Astronomy in the Inland Northwest
Great ASTROCON Speakers

Ed Mannerly - The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Friday, July 16, 1999

The purpose of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Project is to create a 3-Dimensional survey of galaxy positions.

1. To discover the structure of galaxies in the universe.
2. To study what was the nature of the universe before the Big Bang, and to find out what clues the current structure of the universe can give us,
3. Find out the answer to the Missing Mass Question. A 3-D survey of millions of galaxies might provide the answer.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is being done with a specially designed telescope installed at the Apache Point Observatory, at a site 9,100 feet in the mountains of New Mexico, near Alamogordo. The Sloan Telescope is mounted on an alt-az mount with a wind baffle to block wind vibration which blows up the side of the mountain from the desert below. The baffle also helps extract heat from the telescope tube assembly. The entire instrument is located in a roll-off roof building. It has a 3.5-meter objective with a 3-degree field of view for wide angle images on the attached CCD camera.

The spectrograph mounted on the telescope uses modern fiber optical techniques to transmit images from the focal plane of the instrument to the actual CCD chips recording the images. These fiber optical cables are calibrated to known galaxy positions of the field to be spectrographed. The CCD camera array is made up of 20 2x2 inch CCD chips, which tracks the sky in the most efficient great circle for the objects being imaged.

The URL of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is http://www.sdss.org

Astronaut F. Storey Musgrave

Friday Night, July 16, 1999

Astronaut Storey Musgrave was guest celebrity at Alcon 99, and gave a presentation to the general public which was held in the Arena of Eastern Washington State University. He was also the Keynote Speaker at the Saturday night banquet that traditionally closes ALCON. About 500 people, including convention registrants, attended the public presentation. Tickets to the public were $5.00 each and $3.00 for children.

Storey’s presentations stressed the beauty of working and floating in space. He says that when in space, it feels as if you can reach out and touch the universe. Through his exquisite photographic images, he strives to share these feelings with his audiences.

Dr Musgrave says that his goal in creating a photographic image is the “perfection of the moment,” an attempt to show what the eye could see if the viewer were actually in space aboard the space shuttle. His restraints in creating outer space photography are hand-held cameras loaded with slow film used for taking photos from a moving vehicle. His appealing images are simple technically, but the pictures captured in the focal plane of his camera communicate the feel of actually being in space.

Dancing across his screen are a continuous array of images of sunsets, rainbows, and night views of the Earth as seen from space. The Sun, Moon and stars track across the sky and are recorded as the shuttle travels around the Earth at 16,000 mile per hour, in orbits lasting one and one half hours each. Pink clouds, oceanic sunsets and sunrises, the green flash, or sprite, in a sunset photograph from outer space, all are subjects of his stunning visual images.

Musgrave feels that an organism keyed to gravity needs to perceive the presence of gravity for a photographic image to be successful. The introduction of the human element into a perfect composition, seen as the reflection of a face or a hand on a glass window pane, adds an incredible sense of power to a successful space photo. The crystal clarity of a familiar land form seen from an unfamiliar perspective lends a feeling of majesty and awe to the mystery of space.

Story Musgrave has a unique ability to communicate the emotional impact of being in space. He has begun working with the Disney Company to bring Space back to Earth, and to revisit spaceflight, in an attempt to capture the human experience in space and move it into art.

Story Musgrage says it is the journey, not the destination, that is important. In his repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, he did the best he could, making a powerful research tool function correctly. Now back on Earth, the journey continues.

1999 marks the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, on July 20, 1969.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tothemoon/ap11sans.html

IDA Presentation: “Be Aware. Think About Glare!”

Tim Hunter and Bob Gent of the International Dark Sky Association gave several presentations to small groups, thus allowing a high degree of interaction with their audiences.

The IDA presentations stressed that both professional and amateur astronomers need to be involved directly in the fight against light pollution for it to be successful. Less than one percent of astronomers, either pro or am, in the US are members of IDA. And yet they will all profess to be concerned about the slowly declining availability of skies suitable for high quality astronomical observations.

The best way to deal with light pollution is to prevent problems before they happen, rather combat them after they happen. A good example is the problem with the annual Stellafane Convention in Vermont. The State of Vermont and the citizens of Springfield, VT, have already voted to establish a minimum-security prison three miles from the Stellafane site. This is an historical site that has been in use since the late 1930’s. Yet the proposed prison will install high intensity lighting that will ruin the skies for the thousands of amateur astronomers who attend this convention. All for the safety of 350 prisoners.

When a situation such as the one at Stellafane happens, it is too late to be proactive. A much harder battle must now be fought. It is both easier and more economical to find ways of preventing such a situation before it happens, rather that react after it does.

Promoting better and more economical lighting solutions can be an effective way to sell proper lighting techniques and equipment to governmental entities. And sometimes, if you encounter a lighting problem at home, just asking for consideration from a neighbor may be all it takes. It is also important to remember that many local businesses and governments are not aware of either the effects or the costs of bad lighting.

You can find out more about the International Dark Sky Association and its fight against light pollution at its web site: http://www.darksky.org.

The International Dark Sky Association
3225 First Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85719-2103
(520) 293-3198
E-mail: ida@darksky.org

Ed Flaspoehler
Vice-President, AAAA