News

Provided free to all members, the annual AAS Wall Calendar highlights important astronomical events month by month. The AAS is now seeking sponsors and key dates and deadlines for the 2015 edition.

The AAS needs your help in getting due recognition for our most outstanding colleagues. Nominations and letters of support for the AAS prizes for 2015 must arrive in the Secretary's office by Monday, 30 June 2014.

Nominations (including self-nominations) are invited for new members of the Executive Committee of NASA's Cosmic Origins Program Analysis Group (COPAG). Terms are three years. Deadline: 18 August 2014.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory seeks proposals for the operation of Kitt Peak National Observatory's 2.1-meter and Coudé feed telescopes. Letters of intent are due 1 August 2014.

The third data release for the Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard is now online. DASCH provides images, astrometry, and photometry from the digitized Harvard plates for the period 1885 to 1992.

The International Astronomical Union invites proposals from the global astronomical community to renew existing IAU Commissions or to create new ones. Letters of intent are due by 15 October 2014.

Every year the National Science Board salutes leaders with remarkable contributions and public service in science and engineering through its honorary awards. Nominations for 2015 are due by 1 October 2014.

A solar eclipse crosses the US on 21 August 2017. Anyone interested in doing science and/or public outreach for this event are invited to the 2nd Eclipse Planning Workshop in Columbia, Missouri, in August 2014.

David J. Helfand offers a valedictory column in which he channels Charles Dickens to describe the best of times and worst of times, that is, his two years as AAS President.

Travel support is available for graduate students, postdocs, and early-career scientists who wish to attend the Industrial Physics Forum that will be held 29 Sept. to 3 Oct. 2014 in Brazil.

The House of Representatives passed their bill funding NASA and NSF on 30 May, with strong increases for research at both agencies. The Senate now looks to take up its version of the bill, which passed out of committee...

Results are in from the 224th AAS meeting in Boston: 14 graduate students and undergraduates are receiving Chambliss medals or award certificates to honor their winning poster presentations.

Jeffrey Newmark, a member of the AAS as well as our Solar Physics Division, is now overseeing the heliophysics effort within NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

The AAS will now endorse regional meetings — conferences organized for the benefit of clearly defined geographical areas — that meet a few simple rules designed to support and foster astronomical discourse.

On 3 May more than 60 astronomers and students from Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia met for the first AAS Regional Meeting and found that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.