Throughout the month of October 2021, the Sierra Vista Community will celebrate the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. Click here to view the list of planned activities.
Category Archives: Club Events
Articles containing information about club meetings, star parties, observatory public nights, etc.
First Public Viewing Night of 2021!
The Huachuca Astronomy Club (HAC) will host the first Patterson Observatory Public Night of the year! Weather permitting, on Thursday April 22, 2021. Doors open at 7 pm.
ATTENDANCE IS LIMITED. Please register on line at: https://www.universitysouthfoundation.com/patterson-observatory
The event will also be available virtually over Zoom. And a simultaneous partner event will take place at the Henry Hauser Museum (or in the Sierra Vista Library).
Watch our Facebook page for more details as we get closer to the date.
All HAC Events for 2019
We now have a PDF of all the planned HAC events for 2019 available for download on the Resources/Calendars page.
You can stay informed about our events by signing up for our list serve group HacAstro. Just send an email to if you are not already a member. If you select to receive emails, you’ll get reminders about our events.
Special Event: Dr. Seth Shostak – Monday, November 5th
“SETI: Are We Closer to Finding the Aliens?”
A talk by Dr. Seth Shostak on Monday November 5, at 7 PM in the Student Union at Cochise College 901 N. Colombo Avenue, Sierra Vista. This community event is sponsored jointly by the University South Foundation (https://www.universitysouthfoundation.com/) and the Huachuca Astronomy Club.
Admission is FREE.
For nearly six decades, SETI scientists have searched in vain for a signal from the cosmos that would betray the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Does this failure to discover aliens mean something, or could there be something fundamentally flawed with SETI strategy? We consider the state of searching today, and what are the assumptions that undergird the hunt for E.T. And what if a discovery is made? Would the public even be told?
Dr. Seth Shostak directs the search for extraterrestrials at the SETI Institute in California—trying to find evidence of intelligent life in space. He is also committed to getting the public, especially young people, excited about astrobiology and science in general. Seth is the host of “Big Picture Science,” the SETI Institute’s weekly radio show. Big Picture Science can be found in iTunes and other podcast sites.
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.
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.
May Guest Speaker: Dr. David Sand
Our May 18th meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. David Sand.
Dr. Sand will give a presentation titled: Gravitational Waves and Things that Go Boom in the Night
In his presentation, Dr. Sand talks about the ‘time domain’ revolution in astronomy, and how we are finding new ways to study stars that merge, burp and explode by looking at their imprints on space-time via gravitational waves. He will highlight recent results on the gravitational wave detection of the merger of two neutron stars and look to the future of this field. Dr. Sand’s interest in things that go bump in the night led to his team’s search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.Continue reading