6:30 pm – Main Presentation

TITLE:  Comets; History, Science, and Magic—A Personal Journey

PRESENTATION:  David Levy, one of the most enthusiastic and famous amateur astronomers of our time, will talk about some of the great comets in Earth’s history. These frozen leftovers from the formation of the solar system, composed of dust, rock, and ice, hold rich scientific information, making each encounter a much-studied event. Share an expert comet-hunter’s knowledge in this presentation featuring such comets as Halley, those of 1811, 1965, 1970, 1976, and the most famous of David’s many comet discoveries, the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994.

BIO:  David Levy is world-renowned for his comet-hunting expertise. A past president of TAAA, he’s authored over three dozen books, written for three astronomy magazines, and appeared on television programs featured on the Discovery and the Science Channels. Among his accomplishments are 23 comet discoveries, a few hundred shared asteroid discoveries, an Emmy for the documentary Three Minutes to Impact, five honorary doctorates in Science and a PhD which combines astronomy and English Literature. Currently, he has a monthly column, Skyward, jointly published in the Vail Voice community newspaper and the TAAA Desert Skies Bulletin. David continues to lecture worldwide, and hunt for comets and asteroids.

6:30 pm – Main Presentation

TITLE:  HelioSwarm: A Future NASA Mission to Better Understand Space Plasmas

PRESENTATION:  The vacuum of space is not empty, but is filled with a gas hot enough to rip electrons away from atoms, producing a plasma; a material with charged particles consistently creating and responding to electromagnetic fields driven by collective particle motion. Such plasmas constitute more than 99% of the matter in the visible universe. Understanding how energy is injected into, transported through, and removed from these turbulent plasma systems represents one of the open questions in astrophysics and space science.
HelioSwarm, a mission recently selected by NASA to launch at the end of this decade, will employ a swarm of nine spacecraft, to gather multi-scale measurements and learn more about the dynamics of these systems. In this talk, Prof. Kristopher Klein will discuss what is known and unknown about plasma turbulence and how the HelioSwarm mission will address its unknowns. These forthcoming measurements of near-Earth plasmas, both inside and outside of Earth’s protective magnetic bubble, will finally reveal the physics controlling plasma turbulence both within our solar system and throughout the universe.

BIO:  Prof. Kristopher Klein studies fundamental processes that govern the dynamics of ionized gases in our solar system as well as more distant astrophysical bodies. He has particular interest in how these systems become hot, specifically how energy is transported in chaotic, turbulent flows, attempting to answer these questions with a combination of numerical simulations and spacecraft measurements of the Sun’s extended atmosphere as it collides with the Earth’s magnetic field. He earned his PhD from the University of Iowa in 2013, followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Michigan before joining the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory as an Assistant Professor in 2018.

7:30 pm – Second Presentation

TITLE:  Dr. Mary Turners Seasonal Night Sky Presentation