Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) is a national program of evening gatherings that bring artists, scientists, and scholars together for informal presentations and conversations.
Please join us for refreshments at 6:30 p.m. followed by presentations at 7 p.m. by director of the UC Observatories Claire Max, astronomer Garth Illingworth, artist Russell Crotty, and curator Tony Misch.
Claire Max, "Adaptive Optics at Lick and Beyond"
Garth Illingworth, "The First Billion Years: The Dawn of Galaxies"
Tony Misch, "A Keen Delight: Lick's Observatory's historical treasure trove"
Russell Crotty, "Drawing Astronomy"
This event is FREE and open to the public.
Metered parking is available in the Performing Arts Lot adjacent to Digital Arts Research Center.
Parking permits available at vending machines in lot.
The Speakers:
Claire Max, Director of UC Observatories and professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, is known for her ground-breaking work in adaptive optics and laser guide star systems. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Max and her colleagues demonstrated the utility of sodium-layer laser guide stars, and deployed the first astronomical facility using these lasers at Lick Observatory in the mid-1990s. Today the technology has been deployed at many of the largest telescopes in the world, including the twin Keck 10-meter telescopes in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Garth Illingworth, professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, researches when and how galaxies formed. He particularly studies the structure, kinematics, and stellar populations of nearby elliptical and SO galaxies with the goal of inferring how they were built up in the distant past ("galaxy archeology"). He was deputy Principal Investigator on the Advanced Camera for HST that was launched in 2002 and put onto Hubble, bringing us remarkable views of the universe.Illingworth is the former chair of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC). The AAAC offers advice to Congress and NSF, NASA and DOE on the implementation of the science program developed by the astronomy science community through studies carried out by the National Academy of Sciences.
Russell Crotty is known internationally for his drawings based on direct astronomical observation, as well as for works on landscape, the ocean, and surfing. Crotty is represented in major collections in the U.S. and Europe, including SFMOMA in San Francisco. In 2007 he was commissioned to create a site-specific installation of globe drawings for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China. In 2015, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Over the course of his career Crotty has constantly experimented with the form his work takes, drawing on globes of different scales and creating large-scale, handmade artist’s books.
Tony Misch is Director of the Lick Observatory Historical Collections. He holds a BFA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Otis Art Institute. In 1982 he took what was meant to be a six-months' break from painting and teaching to work at Mount Wilson Observatory but contracted a severe case of observatory fever and stayed until 1987, then moving to Lick Observatory where he worked as a resident Support Astronomer until his retirement in 2007. Tony began organizing the Lick Observatory Historical Collections the following year.