On the road: ALCON preview

on Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Tomorrow I leave to attend ALCON Expo 2010, the annual meeting of the Astronomical League, the national federation of astronomical societies. This year the meeting will be held in Tucson, Arizona, and jointly hosted by the League, the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, and the International Dark Sky Association. The event will attract several hundred amateur astronomers and will be built around a series of talks, observing sessions, and seminars on lighting and light pollution.

I greatly enjoy attending ALCON meetings and have been to quite a few over the years. The first one I made was in 1978 in Madison, Wisconsin, when I was a teenager and publishing Deep Sky Monthly. I was awestruck when I met Norm Sperling, one of the editors of Sky & Telescope, who subsequently gave my little journalistic effort its first national exposure in the pages of his magazine. I also met and befriended Richard Berry, then editor of Astronomy, and began an association that would result in me joining Berry’s staff and bringing my publication to Milwaukee to be published as a quarterly. You never know what might happen at an ALCON meeting!

This time, I’ll have the great privilege of delivering the first talk of the opening session on Friday. I’ll speak on “Astronomy’s new frontier” and will provide an overview of where the science is in terms of answering many of the “big questions” that have enticed humanity for centuries. Many other speakers will be well-known to astronomy enthusiasts. Joe Lupica, CEO of Celestron, will deliver a lecture on 50 years of Celestron’s history. Astroimager Adam Block will discuss imaging techniques and show pictures he has shot at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter. Richard Green, director of the Large Binocular Telescope, will address that observatory project. Byron Smith of Lowell Observatory will provide an update on that institution’s Discovery Telescope. Frequent Astronomy contributor Dean Salman will speak on his astroimaging techniques.

The keynote address will come from Roger Angel of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, and will cover his unique telescope making techniques that have produced some of the world’s largest mirrors. A special observing session with Astronomy Contributing Editor David H. Levy will take place at David’s Jarnac Observatory tomorrow night. And there will be much more.

I’ll be blogging about the events at ALCON and providing pictures from the meeting, so please check back each day for a summary.

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