Hello OSSC Members and Friends,
Welcome to my OSSC April Letter. I hope you can attend our April meeting at the Samueli Academy in Santa Ana to enjoy the friendship of your fellow OSSC members and other guests. While we have had events here several times over the past few years, this event will be headlined by my friend Dr. Charles Norton, Deputy Chief Technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Norton will review JPL’s success with designing, building, launching and deploying many small satellites over several years with many outstanding partners.
The OSSC turned 75 years old this year. The first line on our OSSC website home page states: “Since 1951, the Optical Society of Southern California has been the Southern California local section of Optica founded to increase and disseminate the knowledge of optics and closely allied sciences.” More details about the History and Formation of the OSSC can be found on our website at: History and Formation.
This page also includes a link to the OSSC History Project, which we are working on to place many documents from our history in an archival system so people can search the documents by topics of interest. We are always looking for volunteers to help with this project.
Speaking of optics history in Southern California, our May meeting will be back in Pasadena with a special guest speaker, another long-time friend of the OSSC, Virginia ‘Ginny’ Ford. The title of her talk is: “A survey of optomechanical over the past 47 years.” Ginny spent about 25 years as an optomechanical engineer at JPL with 8 years at the Thirty Meter Telescope project in the middle. She and her husband, OSSC Past President Eric Ford and their son Patrick now work with many others at their company Eidetics Optical Systems in Valencia, CA. In my opinion, their systems are among the most amazing optical and optomechanical systems I have encountered.
And for our June Annual Business meeting, we will present our four new Fellows, announce the results of our Annual Officer Elections and celebrate our 75th year with a Panel Discussion about the History of the OSSC. This Panel will include several OSSC Past Presidents and Fellows and we will leave plenty of time for “Open Mic” where members of the audience can talk about their history with the OSSC. We will ask you for your comments and histories in writing so we can publish them in our newsletter and keep them for our History Project.