Tomorrow, I will fly east to Newark and then drive up to Suffern, New York, to attend the 20th anniversary of the Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF), America’s premier astronomy expo, which takes place at Rockland Community College April 16 and 17. (See http://www.rocklandastronomy.com/NEAF/index.html.) The event is driven by the energy and tireless work of many people, but none so much as Alan Traino, the Rockland Astronomy Club’s workhorse. I will report on the event this weekend and then spend a couple days in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History working on a few stories for the magazine. I’ll be blogging all the way through that experience, too.
For the second year running,
Astronomy magazine is proud to be sponsoring NEAF, and we hope many of our readers on the East Coast will enjoy attending it.
If you’re going to NEAF, please look for the
Astronomy magazine booth. Not only will I be there and be looking forward to talking with our readers, but Senior Editor Michael Bakich also will be there , as well as Ad Sales Manager Jeff Felbab and Ad Sales Representative Ken Kozerski. Please stop by and say hello — we’d love to hear what you have to say about the magazine and the website.
Michael actually left yesterday and is also covering the 6th Annual Northeast Astro-Imaging Conference (NEAIC), which takes place today and tomorrow, preceding NEAF itself. NEAIC will offer presentations about imaging from many of the world’s experts, including Peter Ceravolo, Doug George, Alan Holmes, Warren Keller, Jerry Lodriguss, and Mike Simonsen. Stay tuned for Michael’s blogs from this meeting.
When it cranks up to full speed on Saturday, NEAF will offer products from more than 140 vendors and an amazing array of speakers, including
Astronomy’s Contributing Editor Bob Berman; Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley; Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute; Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold, the
Meteorite Men on the Science Channel; and others. In addition, the annual conference of the International Dark-Sky Association will occur during NEAF. Further, the industry association known as the Astronomy Outreach Foundation, of which I am a board member, will have a booth at the show to publicize its activities.
Finally, in addition to all this,
Astronomy’s editors are extremely proud to be bringing 16-year-old Benjamin Palmer of Queensbury, New York, to the show. Benjamin won our 2011 Youth Essay Contest with his essay in which he showed his passion for both the hobby and the science as he explained how astronomy has touched his life. “Astronomy is revolutionary because it changes the way we think about the world and ourselves,” Benjamin writes. “It encourages me to think outside the box — the box of self, the box of finite knowledge, the box of known commodities. In the truest sense, astronomy opens up the physical world of possibility.”
Stay tuned for blogging from me and also from Michael, under the “blogs from the Local Group.”
I look forward to seeing Benjamin and the rest of you at NEAF!