November 2010
President's Message: November 2010
By Tom ThibaultFellow Skyscrapers Members,
October has come and gone and what a great month it was for Skyscrapers. October 1st and 2nd was AstroAssembly which was enjoyed by many of us. We kicked off the event on Friday evening with presentations by Mike Umbricht, Glenn Jackson, Al Hall, and Bob Napier. On Saturday the 2nd, we had a fantastic line-up of speakers that included our featured speaker, Bob Berman of Astronomy Magazine. We were all treated to beautiful autumn New England weather the entire day. The grounds at Seagrave looked great thanks to our Trustee’s and all the volunteers who helped in preparing for the event. We again had the grilles fired up and dogs and burgers were on the menu, perfect food for the day that was bestowed upon us.
As noted in last month’s letter, Dave Huestis’s surprise was revealed, we are now in possession of Frank Evan Seagrave’s infamous hat, which was generously donated by Lewis Boss’s granddaughter recently along with some photos, books, and documents. We were all also treated to the restored Alvan Clark telescope in all its glory. Al Hall and Dick Parker with many volunteers dedicated numerous hours of time, which can only be described as a labor of love based on the end result. Jim Brenek did a great job refurbishing the observatory, a new floor, observing table, and many more touches that brought it all together.
Throughout the day astronomical viewing was taking place, telescopes and binoculars at the swap tables were setup and providing views of the moon. Gerry Dyck’s solar scope provided nice views of prominences coming off Sol’s limb. Jack Szelka brought his homemade 12-inch Dob and was providing views of Venus. Venus was also the target for the Alvan Clark. Many members and guests took advantage of peering through our beautifully restored refractor. It was stunning with its fire-engine red painted tube and freshly polished and lacquered brass fittings, I’m sure Frank Seagrave is smiling from above.
The finale to this year’s AstroAssembly, was our banquet held at the Scituate Community Center. We all enjoyed a great catered meal, presentation of raffle prizes to our lucky winners, and a stimulating presentation by Bob Berman. Bob’s talk on “Light and Color in the Universe” was entertaining and informative and was well received by all who attended.
I can honestly say we will be hard pressed to top this year’s AstroAssembly. Skyscrapers really put on a great event this year with the help of many volunteers. Thank you all. Let me extend a special thank you from all of our members to Steve Hubbard and Kathy Siok. Steve and Kathy were instrumental for the success of this year’s AstroAssembly and deserve the praise and thanks of our society. Thank you Steve and Kathy.
I would also like to again extend a special thank you to Gene Kusmierz and his wife for their generous donation of the ocular lenses to restore the Alvan Clark to its original configuration. In addition, Gene’s three children matched his donation based on the enthusiasm shown by Gene and his description of our society and its dedicated members.
And thanks to the many vendors who provided items for our raffle and door prizes. We appreciate their generous support of Skyscrapers and our annual AstroAssembly event.
Clear Skies
Tom Thibault
Skyscrapers
President
Running the 100y DASCH: Back to the Future for Time Domain Astronomy
Josh GrindlayOver the past five years we have designed, built, tested and now begun to operate a very high speed astronomical plate scanner to initiate DASCH: Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard. Our goal is digitize and put on line the ~550,000 glass plates of the Harvard College Observatory collection, the world’s largest and most complete (full sky) coverage of repeated images of the sky from c. 1880 - 1985 (with some gaps). With generous support from the National Science Foundation, we have built the scanner and now have developed a high speed processing Pipeline for accurate astrometry (~1arcsec) and photometry (~0.1mag) and high speed storage and access of the data in a MySQL database. Other steps need to be done to begin “production scanning” of up to 400 plates per day, which would allow the full project to be completed in 3-4 years. We are seeking volunteers to help with the scanning and plate processing. I will describe the overall project and how it fits in to the emerging field of “Time Domain Astronomy” as well as some of our early results.
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