Chiefland Astronomy

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Adam Ginsburg, University of Florida “The Galactic Center”

Abstract: The center of our Galaxy is full of stars, gas, and active, energetic events. It has long been hidden from our view in the optical, but radio and infrared telescopes have opened the inner Galaxy for exploration. I will give a tour of the innermost regions in the Milky Way, from the inner ends of the spiral arms along the bar into the central ring of gas. There is weird and intriguing molecular chemistry, explosive star formation, and the full life cycle of hundreds of millions of stars all within a few degrees on the sky. Each of these aspects of Galactic space shows different and beautiful features that I will show in images as I tell the story of how gas moves inward in our Galaxy.

About the Speaker: Dr. Ginsburg began his career as an undergraduate at Rice University, earning a B.S. in Astrophysics, in 2007. He went on to earn his PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Colorado in 2013. He was a European Southern Observatory (ESO) fellow in Garching, Germany from 2013 to 2016 then was a Jansky fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico from 2016 to 2019 before coming to the University of Florida.

Dr. Ginsburg studies the formation of the most massive stars and how their formation process affects their neighbors, with the aim of understanding what physical processes control the stellar initial mass function. He uses primarily radio and millimeter telescopes to measure the molecular interstellar medium, which is the gas phase from which stars form. Turbulence and chemistry are the two most important and least understood processes that affect both how the stars form and how we detect their birth environments, so his research includes these fields by necessity. He is also interested in the maintenance and development of new tools to facilitate observational astronomy and comparison between simulations and observations.

His areas of expertise include High-mass Star Formation, Radio and Millimeter Astronomy, Molecular Interstellar Medium (ISM), Turbulence in the ISM, Astrochemistry and Astronomical Software Development.

Speaker

Dr. Jerry Cheney. “Regulus Lunar Occultation”

Abstract: Lunar eclipses are common events in the night sky. Understanding the geometry and physics of these events allows us to understand and predict the images we see. We’ll discuss how to obtain and understand the images we collect during lunar eclipses.

About the Speaker: Jerry Cheney grew up in southeast Texas.  He earned his BS in Biology from Lamar University in 1976 and went on to earn his PhD in Biological Oceanography from the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography in 1981.  He then accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he met and married his lovely wife, Marianne.  They have two sons, Michael, an industrial engineer in Tampa, and Chris, currently in his final year of Pharmacy School at UF.

Dr. Cheney taught oceanography at the college level and continued his studies of the distribution of zooplankton in the North Atlantic, but after ten years he decided to change careers to become an optometrist.  He graduated from the New England College of Optometry in 1994.  The family moved to Florida in 1997 and eventually settled in Ocala, where Dr. Cheney practiced for fifteen years.   He had the good fortune to be able to retire in 2014.

Dr. Cheney always had an interest in astronomy, and being a scientist by general nature and training, he has taken up astronomy as hobby in retirement   He joined the Alachua Astronomy Club in 2015 and has served in the club’s administration for many years, including as president from 2017 to 2019.  He teaches science courses, including astronomy, through Senior Learners in Ocala.