For those who haven’t been before the North East Astro Fair, or NEAF, is the world largest Space Expo. All the great and good from the astronomy world have booths there. Televue, Takahashi, Astro-Physics, Lunt, Skywatcher. The list goes on. You also get the smaller specialised manufactures like Starlight Xpress and nPAE. This year’s speakers included the first female Space Shuttle Commander, Eileen Collins and Fred Haise, the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 13. The Expo is held on Rockland Community College sports hall with one of their lecture theatres for the headline talks. There are lots of other activities going on over the two days includes kids events, solar outreach and a smaller side lecture theatre with its own agenda. Walking around NEAF is like astronomers’ wonderland!
NEAF is really the only opportunity to get up close to manufacturers like Astro-Physics and PlaneWave Instruments as they don’t tend to travel outside of the USA. A trip to New York is always worth it and even more so when you combine it with NEAF.
nPAE was in booth 128 and we got to make lots of new friends and catch up with old ones. Our man on the ground even got to meet Eileen Collins - he was totally star struck - shake hands with her and pose for photos! He said it was better than meeting Mark Hamill! Some people have all the luck…
Big shouts out to Bruce, our booth sales guy who made a great impact, and Frank for organising everything!
See you next year
(Click photos for full size)
The complete NEAF photos gallery is at this link:
https://www.npae.net/neaf-2023-review/
