Santa Cruz, California in the context of "University of California, Santa Cruz"

Santa Cruz County (/ˌsæntə ˈkruːz/ ), officially the County of Santa Cruz, is a county on the Pacific coast of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 270,861. The county seat is Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz County comprises the Santa Cruz–Watsonville, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is also included in the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area. The county is on the California Central Coast, south of the San Francisco Bay Area region. The county forms the northern coast of the Monterey Bay, with Monterey County forming the southern coast.

Central California is generally thought of as the middle third of the U.S. state of California, north of Southern California (which includes Los Angeles and San Diego) and south of Northern California (which includes San Francisco and San Jose). It includes the northern portion of the San Joaquin Valley (which itself is the southern portion of the Central Valley, beginning at the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta), part of the Central Coast, the central hills of the California Coast Ranges and the foothills and mountain areas of the central Sierra Nevada.

Central California is considered to be west of the crest of the Sierra Nevada. East of the Sierra is Eastern California. The largest cities in the region (over 50,000 population), from most to least populous, are Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, Modesto, Elk Grove, Salinas, Visalia, Clovis, Tracy, Merced, Manteca, Turlock, Tulare, Madera, Lodi, Porterville, Santa Cruz, Hanford, and Delano. Over time, droughts and wildfires have increased in frequency and become less seasonal and more year-round, further straining the region's water security.

David Murray Schneider (November 11, 1918, Brooklyn, New York – October 30, 1995, Santa Cruz, California) was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.

Lockheed Martin Space is one of the four major business divisions of Lockheed Martin. It has its headquarters in Littleton, Colorado, with additional sites in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; Sunnyvale, California; Santa Cruz, California; Huntsville, Alabama; and elsewhere in the United States and United Kingdom. The division employs about 20,000 people, and its products include commercial and military satellites, space probes, missile defense systems, NASA's Orion spacecraft, and the Space Shuttle external tank.

Monterey Bay is a bay of the Pacific Ocean located on the coast of the U.S. state of California, south of the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco itself is further north along the coast, by about 75 miles (120 km), accessible via CA 1 and US 101.

Santa Cruz is located at the north end of the bay, and Monterey is on the Monterey Peninsula at the south end. The "Monterey Bay Area" is a regional term used to describe the Monterey Bay-adjacent Central Coast communities of Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito counties. The three counties, along with Monterey Bay-adjacent cities, collaborate in the Association of Monterey Bay Governments (AMBAG) on regional issues and come together for events like the State of the Region hosted by the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership.

Otter 841 (born c. 2018), also known as Sea Otter 841, is a female southern sea otter (Enhydra lutris nereis) who attracted publicity in mid-2023 for her aggressive interactions with surfers and kayakers off the coast of Santa Cruz, California.

841 was born in captivity at the Coastal Science Campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz and raised at Monterey Bay Aquarium by her mother, Otter 723, with minimal human intervention. In June 2020 she was released into the wild at Moss Landing Wildlife Area.

The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the Sun's upper limb; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.

Green flashes occur because the Earth's atmosphere can cause the light from the Sun to separate, via wavelength varying refraction, into different colors. Green flashes are a group of similar phenomena that stem from slightly different causes, and therefore, some types of green flashes are more common than others.