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Free and open to the public held both inperson and online.

We have a new inperson location, “OCC Lecture Halls 1&2” of the “Orange Coast College,” next to the planetarium. Click here for parking instructions and more information.

The main speaker at this meeting will be joining us inperson.

How to Image an Exoplanet

A little look under the hood of the Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 instrument, which will directly image young Jovian exoplanets.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets beyond our Solar System. Yet only a tiny fraction have ever been directly imaged. The challenge: planets are extremely faint compared with their host stars, and appear very close beside them in the sky. Astronomers have developed cutting-edge instruments to overcome this challenge. This talk will explain how techniques such as adaptive optics and coronagraphs allow us to reveal these hidden worlds, what we can learn from them, and how the next generation of telescopes will bring us closer to directly imaging planets like Earth.

Saavidra Perera is an adaptive optics scientist at the California Institute for Technology working in the field of astronomical instrumentation. Her work focuses on overcoming the limitations of the Earth’s atmosphere on ground-based visible/infrared astronomy.

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