Music of the Spheres – Golden Bough

July 23rd, 2022 8:30pm

Performer: Golden Bough

Astronomy Speaker: Dr. Jessica Lu

Golden Bough

Rooted in the traditional music of the seven Celtic nations (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, The Isle of Man, French Brittany, and Spanish Galicia), Golden Bough has become a popular and in-demand group on both sides of the Atlantic.

Since their formation in 1980, this trio of modern day minstrels has traveled great distances to numerous countries, to bring their music to enthusiastic folk fans the world over. Backing themselves on an array of acoustic instruments; Celtic harp, guitar, octave-mandolin, mandolin, accordion, violin, penny-whistle, and bodhran, they blend their voices in the pristine harmonies that have become a Golden Bough trademark. Visit the Golden Bough website for more information.

Lecture Information

Dr. Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley)

The Hunt for Black Holes in the Milky Way

Dr. Lu is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at UC, Berkeley. Her research group is conducting a search for black holes in the Milky Way using gravitational lensing. Her group also studies how stars are born in extreme environments such as in massive star clusters and around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These black hole studies require very high resolution images of the Universe at infrared wavelengths. Prof. Lu helps develop astronomical instruments that deliver sharp views of the sky using adaptive optics systems on large ground-based telescopes. She is the Project Scientist for the ‘imaka and KAPA projects, which aim to expand the reach of adaptive optics to wider fields of view and more places in the sky. Prof. Lu is also a member of international science teams for the future Thirty Meter Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Prof. Lu is originally from Houston, TX and attended the High School for Performing and Visual Arts, majoring in dance. She received her undergraduate degree in physics from the MIT in 2000. She worked as a software engineer in silicon valley for 3 years before returning to academia to pursue her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at UCLA, which was granted in 2008. After completing her PhD, she was awarded a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Observational Astronomy at Caltech and an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) in the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She joined the IfA faculty in 2013 and then, in the summer of 2016, Prof. Lu joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley astronomy department.

Ticket Information

Tickets can be purchased at ucsctickets.com starting April 13th, 2022 at Noon.

Join Friends of Lick Observatory (FoLO) and Get Tickets Early
If you’d like to purchase tickets as early as noon on April 6th, 2022, join our Friends of Lick Observatory (FoLO) program by March 1st, 2022. As a thank you for supporting the observatory, you’ll get special access to purchase tickets before they go on sale for the general public.

More information about tickets and pricing is available at Music of the Spheres.

Program Information

7:30 pm	Doors Open	Brief Telescope Visits
8:30 pm	Concert, Main Hall
9:30 pm	Science Talk, Lecture Hall	Telescope Viewings
10:30 pm	Science Talk (repeated), Lecture Hall	Telescope Viewings
1:00 am	Doors Close

Gift shop is open from 7:30pm-8:30pm, and reopens after the concert until 11:30pm.

Detailed Event Program

More general information about the event is available at Music of the Spheres.