The Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley presented a monthly public lecture series in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. In 2010, we began an expanded program of monthly lectures, featuring astronomy talks as well as talks by other scientists at UC Berkeley. The Science@Cal lecture series has a new webpage, http://scienceatcal.berkeley.edu/the-sciencecal-lecture-series/. The page you are visiting now will remain available, with links to the video from the 2009 talks.
Thanks to all the volunteers who made our 2009 activities such a great success, and thanks to you, our audience and supporters.
If you enjoyed the 2009 activities and wish to support astronomy at UC Berkeley, you can donate here.
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You can listen to Steve Croft talk about the Berkeley IYA talks and his research activities here.
Videos of previous talks are availble below. Click the play button or double click in the center of the video to start. To watch in full screen mode, double click again (once the video is playing) in the center of the video.
On January 17, Geoff Marcy spoke about "The Search for Habitable Planets and Life in the Universe". You can watch the video of his talk below. A copy of the presentation (a 34 MB Powerpoint file) is available here.
On February 21, Eliot Quataert spoke about "Black Holes: Monsters Lurking at the Centers of Galaxies". You can watch the video of his talk below. A copy of the slides for this presentation (a 12 MB PDF) is available here.
You can also listen to this talk as a podcast - the slides should also display in iTunes or similar software. Click here for the 27 MB MPEG-4 audio file.
On March 21, Dan Werthimer gave a lecture entitled "Is Anybody Out There? Searching for ET with Help from 8 Million Volunteers". You can watch the video of his talk below.
On April 18, Chung-Pei Ma gave a lecture entitled "The Dark Side of the Universe". You can watch the video of her talk below.
Also on April 18, Steve Stahler gave a lecture entitled "Why Are There Stars? New Answers to an Old Question". You can watch the video of his talk below.
On May 16, James Graham gave a lecture entitled "Imaging Planets Beyond the Solar System". You can watch the video of his talk below.
On June 20, Alex Filippenko gave a lecture entitled "Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe". You can watch the video of his talk below.
On July 18, historian of science Roger Hahn gave a lecture entitled "A Troublesome Pioneer - Galileo Galilei". You can watch the video of his talk below.
On August 15, Steve Croft and biologist David Lindberg gave a lecture entitled "Astronomy and Evolution: From the Death of the Dinosaurs to the Stardust in your Bones". You can watch the video of their talk below.
On September 19, Nathan Smith gave a lecture entitled "Live Fast - Die Young: Monster Stars and their Temper Tantrums". The video was recorded by the folks at fora.tv so we're linking directly to their video below, as well as posting to Vimeo.
On October 17, Imke de Pater gave a lecture entitled "Fascinating Objects in Our Solar System". Once again the video was recorded by fora.tv and we're linking directly to it here.
On November 21, Maryam Modjaz gave a lecture entitled "Cosmic Fireworks: The Explosive Deaths of Massive Stars". You can watch the video of her talk below.
On December 19, Dick Plambeck gave a lecture entitled "Star Formation Through Radio Eyes". You can watch the video of his talk below.
Thanks to Chris Klein (with assistance from Bethany Cobb) for producing the videos of the talks, to fora.tv for recording the September and October talks, and to all our volunteers from the astronomy department for helping out with organising this talk series.
Contact Steve Croft (scroft@astro.berkeley.edu / http://astro.berkeley.edu/~scroft/).