Hello all,

The public viewing nights will resume next week. Wednesday night viewing
at Robert Lee Moore Hall's 16-inch reflecting telescope will run from
7 to 9 p.m. from January 26 through March 30 and then will change with
Daylight Saving Time. There will be no viewing on March 16 due to Spring
Break.

Fridays and Saturdays are open to the general public at Painter
Hall's 9-inch refracting telescope. Those viewings will start on
January 28 and will run from 7 to 9 p.m. They will change times in
April. There will be no viewing on March 18 and 19 due to Spring Break.

For more details and parking maps, please see our website at:
http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/public/viewing.html


The Department of Astronomy and Board of Visitors will be hosting a
public lecture on Saturday, February 5 at 1:00 p.m. in ACES 2.302
It will be presented by Dr. Wendy Freedman, Director of the Carnegie
Observatories and is entitled "A New Century of Astronomy". Here
is the talk's abstract:

"In the past decade, astronomers have made some spectacular
discoveries. For the first time, planets beyond our own Solar System
have been detected. The census of such planets is growing rapidly and
is now approaching 150. The universe has been discovered to be
expanding at an ever-accelerating pace, a result of a mysterious new
"dark energy," which is repulsive in nature, and pushing the universe
apart. Astronomers have exciting and bold plans to build a next
generation of giant telescopes, both on the ground and in space, to
explore these new frontiers. I will describe the plans to build the
Giant Magellan Telescope, a 24-meter telescope, made of seven
8.4-meter segments. This project is a collaboration of seven
universities, mostly recently among them the University of Texas at
Austin, and Texas A&M university."

Cheers,
Lara Eakins
UT Astronomy