On behalf of the whole team at Berkeley SETI, including our interns, who really do play a crucial part in building the infrastructure for acquisition and analysis of data from our various projects, thank you! We met and exceeded our fundraising goal, and we are in a great position to be able to send six of our students to meetings to present their work. Three of them have already registered for the American Astronomical Society meeting in January in Washington DC, and are excited about the opportunity to share their projects!

Our funding comes from a range of sources at Berkeley SETI. Some of our big grants are earmarked for particular projects so we are always grateful for every donation that helps us enable things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. We hope you'll keep up with us and our efforts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram at @BerkeleySETI, and once again, thank you!

For those of you who requested a shout-out on Facebook, please check out the October 30 post on our Facebook page, and for those of you who requested other perks, we'll be in touch soon with more details.

Steve and the Berkeley SETI team

A huge thank-you to all of our generous donors who helped us reach our $7000 goal to fund five students to attend meetings. With a week left in the campaign we're announcing a stretch goal of $14k so that we can provide for five additional students in future to have this opportunity too. For those of you who have donated already, could you please help us to spread the word about this campaign? For those who have not yet had the chance to donate, there's just a week left to do so!

In this video update, Steve gives a brief overview of the campaign; and our intern Ryan, who your donations have enabled to attend the American Astronomical Society meeting in DC in January, shares his excitement about his research (along with a bit of Cal spirit - Go Bears!).

We're just over a week in to our fundraiser, and already three quarters of the way towards our goal. We'd like to extend our sincerest thanks to those who have already donated. Your generosity will fully fund three of our interns to present their results at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Washington, DC, in January. Many of us on the Berkeley SETI team credit attendance at meetings like this, early in our careers, with inspiring and equipping us to pursue our goals of working as professional astronomers. We're sure that this experience will be just as formative for our current crop of interns.

For those reading this update who have not yet had chance to donate, there's still time to help out. We work intensively with about 6 or 7 students each summer, as well as a handful of students who are engaged in research in addition to their regular classes during the school year. Every additional donation will help us send more students to share their research. The three students attending the AAS meeting in January will be presenting work on identifying and fixing problems in our data, tracking interference from satellites that pass through our telescope's beam, and calibrating our Green Bank Telescope data using observations of known pulsars. We also have student interns who have done great work on looking for laser signals in Automated Planet Finder data, building visualization tools for the status of our instruments, running deep learning algorithms on our radio observations, quantifying signal detection efficiency, and many other topics. We'd love to give more of them the chance to attend meetings in future!

Thanks again to all of the existing donors. For those of you who have donated at levels that come with perks, we'll be in touch once the campaign ends with more information about how to claim these.

Wishing you all the best from the whole team here at Berkeley SETI Research Center!

Steve Croft

Researcher and Education Programs Coordinator