light-years away. This awesome feat of physics, astronomy, and engineering confirmed Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves made over one hundred years earlier, and opened the door to a whole new means of studying the Universe. Adam is one of many so-called “gravitational wave paleontologists” seeking to use gravitational waves to unravel the formation, lives, and deaths of stars and black holes that merge, emitting the tiny waves that we now detect daily. Adam will be discussing how he used simulations of millions of massive stars to provide insight into the rates and demographics of mergers throughout the history of the Universe.
Link to paper

Adam Boesky is a rising PhD candidate at Harvard University studying a broad array of topics relating to astrophysical transients. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he focused on mergers of compact objects (black holes and neutron stars), and developed machine learning pipelines for classifying events detected from large-scale astrophysical surveys. Recently, Adam has been focusing on the detection and analysis of the exotic, elusive transients that occur on the timescales of several years.
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General Meeting – February 2026
2026-02-13 19:30 - 21:30
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Free and open to the public but per our host’s policy, minors (under 18) are welcome to attend as long as they are accompanied by their parent or guardian at all times.
This meeting’s speaker will present inperson from the campus of the Chapman University.

Planetary Habitability in the

Solar System and Beyond

Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era. Though traditionally viewed through the lens of our home planet and its evolutionary history, data from other Solar System objects, and a plethora of planets outside of our Solar System, are shedding new light on habitability research. This presentation will discuss the factors that contribute to planetary habitability, and how these pieces fit together in an inter-disciplinary pathway that will benefit both the understanding of the evolution of Earth’s habitability and identifying possible abodes of life elsewhere throughout the universe.

Stephen Kane is a Professor of Planetary Astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside. His work covers a broad range of topics and he has discovered hundreds of planets orbiting other stars. He is a leading expert on the topic of planetary habitability, the habitable zone of planetary systems, and the study of why Venus and Earth underwent divergent evolutions. He has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as several books on the topic of exoplanets and habitability. He is also a prominent scientific leader for several NASA missions designed to search for life in the universe.
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General Meeting – March 2026
2026-03-13 19:30 - 21:30
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Free and open to the public but per our host’s policy, minors (under 18) are welcome to attend as long as they are accompanied by their parent or guardian at all times.
This meeting’s speaker will present inperson from the campus of the Chapman University.

The Milky Way’s Central Black Hole:

Lessons on accretion physics

Every large galaxy hosts a black hole at its center. These black holes’ feedback on their host galaxies shapes the evolution of galaxies and, ultimately, affects the Universe as a whole. The Milky Way’s own supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is the closest such object and the only one that can be studied in unprecedented detail – down to individual orbiting stars, small infalling clouds, and even its event horizon. Yet, despite its proximity and decades of observations, its behavior remains among the most challenging to explain. This talk explores Sagittarius A*, its immediate surrounding, and the challenges of describing black hole accretion physics. Particular emphasis is placed on the recent discovery of a wind associated with Sagittarius A*. The talk will also address what our own black hole can teach us about supermassive black holes across the Universe.

Elena (Lena) Murchikova is an astrophysicist interested in black holes. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. Originally from Moscow, Lena holds two PhDs: one in astrophysics from Caltech and another in particle physics from Moscow State University. She completed her postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative. Outside of research, Lena enjoys mountaineering and (drone) photography.
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