by Victor Davis

The June 2021 meeting of the AAAP will take place (virtually) on Tuesday, June 8th at 7:30 PM. (See How to Join the June Meeting below for details). This meeting is open to AAAP members and the general public. Due to the number of possible attendees, we will use the Waiting Room. This means when you login into Zoom you will not be taken directly to the meeting. The waiting room will be opened at 7:00 PM. Prior to the meeting start time (7:30 PM) you may socialize with others in the waiting room. The meeting room has a capacity of 100 people.

For the Q&A session, you may ask your question using chat or may unmute yourself and ask your question directly to the speaker. To address background noise issues, we are going to follow the rules in the table below regarding audio. If you are not speaking, please remember to mute yourself. You are encouraged, but not required to turn your video on.

Meeting Event	Participant Can Speak?	Participant Can Self-Unmute?
Director Rex’s General Remarks	Yes	Yes
Program Chair Victor’s  Speaker Introduction	Yes	Yes
Speaker Presentation	No	No
Q&A Session	Start All on Mute	Yes
5-minute bio break	Yes	Yes
Journal Club presentation	Start All on Mute	No
Business Meeting	Start All on Mute	Yes
Director’s closing remarks	No	No

PLEASE NOTE:  June is traditionally the month when AAAP members travel to the New Jersey State Museum Planetarium in Trenton for a custom show presented by AAAP member and Planetarium staffer/educator Bill Murray. Due to Covid restrictions, the museum remains closed. The club will continue virtual meetings via Zoom until further notice.

Featured Speaker: Dr. Anna T.P. Schauer is a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. She will talk about her research investigating “First Star Formation and the Lunar Ultimately Large Telescope.”

Dr. Schauer’s research focuses on the high-redshift Universe, running hydrodynamic, cosmological simulations to study the first stars and black holes. She studies large-scale effects that influence “minihalos,” the early building blocks of galaxies.  By investigating these first objects, she aims to understand how the Universe through successive generations of stars and supernovae underwent the transition from metal-free to metal-enriched. Capturing the light from objects so long ago and far away will take extraordinary instrumentation, and to that end Dr. Schauer is looking forward to observations using what she and her colleagues are calling the “Ultimately Large Telescope.” They hope to revive a design proposed by Roger Angel and collaborators that described a 20-meter telescope (shown below) with a mirror of rotating liquid operating on the Moon. Dr. Schauer and colleagues believe that a 100-meter instrument is feasible, with which they could study the first stars that formed in the Universe, the so-called Population III stars.

Anna T.P.  Schauer grew up in Munich, Germany, where she earned her BS in Physics and two Masters Degrees in Physics and Astrophysics at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität. For her PhD, she moved to the star formation group at Heidelberg University. After defending her PhD thesis, she remained in Heidelberg as a transitional postdoc before starting at UT Austin as a NASA Hubble Fellow in October 2018. Dr. Schauer has been a reviewer of HST proposals, chaired a conference on “The First Stars,” and is a member of UT Austin’s Astronomy Outreach Group. This past year, Dr. Schauer focused on a new area of long-term research by becoming a new mother.

AAAP webcast:  This month’s AAAP meeting, beginning with Rex’s opening remarks and ending at the break before the business meeting, will be webcast live on YouTube and recorded for subsequent public access on AAAP’s YouTube channel. Be aware that your interactions during this segment, including questions to our guest speaker, may be recorded for posterity. 

AAAP webcast:  This month’s AAAP meeting, beginning with Rex’s opening remarks and ending at the break before the business meeting, will be webcast live on YouTube and recorded for subsequent public access on AAAP’s YouTube channel. Be aware that your interactions during this segment, including questions to our guest speaker, may be recorded for posterity. Here is YouTube live link:  https://youtu.be/TrXEKOM4VTs

This session will be recorded and saved on YouTube. Send me an email at program@princetonastronomy.org if you have any concerns.  Due to technical difficulties, the May meeting was not recorded on YouTube, and so is unavailable for public (or private) viewing.

Using Zoom: While we are, social distancing the AAAP Board has chosen to use Zoom for our meetings, based our belief that many members have already have used Zoom and its ease of learning. One of its great features is you can choose whether you want to install the software on your computer or use it within your browser.

How to Join the June Meeting: For the meeting, we are going to follow a simple two-step process:

1. Please make sure you have Zoom installed on your computer. You do not need a Zoom account or need to create one to join the meeting. Nor are you required to use a webcam.
2. Please visit our website for the link to the meeting
3. This session will be recorded and saved on YouTube. Send me an email at program@princetonastronomy.org if you have any concerns.

NOTE: We plan to open the meeting site 30 minutes to the 7:30 start time. This way you won’t have to rush to join the meeting. A maximum of 100 attendees can join the meeting.

More Information: The Zoom site has many training videos most are for people who are hosting a meeting. If you’re unsure how Zoom works you might want to view the videos on how to join a meeting or how to check your computer’s audio and video before the meeting.

We hope to make these short presentations a regular feature of our monthly meetings. If you are interested in presenting a topic of interest, please contact either director@princetonastronomy.org or program@princetonastronomy.org. We’d like to keep our momentum going!

WANTED: Members with interesting stories to tell.  As of this writing, no member has volunteered to offer up a brief story or presentation for Journal Club this month. During the past months, we’ve enjoyed interesting and informative talks from AAAP members, and we’d like to keep the momentum going! We hope to make these short presentations a regular feature of our monthly meetings. We’d like to know what members are doing or what members are thinking about in the broad range of topics encompassed by astronomy. A brief ten-minute (or so) presentation is a good way to introduce yourself and the topics you care about to the club membership. If you are interested in presenting a topic of interest, please contact either director@princetonastronomy.org or program@princetonastronomy.org.

Looking forward to you joining us on-camera on Zoom or YouTube Live webcast at the June meeting!