Skyscrapers December Meeting & Holiday Celebration

Bio:

In High School, I was very fortunate to have a friend who was a member of the school Astronomy club. Hi invited me to a meeting and I found that I was immediately hooked and started a long journey of telescope viewing, sometimes telescope making and travel to many places to catch some incredible astronomical events. 

One of the members of the club had an uncle who was a member of the Skyscrapers which is how I was first introduced to our august group in the dim long ago past of 1973. Hard to believe that I've been a member for over 50 years now! 

I still enjoy visual observing, some light imaging, especially of the Sun and planets and am very fortunate to be able to still do some traveling to total eclipses of the Sun, southern skies below the equator and most recently, Alaska in March to see the Northern Lights. 

Abstract:

Many of us have been fortunate to see some great displays of Northern Lights from our latitude recently. Others have made journeys to places such as Iceland or in the case of my wife Sue and I, Alaska to see them. 

10 years ago, Sue and I joined noted science author and speaker Bob Berman on a tour to the Fairbanks Alaska area where we saw the Northern Lights and this year, with the return of another peak of solar activity, we did a return trip with Bob again. 

This past March, despite a depressing forecast of clouds for our entire time in the Fairbanks area, we lucked out and had 2 wonderful nights of good auroral activity from a remote dark sky site.

For my talk, I will be providing both a travelogue of our journey thru much of Alaska in the winter as well as some basic facts about the Northern Lights in case anyone isn't familiar with the phenomenon. 

Oh and lots of pretty pictures of course too.