NOTE: This meeting will be in person at FURMAN UNIVERSITY, not at the Science Center. Location and Map are listed below:
David Moffett will present a live planetarium show in Furman’s Timmons Planetarium, demonstrating how he uses the planetarium system to teach undergraduate students about the night sky: celestial motion of stars/constellations, planets, the Sun, and the Moon over time.
David Moffett acquired his B.S. and M.S. in Physics at North Carolina State University, then moved to New Mexico to conduct his doctoral research on pulsars using the Very Large Array radio interferometer. After completing his PhD, Moffett moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where he worked as a research astronomer at the University of Tasmania. After two and a half years, he secured a position in the Physics Department at Furman, where he continues to perform astronomical research with undergraduate Physics majors and with collaborators at national and international universities, performing radio astronomical observations of Galactic supernova remnants and optical observations of eclipsing cataclysmic binary stars.
David oversees the Timmons Planetarium and Furman's observatory. In addition to astronomy, he teaches general physics courses and upper-level mechanics and electromagnetic theory courses.
Moffett still collaborates with faculty from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to host the annual Educational Research In Radio Astronomy (ERIRA) workshop at the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia. He was the Co-PI of a grant to produce a radio astronomy laboratory curriculum, "MWU! - the Multiwavelength Universe", where undergraduate institutions employ the use of a 20-meter radio telescope at the Greenbank Observatory. Three additional telescopes managed by the University of Tasmania will soon be added to the remote telescope network, thus expanding radio observing coverage into the Southern Hemisphere.
We will meet in the Furman Planetarium in Plyler Hall in the Townes Science Center. Visitors can park in the South Chapel Lot, which is the parking lot between the Daniel Chapel and the football stadium (park closer to the chapel side – see attached map, follow the red arrow). The building is across the Mall from the parking lot. The planetarium is on the second floor; there is stair and elevator access near the classroom.