Open Spiral Bar
2023-05-13 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-06-10 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-07-15 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-08-12 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-09-09 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-10-14 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-11-11 22:00 - 23:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event.
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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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OCA Astrophysics SIG Meeting
2023-05-19 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-06-16 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-07-21 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-08-18 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-09-15 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-10-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Orange Coast College, Building 40, Astronomy House, Merrimac Way, Costa Mesa, CA, 92626, United States
The monthly meeting of the Astrophysics Special Interest Group is at 7:00 PM every third Friday of the month at the Heritage Museum of Orange County. Please contact the ASIG chair for details at mark@ocastronomers.org .
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Online Beginner's Class
2023-06-02 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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Anza Star Party and Star-B-Que
2023-06-05 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Our annual Star-B-Que and star party at the Anza site for members and their guests. The Star-B-Que is a pot luck early dinner, so please bring something to share with your fellow astronomers. It will be held at 5pm up at the club obsrevatory.
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General Meeting – June 2023
2023-06-09 19:30 - 21:30 | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.
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Throwing DART(s) at Asteroids

NASA’s First Planetary Defense Mission

On September 26, 2022, NASA intentionally smashed the DART spacecraft into an asteroid as humanity’s first test mission for planetary defense. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft’s collision with its target asteroid, which poses no threat to Earth, changed the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes, including those of Las Cumbres Observatory.

In this talk, Dr. Tim Lister will describe near-Earth asteroids, impact hazards, and what the DART mission will do to prepare for potentially deflecting asteroids in the future.

Dr Tim Lister joined Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) as a project scientist in 2007 and is now a Staff Scientist. He specializes in the observation and characterization of small Solar System bodies, particularly comets and Near Earth Asteroids. He received a M. Sci in Astrophysics from the University of St Andrews in 1997 and a Doctorate in Astrophysics on the study of magnetic activity on variable stars in 2000, also from the University of St Andrews. Following his doctorate, he was a founding member of the
SuperWASP transit survey searching for extrasolar planets, specializing in building data processing pipelines for analyzing the survey data, for which he received the RAS Group Achievement Award. Since joining LCO, he has worked on building pipelines and data archives for the observatory, confirming new transiting extrasolar planets and building a new science group for the study of Solar System objects. In the course of this research, he has developed web-based software to allow the scheduling and analysis of observations of Solar System objects using the telescopes of the LCO Network. He is currently Co-lead of the LCO Outbursting Objects Key (LOOK) Project to study the behavior of comets for ESA’s Comet Interceptor mission and a member of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Investigation Team.
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Anza Star Party
2023-06-17 | CA
New moon weekend and the Anza start party for members and their guests.
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Beginner's Class In-person event
2023-07-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Orange Coast College, Building 40, Astronomy House, Merrimac Way, Costa Mesa, CA, 92626, United States
This is a free and open to the public event (In-person event only).
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 Hands-on class.
For details, please visit here and download the sample information PDF package.
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General Meeting – July 2023
2023-07-14 19:30 - 21:30 | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.
Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present inperson on the campus of Chapman University.

Tips and Secrets on Planetary Imaging

This talk will discuss the preparation, imaging capture and processing for Planetary Imaging.

Christopher Go lives on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. He has been an amateur astronomer since 1986, the year of the return of Halley’s Comet. He studied at the University of San Carlos where he received a BS in physics.
Starting as an amateur astronomer with a pair of 10×40 binoculars, Chritopher Go would later own several different telescopes. He currently uses a Celestron C14 for planetary imaging.
Chris’s main astronomical interests are planetary imaging, particularly of Jupiter and Saturn.
In February 2006, Christopher Go discovered that the white spot Oval BA of Jupiter (later called Red Spot Jr.) had turned red. He joined planetary scientists Imke de Pater and Phil Marcus to observe Jupiter in the spring of 2006 with the Hubble Space Telescope. He was also involved with follow-up Hubble and Keck telescope observations of Jupiter.
In 2008, he received the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers’ prestigious Walter Haas Award. In June 3, 2010, he confirmed the Jupiter Impact that was observed by Anthony Wesley. Asteroid 2000 EL157 has been named 30100Christophergo, in his honour.
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OCA Board Meeting
2023-07-30 11:30 - 14:30 | Online
The next OCA board meeting will be held via zoom on July 30, 2023 at 11:30am. Any member is welcome to attend please contact Alan Smallbone for more information.
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In-person Beginner's Class
2023-08-04 19:30 - 21:30 | Orange Coast College, Building 40, Astronomy House, Merrimac Way, Costa Mesa, CA, 92626, United States
This is a free and open to the public event (in person event only)
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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General Meeting – August 2023
2023-08-11 19:30 - 21:30 | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.
Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present online from Heidelberg, Germany.

A Journey Through Binary Black Holes

The zoo of binary black holes has never been so rich. Before the first LIGO-Virgo detection of gravitational waves in 2015, we could only speculate about the existence of binary black holes, i.e. systems composed of two black holes orbiting about each other. Now, the number of detected binary black holes approaches the 100 mark, and we expect many new discoveries in the next few months. The mass of the black holes observed by LIGO and Virgo ranges from a few up to a few hundred times the mass of our Sun. Some of them are relatively nearby, others merged several Billion years ago and their gravitational wave signal reached us from far away. In this talk, we will explore the main properties of binary black holes and discuss their main formation channels and open questions.

Michela Mapelli obtained her PhD in Astrophysics from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, Italy) in 2006. She then moved to Zurich (Switzerland) for a postdoctoral fellowship. In 2010, she got a permanent research position at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), where she built her first research group focused on the study of black holes of different sizes. After holding a professorship at the University of Innsbruck (Austria, 2017-2018) and Padova (Italy, 2018-2023), she recently became Full Professor of Computational Physics at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). During her career, she obtained several prizes for her research on black holes, including the MERAC Prize 2015 for the Best Early Career Researcher in Theoretical Astrophysics and a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council. In 2009, several years before the first gravitational-wave detection, she proposed the formation of black holes with mass about 30-50 times the mass of our Sun. She is now an enthusiastic member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration and is planning for the next-generation gravitational-wave detectors.
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Astrophysics SIG meeting - New Date
2023-08-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Heritage Museum of OC, 3101 W Harvard St, Santa Ana, CA, 92704, United States
The monthly meeting of the Astrophysics Special Interest Group at 7:00 at the Heritage Museum. Please contact the SIG chair for details and requirements. See the Contacts section of the website for details on contacting the group.
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Online Beginner's Class
2023-09-01 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online Zoom event, to attend please click here at or after 7:10pm
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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General Meeting – September 2023
2023-09-08 19:30 - 21:30 | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.
Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present inperson on the campus of Chapman University.

THE SHAKING COSMOS:

Observing the Universe in

Gravitational Waves with LISA

Virtually everything we know about the Universe has been discovered from the study of photons — light in all its myriad forms from radio waves, to visible light, to x-rays and beyond. At the dawn of the 21st century, advanced technology is providing access to the Cosmos through detection of sub-atomic particles like cosmic rays and neutrinos, and through detection of ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself.
These ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves, carry information not in the form of light or particles, but in the form of gravity itself. Gravitational waves are messengers which carry the stories of what happens when two black holes collide at the centers of galaxies, of how the compact stars fall into monstrous black holes, and of how the graveyard of the galaxy is filled with the quiet whisper of binary white dwarf stars that spiral together ever so slowly as they fade into oblivion.

This talk will explore the modern description of gravity, what gravitational waves are and how we hope to measure them, and what we hope to learn from their detection. We’ll focus on the forthcoming space gravitational wave observatory, LISA, being launched in the early 2030s by ESA and NASA. Gravity has a story to tell, and in this talk, we’ll explore some of discoveries we hope to make by listening.

Shane Larson is a research professor of physics at Northwestern University, where he is the Associate Director of CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics). He works in the field of gravitational wave astrophysics, specializing in studies of compact stars, binaries, and the galaxy. He works in gravitational wave astronomy with both the ground-based LIGO project, and future space-based observatory LISA. He was formerly a tenured associate professor of physics at Utah State University. He is an award winning teacher, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He contributes regularly to a public science blog at writescience.wordpress.com, and tweets with the handle @sciencejedi
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OCA Board Meeting
2023-09-24 11:30 - 13:30 | Online
The OCA board meeting will be conducted via Zoom at 11:30am on Sept 24,2023. This meeting is open to all OCA members in good standing. Please contact Alan Smallbone for the link for the meeting.
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Online Beginner's Class
2023-10-06 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 at or after 7:10pm.
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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General Meeting – October 2023
2023-10-13 19:30 - 21:30 | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.
Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present online from Flagstaff, Arizona.

The Discovery of Pluto

The search for, and eventual discovery of, Pluto is a colorful tale of dedication, perseverance. and personal triumph. It was a real needle-in-haystack effort that is as much about the human spirit as it is scientific pursuits.

Kevin Schindler is the historian at Lowell Observatory – where he has worked for 28 years – and an active member of the Flagstaff history and science communities. He has written more than 600 magazine and newspaper articles on subjects ranging from local history and astronomy to baseball and the Lincoln Memorial, and contributes a bi-weekly astronomy column, “View from Mars Hill”, for the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper. He has written seven books, including Historic Tales of Flagstaff (written with Mike Kitt). Fun fact: Kevin has both a fossil crab and asteroid named after him.
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Online Beginner's Class
2023-11-03 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 at or after 7:10pm.
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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General Meeting – November 2023
2023-11-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Irvine Lecture Hall of the Chapman University, 336 N Center St, Orange, CA, 92866, United States
This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.
Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present inperson from the Chapman University’s campus.

RACING WITH THE MOON

DANCING WITH THE STARS

In RACING WITH THE MOON / DANCING WITH THE STARS. Richard Lederer, Ph.D., will share the etymology of words and phrases derived from our moon sun, galaxy and the stars. He’ll also welcome your questions about the English language — puns to punctuation, pronouns to pronunciation, and palaver to palindromes.

San Diego Union-Tribune language columnist Richard Lederer, Ph.D., is the author of 60 books about language, history, and humor, including his best-selling Anguished English series and his current title, Lederer’s Language & Laughter.
He is a founding co-host of “A Way With Words,” broadcast on Public Radio.
Dr. Lederer has been named International Punster of the Year and Toastmasters International’s Golden Gavel winner.
There will be a book signing after the event.
You can find the list of books authored by Dr. Lederer along with instructions for ordering, here: RichardLedererBookList
You can find the text of the talk here: RichardLedererMoonAndStars
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