The Huachuca Astronomy Club will hold their January meeting in the Community Room of the Student Union Building, Cochise College Sierra Vista campus on January 15, 2016 at 7 PM. Our speaker will be Danielle Adams, a PhD student at the University of Arizona. The meeting is FREE and open to the public.
Danielle is a PhD student and 2015-2016 NASA Space Grant fellow at the University of Arizona’s School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the School of Anthropology. Fluent in Arabic, she is translating 1200-year-old Arabic astronomical texts that have never before been accessible to English-speaking scholars. She lived in the Middle East for 3 years and has been an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer for more than 30 years. She has spoken on related topics at international conferences around the world.
Her talk will be entitled “Two Deserts, One Sky: Arab Observational Astronomy and Star Lore”
Abstract
The desert sky we see here in Tucson, Arizona, is the same desert sky that Arabs have observed for millennia. Two Deserts, One Sky (onesky.arizona.edu) is a new initiative intended to bring the richness and depth of observational astronomy in ancient Arab cultures to modern awareness. Danielle will use ancient poetry and star calendars to show us how various Arab societies constructed the night sky before they adopted Greek astronomy.