Vol. 28 No. 3 December 1998 http://physics.weber.edu/oas/oas.html

THE DECEMBER MEETING

The regular meeting of the Ogden Astronomical Society will be held this Thursday December 10, 1998 at 7:30 p.m. in the Ott Planetarium on the Weber State University campus. Members are encouraged to bring friends and students.

This meeting should be of special interest to those desirous of grinding their own mirror and building their own telescope. A video, "Dobson Builds A Telescope", featuring John Dobson himself, will be the feature. See you there.

THE PRESIDENT'S PARSEC

Greetings Earthlings.

Have you ever wondered about the way some people are? No not those people. Here is an example. Last night I took my scope over to a friends and showed him and his wife the planets moon etc. After about 20 minutes he asked me "Just what do you get out of looking at all that stuff?" (mind you, he really couldn't imagine a reason).

Now to me the answer to that is obvious. So obvious in fact I had difficulty answering it. Not so much because of my inability to articulate the concepts, emotions and dynamics involved, but it was more of a case of him being a shallow, vapid creature. Not really, he's a good friend, but that sense of wonder is something that is inerrant within some of us and, for others, attempts at stimulating it will fail because they have a lump of coal where their wonder button should be.

Have you ever wondered about some people? No, not those people. I mean us, the astronomers. Can you think of any other group that is so anxious to share with others the same thrill they experience and the response they get? If you don't think so stick an avid fly fisherman on your front lawn next Halloween and see what kind of crowd he attracts as he explains the finer points of casting. All the kids will be avoiding your side of the street within minutes. Or, picture the hundreds of families that would drive out to White Rock Bay so a local bowling club could demonstrate the proper approach shot to pick up that elusive 7-10 split. Or how about this ( and I apologize for where this is going but I think Dave Berry is channeling through me at the moment) what if the O.A.S. members all had really neat microscopes instead. and every summer we went to Monte Cristo for a weekend. We would line up the picnic tables, prepare our specimens, and place our instruments in neat rows on each side of the table. Then some of us would go through the camps inviting people to come over and look at pine needles and bug guts. After a few hours we would have our choice of campsites.

Do you understand what I am saying? It has to be at night, it has to be with telescopes, it has to be the heavens. Nothing else has pushed the wonder button over the centuries like the stars . Modern man and ancient man both experience the heavens the same way at the deepest level. There is a sense of expectancy, of waiting to hear a message or see a sign and I'm not referring to anything as mundane as E.T.s. The proofs of this are the legends imposed on the constellations from early times as man tried to make the heavens speak. And the modern man can watch all the NOVA

episodes of the "Mysteries of Space" with all the technical information and the stunning color pictures, but when he drives out to Antelope Island and looks thru our telescopes and stands under the Milky Way, he

touches something and something touches him. It's an experience that transcends facts and fables. That is what is so fulfilling about what we do. People experience that primal sense of wonder for the first time

at our telescopes and we are there when it happens. But still there are those people like my friend who will walk away from your scope and ask with a bored voice " what else ya got?" Those people can't be reached.

Our mission is to keep showing the heavens to who ever is next in line and you'll know when that wonder button is pushed by the look in their eyes. The rest will be history

The Prez.

P.S. We are going to watch the John Dobson telescope making video this meeting. Be sure to come and watch the living legend ply his craft. He is definitely one of a kind.

A NOTE FROM THE PLANETARIUM DIRECTOR, DR. JOHN

Observatory Project:

I only have one update on the observatory project. I have received a quote for the concrete structure that will become the storage room. It is a preformed concrete room that is 10.5 ft X 24 ft X 9 ft (outside dimensions). It comes in two sections (halves) that are top and bottom. The weight of each section is 54,000 pounds. The price is $8,170 delivered although the contractor is responsible for offloading and setting the sections. This price is for a bare vault and doesn't include anything else. There is a single opening for double 3 ft wide doors (6 feet total).

Planetarium Updates:

We start our Christmas show on Dec. 2 and will run EVERY Wed. night in Dec. It is the usual holiday fare:

6:30 The Sky Tonight 7:30 A Season of Light 8:30 Star Party

The new show starting on January 13 is "Mars: Return to the Red Planet." We will be closed on January 6th. For those OAS members that have been helping out with the weekly star parties, they need to know that there will be no star party on the 6th. (Thank you very much for the help!)

On Wed. Dec. 9 we will be hosting the assistant director from the planetarium in LaPaz. This is part of an ongoing exchange program we have with them through an ex-Hansen Planetarium employee, Doug Lowe. When we upgraded our automation system 6 years ago we donated the old automation system to the LaPaz planetarium. They have integrated this system into their planetarium with great success and now have automated star shows complete with a two projector dissolve system. This gives them similar automation to what we had in 1992.

After Wednesday December 16th I will be no longer available until January and will not be actively directing the planetarium until August of 1999. I will be on a sabbatical leave to conduct research. I'll be doing that work here at WSU but will not be generally available. I'll continue to handle the long term planning of the planetarium during this time and will respond to any disasters that might occur. In my absence a very capable student, Jarett Bartholomew, will be the acting director. Jarett will be in charge of day to day operations of the planetarium including the scheduling and presentation of school shows and the Wednesday night public star shows. Jarett will also be in charge of the other six members of the planetarium staff. I'll probably continue to update the web page, but I'm not sure about that.

John

1999 NATIONAL CONFERENCES AND STAR PARTIES OF INTEREST

January 5 - American Astronomical Society Winter Meeting, Austin Texas

January 21-26 - American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anaheim California

February 15-20 - Winter Star Party, Florida Keys, Florida

April 15-18 - Peach State Star Gaze, Jackson, Georgia

May 9-15 - Texas Star Party, Fort Davis, Texas

May 16 - Northeast Astronomy Forum, Suffern, New York

May 28-31 - Riverside Telescope Makers Conference, Big Bear, California

May 30-June 3 - American Astronomical Society Summer Meeting, Chicago, Illinois

July 1-7 - The Astronomical Society of the Pacific Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada

July 2-4 - Universe '99, Toronto, Canada

July 15-18 - Starfest, Mt. Forest, Ontario, Canada

September 17-19 - Astrofest, Kankakee, Illinois

MINUTES

OGDEN ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

November 12, 1998

President Ron Vanderhule called the meeting to order at 7:30 p.m. in room 221 of the Lind Lecture Hall on the Weber State University campus. The planetarium is in use tonight.

The Lomond View elementary school star party has again been rescheduled. Members are asked to bring equipment and attend to the students and parents next Tuesday November 17.

A Christmas party was discussed but no decisions made.

Bob Tillotson displayed several large, high resolution photographs from the Lunar Orbiter program that he acquired from Patrick Wiggins at the Hansen Planetarium. Members wishing to have similar images can attend the SLAS meeting at the Hansen next Thursday.

Dr. Sohl described the new 16-inch telescope recently acquired by WSU Physics Dept. John also described the Observatory Project now under way, (see page 2 of this issue for more information).

The evening's speaker, Mr. Lowell Lyon was introduced. Lowell is a former president of the Salt Lake club, SLAS, and is presently their liaison with the Astronomical League.

Mr. Lyon presented a slide show of recent events sponsored by the League and he described activities and advantages to astronomical clubs who are members of the AL.

The Salt Lake Astronomical Society is a member of the League and is proposing that Utah host the AL's Annual Meeting in 2002. The OAS was invited to participate.

Many members had ordered astronomical calendars; these were distributed. Orders for others were taken. Free samples of The Sky Planner were handed out. The new Pentax eyepieces were discussed as well as telescope making and used instruments, now available to members.

The meeting adjourned to informal discussions at 9:00 p.m.

Bob Tillotson, Secretary

Jim Seargeant's - "Images"

(On the outside cover) is an image of Jupiter and it's Galilean moons. It was taken by a group of Dr. Sohl's students on 24 Nov. 98 at 8:27 p.m. MST. The 12" Meade LX-200 with f/6.3 focal reducer was stopped down to a 3 ½ aperture using a mask in front of the corrector plate. Jupiter is so bright that even at that aperture and with the SBIG ST-7 operating at high resolution (9x9 micron pixels), a time of .11 sec. provided plenty of exposure. Elgie Mills helped with the processing - removing both cold and warm pixels. Because of the great difference in brightness between Jupiter and it's moons, He used Adobe Photoshop to assemble this image from two different treatments of the raw image. In one pass he sharpened the raw image once and adjusted contrast and range to produce good moon images, then cut out Jupiter. He then went back to the raw image, sharpened it twice to bring out the details in Jupiter, cut it out, and pasted it into the "moon" image. This is the result.

This image is "upside down", with North to the bottom, because of the way the camera is mounted. Callisto is on the left. Next to the right, Ganeymede is in front of Europa, then Jupiter, then Io is on the far right.

Elgie and I were surprised at the detail brought out on Jupiter - the focus must have been "right on" and the seeing excellent, although the short exposure time will freeze most atmospheric disturbance. If the skies will ever clear again, I'd like to try Jupiter at f/10 or f/20 to see if even more detail can be recorded.

Jim