Presentation on November 7, 8:00pm PST
in the CSM Planetarium
Speaker: Astronomy Professor Darryl Stanford
College of San Mateo
Planetarium Show – The Sky Tonight
Plus Full Dome Movie:
Incoming!
Free and open to the public. Free Parking in nearby lots.
Embark on a journey back in time and across the Solar System, following the paths of asteroids and comets that have collided with Earth—and those that roam far from home. These ancient objects travel billions of years before reaching Earth, and their impact can be so powerful that just one collision can change the course of life on our planet.
Scientists aren’t waiting for asteroids and comets to come to us to learn more about them—get an up-close look at spacecraft sent to rocky asteroids and icy comets to collect invaluable data. You’ll follow the trek of the Chelyabinsk meteor as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2013 and visualize major shifts in the history of the Solar System billions of years in the making. Narrated by George Takei.
Sit back and enjoy this show in the College of San Mateo’s state of the art Planetarium!
We propose a mission concept for a space observatory with a large-aperture (50-meter) unsegmented primary mirror suitable for a variety of astronomical applications. The mirror would be created in space via a novel approach based on fluidic shaping in microgravity, which has already been successfully demonstrated in a laboratory neutral buoyancy environment, in parabolic microgravity flights, and aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Theoretically scale-invariant, this technique has produced optical components with superb, sub-nanometer (RMS) surface quality.
Darryl Stanford has been an Astronomy Professor at the College of San Mateo since 1996. He received his B.S., Physics, at the Polytechnic Institute of New York; an M.S., in Solid State Physics at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada; and an M.S, in Astrophysics at the University of Toledo.
His other interests include riding his Harley, playing with his dogs, amateur astronomy, learning new languages, and playing his conga!
The San Mateo County Astronomical Society Star Parties, Speaker Series, and meetings are open to the public. Speaker Series and meetings happen in person at the College of San Mateo Planetarium. General meetings and socials start at 7:00 pm in Room 110 in the ISC Building (36), and Speaker presentations start at 8:00 pm in the Planetarium.