Starry Nights @ SFU: Geek Week and IYA Kickoff

Starry Nights @ SFU: Blogs & Pics - January 27 2009

Geek Week & Kickoff for the International Year of Astronomy at SFU!

On January 27 2009 SFU held a kickoff event for the the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, which honours Galileo Galilei who in 1609 first turned a telescope on the heavens, and ushered in the modern view of the cosmos. This event was also held as part of Science Week at SFU (aka "Geek Week"). The event was free, and was kindly sponsored by the Dean of Science and the Simon Fraser Student Society.

Our celebrations this evening included a free pizza dinner, an audio-visual presentation by yours truly (Howard Trottier, SFU Professor of Physics), and a telescope show-and-tell by several special guests. We had a very good turnout of about 90 guests (despite bad weather which included a pretty heavy snowfall late that day), and the free pizza and pop quickly disappeared!

I would like to extend a huge "Thank You!" to our special guests who brought their telescopes for the show-and-tell portion of our evening: Ted Allen, Leigh Cummings, Gwen Eadie, Ronan Kerr, Michael Levy, Wayne Lyons and Bob Parry (of the Vancouver chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada), Leigh Palmer (Emeritus Professor of Physics), Aaron Springford, and Tyler Gamsby (of DVD Works). Each of the guests who brought astronomical gear was asked to say a few words about their passion for astronomy, and then we all had a chance to talk to the scope owners about their gear.

Starry-eyed
@ SFU since Nov. 2007

The evening would not have been possible without the hard work of a group of dedicated volunteers, to whom I would like to extend another very huge "Thank You!" for all their efforts in setting up the auditorium, serving the pizza, cleaning up afterwards, and not least, helping our special guests to transport their gear from the parking lot to the auditorium and back: Gwen Eadie (President of the SFU student astronomy club), Stephanie Hendy (SFSS Science Rep), Sarah Johnson (SFU Physics Faculty), Jos One, Milos Perovic, Stephen Price (Coordinator of Student Recruitment and Retention for the Faculty of Science), Eric Thewalt, and Kasia Tokarska. Thanks in particular to Aaron Springford for the images in the gallery to the right.

My presentation at this event centered on Galileo's revolutionary telescopic observations. You can see a quicktime export of my slideshow on the right; click here to view it in a larger format. We were also treated to a presentation by Dr. Leigh Palmer of SFU on his reproduction of one of Galileo's original telescope designs. Audience members also had a chance to look through Dr. Palmer's telescope after his talk. The highlight of the evening by far was the telescope show-and-tell, though too bad that we weren't able to look at the wonders of the night sky through all that gear - well, we'll have to try for a get-together on this scale again, but next time under clear skies!