2012 AAS Conference

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) holds two annual meetings, the larger being in January. With attendance of around nearly 3000, there are always lots of exciting announcements in a variety of areas of astronomy, cosmology, technology, education, and more. This year’s winter AAS was held January 7 - 12 in Austin, Texas. This year, for the first time, LCOGT had a booth in the exhibit hall in addition to several talks and posters. Within our 10' x 10'; x 8' space, we had something from many of the niches of LCOGT. This included a world map with a shadow moving across the face with the telescope sites changing from red to green as night fell on those sites projecting on a 50” TV to emphasis the capabilities of the network (created by BJ Fulton and Jessica Barton), a 1.0m filter wheel (which will be part of Sinistro) which happily spun around awing everyone for the entire week, the moving focuser and filter wheel for the high speed camera, slides shows about the main science areas that LCOGT scientists are participating in and all of the software and engineering being done, and a laptop set up where everyone can try out ...