Tomorrow I’ll travel to my old home grounds in southern Ohio to attend the 2009 Apollo Rendezvous meeting in Dayton. I’ll give a talk about Galileo’s telescopes and observations in this 400th anniversary year. Apollo Rendezvous is a nice meeting, held at Dayton’s Boonshoft Museum of Discovery and sponsored by the Miami Valley Astronomical Society. It’s a special event for me; the very first astronomy convention I ever attended was the 1976 Apollo Rendezvous, and the staff at the host Dayton Museum of Natural History (which became the Boonshoft) allowed me to use its printing press for several years to produce the magazine I started in high school, Deep Sky Monthly.
This year the event will feature talks, observing at John Bryan State Park, and an astrophotography and telescope contest. During the trip I’ll also get the chance to roll down to Cincinnati for a tour of the Cincinnati Observatory Center, one of the oldest astronomical facilities in the United States and winner of Astronomy's 2009 Out of this World award for astronomy outreach. I’ll keep you posted with blogs from Apollo Rendezvous.
Related video: The day Galileo changed the universe