David Dunham ("Observing Occultations", Small Tent, Friday 2:30 p.m.; "IOTA - Exploring the Cosmos with Occultations" Main Tent, Saturday 11:00 a.m.) began his astronomical pursuits as a teenager in California in the late 1950's. He first computed grazing occultations and promoted observations of these events in the early 1960's as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. David obtained his doctorate in celestial mechanics at Yale University in 1971. He has been President of the International Occultation Timing Association since its founding in 1975. Since 1976, his day job has been the computation of spacecraft orbits. He presently works at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

On Friday, David will conduct a "how to" workshop to help people who would like to observe occultations. Current techniques for timing and reporting occultations will be discussed, from getting started with visual observations to video and CCD methods. The cost of sensitive video cameras is now quite low, permitting more observers to make more accurate occultation timings.

On Saturday, David will talk about The International Occultation Timing Association and the contributions it has made to Astronomy. IOTA, which was founded in 1975, mainly to promote observation of lunar grazing occultations, soon diversified to also observe and analyze solar eclipses, occultations of stars by asteroids, and even lunar meteor impact flashes.