Dara Norman

Dr. Dara Norman is a full scientist at, and deputy director of, the Community Science and Data Center at the NSF’s National Optical and Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) and president of the American Astronomical Society.

Talk title: “Seeing Southern Stars and Galaxies from the Windy City”

Abstract: Growing up in Chicago, it is hard to see anything in the night sky besides the moon and the brightest stars. However, opportunities to engage with astronomy and science abound in the windy city… and will shortly become even better! The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon come online to start its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and opportunities to interact with images from this survey will be available to citizen scientists. This survey of the southern and equatorial sky will collect 20 terabytes of imaging data every 24 hours… and will continue doing that over 10 years creating an unprecedented map of the sky covering a large area to great distances and across time.

In this talk, I will discuss why a survey like Rubin’s LSST will give insights into the role a galaxy’s environment may play in triggering its energetic center and how access to the LSST data will broaden the community of researchers able to work on these and other outstanding questions about our universe