Fall 2015: Upcoming bookstore events explore history, poetry and photography

All UAA Campus Bookstore events are informal, free and open to the public. For a look at future events, view the bookstore calendar. Event podcasts can be found at the bookstore website or simply search for UAA Campus Bookstore in iTunes. For more information, contact Rachel Epstein at (907) 786-4782 or repstein2@uaa.alaska.edu.

Pennelope Goforth presents 'Voyages of the Lost Aleutian Ledgers of the Alaska Commercial Co' Saturday, Nov. 21, 1-3 p.m. UAA/APU Consortium Library, Room 307

At this event, historian J. Pennelope Goforth shares her exciting discovery of Alaska Commercial Co. business ledgers and logbooks from several villages in the Aleutians.

After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the Alaska Commercial Company (ACC), the only government-sanctioned business in Alaska, engaged in extensive sea otter hunting operations in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. Unfortunately, most ACC records for the Aleutian Islands were believed lost or destroyed. Then, purely by chance, J. Pennelope Goforth found six ACC ledgers in a Nordstrom shopping bag in a basement in Washington State. The ACC business records, from 1875-1897, detail the daily life of the Aleutian people and is a true treasure find.

Pennelope Goforth is author of the book Sailing the Mail in Alaska: The Maritime Years of Alaska Photographer John E. Thwaite. She is also the founder of SeaCat Explorations: Adventures in Alaska's Maritime History.

Parking on campus is free on Saturdays.

Travis Rector presents 'Coloring the Universe: An Insider's Look at Making Spectacular Images of Space' Monday, Nov. 23, 5-7 p.m. UAA/APU Consortium Library, Room 307

For more than 20 years, Travis Rector has been creating astronomical images using some of the largest telescopes in the world, including those at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory and the giant eight-meter telescopes of the Gemini Observator.

His new book Coloring the Universe describes how "giant telescopes work, what scientists learn with them, and how they are used to make color images. It talks about how otherwise un-seeable rays, such as radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays, are turned into recognizable colors. And it is filled with fantastic images taken in far-away pockets of the universe."

Travis Rector is a professor of astrophysics at UAA. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in Boulder.

For this event, there is free parking in the Library Lot, Library NE Lot and East Garage.

Note: Coloring the Universe is also the focus of a new planetarium show debuting Friday, Nov. 20.

November Archive