Dark Sky Festival
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2021 Ursa Major SponsorsWhat registration includes
Registration is an "all-inclusive" fee.
For clarity, the DSF Registration fees include: - Festival social activities, presentations, night viewing opportunities - Circus Science, STEM activities and projects, cosmic crafts - Seminars and workshops, presentations - Friday welcome dinner, Saturday festival dinner, Sunday breakfast - 2 nights camping at Pine Lake (Friday, Saturday) - Access to viewing equipment (telescopes, binoculars) Schedules may include additional tours or activities that are offered by other 3rd party groups or businesses. These will be clearly identified and the applicable fees for those activities will be noted. DSF Quick Links
Information Links (3rd party sites)
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Virtual Guest Speakers (2021)
Thursday Evening: 8:00 pm / Festival Early Bird Social
![]() Seth Shostak
Seth is Senior Astronomer and Institute Fellow at the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California. He has an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University, and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. For much of his career, Seth conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies, and has published approximately sixty papers in professional journals. >> Read Seth's full biography Science Looks for the Aliens (Thursday presentation - Seth Shostak)
Are we alone in the universe? The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial life is now into its sixth decade, and we still haven’t discovered any cosmic company. Could all this mean that finding clever beings beyond Earth, even if it exists, is a project for the ages – one that might take centuries or longer? New approaches and new technology for discovering extraterrestrial life suggest that there is reason to expect that we could uncover evidence of sophisticated civilizations – the type of aliens we see in the movies and on TV – within a few decades. |
Friday Evening: 7:00 pm / Post-dinner Presentation
![]() Andrew Chaikin
Space historian Andrew Chaikin is best known as the author of "A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts", which tells the stories of the Apollo missions through the eyes of the astronauts. The book was the main basis for Tom Hanks’ 12-part Emmy-winning miniseries for HBO, “From the Earth to the Moon.” >> Read Andrew's full biography Stories and Lessons from the Moon (Friday presentation - A Chaikin)
Space historian Andrew Chaikin conducted extensive interviews with 23 of the 24 Apollo lunar astronauts while researching his 1994 book, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. He will share some of the stories he heard during those conversations, about what they saw, thought, and felt during their historic explorations - including the elation and awe of setting foot on an ancient, alien wilderness, the demands of being lunar field geologists under the merciless pressure of the timeline, and the beauty of the Moon itself and the distant Earth suspended in a sky of utter blackness. Andrew will also explore some of the lessons of the first lunar landings for NASA’s return-to-the-Moon program, Artemis. |
Contact Us
Thebacha & Wood Buffalo Astronomical Society
PO Box 1354 Fort Smith, NT X0E 0P0 Telephone: 1-867-872-0243 Email: info@tawbas.ca |
Wood Buffalo National Park
PO Box 790 Fort Smith, NT X0E 0P0 Telephone: 1-867-872-7960 Email: wbnp.info@pc.gc.ca |
Town of Fort Smith
PO Box 147 Fort Smith, NT X0E 0P0 Telephone: 1-867-872-8400 Email: townoffortsmith@fortsmith.ca |
Updated: 2 Sept 2021