The Ultimate DXer, Jill Tarter, Director of SETI
Is the Pacificon 2008 Banquet Speaker

Jill Tarter,oversees the construction of the massive Allen Telescope Array, as part of the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe

PACIFICON 2008 proudly welcomes Doctor Jill Tarter as our Banquet speaker. She is Director of the Center for SETI Research (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) at the SETI Institute in Mountain View California. Jill got her start in science and electronics at an early age when her father introduced her to Amateur Radio, to a love of electronic devices and to the wonders of the cosmos. This led her to a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California in Berkely, and a distinguished career in radio astronomy. This year, Doctor Tarter will extend our reach to the ultimate DX - intergalactic radio communications - through the massive SETI Allen Telescope Array at the University of California's Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, California. Her topic for the Pacificon 2008 Banquet will be "The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence Through the New Allen Telescope Array".

Doctor Tarter served as Project Scientist for NASA's SETI program and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. She currently serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array. She is overseeing the construction and operation of this massive new radio array of small parabolic antenna dishes that will eventually number 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. Using the separate antennas as if they were one giant dish, radio astronomers will be able to map vast swaths of the sky cheaply and efficiently, and collect scientific data from the far reaches of the universe. The Allen Telescope Array provides simultaneous access to any frequency between 500 MHz and 11.2 GHz, with four separate frequency channels feeding a suite of signal processing backends that can produce wide-angle radio images of the sky. Doctor Tarter's search for intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is one of the most important scientific endeavors that mankind has undertaken.

Jill Tarter is generally thought to be the inspiration for Carl Sagan's main character in his novel "Contact", later played by Jodie Foster in the movie with the same name. Doctor Tarter is an inspiration to all of us, especially to our young people whose futures are ahead of them.

For further information and a video about SETI, Doctor Tarter, and the Allen Telescope Array, see the SETI Institute website.

For those wishing to purchase tickets for the Banquet Dinner, regretfully this event has been totally sold out. No further tickets are available for the Banquet Dinner.

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