Orange County Astronomers

Outreach- Dale Junior High
2021-11-04 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.
Views: 2

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

Open Spiral Bar
2021-10-09 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.

Views: 2

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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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.
Views: 2

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/

Views: 2

Open Spiral Bar
2021-09-11 22:00 - 23:30, 2021-08-14 22:00 - 23:30, 2021-07-10 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.

Views: 2

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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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.
Views: 2

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.

Views: 2

Online Beginner's Class
2021-08-06 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 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.
Views: 2

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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Last Quarter Moon
2021-07-31, 2021-07-01 | Online

Full Moon: July's Full Moon is also known as Thunder Moon, Hay Moon, and Wort Moon
2021-07-23 | Online

Apollo 11 Lands on Moon: 1969
2021-07-20 | Online

First photograph of a star (Vega) 1850
2021-07-17 | Online

Mars 0.5 deg. south of Venus
2021-07-13 | Online

Online General Meeting - July 2021
2021-07-09 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.
Chasing Supernovae Explosions with Kepler

The Kepler Telescope discovered and revolutionized our understanding of 1000s of exoplanets. However, it also has given us the opportunity to study supernova explosions with exquisite accuracy. Dr. Rest will talk about how we can use these Kepler light curves to learn about the progenitors of the different types of supernovae and the physics of their explosion mechanisms.
Kepler’s Supernova Experiment Captures First Moments of a Dying Star

NASA Spacecraft Capture Rare, Early Moments of Baby Supernovae
Type 1a Supernova Animation

Dr. Armin Rest is an Associate Astronomer at STScI. Originally from Germany, he came to the US as an exchange student, and decided to stay to obtain his PhD at the University of Washington.

After his PhD, he worked as an NOAO Goldberg fellow at the CTIO observatory in Chile, before doing another postdoc at Harvard University. He started to work at STScI in 2010, and has been working there since as an NIRCam/JWST instrument scientist. His research interest is focused on supernovae, exotic transients, cosmology, and gravitational waves.

Views: 2

New Moon
2021-07-09 | Online

Crab Nebula first seen 1054
2021-07-04 | Online

Online Beginner's Class
2021-07-02 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This event is free and open to public; to attend please register with zoom by clicking on the “View Event Website” link on the box above.

This is the “How to Use Your Telescope” session of the Beginners Astronomy Class. 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.
Free and open to the public as well as members of OCA.
Views: 2

Full Moon
2021-06-24 | Online

Moon at Perigee
2021-06-23 | Online

Online Ventura County Astronomical Society's General Meeting
2021-06-18 20:30 - 22:00 | Online
This is an online event held by OCA for VCAS.
No prior registration is required but when entering the webinar, zoom will ask for your name and email.
At the time of the meeting, to attend via zoom app click here, via your browser click here.
To install the zoom app click here.

The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O’Neill tells the untold story of the life and influence of the late physicist and space colony pioneer Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill. In 1977, O’Neill wrote the book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, which sparked an enormous grassroots movement to build Earth-like habitats in space in order to solve Earth’s greatest crises. The film is told through “Gerry’s Kids” as they affectionately call themselves; his peers, family, and the younger generation who followed that movement and are now leading the modern day space industry. Find out more at www.thehighfrontiermovie.com
Will Henry is a Filmmaker and Writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Born and raised in Princeton, NJ, Will later attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as a Directing/Screenwriting double major where he graduated top of his class. Will began his career in development at Tribeca Film under Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro, and later as a Creative Executive at Cindy Cowan Entertainment. Will moved into the independent film industry as a Filmmaker and Writer shortly after relocating to Los Angeles, CA, gaining recognition for his first feature documentary film, The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O’Neill.

Will Henry (Producer & Writer)
Filmmaker & Writer, Creative Director & Senior Producer at Multiverse Media

Dylan Taylor (Executive Producer & Writer)
Chairman, Multiverse Media, CEO Voyager Space Holdings, Founder, Space for Humanity. Co-Founding Patron, Commercial Spaceflight Federation

Ryan Stuit (Director & Editor)
Accomplished artist, designer, and composer. Creative Director and Designer at Subtractive Inc. Future directorial slate includes “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” based on Robert Heinlein’s 1950s Sci-Fi short story.

Kyle Schember (Producer)
Co-Founder and CEO of Subtractive Inc, specializing in scripted film, television, music videos, and music. Producer and Executive Producer for “Anna” with Emma Stone and “Who Cares” with Paul McCartney & Emma Stone. Producer on Prince EA’s “One Planet” produced for the Bloomberg Global Business Forum.
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First Quarter Moon
2021-06-17 | Online
