I’m very excited to announce the advent of SETIcon, a convention about astronomy, SETI, and Star Trek!

Yeah, you read that right. SETIcon guests will include many astronomers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, including David Morrison, Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, and Jill Tarter. Other astronomers will include my friends Alex Filippenko, Debra Fischer, and Kevin Grazier, and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart.

Oh! And me. I’ll be there, too.

But besides astronomers and astronomy and hardcore science talks, there will also be several actors from the scifi genre there, including John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox from Enterprise; I met him at Dragon*Con and he is smart, funny, and just a generally nice guy) and Tim Russ (Tuvok from Voyager, who is an amateur astronomer). More guests have been invited, and I’m hoping to have one or two cool announcements concerning them as they confirm.

There will be panels, talks (I’ll most likely give my Death from the Skies! talk) and I just bet Kevin and I will do one of our famous panels where we nitpick movies and each other. Mostly each other. That’s a lot of fun.

SETIcon will be August 13 – 15 in Santa Clara, California. Unbelievably, tickets are only $20 a day or $35 for the weekend. That’s really cheap for something like this! Of course, more expensive tickets get you more stuff, so explore your options. I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll be fun, and I hope to see lots of BABloggees there.