The July 2019 membership meeting of the Cuyahoga Astronomical Association (CAA) will take place Monday, July 8, beginning at 7:30 PM.

Featured speaker for the evening will be Dr. Madeline Wade, Assistant Professor of Physics, Kenyon College. Dr. Wade writes: “The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO) has been making ground-breaking discoveries since the moment it turned on in 2015. The LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaborations have published results for 11 total gravitational wave detections. We have detected gravitational waves from ten merging black hole systems and one merging neutron star system. In this talk, I will give an overview of gravitational-wave physics, the LIGO detectors, and give some highlights of the current discoveries. I will also discuss some of the current and ongoing research I am involved in, including calibration of the LIGO instruments and applications of machine learning algorithms to improve the quality of LIGO data.”

The CAA’s monthly meetings are held on the second Monday of every month (except December) at 7:30 PM at the Rocky River Nature Center; 24000 Valley Parkway; North Olmsted, Ohio, in the Cleveland Metroparks. Meeting programs are open to the public. Following the presentation and a brief social break, the club will conduct its membership business meeting.