FWIW, if anyone can think of a good reason to hold an HP3000-style technical
meeting here soon, I would recommend meeting in Socorro, NM on Saturday,
October 30th.
Socorro (which means "mercy" in Spanish, the same way that Ruth means "mercy"
in English) is the home to the Array Operations Center of the Very Large
Array, the giant telescope that was featured prominently in the movie,
"Contact". Socorro is about 80 miles south of Albuquerque. The VLA itself is
about another 60 miles to the west of Socorro, on the plains of St. Augustin.
The reason for choosing that date is that Frank Drake, the president of the
SETI Institute, will give a public lecture at the AOC that evening. I've
included below a notice I received last night concerning the lecture.
Wirt Atmar
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Contact: Dave Finley, Public Information Officer
(505) 835-7302
[log in to unmask]
SETI Pioneer to Lecture in Socorro
Dr. Frank Drake, president of the SETI Institute and a pioneer in
the search for life beyond Earth, will present the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory's annual Karl G. Jansky Lecture in Socorro.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held at
8:00 p.m., Saturday, October 30, at Macey Center on the campus of
the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NM Tech).
Drake, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University
of California at Santa Cruz, is widely known as the author of the
"Drake Equation," a means of estimating the number of intelligent
civilizations in our Galaxy with which we might be able to communicate.
As a staff member of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in
Green Bank, WV, in 1960, he conducted the first radio search for
extraterrestrial intelligence.
A graduate of Cornell University and recipient of a Ph.D in
astronomy from Harvard, Drake also worked at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, and taught at Cornell from 1964 until
moving to Santa Cruz in 1984. As president of the SETI (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, CA,
Drake provides overall direction for research, including the
operation of Project Phoenix, in which sophisticated electronic
equipment is transported to powerful radio telescopes around the
world to search for signals from distant civilizations.
Early in his career, Drake shared in the discovery of the planet
Jupiter's radiation belts and conducted early studies of pulsars,
spinning superdense neutron stars emitting lighthouse-like beams
of radio waves. He is the author of more than 150 articles and
books and hes received numerous honors, including election to the
National Academy of Science and selection as a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the British Interplanetary Society.
This is the thirty-fourth Jansky Lectureship, an honor established by
the trustees of Associated Universities, Inc., to recognize
outstanding contributions to the advancement of astronomy. First
awarded in 1966, it is named in honor of the man who, in 1932, first
detected radio waves from a cosmic source. Karl Jansky's discovery of
radio waves from the central region of our Milky Way galaxy started
the science of radio astronomy. Recent recipients of the Jansky award
include Nobel laureates Drs. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of AT&T
Bell Laboratories; Dr. Joseph H. Taylor of Princeton University; the
late Professor William F. Fowler of the California Institute of
Technology; and the late Professor S. Chandrasekhar of the University
of Chicago.
Drake's public lecture in Socorro will follow a day-long professional
symposium, in which astronomers from universities, observatories and
national laboratories throughout New Mexico will present recent research
results.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National
Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated
Universities, Inc.
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