From The President
Hello OSSC Members and Friends,
We are off to a grand beginning of the 2025-2026 OSSC year with our first regular meeting in the books and our 2nd meeting just ahead. Our September meeting at the Torrance Holiday Inn was an excellent start with our guest speaker, Dr. Joel Sercel, CEO of TransAstra, telling us about their Sutter Turn Key Observatory (TKO), and also how they are using that and their custom Theia software to detect spacecraft and asteroids that would otherwise be invisible. We are still working on uploading all our speakers’ presentations to our website for this year and hope to have that done very soon.
This month we are back to my favorite topic, ‘Quantum Technology’ where are friend Doug Finke from Global Quantum Intelligence will give us an update on the state of the quantum ecosystem and what you can expect and when. It is really a moving target, as I try to keep up, and read Doug’s Quantum Computing Reports regularly; along with a few other newsletters I subscribe to. We met Doug when we had our first meeting on Quantum back in June 2019, just after the National Quantum Initiative became law. And our Nov.2022 meeting had Doug and I give a joint presentation on the Quantum Industry and Education.
More on that a bit later in this newsletter; along with some more Quantum Technology Developments here in Southern California.
A few of our OSSC Leaders have been working behind the scenes for some time to improve members’ experiences with our website, meetings and outreach events. We would like to survey our members and friends to get direct feedback so we have better ideas of what you would like us to do on your behalf. If you have any idea about surveying society members or questions you would like to pose to our members and friends, please send them to one of our Leaders (myself included). You can find all our contact information at: Contact - Optical Society of Southern California.
One of the ‘behind the scenes' activities our leaders have been working on is to implement using Microsoft 365 for non-profits and Microsoft Teams. Many of our leaders use these online business tools in their daily jobs and the rest of us are learning how to use them too. If you are reading this and would like to lend some of your time and experiences to the OSSC Leadership Team, just let us know and we will welcome you to our online experience.
Wishing You Well on your Optics Journey, and
Hoping to see you soon at an OSSC meeting or event,
Donn Silberman
OSSC President 2025-2026