[AANC Contacts] M 101 Unveiling, First 2 Billion Years, EAS Awards Dinner March 8th

[Kenneth Frank]

Happy Valentine's Day.
We have lots to celebrate here in the Greater Bay Area.
Here are a few reasons why:


Greater Bay Area Unveiling
In conjunction with Galileo's birthday this Sunday, the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration is releasing images from its Great Observatories -- the Hubble and Spitzer 
space telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to more than 100 U.S. planetariums, 
museums, nature centers and schools.

"The selected sites will unveil a large 9-square-foot print of the spiral galaxy Messier 
101 that combines the optical view of Hubble, the infrared view of Spitzer and the X-ray 
view of Chandra into one multi-wavelength picture," NASA said. Each image presents a 
different wavelength view of that galaxy, illustrating how far astronomy has come since 
Galileo first turned his telescope to the sky in 1609.

"It's like using your eyes, night vision goggles and X-ray vision all at the same time," 
said Hashima Hasan, NASA's lead scientist for the International Year of Astronomy.

Messier 101 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years from Earth in the 
constellation Ursa Major.

The Feb. 14-28 unveilings will occur at 76 museums and 40 U.S. schools and universities.
Locally they will be unveiled at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Lawrence Hall 
of Science, University of California Berkeley, The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose 
and the Sacramento Museum of History, Science & Technology:
http://hubblesource.stsci.edu/events/iya/participants.php.


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Wednesday, March 4, at 7 pm, astronomer Steven Beckwith,
former Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (which runs the Hubble),
will give a non-technical, illustrated talk on:

The Dawn of Creation: The First Two Billion Years

Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures in the Smithwick Theater, Foothill College,
El Monte Road and Freeway 280,in Los Altos Hills, California.

Free and open to the public. Parking on campus costs $2.

Call the series hot-line at 650-949-7888 for more information and driving directions.

All the great islands of stars got their start in the first billion years after the 
beginning of time,
the Big Bang. Every deep picture of the sky reveals thousands of these galaxies, each made
up of billions of stars like the Sun. The intricate structures of the Milky Way and other 
galaxies
took shape slowly, building up from many pieces in the debris of the initial explosion. 
This process
was governed by the mysterious dark matter that we can sense but still not see. Modern 
instruments
like the Hubble Space Telescope have made it possible to look back to a time when the universe
looked very different that it does today.  Dr. Beckwith will show some of the deepest 
images of the universe
ever taken and share recent discoveries about the early days of the cosmos.

Steven Beckwith is currently the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies for the 
University of California's ten
campuses. His 30-year research career spans many areas of astronomy, including the 
formation and early evolution of
planets around other stars and the birth of galaxies in the early universe. In 2004, he 
led the team that created the
Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, resulting in the discovery of the most distant galaxies 
ever seen.

The lecture is co-sponsored by:
* NASA Ames Research Center
* The Foothill College Astronomy Program
* The SETI Institute
* The Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

This talk is part of the local events celebrating the International Year of Astronomy in 
2009.

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EAS ANNUAL AWARDS DINNER
Eastbay Astronomical Society (EAS)
Sunday, March 8, 2009, 5:45pm at the Chabot Space & Science Center
Speaker: Dr. David Morrison, Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at NASA/Ames
This year the Helen Pillans Award goes to: Dave Barosso of the Chabot Telescope Makers' 
Workshop (TMW)
http://www.eastbayastro.org/
*Purchase tickets online via PayPal!* (Please note: If you purchase 2 or more tickets 
using PayPal, also email us the names of the other attendees,
so we can make name tags for them, too. Thank you.) For further inquires, contact Don 
Saito: donsaito at comcast.net