The Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers (SARA) hereby solicits papers for presentation at its 2015 Western Regional Conference, to be held March 20 through March 22, 2015, at Stanford University, California. Papers on radio astronomy hardware, software, education, research strategies, observations and philosophy are welcome.
On April 26-27, the 3rd Annual USA Science and Engineering Festival took over the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Over 325,000 people came out to celebrate discovery and innovation through over 3,000 hands-on activities and 150 performances and lectures. Sneak Peek Friday alone (Apr 25) included more than 40,000 students, teachers, military families, government officials and press.
John Cromwell Mather PHD, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics, will visit NRAO on June 30, and will give a talk that afternoon. SARA is delighted that Dr. Mather will be speaking during the SARA conference and the SARA attendees will attend. Dr. Mather is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot.
The Jove meeting begins on Wednesday morning with a discussion of the Jove radio telescope. Throughout the day we will progress from the basics of radio Jove to more advanced systems. Along with discussions of receiver hardware and analysis software, you will hear about Jovian emissions, the source of these signals, and remaining mysteries as to how these signals are generated. Beginning at an introductory level suitable for the new Jove observer, we will progress to advanced receiving systems and analysis being performed by amateur and professional Jupiter radio astronomers.
The 2014 SARA Western Conference was held in Bishop, California USA over the weekend of 22~23 March at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) and Holiday Inn Express. Bill and Melinda Lord again worked hard to get everything setup, and David Westman helped arrange our visit to the OVRO, which is about 27 road miles south of Bishop . Whitham Reeve, conference coordinator, did very little but, of course, took all the credit as we have come to expect. We had 30± attendees at this year’s conference, and to my knowledge there were no trouble-makers in the group except, as usual, SARA president Bill Lord.
