Eclipse Lecture and Information session from Eclipse Experts at the Rearden Theater on the campus of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School

Eclipse Lecture and Information session from Eclipse Experts at the Rearden Theater on the campus of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School


Sunday, August 20th – 5pm – 6:30pm
www.RabunGap.org

Events happening for the Total Solar Eclipse
You don’t know much about what a Total Solar Eclipse is or why it is so significant to the world.  This was your chance to come get all the answers you were asking.  The Rabun County Tourism Development Authority presented Dr. Keith Bechtol with a lecture titled “Light and Shadows: the Eclipse and other Cosmic Wonders” .
Dr. Bechtol expressed that seeing an eclipse is an amazing experience, but nowadays, eclipses are very well understood scientifically. The current frontier of human knowledge involves questions about the origin and fate of the universe, new types of matter and energy, black holes, and the search for planets beyond our solar system, etc. Many of these questions we would not have known how to ask until recently. So eclipses are a source of inspiration, and represent the beginning of an ongoing effort to better understand the cosmos and our place within it.
This lecture and question & answer session was very informative and intriguing.  Our guests were ready to observe the Total Solar Eclipse the next day when they viewed the eclipse from the only place in the state of Georgia that was in the Path of Totality.
About Dr. Bechtol:

Born and raised in Virginia
* Undergrad at College of William & Mary, Physics
* Grad school at Stanford University, Physics PhD
* Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
* John Bahcall Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
* Staff scientist for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a new telescope now under construction in Chile (more info on LSST here: https://www.lsst.org/) This is Dr. Bechtol’s current position based in Tucson, AZ.
* Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (starting fall 2018)
* Discovered more than a dozen small galaxies orbiting the Milky Way
* Visited 6 continents for scientific research, including Antarctica
* Research involves dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos, supernovae… use telescopes on mountains, high-altitude balloons, deep within glaciers, and in outer space