Colleagues:

Summer’s coming, and so is SPIE’s magnificent Optics+Photonics Symposium in San Diego, August 17th through the 21st.  The week will be loaded with optomechanical events and technologies.

On Monday the 18th I’ll be presenting a paper, “Use It Or Lose It,” in Mark Kahan’s conference, “An Optical Believe-It-Or-Not:  Key Lessons Learned III.”  That should be a hoot! 

Then, Bright and early Tuesday, the 19th, there’s a meeting with SPIE staff for planning next year’s Optomechanical Engineering Conference.  That conference will be your place in the sun, technologically speaking, so get your abstracts ready for submittal and spread the word to your friends and associates.

Tuesday evening, 8 to 10 PM, the Optomechanical Engineering Technical Group will hold their annual West Coast Bash.  Our speaker will be Tony Hull, Adjunct Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of New Mexico.  He’ll be addressing the primary mirror material selection process for spaceborne telescopes and how it drives the architecture and planning of these systems. 

Wednesday, the 20th,I’ll be teaching my tutorial, “Optomechanical Analysis,” all day to a bunch of bright-eyed students.  This is aimed primarily at mechanical engineers and I try to give them some new tools to relate their mechanical engineering decisions to the optical behavior of their systems.  This material may also be of interest to other optics professionals, even structural engineers.

Wednesday evening is SPIE’s Awards Banquet where all of the elephants of the academy and industry gather to celebrate new honorees.  This is always a great event and I’m sure that Phil Stahl, our President, will put his usual high gloss finish on the whole program.  I may be weary from teaching all day but this is always a must-do event for me.

And Thursday, ahh… Thursday:  Finally, I’ll get to cruise the exhibits, mingle with colleagues, meet new people, and catch up on the technology in the conference rooms.  Then at the end of the day, after the exhibits close, a few of us will go out to a local bistro for a toast-n-roast dinner (maybe with some red meat, even!).

It’s all one great week-long event:  More material than you can ever hope to capture in real-time.

And I hope to see you all there.

Al H.
6-16-14