The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile (first light happened just weeks ago!) recognizes and honors the remarkable achievements of an astronomer whose observations, overcoming obstacles and bias, con- firmed the existence of Dark Matter. This talk will outline Dr. Rubin’s research and explain how her observations imply that most of the mass of our Milky Way and other galaxies consists of “dark matter” — matter that does not emit electromagnetic radiation.

The telescope and its detector are unique engineering marvels. Unlike scopes at other observatories, it has only one mission: to make synoptic observations of the entire night sky, looking for variations in brightness (for example) on timescales rang- ing from seconds to years. The telescope has only one remarkable detector, an array of 189 CCD’s (a total of 3.2 gigapixels) which will take a 15 second exposure of ten square degrees. This will generate about 20 terabytes (TB) of data per night, or 60 petabytes (PB; 1 PB = 1000 TB) over a ten-year interval. The goal is to identify objects in the night sky that change in brightness or position.

Imagine the discoveries of the many variable stars, quasars, asteroids, comets, and Kuiper Belt Objects that will be made!

At this meeting we’ll continue our tradition of a slide show of recent astrophotos taken by club members, and we’ll also give away another Astroscan telescope from the several that were donated to the club last fall. You must be a club member in good standing (i.e. an application on file and dues paid) in order to enter the drawing.

The meeting is at 7:00 on Thursday, July 17th at the Eugene Science Center planetarium, 2300 Leo Harris Parkway in Eugene (behind Autzen Stadium). Note that the west entrance off Martin Luther King Blvd. is open again, and the east entrance is now closed.