I will be giving a talk to the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association on Friday, December 1 at 7:30pm in the Steward Observatory Lecture Hall here on the University of Arizona campus. I will be talking for an hour (plus Q/A time) on Cassini's results at Titan so far, particularly the results from the ISS camera. I will also talk a little about the results from RADAR and VIMS, but mostly ISS. I will also diverge a bit into Enceladus, but only a little. I'm sure UMSF members in the Tucson region are welcome and I would love to see you there.

Edit: yeah, I just realized that the First is tomorrow, not saturday...

Thanks - A little more notice and I would be there...

I assume that is Arizona standard time, but I don't know if the Arizona standard day is ahead, or the day of the week is behind most of the continent. Would that be Saturday the Second or Friday the First

I doubt Jason'll give it, but it wasn't until yesterday afternoon that he realized that the first was a Friday, and almost made other plans for that day;-) But yes, the first is in fact Friday in Arizona.

Those were fun plans too... Oh well, I guess my weekend is free now.

So is there any chance those of us located out in Webspace could get a post of the slides after you've done the presentation?

(For those of us located waayyyy out of state)

-Mike

In my entire life I have been in Tucson exactly once: last week Thurs, Fri, Sat.

So you couldn't have given your presentation LAST Friday?????

I know it was Thanksgiving break, and we are talking a University here, but still......

Oh well, at least while my friend was giving me the guided tour of the town we drove by the Planetary Sciences building, and later on he showed me the home of Gerard Kuiper (with the small obersatory still in the backyard). My buddy had walked by the house a lot when he was a kid, and knew that an astronmer named Kuiper lived there, but he had no idea what the Kuiper belt was until I told him about it. So when I was in town he made a point of taking me past it.

Where is his home, out of curiosity? I would like to know...

I don't know how useful the presentation file would be. There isn't a whole lot of text, and most of the images are publically released. Those that aren't, well. I would remove them from the file before putting it here. The audience for the presentation is amateur astronomers, so I figure they'll want to see lots of pretty pictures, not a whole lot of jargon (but not simplistic either), and a brief refresher on Titan and its history.

A good powerpoint presentation can tell a really good story. Sometimes it's nice to see the order of the images selected by the author and how they relate to each other. A good overview and refresher to put everything together in context is also helpful.

(As a voyeuristic amateur, I feel that a quick slide presentation is much easier to digest than a full scientific article).

Hope the talk went well.

-Mike

It went well. I should have remembered to ask someone here if I can borrow a laser pointer, but luckily somone in the audience bailed me out Otherwise, yeah it had a lot of images, but I tried to organize the images in such a way that I could tell a story, but someone just picking up the presentation without listening to the talk probably wouldn't get much out of it.

Off topic, but a recognized problem phenomenon of the past few years has been for people to generate PowerPoint presentations that require verbal elaboration and then to use them as reports in contexts where the verbal elaboration is absent. This has been noticed in business and the military, and I'm sure academia and research as well. Some people have suggested that the problem is so insidious that extreme measures may be necessary because authors are rarely aware of it at the time they publish their under-described handiwork.