Meetings
Map of UOP
University of the Pacific, Olson Hall Room 120
UOP has closed its campus due to the corona virus.
Virtual Zoom Meeting Link
http://tiny.cc/stocktonastro
7:30 PM Thursday August 12 2021
Our presentation will be given via Zoom. We
will officially commence at 7:30 PM. Join us for a
soft start at 7:00 PM. This is to socialize and ensure
that everyone is online prior to the meeting.
Stockton Astronomical Society
Presents
Nic Scott
Exoplanets And How To Find Them
We’re currently in the midst of a golden age of astronomy. The
confirmation of planets around other stars has given way to finding
countless strange and fascinating worlds and stellar systems very
unlike our own. What are some of these planets and how were they
discovered? What techniques do astronomers use to find them? How
do we know what they may be like and how may we be fooling
ourselves? What is habitable anyway? What new discoveries are we
looking forward to? How has new technology revitalized a 50-yearold
technique for ground-based observing to plays a critical role in
exoplanet discoveries and characterization? Why observe from the
ground when we have space telescopes anyway?
Introducing: Nic Scott
Dr. Nic Scott was a lead research scientist at NASA Ames Research
Center working on exoplanet validation and characterization and is
now the Telescope Systems Scientist at the Center for High Angular
Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array. He lived in the SF Bay
Area for 5 years and now resides in LA. Prior to coming to work at
NASA he worked for Georgia State University at the CHARA Array
on Mt. Wilson just outside of Los Angeles. His specialties are
instrumentation, ground-based telescopes, high angular resolution
techniques, interferometry, and exoplanets. He finished his PhD
from GSU in 2015 and also received a cotutelle doctorate from the
Paris Observatory the same year. His current work in on
interferometric detection of exozodiacal light around nearby stars
(hot dust around nearby stars) and he is also part of the speckle
imaging group that follow-up on space-based detections of
exoplanets. He's helped build and install three speckle cameras at
telescopes on Hawaii, in Chile, and in Arizona.
