Register below!
AAA online talk Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 7-9 PM
Even today, less than 20% of people in astronomy and physics are female. And in the past, there were even fewer women in that field.
From the beginning of people looking up into the sky, until now, a countless number of women have made significant, field-changing discoveries and contributions. These contributions include the measurement of planet and star positions dating back to the first century, stellar composition, the development of the Hubble constant, pulsars, neutron stars, black holes and dark matter.
We will highlight the following seven women who made impactful changes to our understanding of the universe. They often challenged and proved wrong many of their male counterparts, and also the common thinking of the time.
1. Hypatia
2. Caroline Herschel
3. Annie Jump Canon
4. Henrietta Swan Leavitt
5. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
6. Vera Rubin
7. Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Our speaker is Steven Bellavia, an amateur astronomer and telescope maker. He is an aerospace engineer who worked for Grumman Aerospace with the Thermodynamics Group of the Space Division. He had a key role in developing a nuclear rocket engine, and performed the analysis, design and fabrication of the micro-gravity liquid droplet radiator that flew on Space Shuttle mission STS-029.
Steve has been at Brookhaven National Laboratory since 1992 and was the principal mechanical engineer for the camera on the Vera Rubin (formerly called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST). Prior to that, he was doing research and engineering for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory. He has been recognized for the discovery of the Clair Obscure effect “Lunar L”, which is described in the December 2018 issue of Astronomy magazine.
Steve is an adjunct professor of astronomy and physics at Suffolk County Community College and is the Astronomy Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Custer Institute and Observatory in Southold, New York. He’s active in AAA’s Astrophotography group and Long Island astronomy clubs.
Register in the Tickets Window below, starting March 11. (*)
$12 for AAA members. $20 for nonmembers.
(*) You’ll receive a receipt containing the link to the Google Classroom (GC). Click on it immediately to be on the active roster of the class. This GC page gives the link the Zoom class, which will open 6:45 PM on April 1. It is used for correspondence. Afterwards the GC page gives the recording link to the class.
……………………………..
Do you have relatives and friends that might want to know of this class? Forward this or suggest they visit AAA.org/classes to consider it. They will thank you for doing so, as does the AAA for helping to support our events.
