October Guest Speaker: Dr. Eric Pearce

Our next meeting is October 12th at 7PM in the Student Union building on the Cochise College campus. At this meeting, Dr. Eric Pearce will give his presentation on “Space Situational Awareness.” He will discuss how the network of telescopes and radar systems to keep track of the satellites and other manmade objects currently in orbit around the Earth was developed and what purpose it serves.

Dr. Pearce, who joined the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in 2016, has primarily focused his research on the development of advanced systems and astronomical techniques specifically optimized to discover, track and characterize artificial earth-orbiting satellites.

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Kartchner Star Party – Saturday, October 13

“Camels in the Sky: Our Heritage of Arabian Star Lore”

Saturday, October 13 at 5:30 in the Discovery Center.

Dr. Danielle Adams, a recent graduate from the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and NASA Space Grant fellow, will speak about the rich star lore of Arabia as it was more than a thousand years ago. Camels, vultures, goats, wild cows and many other kinds of animals graced the skies of the Arabian desert, and some of these survive in the star names used by astronomers today. Danielle will especially focus on the stars that are visible in the fall so that visitors can find them after the talk in the park’s famously dark sky. Some of these stories can be found on her website, onesky.arizona.edu.

July Guest Speaker: Dr. Kaitlin Kratter

The July meeting will be held in the Student Union building at Cochise College, Sierra Vista on July 13, 2018 at 7 PM.

Our speaker will be Dr. Kaitlin Kratter, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Kratter’s research focuses on the formation and evolution of stellar and planetary systems. Kratter employs analytic and computational techniques to tackle topics including accretion disk dynamics, binary formation, few body dynamics, and planet-disk interactions. Her current work is focused on the intersection of binary and planet formation, especially in circumbinary systems. She is also collaborating closely with observers to discover extreme mass ratio binaries, and very young multiple star systems.

June Guest Speaker: Dr. Chad Bender

The meeting will be held on June 8th in the Student Union Building at Cochise College 901 N. Colombo Avenue, Sierra Vista at 7pm

Dr. Chad Bender studies exoplanets to improve our understanding of how planets and planetary systems form and evolve. He and colleagues are currently building a pair of spectrometers that will search close- by stars for Earth sized planets that might be capable of supporting life.

Dr. Bender received his Ph.D. in 2006. He is currently an Associate Astronomer at The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory

The first exoplanets discovered in 1993 paved the way for an astronomical revolution. The subsequent 25 years have revealed thousands of planets orbiting stars, with a diversity of characteristics not seen in our Solar System, nor even previously imagined. Over the past decade, astronomers have pushed detection sensitivities towards smaller and smaller planets and are now finally at the cusp of discovering Earth like planets around nearby stars. Dr. Bender will describe some of these discoveries, and the cutting-edge instrumentation and surveys that are finding them.