Southeast Section APS meeting, LSU and LLO, Oct 2010
The very day that LIGO Livingston staff began decommissioning the initial LIGO detector to make room for Advanced LIGO, LSU and LIGO hosted a meeting of the Southeast Section of the American Physical Society (SESAPS) and a program for local science teachers.
LSC/Virgo joint collaboration meeting Hannover, Sept 2013
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo collaboration held a joint meeting in Hannover, Germany. Included here are some photos of the data analysis computing cluster and of the GEO 600 detector site.
LSC/Virgo joint collaboration meeting, Nice, Mar 2014
The LSC and Virgo teams met again in Nice, France. At the banquet, the two collaboration leaders signed our data-sharing agreement.
Advanced LIGO Dedication, LHO, May 2015
After 5 years of installation we gathered at LIGO Hanford to celebrate the dedication of the two Advanced LIGO detectors.
LSC meetings at LLO to prepare for discovery publication, Jan 2016
After months of careful analysis and the preparation of a discovery paper draft, Gaby led a set of in-person and teleconference meetings leading to the Collaboration's approval to publish our result. Many colleagues were in town for LIGO PAC meeting and a software face-to-face.
Announcement day press conference at LLO, Feb 11, 2016
On the day that the NSF, LIGO and Virgo announced the discovery of gravitational waves, LIGO Livingston hosted its own press conference for local and regional media, partners and collaborators. Photos taken by Mike Fyffe, LLO.
Visit to LLO by NSF Director France Córdova, Feb 16, 2016
The National Science Foundation Director, France Córdova, visited LIGO Livingston the week after our discovery announcement. She toured the site and then met, congratulated and thanked our staff for their hard work. Photos taken by Eddy Perez, LSU.
LIGO Scientific Collaboration/ Virgo Collaboration meeting held in Pasadena Hilton, March 2016
Photos are largely from the banquet and after-dinner remarks by Rai Weiss, Stan Whitcomb, Albrecht Rüdiger and Jim Hough, hosted by Gabriela González, about the early work that led to long-baseline gravitational-wave detectors..
American Physical Society meeting, held in Salt Lake City, April 2016
Photos from the inaugural meeting of the APS Division on Gravitational Physics, which had been until then the Topical Group on Gravitation, and of a dinner to celebrate the birthday of Beverly Berger, who was the founder of the Topical Group, among other things.
LLO Staff Dinner with Rai Weiss, August 2016
Livingston staff, students and visitors enjoyed a night out with Rai Weiss, who wanted to give us his impressions of where we were coming from and where we were going, thanking the staff for the hard work that led to the discovery.
LIGO/ Virgo Collaboration meeting, Glasgow, August 2016
The University of Glasgow hosted our summer '16 LVC meeting, which featured a number of excursions and (as seen in these photos) Scottish dancing at the banquet.
Spring and summer lab photos from 2017
Photos from various LIGO activities and gatherings in spring/summer 2017, including the LIGO/ SUBR participation in the NSF Arc of Science in Washington, DC, and some action in the control room.
LIGO/ Virgo Collaboration meeting, CERN, August 2017
CERN hosted our summer '17 LVC meeting, which brought our collaboration to Europe's massive particle physics lab near Geneva, featuring a post-meeting exchange about practical and speculative matters between gravitational and particle physicists.
LIGO Livingston events, August 2017
The first gravitational-wave signal from a neutron star binary merger, on Aug. 17, 2017, led to some low-key celebration at LLO, well before the papers were written and word got out. We also gathered that month to see a partial solar eclipse.
Stockholm, December 2017
Three founders and decisive contributors to LIGO, Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, were awarded the 2017 Nobel prize in physics. A bunch of us dressed up and flew to Stockholm to congratulate them, enjoying each other's company while watching the ceremony on television from a Grand Hotel meeting room.
LIGO/Virgo collaboration meeting at Sonoma State, March 2018
Banquet photos from the March 2018 joint collaboration meeting of the the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration held at Sonoma State University in California.
LIGO Laboratory leadership retreat, April 2018
Photos from a dinner at the end of day one of a two-day meeting of LIGO Lab. leaders from LIGO Livingston, Hanford, MIT and Caltech, held near Caltech's campus in Pasadena, in April 2018.
LSU May 2018
At LSU in May, 2018, we celebrated Gaby Gonzalez's induction to the NAS with a dinner hosted by LSU's president (only two photos by me, though). We also enjoyed Rai Weiss's visit to receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the commencement address to the College of Science. I was pretty far back in the audience, but the long lens did its job. Later that day, Rai joined the Physics and Astronomy department and others to answer (and ask) questions about many things.
APS plaque dedication 2018
On June 20, 2018, the American Physical Society dedicated a pair of plaques designating the two LIGO observatory facilities as historic physics sites. There were many guests. including F. King Alexander, LSU President, France Cordoba, NSF Director, Roger Falcone, APS President, Paul Halpern, APS, David Reitze, Caltech - LIGO Lab Director, Mike Landry, LHO Head, Rainer Weiss, MIT prof emeritus, Mark Coles, NSF, Fred Raab, Lab assoc director, Mike Zucker, Caltech and former LLO head, Gaby González, LSU and recent LSC spokesperson, Sam Bentley, LSU CoS, John Detusa, LSU P&A, Jorge Pullin, LSU P&A, and Stephen Beck, LSU ORED. The dedication photos were taken by Cody Willhite of LSU Strategic Communications.
Jimfest, February 2019
Jim Hough, Prof. at Glasgow University, was made a Knight Bachelor of the British Empire in January, 2019. To celebrate, the University of Glasgow sponsored a meeting, "Gravitational waves - past, present and future," the following month. Many of his colleagues collaborators across several generations participated.
Wave wall and signs 2018 - 2019
There was a request for some fresh photos of the LIGO SEC wave wall in Sept., 2018, some with wind and some without. Also, 2019 photos of LIGO Livingston's new signs that include an NSF logo, and of the APS plaque mounted on a boulder near the LLO OSB entrance.
Yerkes Observatory tour at LVC meeting in Wisconsin, March 2019
During the 2019 LVC meeting in Wisconsin, we enjoyed an excursion to the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay. The University of Chicago kindly agreed to let us in, despite the facility's having been closed the previous year. We were guided by experienced U. Chicago astronomers who came back for the event.
Saulsonfest, October 2019
Peter Saulson's career was celebrated in October, 2019, at a meeting called, "Gravitational waves in the Adirondacks," in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. Judging from the number of photos, you can see I enjoyed the surroundings.
LLO holiday dinner party 2019
On December 10, 2019, we had a winter holiday dinner party for the Livingston staff, visitors and their guests to recognize the hard work they did to prepare for and carry out the O3 run. The venue was the Riverfront Gallery Room at The Estuary, a building in the Water Campus built over the Mississippi batture.