NOVAC General Meeting
Join NOVAC Astronomers

at George Mason or Online
November 9, 2025

NOVAC Public Meeting, Dr. Meredith MacGregor presents: What’s the Space Weather Like on Proxima Centauri?, September 14, 4:30 pm EDT

What’s the Space Weather Like on Proxima Centauri? Stars (including our Sun) are active, periodically releasing bursts of high energy radiation called flares.  These flares can destroy molecules in the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets and potentially even erode those atmospheres entirely.  In order to understand whether any of our nearest neighbors are in fact habitable,

NOVAC Public Meeting, Dr. David DeVorkin presents: From the Laboratory to the Moon: The Quiet Genius of George Carruthers, July 13, 4:30 pm EDT

Dr. David DeVorkin follows Carruthers from his childhood in Ohio and then Chicago to his career at the US NavalResearch Laboratory in Washington, DC. In the highly competitive world of space science in the 1960s and 1970s, Carruthers’s genius for experimentation and exploration transcended the racial stereotyping and discrimination of his day, and he achieved world-class