Postponed!!!! Astrophysics Special Interest Group
2023-02-24 19:30 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Orange Coast College, Building 40, Astronomy House, Merrimac Way, Costa Mesa, CA, 92626, United States
Astrophysics Special Interest Group

This meeting has been postponed, please contact the SIG chair Mark Price for further details. A new date when available will be posted.

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Online Beginner's Class
2023-03-03 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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OCA Board Meeting
2023-03-05 10:30 - 13:30 | Online
The Board of Directors for the OCA will meet online at 10:30am on March 05, 2023. All current members may attend. Please contact the club secretary for the link to the meeting.
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General Meeting – March 2023
2023-03-10 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.
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Hunting Isolated Black Holes

Black holes are fascinating, but enigmatic celestial objects. Long predicted by theory, as the product of some of the most energetic events in the universe, they have always presented severe challenges to observational astronomers. If the have a binary companion, accretion or the gravitational waves released during a merger can reveal their presence, but isolated black holes offer no such signatures. Yet understanding the Milky Way’s population of stellar remnants – both isolated and binary – will place important constraints on models of stellar evolution. The phenomenon of microlensing provides the means to detect massive objects, even when they emit no light at all. Modern surveys are capable of detecting these transient events across a huge swathe of the Galaxy, and will chart the population of stellar remnants in the Milky Way. This talk will explore how black holes fit into our understanding of the lives of massive stars, how microlensing can reveal even singleton stellar remnants, and describe how recent work has confirmed the first such discovery.
More on microlensing: http://www.microlensing-source.org/

Dr. Rachel Street completed her Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where her thesis focused on searching for exoplanets in open clusters. This work led to her first post-doctoral position at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she was a founder member of the SuperWASP transit survey, for which she received the RAS Group Achievement Award and a PPARC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Rachel considers herself fortunate to have joined Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), soon after it was founded, giving her the opportunity to watch the LCO Telescope Network develop into full operation. Rachel started to study first exoplanets and later stellar remnants through the phenomenon of microlensing using LCO’s telescopes, and she now leads the LCO Microlensing group as a Senior Scientist. Rachel recently stepped down as a co-chair of the Rubin Observatory Transients and Variable Stars Science Collaboration, which aims to prepare for groundbreaking science with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

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Adopt-a-Scope Pickups
2023-03-11 10:00 - 12:00 | South Coast Self Sorage, 3480 W Warner Ave, Santa Ana, CA, 92704, United States
Adopt-a-Scope Pickups
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Open Spiral Bar
2023-03-11 22:00 - 23:30, 2023-04-15 22:00 - 23:30, 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 | 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
2023-03-17 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-04-21 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-05-19 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-06-16 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-07-21 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
2023-04-07 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 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 – April 2023
2023-04-14 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.
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Observing the universe in the Ultraviolet

Prof. Hamden is a telescope builder, with a focus on UV astronomy and developing new detector technology. She will describe why the UV is so interesting scientifically and why is it criminally understudied. She will also discuss her own work on several different UV missions in development, including FIREBall-2 and Aspera.

Dr. Erika Hamden is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona. She specializes in building telescopes that go into space and the stratosphere, and developing technology to make telescopes better. Erika is a leader in the field of space astrophysics, and has developed programs to teach early career scientists how to develop their own space missions. She is the deputy principal investigator of Aspera, a NASA orbiting telescope in development. She is a former chef, a TED Fellow, a AAAS If/then Ambassador, an aspiring astronaut, and is working on her pilots license.
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Online Beginner's Class
2023-05-05 19:30 - 21:30 | Online
This is a free and open to the public online event, to attend please click 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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OCA Board Meeting
2023-05-07 11:30 - 14:30 | Online
The OCA board is meeting via zoom on Sunday May 7,2023 at 11:30am. The meeting is open to all current members. If you would like to attend contact Alan Smallbone.
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General Meeting – May 2023
2023-05-12 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

The Mystery Behind the Origin of

Radio Filaments in our Milky Way Galaxy

The Galactic center is an active region of our Milky Way Galaxy. There is a supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy.
Beyond its sphere of influence, there is a rich environment revealing relic of past activities of the black hole.
As part of an international team, observations with the new South African MeerKAT observatory has discovered hundreds of
magnetized thread-like filaments in the inner 1000 light years of the region surrounding the black hole at the Galactic center. These filaments appear
harp-like, commentary tail-like, or loop-like structures. After a brief history of the discovery of radio filaments in
the 80’s, the nature and origin of these structures will be discussed with an emphasis of why it is so puzzling
to understand their origin.

F. Zadeh received his PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University in 1986 before he went to NASA/Goddard Space Flight center as a National Research Council postdoc. He then joined the department of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in 1989 and has been there since. His research interests are the black hole at the center of the Galaxy, star formation and cosmic-ray physics.
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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.
Join Zoom

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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