The November meeting of the Roundtable is at noon, Thursday, November 15th, at the Capital City Club downtown.
Our speaker is Georgia State University Regents’ Professor Dr. Douglas Gies, director of the GSU Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA). Funded by the National Science Foundation, CHARA operates the CHARA Array on Mt. Wilson in in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, California. The CHARA Array combines starlight from six widely separated component telescopes to act like one enormous telescope in terms of recording the fine details of stars and their environments, and it is the largest such telescope array in the world.
Dr. Gies will speak on “Seeing the Stars Close Up with the CHARA Array” and will provide a down-to-earth description of the discoveries made with this unique astronomical facility.
Doug Gies has enjoyed stargazing since taking it up first as a hobby as a high school student. He has Bachelor, Masters and PhD degrees in astronomy from the University of Toronto. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, and he came to Georgia State as a professor in 1988. He the author or co-author of some 180 research papers in the scientific literature, and he is a frequent speaker to both expert and non-technical audiences.