Past Meetings 2014

 

Astrophotographer Dan Crowson will be featured at the January meeting of the St. Louis Astronomical Society. The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM Friday, January 17, in McDonnell Hall, Room 162, on the Washington University campus, Saint Louis, MO 63130. McDonnell Hall is accessible from Forsyth Boulevard via Tolman Way. The event, cosponsored by NASA's Missouri Space Grant Consortium, is open to the public free of charge.  
Photographing objects in the night sky is a challenging activity. Most astronomical objects are quite dim, so just finding them in a telescope can be difficult. Then the Earth’s spin puts the sky in constant motion, so keeping the object in view can be difficult. But advances in telescope and imaging technology make it possible for amateur astronomers to meet the challenges and achieve professional results. Dan Crowson is well known for his astrophotography. His images have been featured on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day web site, as well as in several magazines. Mr. Crowson will use a workshop-demonstration approach to show how to produce high quality astronomical images with modest equipment, using readily available image processing software.

 

 

Way-Finding and Wobble: Navigating by Starlight”, a double-feature illustrated lecture by St. Louis Astronomical Society members William Biermann and Grant Martin, will be presented at the February meeting of the St. Louis Astronomical Society.

 

Grant Martin will talk about “Mysteries of Polynesian Navigation”. Polynesian sailors were able to navigate their small craft across hundreds, even thousands of miles of seemingly trackless ocean. Without a sextant or a compass, much less a GPS unit, the Polynesian navigator-boatman could locate small islands isolated within the vast sea. In part, they could use the stars as guides. Mr. Martin will describe some of the Polynesian secrets – known and unknown.

 

Bill Biermann will talk about the wobble in the Earth’s spin, called “precession”. This is a slow wobble – it takes about 26,000 years to complete one cycle. Mr. Biermann will explain why precession occurs and how it changes the location of the north pole of the sky. He will also discuss how we continue to find evidence that ancient civilizations probably understood some of the effects of precession, and even made corrections for it.

 

 

 Dr. Matthias Beilicke will be featured at the March meeting of the St. Louis Astronomical Society. The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM Friday, March 21, in McDonnell Hall, Room 162, on the Washington University campus.

Gamma rays pack much more energy per particle than their more familiar cousins – light, heat, and radio waves. Gamma rays are produced in some of the most violent events that occur in the universe – exploding stars, colliding stars, black holes, supersonic shock waves. Fortunately for all forms of life, cosmic gamma rays are screened out by the atmosphere so that they cannot disrupt living cells. But as a result, gamma ray observations must occur out in space, using special remote-controlled devices rather than regular optical-type telescopes. Dr. Beilicke will talk about our present view of the gamma ray universe, particularly about the gamma ray instruments he uses and some of the recent discoveries from the high energy frontier.

Matthias Beilicke is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University. He received his Doctorate in Physics from the University of Hamburg.

 

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SLAS Regular Meeting
Friday, April 18, 2014 7:30pm
McDonnell Hall, Washington University
Rotational Dynamics of Planets, Stars and Galaxies
by Dr. Robert Criss Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences  Washington University

Dr. Robert Criss will be featured at the April meeting of the St. Louis Astronomical Society. The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM Friday, April 18, in McDonnell Hall, Room 162, on the Washington University campus.

 

Everything in the universe is in motion, and much of that motion is spin. Rotational dynamics – the motions and effects caused by spinning – explains many properties of planets, stars, and galaxies. Dr. Criss will talk about a range of topics, including the origin of the rotation of the solar system, the slowing down of spin in super-dense white dwarf stars, and how the slow rotation of the entire Milky Way galaxy reveals some unexpected features of its structure.

 

Robert Criss is a Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University. His primary research interest is in the use of stable isotopes to trace the flow of groundwater and its contaminants. He also studies the origin, character and behavior of river and flood waters in the Mississippi, Missouri, and Meramec River basins. But his scientific curiosity often leads him to far different areas – such as the effects of rotation on a broad range of astronomical objects.

 

Centuries ago, research in astronomy was done mostly by amateurs unpaid volunteers. Then telescopes got much larger, specialized instruments got very expensive, and professional astronomers took over. But with the rise of the internet and fast personal computers, amateurs can again play a big role in modern research and do it at home!  Citizen science projects in astronomy allow amateurs to download images from major telescopes and from robot spacecraft. Free software first provides the training and then provides the actual images for amateurs to work with. Pamela Gay has been deeply involved with a number of citizen science projects classifying distant galaxies, searching for planets around other stars, - and examining craters on planets and satellites in our own solar system.

 

Dr. Gay is an Assistant Research Professor in the Center for STEM of SIU-Edwardsville. She is an astronomer, writer, and podcaster focused on using new media to engage people in science and technology. Her best-known project may be Astronomy Cast, a podcast co-hosed with Fraser Cain, Producer of Universe Today.

 

Dr. Alex Meshik of Washington University will be featured at the June regular meeting for SLAS. The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM Friday, June 20. Meteorites are the pieces of rocks from outer space that survive to land on the ground or ocean. Most meteors – streaks of light in the night sky - are caused by pinhead sized dust grains. They vaporize many miles above the surface. Each year, only a few dozen rocks survive to hit the ground. These meteorites are valuable for what they can tell us about their composition and origin on the Moon, Mars, or an asteroid. They are perhaps more valuable for what they can tell us about the birth and early years of the solar system – including the Earth. Dr. Meshik will talk about his research on meteorites, and why Antarctica is the best place in the world to find them. 

Dr. Alex Meshik is a Research Professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University. He is also an avid photographer. He will be showing photographs from his two month expedition to Antarctica, taken under the challenging lighting and environmental conditions of that icy continent.

 

by Richard Heuermann Washington University
       
“Seen one and you’ve seen them all” does not apply to stars. Although each looks like a single point of light, perhaps with a little bit of color for some, the stars come in a wide range of sizes, ages, and physical conditions. Richard Heuermann will talk about several of the many types of stars that populate the stellar zoo. He will examine some of their differences in terms of stellar life cycles, variances in environmental conditions, and stellar companions.   

Rich Heuermann is the outreach program coordinator for the NASA Missouri Space Grant Consortium at Washington University. He is also a member of the Saint Louis Astronomical Society.

 

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Scientists interested in the origin of Earth and the other planets study regions where new solar systems are forming. The planet-building process is occur-ring throughout the Milky Way galaxy in much the same way as it did about 4.6 billion years ago, when our sun and its planets formed. Logan Brown will explain how astronomers observe young stars, still surrounded by the remnants of the huge clouds of dust and gas from which they condensed. They search within the disk-shaped structures of protostars for traces of water and other chemicals necessary for life. Of particular interest to Mr. Brown is the problem of how planets such as the Earth obtained their water and other volatiles.

Logan Brown is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of UMSL. A native of southeastern Wisconsin, he has come to UMSL to study planetary system formation and early evolution. His research is focused on the chemistry of protoplanetary disks of dust and gas.

 

 

Professor Jack Fishman of Saint Louis University and Professor William Hayden Smith of Washington University, will be featured at the September meeting of the St. Louis Astronomical Society.

 

There is strong, but perhaps not yet conclusive, evidence that the climate is changing. Average temperatures are rising in many regions, leading to shifts in weather patterns. Local ecologies are stressed and shifting. Sea waters are rising. While the global climate is known to have changed many times in geologic history due to natural causes, most scientists believe that the current climate changes are either triggered or accelerated by human activity. However, some scientists dispute the projected rate of climate change and the role of human activity in causing the change. Dr. Fishman will present some of the findings of climatologists that support theories of global warming and point to human activity to explain the rate of climate change. Dr. Smith will examine climate data and dispute the global projections and the assertions that human activity is a major factor. A discussion period will follow the two presentations.

 

Dr. Jack Fishman is Professor and Director of the Center for Environmental Sciences at Saint Louis University. His research interests are focused on satellite studies of atmospheric composition and pollution; global pollution and crops, at-mospheric chemistry, and global change due to human activity.

Dr. William H. Smith is Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a Fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University. His research projects involve climate change studies, the development and application of remote sensing instruments to environmental problems, and the Development of medical diagnostics for long-term spacecraft missions.

The format for the meeting will be as follows:

1. Dr. Fishman and Dr. Smith will each be given 30 minutes for their presentations. There will be no questions during the presentations themselves.

2. Cards will be passed out to the audience before the presentations. After both presentations are finished, those who wish to ask questions will pass their card forward and cards will be randomly drawn to select who will ask a question. The time allotted for the question period will be limited to 30 minutes.

We look forward to a lively meeting!

 

Dr. Catarina Ubach will be featured at the October meeting of the St. Louis Astronomical Society. The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM Friday, October 17, in McDonnell Hall, Room 162. More than 900 "exoplanets" are now known to orbit other stars. That number will continue to increase as telescopes both on the ground and in space search the skies. Dr. Ubach will outline the history of planet searching, and review what has been discovered since the first exoplanets were detected in 1995. She will also explain the likely nature of future technologies. Advanced devices will reveal the chemical composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets, as well as provide direct images of Earth's distant cousins. They may even detect traces of life on other worlds.

Dr. Catarina Ubach obtained her PhD at Swinburne University of Technology in Astrophysics and is an astronomer interested in public outreach programs as well as research. Her own research is focused on the early stages of planet formation, particularly on the growth of rocky dust grains in the clouds from which new stars and planets form.

 

 

Scientists have discovered that most of the material in the universe is invisible – it neither emits light nor reflects light, so they call it "dark matter". They have also discovered a strange force that is causing the universe to expand ever faster. The force is apparently due to an unknown phenomenon, which they have called "dark energy". Dr. Ratra will describe the astronomical data that persuades cosmologists that the dark energy and dark matter, whatever they turn out to be, are by far the main components of the universe at this time. He will also explain how these observations have led to the development of a detailed "standard" model of cosmology. This model describes how the universe has evolved from a small speck at an unimaginably short time after the Big Bang to the immense and complex structures of the cosmos that we see almost fourteen billion years later.

 

Dr. Ratra is a Professor of Physics at Kansas State University. His research interests involve cosmology and astroparticle physics. He studies the structure and evolution of the universe by devising computer models. These models predict the distribution of matter and energy of the present universe from points in time after its beginning. He then compares the results of the models to the observed universe of today.

SLAS Regular Meeting

 

 

The meeting will be a presentation by astrophotographers about the solar eclipse and lunar eclipse of last October,  will be featured at the December meeting of the Saint Louis Astronomical Society.

The Moon orbits the Earth in almost the same plane as the Earth orbits the Sun. The “almost” means that Earth, Moon, and Sun usually do not line up exactly twice per month – the Moon is usually above or below the Earth-Sun line. Only twice a year is the alignment close enough that eclipses can occur. This year, one of those times occurred on October 8, when the full Moon moved into the Earth’s shadow, causing a total lunar eclipse. Then, on October 23, the new Moon moved between the Earth and the Sun, but the alignment was not exact. A partial solar eclipse resulted.

 Members of the Saint Louis Astronomical Society will display pictures taken during these eclipses. They will explain what techniques were used to obtain their images. Observing solar eclipses safely requires special equipment and knowledge, since the Sun is being viewed directly. Instant and permanent eye damage results from even a quick look at the Sun through binoculars or a telescope, unless the proper equipment and safety precautions are employed. Consequently, photographing solar eclipses requires care and caution. Lunar eclipses are safely viewed with no equipment. However, skill is required to manage the brightness contrasts among eclipsed portions of the Moon, uneclipsed portions, and the night sky, in order to obtain good images.

All are welcome to bring photos to share with the group for either the Solar or Lunar eclipses.