Come and explore the universe and enjoy our renowned northern hospitality! |
Dark Sky Festival
Guest Speakers ~ Interactive "virtual" presentations via Zoom
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Our "Virtual Guest Speaker" presentations will be offered demonstrating the latest features in Zoom technology and large screen projection.
After a brief introduction, our speakers will provide a live-feed presentation and then they will field questions from the audience. |
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Seth Shostak
Thursday Evening: 8:00 pm (early bird social)
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Andrew Chaikin
Friday Evening: 7:00 pm (post-dinner)
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Biographical Sketch:
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. He has written 600 popular magazine, newspaper and web articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film and television. For a decade, he chaired the International Academy of Astronautics’ SETI Permanent Committee. Every week he hosts the SETI Institute’s one-hour science radio show, “Big Picture Science” Seth has written, edited and contributed to a half dozen books. His most recent tome is Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (National Geographic), and he is co-author of a college textbook on astrobiology. Thursday presentation - Seth Shostak
Science Looks for the Aliens 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. |
Biographical Sketch:
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.” A graduate in geology from Brown University, Chaikin has brought his knowledge of planetary science to his writing and teaching. As a visiting instructor at NASA he has taught the history of human and robotic space missions, as well as the human behavior aspects of success and failure in spaceflight projects. Friday presentation - Andrew Chaikin
Stories and Lessons from the Moon 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. |
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