Orange County Astronomers

Apollo 11 Lands on Moon: 1969
2021-07-20 | Online
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Full Moon: July's Full Moon is also known as Thunder Moon, Hay Moon, and Wort Moon
2021-07-23 | Online

Last Quarter Moon
2021-07-31 | Online

OVRO Trip
2021-07-31 | Owens Valley Radio Observatory, 100 Leighton Lane, Big Pine, CA, 93513, United States
OCA is holding the first on-ground OUTREACH of 2021. Elementary students will marvel at the sky for the first time through telescopes.
Join us for an extraordinary adventure in science education at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory outside of Big Pine, Ca. Open to all OCA members.
1 pm: Tour of the Dish
7 pm – Midnight: Star Party and Astro Photography
To RSVP or Questions: Dr. Doug Millar drzarkof56@yahoo.com
Outreach: Cecilia Caballero, M.Ed Ceci@OCAstronomer.org
http://www.ovro.caltech.edu
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Online Beginner's Class
2021-08-06 19:30 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online
This is a free online event, to attend please register with zoom using the”View Event Website” link on the box above.
The 6th session of the Beginners Astronomy Class covers the basics of astrophotography, covering different types of imaging, how different types of cameras are used for this kind of photography, and other equipment and considerations for taking a good picture.
This session is taught by Kyle Coker, who is active in the club’s AstroImaging special interest group.
Free and open to the public as well as members of OCA.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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Online General Meeting - August 2021
2021-08-13 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free online event, to attend please register with zoom using the “View Event Website” link on the box above.
Into the Void: Probing the Space between

Planets, Stars, and Galaxies

It is hard for us to grasp how vast and how empty space is, but it is also true that the vast majority of matter in the universe is distributed at barely-detectable densities through the voids between planets, stars, and galaxies. The propagation of radio pulses through the tenuous interstellar and intergalactic media offers a unique probe of this gas. Pulses from radio pulsars – rapidly spinning neutron stars – have been used to map the ionized interstellar medium of the Milky Way.
Into the Void with Voyager, Pulsars, and Fast Radio Bursts

The recent discovery of fast radio bursts has allowed us to start probing the intergalactic medium even as we try to understand what powers these enigmatic radio pulses from distant galaxies. Closer to home, data from the Voyager spacecraft has revealed a new way to monitor the boundary between the solar wind and interstellar space. We will take a quick tour of these diverse phenomena, and what we have learned so far.

Shami Chatterjee is a Principal Research Scientist at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science and the Carl Sagan Institute, which seems like coming full circle, since he grew up watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and dreaming about the stars. Dr. Chatterjee studies neutron stars, works on the forefront of efforts to use them to build a low-frequency gravitational wave detector, and has been in hot pursuit of fast radio bursts, mysterious flashes of radio waves that are coming from billions of light years away.
Dr. Chatterjee has a PhD in astronomy from Cornell University, and he was a Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a stint as a University Fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia and as an astronomer at the Australia Telescope National Facility, he has been at Cornell University since 2009.

Dr. Chatterjee’s work has appeared on the cover of Nature, in the New York Times and Washington Post, and has even been picked up by his hometown newspaper in Kolkata, India. He enjoys a quiet life in upstate New York with his lovely wife and wonderful children, and laments the fact that his to-read pile grows faster than he can possibly keep up with.

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Open Spiral Bar
2021-08-14 22:00 - 23:30, 2021-09-11 22:00 - 23:30 | Online
This is a free online event, to attend please register with zoom using the “View Event Website” link on the box above.
Come and socialize with your fellow astronomy enthusiasts face-to-face virtually!
Bring your latest astrophotos, mini-presentation, questions or none and your own refreshments.

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Online Beginner's Class
2021-09-03 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.
The 1st session of the Beginners Astronomy Class gives a general overview of all of the different objects you can see in the night and day time skies, with some history and information about what they are and their significance. An overview of the current scientific understanding of the Universe’s beginning, present and future is also covered.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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Online General Meeting - September 2021
2021-09-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free online event, to attend please register with zoom using the “View Event Website” link on the box above.
Radio astronomy in South Africa:

Background, recent discoveries, and role

in the development of the continent

Our understanding of the universe is being comprehensively revisited thanks to a new generation of telescopes that are true big data machines. A region of the world where astronomy is growing faster than anywhere else, is probably Africa, a continent not traditionally associated with groundbreaking astronomical research. In South Africa, the radio astronomy community, in particular, has grown from merely present to broad and inclusive, thanks to the country’s commitment to the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project, and the home-grown human capacity development programme that accompanies it.

This presentation will set the context of this growth, review a few recent discoveries made with the MeerKAT radio-telescope, a 64-dish interferometer precursor to the SKA, and discuss the many developments, both scientific and social, that have been triggered by the South African SKA project. Indeed, the engagement into a scientific programme of this scale in Africa is not without broader impacts, social, economic and educational.

It will conclude with a view of the future, and the scientific ambitions of a continent and a community now able to use Africa’s big skies to pursue big dreams.
Dr. Carolina Ödman

Dr. Ödman is Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Trained in physics at EPFL in Switzerland, she holds a PhD in cosmology from Cambridge University, UK. After a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellowship in Italy, she grew an interest in education, becoming the first international project manager of Universe Awareness, an early childhood development program that uses the inspirational aspects of astronomy to stimulate children’s development in underprivileged environments. She led Universe Awareness for 5 years, taking it from an idea to a global network of volunteers running projects in more than 40 countries.

She joined the South African Astronomical Observatory as an SKA Research Fellow working at the interface between astronomy and technology, which she continues, as founding member of the “.astronomy” (dot-astronomy) conference and hackathon series. She was Director of Academic Development for the Next Einstein Initiative before joining thumbzup, a financial technology start-up as Chief Scientist. At thumbzup she set up a data science and analytics pipeline. In 2018, she joined the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy as Associate Director, Development and Outreach. There, she leads a number of initiatives, including big data skills development, and continues to do multidisciplinary research on how big data and astronomy can contribute to development of communities and society at large. Her work has earned her numerous awards, including Inspiring Fifty South Africa (2020), an International Astronomical Union Special Award for Astronomy Outreach, Development and Education (2018), Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans (2014), Bilan Magazine 300 most influential of Switzerland – category under 40s (2013), an American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (2010).
https://carolune.org
https://astro.uwc.ac.za
https://www.idia.ac.za
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Luminous Documentary Screening
2021-09-17 20:00 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to enjoy please follow the steps below:

1) Click here to register for attending the event
2) Click here to register for watching the movie

3) Click here for access to the scientific paper

When astronomy professor Larry Molnar stumbles across a strange star, he and his students embark on a dramatic journey of scientific discovery that brings their unlikely team into the international spotlight.

Luminous tells the story of the first astronomer in history to publicly predict the near-future explosion of a star – if he’s right, 2022 will see the closest thing to a supernova in the skies of earth in 400 years, and every school kid in the northern hemisphere will know it. But the prediction is high risk. Others in the astronomical community are skeptical, and Larry’s professional reputation hangs in the balance. Luminous, a feature documentary by award-winning filmmaker Sam Smartt (Wagonmasters), follows Larry’s journey to test his unprecedented prediction, knowing that its success or failure will unfold squarely in the international spotlight.

Humans have long been fascinated by stellar explosions when they appear as new stars – novae – in the night sky. But predicting the event in advance and watching it occur has so far proved impossible, both because of the sheer number of stars in our galaxy and because of the improbability of finding one that would explode within the lifetime of the observer. Indeed, using a telescope to find a star in its last century of life is like using a satellite to find a human being taking her final breath. It’s a task most astronomers don’t think is possible.

Larry Molnar is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI. He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1985 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1985-1988. Before coming to Calvin, Larry taught at the University of Iowa from 1988-1998.
In many ways, Larry is an unlikely protagonist for this story. Though brilliant, he is mild-mannered, kind, unassuming, and not a seeker of the limelight. He believes in intellectual curiosity for its own sake, not in accomplishing great things in order to garner attention.
For the audience, the central dramatic question of the film is clear— “Is Larry right? Will the star actually explode?” But as a scientist Larry sees it differently: “In a sense, I don’t care whether I’m right or not. What I want to know is the truth.”

Sam Smartt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and associate professor of Film & Media at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI. He earned his MFA in documentary filmmaking from the Documentary Film Program at Wake Forest in 2013.
His short, Wagonmasters (2013) won a College Television Award and was distributed via American Public Television, PBS, and Kanopy. Shipping Home (2016) was also distributed via Kanopy. He enjoys telling stories about characters who defy our categories and challenge our expectations.

https://www.luminous-film.com/

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Online Beginner's Class
2021-10-01 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free online event, to attend please register with zoom using the”View Event Website” link on the box above.
The 2nd session of the Beginners Astronomy Class covers the different types of equipment used to observe the night sky, including telescopes, mounts, eyepieces, filters, and advantages and disadvantages of different options.
This session is a must if thinking about buying a telescope.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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Online General Meeting - October 2021
2021-10-08 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.

The “What’s Up?” presentation at this meeting will feature an android app called “Mobile Observatory” those interested are advised to install it on their cell phone before the meeting by clicking here and then download the extended catalogue within the app.

Stars are not Spherical Cows

Stars are the sources of all the light we see in the universe. Whether we are investigating our own celestial neighborhood
or the most distant corners of the universe, we use stars as our beacons. The universe is mostly made of dark energy, and galaxies and clusters mostly of dark matter. But it is stars like our sun that trace them all. Stars are not eternal balls of gas churning out energy from their nuclear furnaces. They are born, they live, and they die. The birth of stars is particularly important as it can be traced back to the birth and evolution of galaxies across cosmic times. I will review progress over the past decade in understanding how stars form out of the gas clouds that pervade galaxies, and how this has helped with furthering our understanding of the universe. Space missions, as well as advanced ground-based telescopes, have played key roles in advancing our knowledge. With many challenges still ahead of us, the way forward will require innovative thinking for the future missions and facilities that will enable humanity one day to say, “We know where we came from.”

Daniela Calzetti is an astronomer recognized for her investigations on the interstellar dust and star formation in external galaxies. Calzetti obtained her PhD at the University of Rome in 1992. In 1990, she became first an ESA Fellow and then a postdoc at the Space Telescope Science Institute (Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.). Here, she was hired as an astronomer in 1995, and worked on characterizing and supporting instrumentation on the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. In 2007, she moved to a faculty position at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is serving as the Head of the Astronomy Department since 2018. In 2013, she was named the Blaauw Professor at the Kapteyn Observatory (University of Gröningen, The Netherlands), and in 2016 she was awarded the Tage Erlander Guest Professorship by the Swedish Research Council, which she spent at the University of Stockholm (Sweden). Calzetti was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

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Open Spiral Bar
2021-10-09 22:00 - 23:30, 2021-11-13 22:00 - 23:30, 2021-12-11 22:00 - 23:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.
Come and socialize with your fellow astronomy enthusiasts face-to-face virtually!
Bring your latest astrophotography, mini-presentation, questions or none and your own refreshments.

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Outreach- Laguna Niguel Elementary
2021-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Laguna Niguel Elementary, 27922 Niguel Heights Blvd, Laguna Niguel, CA, 92677, United States

Outreach- Biola University
2021-11-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Biola University, 13800 Biola Avenue, La Mirada, CA, 90639, United States

Outreach- Dale Junior High
2021-11-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Dale Junior High, 900 South Dale Ave, Anaheim, CA, 92804, United States
Orange County Astronomers are ready to share the love of the sky with our community.
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Outreach - Crown Valley Community Park
2021-11-05 19:00 - 21:00 | Crown Valley Community Park, 29751 Crown Valley Parkway,, Laguna Niguel, 92677
Orange County Astronomers are ready to share the love of the sky to our community.
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Online Beginner's Class
2021-11-05 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.
The 3rd session of the Beginners Astronomy Class covers different methods of finding objects in the night sky. Special topic is learning the constellations.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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CANCELED-Outreach- Community Roots Academy
2021-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 | Community Roots Academy, 29292 Crown Valley Pkwy, Laguna Niguel, CA, 92677, United States
This Charter school will have students marvel at the stars with the help of OCA guest astronomers.
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Outreach- Laguna Woods Astro Club
2021-11-10 07:00 - 21:00 | Laguna Woods Astronomy Club, 24351 El Toro Road, Laguna Woods, CA, 92637, United States

Online General Meeting - November 2021
2021-11-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.
Chasing the Northern Lights

An aurora selfie taken during the display on April 16-17, 2021, with the Sony a7III and 15mm Laowa lens.
Alan will provide advice on when and where to see the sky sight that is on the “bucket list” for many people, the Northern Lights. He’ll include tips and techniques for capturing the aurora in stills, time-lapses and real-time movies. He’ll illustrate the talk with images taken in Yellowknife and Churchill in northern Canada, and in Norway, as well as from his home in Alberta, Canada.

Alan is co-author of the popular guidebook for amateur astronomers, The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, just out in a greatly revised and thoroughly updated fourth edition, and is author of the eBook, How to Photograph and Process Nightscapes and Time-Lapses. Alan lives in Alberta, Canada, where the Northern Lights often appear in his skies, but he also pursues the Lights to even more northern latitudes. Asteroid 78434 is named for him.
http://amazingsky.com/
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Online Beginner's Class
2021-12-03 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.
The 4th session of the Beginners Astronomy Class covers the science behind the telescope.
How do our eyes actually perceive objects we see in the telescope and what is the physics that allows that perception.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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Online General Meeting - December 2021
2021-12-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.

White Holes

Black holes are solutions of the Einstein equations long believed to be unphysical. Now we know they represent real things in the sky.
White holes are solutions of the Einstein equations long believed to be unphysical. Can they represent real things in the sky?

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum gravity. Born in Italy, he has worked in the United States, France and Canada. Rovelli is member of the Institute Universitaire de France, honorary professor of the Beijing Normal University, Honoris Causa Laureate of the Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires, member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. In 1995 he has been awarded the Xanthopoulos Award for “the best relativist worldwide under forty”. He has written global best sellers among which are ‘Seven Brief Lesson on Physics’, translated in 44 language, ‘The Order of Time’ and the recent “Helgoland” on quantum theory. He has been included by the Foreign Policy magazine in the 2019 list of the 100 most influential global thinkers.
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Online General Meeting - December 2021
2021-12-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.

An Antarctic Odyssey: Winter-Over at South Pole Station

In a lavishly illustrated presentation, John W. Briggs of New Mexico will describe his year-long experience living at the Geographic South Pole while working for the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica. In preparation for this at Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, John was a team member building a 24-inch infrared telescope and related experiments that were set up at the Pole in time for him and colleagues to observe the July, 1994, explosive crash of fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into the planet Jupiter.
John weathered the “winter-over” with 26 other members of the U.S. Antarctic Program in an experience that many believe approximates what life will be like someday at a lunar or Martian outpost. Once begun, South Pole winter-over is an irreversible commitment, since the Program’s special LC-130 ski planes can’t land in the winter temperatures — in 1994, sometimes as low as 107 degrees F. below zero (with windchill, as low as -180 degrees). John will delight the audience with his perspective on the total South Pole experience — the strange natural environment, the odd social atmosphere, and the challenging, ongoing science.

John W. Briggs has lived and worked at far-ranging observatories in various technical capacities, including Mount Wilson, Yerkes, National Solar, Maria Mitchell, Venezuelan National, Chamberlin, and South Pole Station. He came to New Mexico with his family in 1997 to assist in the final commissioning of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Apache Point. In the 1980s he was an assistant editor at Sky & Telescope magazine and built Bogsucker Observatory in Massachusetts. He is a member of many astronomical organizations including the Springfield Telescope Makers responsible for the annual Stellafane Convention in Vermont, and he has recently been elected to the board of the century-old American Association of Variable Star Observers. His principal activity now involves the Astronomical Lyceum, an informal museum, library, laboratory, and lecture hall devoted to historical astronomy and its preservation, located in a 1936 former school gymnasium-theater in Magdalena, New Mexico. In the middle 1980s he assisted the late Professor Edgar Everhart, Director of Chamberlin Observatory, in his well-known program of cometary astrometry. John has many old friends in the Denver Astronomical Society.
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NEW MOON
2022-01-02 | CA

Online Beginner's Class
2022-01-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please register with zoom by clicking here.
The 5th session of the Beginners Astronomy Class is the “How to Use Your Telescope”.
If you have a telescope and would like some help learning to set it up and use it, attend this on-line class.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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Open Spiral Bar
2022-01-08 22:00 - 23:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event.
Join Zoom

Come and socialize with your fellow astronomy enthusiasts face-to-face virtually!
Bring your latest astrophotography, mini-presentation, questions or none and your own refreshments.

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