SUNSET: 
Upcoming Astronomy Events
As a service to our community, Sky & Telescope lists astronomy-related events, including star parties, observatory public nights, astronomy talks, and more. Star parties offer dark skies and astronomical fellowship and often cater to families and feature special activities for kids. Public nights give the general public a chance to view the sky through large telescopes, and public talks are a great place to learn the fundamentals of the science and the craft.
You’ll also see online events offered here.
And if you’d like free copies of Sky & Telescope‘s Let’s Go Stargazing flyer or door prizes for your next star party, you can fill out this form.
AAVSO Webinar, with Dr. Christian Knigge & François Cochard
May 8, 2021 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm EDT
Free
This webinar features talks by two astronomy researchers:
First, Dr. Christian Knigge: "Cataclysmic Variables as Universal Accretion Laboratories." Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are numerous, bright, and nearby, making them excellent laboratories for the study of accretion physics. Since their accretion flows are unaffected by relativistic effects or ultra-strong magnetic fields, they provide a crucial "control" group for efforts to understand more complex/compact systems, such as accreting neutron stars (NSs) and black holes (BHs). He will review recent work on CVs, which has revealed that these superficially simple systems actually exhibit the full range of accretion-related phenomenology seen in accreting NSs and BHs. Given this rich set of shared behavior, it is reasonable to hope that much of accretion physics is, in fact, universal.
François Cochard will follow with "Spectroscopy: Which Hardware for Which Observations?" We'll look into what kind of hardware is required to start in spectroscopy, and the kind of observations we can make with it. There are a lot of things that we can do in spectro---but some are easier and some are less so. This presentation will mainly be dedicated to newcomers to spectroscopy, and you can attend even with no experience---just curiosity.
