General Meeting – January 2020

6:30 pm – Introductory Presentation

Title:  Seasonal Night Sky Objects

Speaker:  Mary Turner, PhD

Mary Turner, TAAA’s appointed Chief Observer, takes us on a tour of the winter night sky. Dr. Turner’s use of astronomical data, images, and mythology will bring seasonal changes in the sky to life, as always in her popular quarterly talks.

7:30 pm – Main Presentation

Title:  New Technologies to Search for Exoplanets with Space Telescopes Large and Small

Speaker:  Ewan Douglas joined the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory in the Spring of 2019 as an assistant professor. His research focuses on space instrumentation, wavefront sensing and control, and high-contrast imaging of extrasolar planets and debris disks, and small spacecraft such as CubeSats. Dr. Douglas graduated from Tufts University with a Bachelors in Physics in 2008. He worked for a year at the Hanford Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory before attending graduate school at Boston University, where he received a PhD from the Astronomy Department in 2016 followed by a postdoc in the MIT Space, Telecommunications, Astronomy, and Radiation Laboratory.

Dr. Douglas’ talk will focus on his ongoing work in the University of Arizona’s Space Astrophysics Lab (UASAL) to leverage low-cost spacecraft such as CubeSats, sounding rockets, and SmallSats, so that they efficiently and effectively, as well as relatively inexpensively, advance the technologies needed to image Earth-sized planets and asteroid belts around other stars. With Dr. Douglas’ work in cutting edge technologies, and ability to simplify complicated topics, TAAA’s first main presentation of 2020 promises to be interesting to all.