A Series of three popular talks
on topics in astronomy and history
held each fall in the
GE Theater at Proctors
Tuesdays at 7:30pm

Fall 2011

John W. Briggs - September 27, 2011
Adventures in Astronomy: 
Imaging the Solar System from Home

Modern technology allows smaller observatories to photograph and explore the sky at a level of detail unimaginable only a short time ago.  Backyard observatories can now record images of extraordinarily distant objects in our Universe, in color and in beautiful aesthetic detail.  It has also become more practical than ever before for privateobservatories to make exciting scientific measurements, thanks to computers, digital cameras, and specialized software.  Among the most interesting targets are the relatively nearby objects in solar solar system.  John W. Briggs, a native of Massachusetts now observing from a mountain site near Eagle, Colorado, has been charting minor planets and comets since the 1970s.  He will share celestrial photographs recorded with both simple and advanced equipment, explain the wonders of recent technical advances, and demonstrate free software tools that allow measurement and discovery.  As fun as astrophotography is on aesthetic grounds, it can be equally exciting when one's images can be used for discovery, exploration, and astronomical collaboration.

John W. Briggs is Astronomer in Residence at the HUT Observatory in Eagle, Colorado.  John's present work includes solar system astrometry, CCD photometry, and educational projects involving schools, science centers, and related organizations.  Recently a visiting scholar at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, John served for many years as an instrumentation engineer based at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory.  Among projects during that time were pioneering experiments with sodium laser "guide stars" now commonly used in adaptive optics; instrument commissioning for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; field engineering for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope Site Survey; and three visits to Antarctica, including a winter-over at South Pole Station for Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica. 

In earlier days John served as a parallax observer at Wesleyan's Van Vleck Observatory.  In residence at Mount Wilson, he observed chromospherically active stars for the long-running HK Project, the results of which suggest that stars have solar-like Maunder minima in their magnetic activity cycles.  John enjoys the history of astronomy and is a past-president of the Antique Telescope Society.  He also served on the editorial staff of Sky & Telescope magazine in the 1980s.  On May 22 of this year, participating in a campaign organized by MIT and Williams College, John recorded an occultation by Pluto using the 24-inch telescope at Middlebury College in Vermont.  He is currently organizing a workshop at Mount Wilson in association with the 2012 Transit of Venus.

Dave Latham - October 25, 2011
"Super Earths and Life"

Transiting planets are special.  The amount of light blocked by the planet as it passes in front of its host star sets the size of the planet (relative to the star).  If an orbit can be derived from Doppler spectroscopy of the host star, the light curve also provides the orientation of the orbit, leading to the mass of the planet (again relative to the star).  The resulting density for the planet can be used to constrain models for its structure and bulk properties. We are on the verge of using these techniques to characterize a population of Super Earths, planets in the range 1 to 10 Earth masses that may prove to be rocky or water worlds.  Space missions such as Kepler, Plato, and TESS promise to play key roles in the discovery and characterization of Super Earths.

Transiting planets also provide remarkable opportunities for spectroscopy of planetary atmospheres: transmission spectra during transit events and thermal emission throughout the orbit, calibrated during secondary eclipse. Spectroscopy of Super Earths will not be easy, but is not out of the question for the James Webb Space Telescope. Our long-range vision is to attack big questions, such as "Does the diversity of planetary environments map onto a diversity of biochemistries, or is there only one chemistry for life?"  A giant first step would be to study the diversity of global geochemistries on super-Earths and Earth analogs.

Dave Latham is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. He works on the discovery and characterization of planets around other stars, with the goal of identifying planets enough like the Earth so that water could be liquid on the surface and life as we know it might be comfortable.  NASA's Kepler mission is enabling important progress towards this goal.

Trudy E. Bell - November 15, 2011
"The Mysterious George Washington Hough & His Amazing Astronomical Inventions"

George Washington Hough (1836–1909) was assistant astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory, astronomer and later director of the Dudley Observatory (1860–1874), and director of the Dearborn Observatory in Illinois (1879–1909). A meticulous observational astronomer, he was known for his discovery of 648 close double stars, and four decades of systematic visual observations of Jupiter. He was also a prolific inventor, whose self-registering meteorological instruments and astronomical devices were adopted at a number of 19th-century observatories.
But his inventions also got him into trouble. Moreover, published sources are silent about exactly where he was and what he was doing for fully five years: from 1874 (when he left Dudley Observatory) until 1879 (when he resurfaced as director of the Dearborn Observatory). Indeed, since his death, he has fallen into such obscurity that sources conflict about basic facts of his life, such as what degrees he earned and from where, the full number of his publications, and the actual number of his children.
This illustrated talk will highlight Hough’s key inventions—and also reveal evidence that he fathered at least three children not mentioned in published sources. Also, the first complete bibliography of Hough’s publications—more than 130, which he himself never listed in one place—will be formally presented to the
Dudley Observatory.

Research, which included consulting unpublished correspondence and documents at eight institutions, was supported by the Herbert C. Pollock Award of the Dudley Observatory.

Trudy E. Bell earned an M.A. in the history of science and American intellectual history from NYU. A former editor for Scientific American and for IEEE Spectrum magazines, she has also served as managing editor of the Journal of the Antique Telescope Society. Nineteen of her 350+ popular articles about astronomy and space technology have received top journalism awards, including the David N. Schramm Award from the American Astronomical Society. She has been a Presidential Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She now serves as senior writer for the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HIPACC).

Notable Speakers from Previous Lectures

Dava Sobel - October 9, 2008
"Galileo and the International Year of Astronomy"

In October 1609, using his own handmade telescope, Galileo initiated the string of discoveries that opened the heavens to scientific scrutiny. In 2009, everyone--not just astronomy buffs, but non-astronomers with no prior experience or interest in the subject--will be able to see all the things Galileo saw, from the phases of Venus to the moons of Jupiter.

Also: Unveiling of Historic remake of "Dedication of the Dudley Observatory"

Prof. John Delano - November 13, 2008
“NASA’s search for life in the Universe”

Is life common, or is it rare, in the Universe?  What about planets orbiting other stars?  Are they common, or are they rare?  Are the basic molecular ingredients necessary for forming life elsewhere in the Universe common or rare?  These are just some of the questions, which have been asked by human beings for centuries, to be explored in this Skywatch Lecture.  Not only is NASA working hard on these, and other, questions, but some tantalizing answers have already emerged.  The United States Space Agency is currently designing instruments and spacecraft capable of detecting life on planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.  It currently seems reasonable to imagine that the current generation of humans will soon be able to point at stars in the night sky having planets where life will be known to exist.  That will be a startling point when we as a species can peer at a living Universe.

Dr. Sten Odenwald - December 11, 2008
"Cosmology in the 21stCentury"

Dark matter, dark energy, strings theory, extra dimensions and Higgs Bosons. These pivotal ideas in 21st Century cosmology are about to be put to the test as the European Large Hadron Collider continues to power-up since last September. How did the universe start? Why does it look the way it does today? What is the nature of mass, energy and dimension? With each new discovery, we are pushed towards ever-more subtle questions requiring the efforts of nations and armies of scientists and engineers to answer. Tonight, we will explore what questions have firm answers, and what questions remain open for the latest round of investigation. We will explore the subtle interplay between space, matter and dimensionality on the quantum scale, and the imprints they have on the cosmic scale. We will also look at what new discoveries await the latest experimental researches by LHC, neutrino and gravity wave telescopes, and future space observatories. Finally, we will step back and see how well the emerging picture of the physical universe matches our intuitive and religious views about creation and destiny.

Eric Chaisson - October 13, 2009
Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature

Using astronomical telescopes and biological microscopes, among a virtual arsenal of other tools of high technology, modern scientists are weaving a thread of understanding spanning the origin, existence, and destiny of all things. Now emerging is a unified scenario of the cosmos, including ourselves as sentient beings, based on the time-honored concept of change. From galaxies to snowflakes, from stars and planets to life itself, we are beginning to identify an underlying, ubiquitous pattern penetrating the fabric of all the natural sciences--a sweepingly encompassing view of the order and structure of every known class of object in our richly endowed Universe.

Michael Turner - November 10, 2009
"The Dark Side of the Universe: Beyond stars and the starstuff we are made of"

The sky is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, all lit up by their stars. But, stars account for less than one percent of the material in the Universe, and galaxies are held together by a new form of matter -- dark matter -- that accounts for 1/3 of the stuff in the Universe. The other 2/3 exists as in an even more mysterious form -- dark energy -- and is causing the expansion of the Universe to speed up, rather than slow down.

Owen Gingerich - December 8, 2009
"Kepler, Galileo, and the Birth of Modern Astronomy"

2009 is the 400th anniversary of Kepler's Astronomia nova, and of the first astronomical use of the telescope, especially by Galileo. I will argue that more important than Kepler's elliptical orbits and the law of areas was his pioneering insistence on astronomy based on physical causes. Particularly remarkable about Galileo's use of the telescope was the way in which he used his observations to challenge the traditional geocentric cosmology. In very different fashions these two contemporary astronomers hastened the astronomical revolution and became the fathers of modern astronomy.

Anna Frebel - September 28, 2010
"Our cosmic ancestors: The oldest stars in the Universe "

There are stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy that are almost as old as the Universe itself, which is some 14 billion years. I will present some of those stellar fossils, and show what we can learn from studying them. This includes the origin and evolution of the chemical elements from which we humans and the world around us are made off. We really all are made from 'star stuff' and even a little bit of Big Bang material.

Dr. Anna Frebel is currently a Clay Fellow at Harvard Center for Astrophysics. Her research interests broadly cover how the oldest stars can be used to learn about the very first stars, their supernova yields, and stellar nucleosynthesis. She is best known for her discoveries and subsequent spectroscopic analyses of the oldest stars, and how they can be employed to uncover information about the time shortly after the Big Bang. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and received her PhD from the Australian National University's Mt. Stromlo Observatory in 2006. Since then has received a numerous awards for her work.

Alex Filippenko - October 19, 2010
"Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe"

Observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) show that the expansion of the Universe is now speeding up, rather than slowing down due to gravity as expected.  Over the largest distances, our Universe seems to be dominated by a mysterious, repulsive "dark energy" that stretches the very fabric of space faster and faster with time.

Alex Filippenko, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the world's most highly cited research astronomers. Winner of the top teaching awards at UC Berkeley, he was named the National Professor of the Year in 2006. He has produced several astronomy video courses for The Teaching Company and appears in numerous television documentaries.

Jay Pasachoff - November 30, 2010
"The Sun and Solar Eclipses"

Professor Pasachoff will describe the most recent of a series of eclipse observations, including Greece in 2006, Siberia in 2008, China in 2009, and Easter Island in 2010, and place ground-based eclipse observing in the context of contemporary solar research from the ground and from space.

Jay Pasachoff is especially known for his scientific work at total solar eclipses; the total solar eclipse of 11 July 2010 was his 51st! He worked at the Harvard College Observatory and Caltech before going to Williams College in 1972. He received the 2003 Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society, "For his eloquent and informative writing of textbooks from junior high through college, For his devotion to teaching generations of students, For sharing with the world the joys of observing eclipses, For his many popular books and articles on astronomy, For his intense advocacy on behalf of science education in various forums, For his willingness to go into educational nooks where no astronomer has gone before"

Broadcasts

Dudley Observatory Skywatch Lectures
Broadcast on PUBLIC ACCESS, TV-16. Watch for listings

DVDs are available from Dudley Observatory