Schedule of Events

Star Parties at the Dark-Sky Helderberg Site

Talks and activities, followed by observing.
July 9, 8pm – Lost in Space? Learn to Read Star Maps!
CANCELED - August 27, 8pm – Deep Sky Objects, or “Nebulae, Galaxies & Clusters, Oh My!”
September 24, 7pm – How to use that telescope that you got for _____ (fill in the blank).
October 15, 7pm – Lunar Observing, or “Fazed by the Moon?”
November 26, 7pm – Deep Sky Objects, or “Nebulae, Galaxies & Clusters, Oh My!”

588 Middle Road 12053, or http://ow.ly/59JAZ  for directions

FALL 2011

Save the Dates:
September 27
October 25
November 15

Tuesday Evenings at 7:30
in the GE Theatre at Proctors

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 workincludes 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).