This event has been canceled
Greetings Fellow Planetarians!
Bays Mountain Planetarium is proud to host the annual conference for SEPA, MAPS, GPPA, PPA, RMPA, & SWAP. We are also happy to welcome any other professional planetarian including members of GLPA or anywhere else in the world. The official conference dates are June 22-26, 2021.
Like all of you, we are in a perpetual holding pattern waiting to see if we can land safely and proceed with this summer’s planetarium conference. The tricky bit is if we can hold the event safely. As I write this at the end of 2020 (sounds good, doesn’t it?) the vaccines for the COVID-19 virus are just being administered to health professionals and those in elderly healthcare in the US. What is not known at this time is how fast will the vaccines be distributed and to what point will it be safe for us to gather in close proximity. I’ve been working on this conference since the summer of 2018 and most of the details have been complete for a while. As such, we’ve “bought time” to wait and see if we can still meet. I am hopeful by this spring to know one way or another. The worst that will happen is that we will postpone the event until 2023 if we cannot gather. I know it is hard on everyone because you need to make plans. I will say this. Go ahead and make your hotel reservations now. You can cancel them if you need. Check the hotel’s website to make sure of their policy at that time. The link for the special rate follows. Since we expect families to join you to maximize your travel dollars (or your favorite currency), we’ve extended the date range for the special rates. The rate is $119 USD + tax per day from Wed. 6/16/21 to Wed. 6/30/21. The hotel is the four-star Marriott MeadowView Conference Center and Resort. It is the best hotel in all of East Tennessee and is the closest to Bays Mountain!
https://www.marriott.com/events/start.mi?id=1595526691128&key=GRP
I will avoid all the conference details in this message. They should be posted on SEPA’s website by late winter. I do want to state a few important parts of the event, though. Tuesday, June 22 will hold a day-long Mini-LIPS workshop with Karrie Berglund and end prior to the start of the official conference that late afternoon. Monday, June 21 will hold an additional day-long workshop entitled “Astronomy Teaching Boot Camp.” It will be led by the well-known astronomy educator Tim Slater. Both have limited occupancy. The weekend prior, the IPS Council will be meeting! Since this will be printed in the IPS Journal, I felt it was appropriate to mention it. There may be some other day-long workshops offered as well. I know of at least one in the planning.
If you want to provide a workshop for the Friday afternoon, please contact me at AdamThanz@KingsportTN.gov. My goal is to have them all set prior to opening up registrations. There will be a number of meeting spaces arranged and a maximum of 1h 45m in length. They can be shorter and that will be great.
Of the many attractions of this event, we are updating our Carl Zeiss ZKP-4 star projector to LED lamps and installing the first six-channel VELVET LED digital projection system in the Western Hemisphere. As a side note, one major modification I had to make in the last two months is to accommodate the increased interest in the event. As such, I’ve worked with MeadowView to adjust all of our meeting spaces to accommodate a larger group. We are now expecting up to 300 to attend. We’ll see….
The event will be lots of fun and a great way to get back together and share. The best part of being a planetarian is that you’re part of a global, yet small, community of fellow misfits. We hope to see you in June!