We’ll be in Concord for our Spring Meeting!
Our keynote speaker is Jessie Dotson, project scientist for NASA’s K2 Mission. 
Pictured to the right, she’ll tell us about recent Kepler results. We’ll also have all of the other things that make our meetings so much fun, Share&Tell, a panel, workshops and we are bringing back the poster session. If you paid dues last Fall, registration is free (we’ll send you an email with a discount code), otherwise dues are $20 through Wednesday night, $25 at the door. Click here to register for the main event: https://ncnaapt.org/even
Mt. Diablo High School Map
On Friday we’ll be in S9 in the Science Building, near the faculty parking lot. On Saturday we’ll be in the library, right behind the main office, use the student parking lot.
A tentative schedule of events:
Friday Night Social
Meet us at Mt. Diablo HS for a viewing of Hidden Figures, some pizza, soft drinks and cool friends. A lucky participant will walk home with a movie DVD. Doors open at 6PM, we’ll start the movie at roughly 6:30. Food courtesy of Paul Robinson.
Saturday Timeline
A tour of the universe as seen by NASA’s K2 Mission
NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009 to search for earth-sized planets around sun-like stars. Kepler monitored 170,000 stars in Cygnus continuously over 4 years seeking the telltale dimming of a transiting planet. After losing its second of four reaction wheels in May 2013, the spacecraft was repurposed as the K2 mission, pointing in the ecliptic where the solar pressure stays on the spacecraft axis of symmetry, allowing 80-day long observation of a field-of-view. Observing along the ecliptic allows the tool of high-precision time domain observations to be applied to a variety of areas of research including exoplanets, asteroids, white dwarfs and supernova (to name a few).
11:15-11:25 Break
11:45 Group Photo
Always good to show those administrators who are interested in your professional development.
1:30-3:00 NGSS Workshops and College Roundup
We’ll break into two different streams in the 1:30-3:00 segment
3:00-3:45 Q&A with Tracy Van Houten
We are excited that Tracy Van Houten will be joining us remotely. She is leaving a position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to run for California’s 34th Congressional District. If elected, she will be the first woman engineer in Congress. Read more about her in this article in The Atlantic.