July 26th, 2024 8:30pm
Astronomy Speaker: Dr. Natalie Batalha
Lecture Information
Dr. Natalie Batalha (UC Santa Cruz)
Observing Exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope
Natalie Batalha has been a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz since 2018. She is an eminent planetary astronomer who served as the scientific lead for NASA’s highly successful Kepler mission, which discovered over 2,700 exoplanets and another 2,000 candidates awaiting confirmation. On the Kepler mission, she identified planets that might be able to sustain life and led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system. In 2017, Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.
After the Kepler space telescope retired in October 2018, Batalha left NASA to join the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, returning to where she had received her Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1997. She received the UCSC Alumni Achievement Award in 2018 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Her research focuses on exploring the diversity of planets in our galaxy, investigating questions of planetary habitability and searching for evidence of life beyond the solar system.
Ticket Information
Tickets can be purchased at Eventbrite starting April 17, 2024 at Noon.
Join Friends of Lick Observatory (FoLO) and Get Tickets Early
If you’d like to purchase tickets as early as noon on April 10th, 2024, join our Friends of Lick Observatory (FoLO) program by March 1st, 2024. As a thank you for supporting the observatory, you’ll get special access to purchase tickets before they go on sale for the general public.
More information about tickets and pricing is available here.
Program Information
| 7:30 pm | Doors Open | Brief Telescope Visits |
| 8:30 pm | Science Talk, Lecture Hall | History Talk, Great Refractor Telescope Dome |
| 9:30 pm | Science Talk (repeated), Lecture Hall | Telescope Viewings |
| 10:30 pm | History Talk (repeated), Lecture Hall | Telescope Viewings |
| 1:00 am | Doors Close |
Gift shop is open from 7:30pm until 11:30pm.
More general information about the event is available at Evening with the Stars.