ASP2019: Earth to Space - Celebrating a Century of Astronomy

ASP's 131st Annual Meeting
October 18, 2019 - San Francisco State University

ASP2019: Earth to Space, the ASP's public event held at San Francisco State University, featured a day that included a dynamic collection of speakers and panelists, tables filled with local organizations and SF State astronomy clubs sharing their missions, solar viewing through Sunspotters, solar telescopes, and safe solar viewers, at-capacity planetarium shows at Hagen Planetarium and clear skies for Observatory viewing.

Kimberly Ennico Smith, staff scientist from NASA Ames, kicked off the day presenting "Exploring the Moon: Past, Present, and Future" discussing lunar science research as well as manned and unmanned exploration of the Moon. Following her talk, a tag-team set of presentations titled "100 Earths," with research astronomers and collaborators studying planets outside our solar system, Debra Fischer (Yale Univ.) and John Michael Brewer (San Francisco State Univ.) discussed the fascinating history and future of exoplanets research, including the hope and promise of finding perhaps dozens of Earth-like planets before too long.

A multidisciplinary panel moderated by earth/climate scientist Petra Dekens (San Francisco State Univ.), featured panelists Debra Fischer again, Steve Richard (Climate Reality Project), Shawn Rosenmoss (City of San Francisco Dept. of the Environment), and Brandon Kline (San Francisco State Univ., Environmental Programs). Collectively, their discussion "Astronomers for Planet Earth: Action for a Habitable World, " looked at our climate change environmental challenge from the space/astronomy perspective (including the launch of the Astronomers for Planet Earth activism group) to multilateral actionable work being done at the regional/community level down to the city and the campus levels.

Finally, our keynote presentation featured professor Andrew Fraknoi (Univ. of San Francisco), delivering "The Top Tourist Sites of the Solar System," as well as an introductory brief history of the ASP since its founding 130 years ago. In a lively entertaining talk envisioning future tourism to planets and moons as far away as Pluto, he highlighted much of the amazing research and exploration that has revealed incredible sights that our descendants will surely seek out when people travel away from Earth on trips in the next several decades.

Thank you to our speakers, panelists, and SF State Student and Staff volunteers who dedicated a day to astronomy!