For anyone interested in planning or attending a Vesta Fiesta event to celebrate the Dawn Mission spacecraft arrival at Asteroid 4 Vesta, here's a link to a handy how-to guide and map: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/vesta_fiesta.asp

Here is a link to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences Vesta Fiesta event in Raleigh, NC on August 6, 2011 from 10 AM -1 PM:
http://naturalsciences.org/programs-events/?select=1749

Whoo-hoo!

Break a leg, Mike! Wish I could be there, man.

The celebration schedule for Tulsa is now online.

Tulsa Air and Space Museum (Link no longer active)

Orange County Public Library Vesta Fiesta
Hillsborough, North Carolina at 3:30 PM ("downtown Hillsborough")

http://web.co.orange.nc.us/LibraryEvents/index.aspx

Fiesta Grill (!!) Vesta Fiesta at 7:30 PM sharp on Sunday, August 7.
West on NC 54 outside Carrboro, NC

(And here's the best part...), this is just a half-mile W of "The Kraken" bar, complete with squiddly / Flying Spaghetti Monster thingy:

Click to view attachment

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#1: Genius for the entire post!
#2:

We had a sold out crowd of just over a hundred last night. During Claudia Alexander's demo the resolution didn't allow any of the graphs or text to be readable. The planetarium director halted it and moved on to our local program early. During the main presentation we had the crowd come back to the auditorium excited about seeing "the pictures of Vesta". About a half hour into it, families started to sneak out. By the time we got to the pictures maybe half the people were gone. Those that stuck it out couldn't understand most of what was being explained about the pictures.