When is aas birthday

The law of unintended consequences strikes again! After we produced our first AAS Wall Calendar in , we realized that most of the dates had nothing listed but the Two AAS meetings, a few Division meetings, a handful of membership-renewal and observing-proposal deadlines, and the principal phases of the Moon didn't make for a particularly content-rich publication worthy of display.

So we decided to add some naked-eye highlights of the evening and morning skies — such as eclipses, Moon-planet conjunctions, planetary oppositions, and meteor showers — as well as birthdays of our departed AAS Presidents and Henry Norris Russell lecturers.

It didn't occur to us that nearly all our birthday celebrants would be men in particular, white men , but it should have. The AAS was founded in , and the Society — and the astronomical sciences more generally — have been overwhelmingly white and male for most of the subsequent years.

Now that more and more women and people of color are entering and enriching our discipline, we look forward to a time when the gender and racial balance of the AAS membership more closely matches the gender and racial balance of the American population.

The question is, how best to do that? Expanding the list of officers and prizewinners beyond AAS Presidents and Russell lecturers won't help much, because except for the Annie Jump Cannon Award, which always goes to a woman, every AAS office and prize will have the same historical bias toward white men. Instead, we've decided to keep it simple: We'll list the birthdays of as many historically noteworthy AAS members as we have room for, regardless of whether they served as Society officers, were honored with prizes, or were otherwise celebrated during their lifetimes.

Please send us your suggestions! We've created a short webform to collect your input. There's no hard deadline, but since we'll begin working on the calendar before summer's end, you should fill out the form by September 1st if you want your recommendations considered for the upcoming edition.

The form doesn't collect or report any identifying information, so your responses will be anonymous unless you choose to identify yourself. We have already added the following people to our list: Claudia Alexander Beth A.