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ATMoB Business Meeting and Presentation. Zoom online meeting.

This month’s speaker is Richard Nugent. Not our Richard Nugent - the Richard Nugent from Houston, Texas! The one associated with the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA). Richard’s talk will address how to observe and record occultations using backyard telescopes and how occultations are used to discover new double stars, measure the size and shape of asteroids, and update their orbits.

Our speaker graduated from the Department of Astronomy at the University of South Florida/University of Florida in 1979 with a B.S. and M.S. in Astronomy, specializing in positional astronomy. His graduate work was with the world-renowned astronomer, astrometrist and the father of modern astrometry, Heinrich K. Eichhorn. Richard's career at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas included analyzing satellite data, and in the Shuttle program: flight design, rendezvous maneuvers and instrument pointing to celestial targets along with military applications. He's traveled worldwide on over 150 scientific expeditions collecting scientific data on solar eclipses plus stellar eclipses by asteroids (asteroid occultations).

Does this sound like something you might be interested in doing? No matter how you answered that question, please join us at the September meeting to hear more about this! Hope to see you there.