Combining art with astronomy, astrolabes are instruments enshrouded in some mystery: What are they used for? How do they work? Who invented them? Québec amateur astronomer and astrolabe-maker Pierre
The February monthly meeting of the London Centre RASC will be held on
February 16th at 19:30PDT. You can attend in person at the Cronyn
Observatory or via Zoom at:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8901
or via using the zoom app with meeting ID 89015777788 with no password.
Pierre Paquette has been an amateur astronomer for close to 40 years. He has been secretary (1990–1992) and president (1993–1994) of the Centre francophone de Montréal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, board member of the Fédération des astronomes amateurs du Québec (1993–1994, then 2010–2014), and vice-president of the Club des astronomes amateurs de Laval (2014). From 2012 to 2016, he was the editor and publisher of Astronomie-Québec, a freely available PDF magazine, and he still sometimes publishes on its website and Facebook page. He was main presenter at National Geographic Night-Sky Odyssey, the first-even open-air planetarium with augmented reality, in Sutton, Québec, from 2018 to 2021. He has been an Ambassador of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada since 2013. In 2016, he received the Fred Clarke Award of the CAFTA (Concours Annuel de Fabrication de Télescopes Amateurs; Amateur Telescope Makers’ Annual Contest) for his lifetime achievements. In 2022, he translated Ptolemy’s Almagest to French and made it freely available as a series of web pages at EcliptiQc.ca. He has given talks and workshops in Montréal, Québec City, and many other cities in Québec; at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto; in Whitehorse (Yukon, where he is Subject Matter Expert for the Aurora | 360 Experience); and in Brazil.