Spring Dinner Saturday 23rd March 2013

We are pleased to welcome as speaker, Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. A staff member of the ChandraX-ray Center, he studies black holes, quasars and X-ray sources in galaxies, as well as developing data analysis software for the X-ray astronomy community. Dr. McDowell has a B.A in Mathematics (1981) and a Ph.D in Astrophysics (1987) from Churchill College, Cambridge, and has previously worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the Jodrell Bank radio observatory and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Dr. Jonathan McDowell is also the editor of Jonathan's Space Report, a free internet newsletter founded in 1989 which provides technical details of satellite launches, and was a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope Magazine for 16 years. Dr. McDowell's web site, planet4589.org, provides the most comprehensive historical list of satellite launch information starting with Sputnik, and he carries out research on space history topics using original sources including declassified DoD documents and Russian-language publications.The asteroid (4589) McDowell was named after him in 1993. The picture shows McDowell leaning out of a Soyuz spacecraft in Moscow.