November Monthly Meeting: Space weather: the history, status, and future prospects for understanding the space environment.

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

While the term “space weather” is relatively new to the scientific vocabulary, attempts to understand associated phenomena such as the aurora go back centuries and as recently as the mid-20th century there were still significant gaps in our understanding of how the Sun causes phenomena at Earth such as geomagnetic storms. In this talk, Dr. Thomas Berger will review the history of our understanding of how the Sun and the Earth interact to create space weather, the many phenomena associated with space weather and their impacts on critical technological infrastructure, and what we need to do to increase our understanding of, and ability to mitigate, space weather impacts as we venture back to the Moon and eventually to Mars and beyond.

Bio

Dr. Thomas (Tom) Berger is the director of the University of Colorado Boulder Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center (SWx TREC). Prior to this position, he was the director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder. Tom recently became the Principal Investigator of the NASA Space Weather Operational Readiness Development (SWORD) center of excellence, working with the Universities of Michigan, Iowa, Alaska, and NCAR/High Altitude Observatory to advance predictive models of the geospace environment during space weather storms. Tom’s original research was in solar physics as a member of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto following his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is originally from the Bay Area of California and has an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from the University of California Berkeley. 

October Monthly Meeting: Active Solar Cycle 25: What You Want to Know!

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Inform about space weather risks and hazards, and provide it in an informative and contextual context. Discuss the highly active Solar Cycle 25 and how the cycle continues to be quite prolific. Relate primary solar storms of concern and potential impacts to our society and the technology we rely upon. Describe the historical May 2024 G5 (Extreme) geomagnetic storm, its effects and impacts, and what was accomplished by SWPC to make this extreme solar storm the most successfully mitigated in history. Provide a background of other historical space weather events from the past and how they could be majorly impactful today for what is historically possible, yet overdue. Relate this complex and little understood natural hazard to help attendees understand the Space Weather Prediction Center's role and operational support in this realm. Finally, discussion throughout will focus on sunspots, space weather activity/storms of interest, what they are, what they mean, and how they are associated with each other. A side goal will be to give attendees a better understanding of the solar wind, changes, and other influencers and what that means for auroral viewing potential.

Bio

Mr. Shawn Dahl is a U.S. Air Force (USAF) retiree (22 years) where he spent most of his career in the field of meteorology and space weather. He retired from active duty in 2007 and held several meteorological forecasting positions with the USAF and the NWS until 2015, when he was hired as a physical scientist and senior space weather forecaster by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). He was selected as SWPC’s first Service Coordinator in August of 2023 and now leads Impact-based Decision Support Services (IDSS) issues, relations, and products. He also leads education/outreach initiatives and efforts, and conducts many customer and partner interactions on behalf of SWPC - to include working with the press/media, broadcast meteorologists, and the emergency management community.

September Monthly Meeting: Earth at Sun’s Mercy by Dr. Ryan French

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Despite its seemingly unchanging appearance in the daytime sky, the Sun is incredibly dynamic and shrouded in mystery. Descended from ancestors who hailed the Sun as a deity, the way we observe the Sun has come a long way. Our scientific journey to understand the Sun has included many intriguing and humorous stories from over the centuries, including tales of 11th century monks, feuds of 17th century astronomers, and a part-time brewery owner who discovered the link between the Sun and northern lights. The influence of the Sun’s activity on the near-Earth environment is known as space weather, which has the ability to damage satellites, disrupt power grids, and deliver harmful levels of radiation to astronauts. In this talk, we’ll explore how humanity is adapting to living under a star, and how our understanding of the Sun has helped unlock the wider secrets of the universe. 

If there is demand for it, Ryan will also be selling personalized signed copies of his book, ‘The Sun: Beginner’s guide to our local star’. ($15, cash or Venmo)

Bio

Dr. Ryan French is a solar physicist at the National Science Foundation’s National Solar Observatory, science communicator, and author. Since completing his PhD in 2022, he is pursuing the mysteries of the Sun at the forefront of modern solar physics research, using cutting edge telescopes on the ground and in space. Ryan also works to share the wonders of the Sun and space with the public, through social media, public talks, and on television and radio. 

Website: www.ryanjfrench.com

Twitter & TikTok: @ryanjfrench

August Monthly Meeting: Meteorites

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Meteorites: What are they, Where do the come from, and How do they relay to the rest of the Solar System

Bio

Dustin Dickens is the Director for the Colorado Center for Meteoric Studies and manages the analysis and analysis services including sample prep, microprobe analysis, classification, and write up for submission to the nomenclature committee.

July Monthly Meeting: Lunar science and exploration as part of the Artemis program

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Dr. Paul Hayne is an associate professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He directs the Exploration of Planetary Ices and Climates (EPIC) group at CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. from UCLA. Prior to joining LASP, Dr. Hayne was a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he served in a variety of mission science roles, including as an Investigation Scientist for Europa Clipper. He is a Co-Investigator on several active NASA missions, and is Principal Investigator for the Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System (L-CIRiS), a heat-sensing camera planned for deployment near the south pole of the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

June Monthly Meeting: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission: Early Results from Asteroid Sample Analysis

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

The primary objective of NASA’s Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission is to explore and return a pristine sample from the asteroid Bennu to help scientists understand the origin and evolution of our solar system and, ultimately, how life began. After arriving at Bennu in 2018, the spacecraft gathered data to understand the asteroid and select a sampling site. A sample was collected successfully in October 2020 and OSIRIS-REx began its return to Earth in May 2021. In September of 2023, the sample was successfully returned to Earth -- the mission science team has begun analysis of this incredible sample and this presentation will describe early results.

Bio

Dr. Vicky Hamilton is an Institute Scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University and her A.B. from Occidental College. She is a geologist specializing in laboratory spectroscopy of minerals, meteorites, and returned samples, and infrared remote sensing of planetary surfaces to determine composition and physical properties. She has been a science team Co-Investigator and Deputy Instrument Scientist/Principal Investigator on five NASA planetary science missions to Mars and asteroids. She is also the Chair of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), a research community-based, interdisciplinary forum providing the science input needed to plan and prioritize NASA’s Mars exploration activities.

May Monthly Meeting: Galilean Moons: Past, Present and Future

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

As Juno’s orbit has evolved over 8 years, the spacecraft has also made flybys of the Galilean moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. This provides an opportunity to review the history of the Galilean moons, discuss previous observations made by Voyager, Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons missions to provide the context for recent Juno flybys. Looking to the future, ESA’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions will be probing deeper into these very different worlds.

Bio

Dr. Fran Bagenal is a senior research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado. She has participated in several of NASA’s planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno.

April Monthly Meeting: LAS Member Open Forum

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Calling all LAS members, come share your spring projects, eclipse chasing stories and photos, and astronomical events for the year!

March Monthly Meeting: “Cepheids”

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare had Caesar utter the line “I am as constant as the Northern Star.” While poetic, this line isn’t remotely accurate by astronomy standards. Not only does the star that happens to be the “North Star” change over time, the star that is currently the North Star, Polaris, is a Cepheid variable star, a class of variable star that changes in brightness due to the star physically pulsating. Since their discovery in 1784, Cepheids have become one of the most important tools of astronomers, allowing Edwin Hubble to discover that the Universe is expanding, providing important clues about the internal structure of stars, and allowing a way to study the evolution of stars over short time periods. In this talk we will look at what causes Cepheids to pulsate and talk about their important role in modern astronomy.

Bio

Dr. Charles Kuehn is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Northern Colorado. He earned his B.S. in Astronomy from The Ohio State University and his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Michigan State University before completing a postdoc at the University of Sydney in Australia. His research focus on the study of variable stars in an effort to understand stellar evolution, the formation of the Milky Way, and to determine the physical properties of stars that host exoplanets. He also engages in astronomy education research aimed to increase the accessibility of astronomy labs at the university level. He is passionate about outreach and runs a quarterly series of physics and astronomy talks at Loveland Aleworks.

February Monthly Meeting: “All Good Things Must Come to an END (Eccentric Nuclear Disk)”

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

From humans to supermassive black holes, many objects in the universe get a boost or a “kick” from certain phenomena. In the case of humans like me, the boost usually comes from caffeine or the pressure of a deadline. Supermassive black holes, on the other hand, can get a kick by emitting gravitational waves anisotropically - which means not the same way in every direction - during the merger of two black holes. Supermassive black holes lurk at the center of most galaxies and are usually surrounded by a dense region of stars called a nuclear stellar cluster. When these black holes receive a kick, the surrounding star cluster rearranges itself into a lopsided, eccentric disk. These eccentric disks are fairly abundant in the universe: our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, hosts an eccentric disk in its nucleus for instance. In this talk, Tatsuya Akiba will present results from a series of N-body simulations which show the formation and evolution of eccentric disks after a kick gets imparted on the central supermassive black hole. Akiba will show that eccentric disks are able to produce tidal disruption events - which are when stars get ripped apart due to the supermassive black hole’s tidal gravity - with extreme efficiency. These tidal disruption events (and more!) can be used as observational signatures to follow-up future gravitational wave events and to look for these kicked supermassive black holes!

Bio

Tatsuya Akiba is an astrophysics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder (expected to graduate in May, 2025). He currently works with Professor Ann-Marie Madigan on gravitational dynamics of various scales: from planetary systems around white dwarfs to star clusters around supermassive black holes. He graduated from Truman State University with B.S. degrees in physics and mathematics before joining CU Boulder. Since then, he has won several research awards/fellowships including the Raynor L. Duncombe Student Research Prize (from the Division on Dynamical Astronomy) and the Dissertation Completion Fellowship (from the CU Boulder graduate school). He is also passionate about teaching and public outreach: He has served as a Lead Graduate Student Fellow for the Center for Teaching and Learning in the past and he is currently the instructor for an introductory Python course in the CU Boulder astrophysics department.

January Monthly Meeting: “The Hunt for the Pale Blue Dot: Science, Technology, and People for NASA’s Search for Habitable Planets”

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

In the past three decades, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 extrasolar planets, changing our understanding of Earth’s place in the Universe. We are now poised to begin the search for Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, our first true attempt to find “Earth 2.0” and to conduct a census of nearby stars to understand how common life is beyond the solar system. In this talk, Dr. France will discuss work ongoing at NASA and at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics to advance this search. Dr. France will talk about NASA’s upcoming “life finder” mission, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, and talk about the projects CU is undertaking today to enable this mission. As examples, he will focus on the CUTE small satellite that is studying evaporating planets around nearby stars, how CU rocket missions are advancing instrument technology, and how we incorporate students into these activities to train and mentor the scientists and engineers that will lead NASA’s search for habitable planets over the next two decades.

Bio

Kevin France is a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder. He is an expert on space instruments for astrophysics and the study of extrasolar planets. He had led approximately 10 NASA rocket and small satellite missions at LASP, works extensively with the Hubble Space Telescope, and is engaged with the development of NASA’s future observatories to find habitable planets beyond the solar system.

November Monthly Meeting: “The Clouds Out Here Have Dark Bases”

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

A Short History of Dark Sky Activities around San Miguel County. By Dr. Bob Grossman, President Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition

Bio

Bob Grossman (BSEE Duke, MS and PhD Atmospheric Science, Colorado State Univ.) has had a fruitful and adventurous career as a field scientist participating in many atmospheric and oceanic expeditions, often taking long adventurous vacations afterwards. He was a USAF Weather Officer assigned to a forward Strategic Air Command base in England, participating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. After receiving his PhD from CSU in 1973, he was an Advanced Study Program Post-Doc at NCAR and afterwards a Staff Scientist. While at NCAR he was seconded to the United Nations World Meteorological Organization to become a consultant to the Government of India managing and directing an international expedition to study the monsoon of 1979 as part of WMO’s Global Atmospheric Research Program, spending almost four years at that task. Upon return he became a Visiting Fellow at the Univ. Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environment (CIRES) and was a research associate for a few years when he was invited to join a group of atmospheric scientists working in the Astrogeophysics Department. That group became the founding members of CU’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, the only department in the State granting B.A. through Ph.D degrees.

After 20+ years with CU he retired to a home he had built on Deer Mesa north of Norwood Colorado. Part-time on Wright’s Mesa since 2004, he moved from Boulder to Norwood in 2018. As will be described in the talk, serendipity introduced him to the Dark Sky movement and he led the effort that made Norwood the second Dark Sky Community in the State and first on the Western Slope. After creating the Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition, he is now leading the effort to make all of San Miguel County a Dark Sky Reserve, something never before attempted. If successful, the Reserve will become the 22nd in the world, 3rd in USA, and 1st in Colorado.

October Monthly Meeting: Astro-photography, some Astro-physics, Astro-art, and Accidental Discoveries

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

David Elmore is an Astronomer Emeritus for the National Solar Observatory. His professional career centered around conceptualization, design, and construction of solar research instruments attached to solar telescopes. His particular expertise is in measurement of magnetic fields on the sun utilizing the polarization properties of light. His instruments have been deployed at observatories around the world, the stratosphere, and on spacecraft. After decades at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmosphere, Mr. Elmore served as Instrumentation Scientist for the newly completed and world’s largest solar telescope, the National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.

Astrophotography has been a hobby for David from film to digital. Currently he remotely operates wide-field telescopes located in a rented observatory at a dark site in southern New Mexico. This talk features images from that observatory tracing the cycle of life in the Milky Way from clouds of galactic cirrus to new stars to planetary nebulae and super novae back to clouds in the in the galaxy. As a sidelight David will describe the accidental discovery of three never before identified planetary nebulae.

September Monthly Meeting: Europa Clipper: Voyage to an Ocean Moon

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

John Spencer is an Institute Scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, where he has worked since 2004. He is deputy principal investigator for Europa Clipper’s temperature mapping instrument, and a science team member on its ultraviolet spectrometer. He specializes in observations of the outer solar system, and Jupiter’s moons in particular, with telescopes on the Earth’s surface, the Hubble Space Telescope, and interplanetary spacecraft.

August Monthly Meeting: Gravitational Waves - Observing the Dark and the Bright

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

For the last few years we have been able to observe gravitational waves, ripples in space-time itself, originating from the most extreme astronomical objects and processes in the Universe. In this talk, Dr. Carl Haster will both introduce the concepts of gravitational waves, and describe what our current set of observations can tell us about the nature of Black Holes, stellar evolution ultra-dense nuclear matter and even Gravitation itself.

About the Speaker

Carl Haster is an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Learn more at https://cjhaster.com/

July Monthly Meeting: Topic TBD

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

TBD

June Monthly Meeting: Life and climate on Mars:  Past, present, and future

Location

Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Mars is the closest planet to us that holds the potential to have had life in the past, to have it at the present, or possibly to have it in the future.  Bruce Jakosky will discuss the history of the climate and habitability of Mars, the current exploration program that has as a major goal searching for evidence of life, and the potential for a future climate to be able to support life. 

Bio

Bruce Jakosky has been a Mars researcher since being an undergraduate working on the Viking spacecraft mission in the 1970s.  He has been at the University of Colorado for more than 40 years, as a researcher and as a professor.  He has written more than 300 papers for the scientific literature, and is author or co-author of three books on life in the universe.  He led the MAVEN spacecraft mission to explore Mars’ upper atmosphere and climate evolution from its inception in 2003 through seven years of operation in orbit at Mars, and is now heavily involved in planning future Mars exploration.

May Monthly Meeting: Living In the Golden Age of Solar Physics by Maria D. Kazachenko

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

Space weather is largely caused by the activity of our Sun. Invisible yet powerful magnetic fields, created within the Sun, determine when and where the next solar eruption will happen. Large solar storms can put our technological society at risk. In this talk, CU Boulder and National Solar Observatory professor, Maria Kazachenko will discuss how advances in solar telescopes allow scientists to understand the Sun in a lot more detail than ever before. 

About the Speaker

Maria Kazachenko is an assistant professor at Astrophysical & Planetary Science Department (APS) Department at University of Colorado, Boulder and the National Solar Observatory (NSO). Before that, she spent seven years at Space Sciences Lab (SSL) at UC Berkeley, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a research scientist. Since 2011, she has been part of the Coronal Global Evolutionary Model Team, a collaboration between scientists at UC Berkeley, Stanford, Lockheed Martin etc.

April Monthly Meeting: Our Universe

by Jeremy Darling

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

What is the Universe? What does it contain? What is its history? Its future? This talk will explore the scale, age, and fate of the Universe. We will learn how we observe the Universe, how we know what we know, and what is still not known. We will also explore alternate Universes as a device for understanding our own.

About the Speaker

Jeremy Darling is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He studies black holes, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. Mostly using telescopes, but sometimes just by thinking.