Jacqueline Woods, “Black Sun No. 30,” 2012.

Up next in a series of talks connected with the Bates College Museum of Art exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography are presentations by a professor of astronomy from Yale and by an artist showing work in the show.

At 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 6, astronomy professor Jeffrey Kenney gives the talk Imaging the Universe, addressing how we interpret beautiful images of astronomical objects and how such images are taken.

California artist Jacqueline Woods discusses her work in an talk titled Discovering the Black Sun at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11.

Both events take place in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. A reception in the museum, also located in the arts center, follows each presentation. The events are free and the public is welcome.

The Bates College Museum of Art is open free to the public Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesday evenings through May until 9 p.m. For directions and more information, please visit bates.edu/museum/ or call 207-786-6158.

Yale astronomer Jeffrey Kenney ’80.

A member of the Bates class of 1980, Kenney will offer a lavishly illustrated presentation that will also explore what different colors in astral imaging mean to scientists and what images teach us about the nature of things in the universe. He’ll present remarkable images of evolved and exploding stars, star-forming nebulae, and interacting galaxies and clusters.

“Because Starstruck showcases images taken at the confluence of art and science, each image has something to teach us about our universe,” says exhibition organizer Anthony Shostak, the museum’s curator of education.

“Whether it’s judging the age of a star based on its color or discerning the elements in a colorful image of a nebula, Jeff is an ideal person to give us some insight into some of what the art has to offer.”

Woods is one of nine artists invited to participate in Starstruck whose work forms a core around which the juried portion of the exhibition was built. Her cameraless photographs in the show were inspired by celestial phenomena such as eclipses, and are a response to historic photographs by Ansel Adams and Minor White.

Teachers in all levels of education find Starstruck is a perfect vehicle to explore a variety of subjects outside the classroom, including astronomy and physical science, history, geography, literature, religion, and math. Group tours are welcome by appointment: 207-786-8302.

Astronomer Jeffrey Kenney '80 discusses galactic clusters.

Jeffrey Kenney ’80, an astronomy professor at Yale University, visits campus to discuss interactions within galactic clusters at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in Carnegie Science Hall, Room 204, 44 Campus Ave.

The talk, titled The Fate of Galaxies in Clusters, is intended for a mainstream audience and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6490.

Clusters are the harshest environments for galaxies, and in clusters galaxies undergo many processes that change them. Some are changed by gravitational disturbances including collisions or mergers, whereas others have their star-forming gas stripped out from the stars, leaving “dead” spiral galaxies.

Focusing on disturbances in the Virgo cluster, which consists of 1,300-2,000 galaxies and is the nearest to Earth, Kenney will explain how scientists determine which processes have acted on the galaxies and how they interpret the consequences of these interactions for galactic evolution.

In his research, Kenney explores trends in cluster interactions through targeted studies of individual galaxies, using data from ground- and space-based telescopes, including the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes.

Kenney graduated from Bates in 1980 with a degree in physics and earned his doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1987. He joined Yale’s faculty in 1991 and chaired the astronomy department from 2005 to this year.