Adler Planetarium

One of my obligations on this trip to "Ketelsen East" was that I had agreed to speak at the September meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society - at Adler Planetarium! I think it was a big deal because Adler is a big deal! It is the oldest planetarium built in this country and is part of the lakeside museum complex where Chicago meets Lake Michigan. In fact, flying into O'Hare the day before speaking, we flew out over the Lake before turning and landing towards the west, and had a great view of the downtown area, including the shot at left of the museum complex. This is a full resolution (cropped from the full image) and labels added to identify some of the major structures. The planetarium is on a manmade island which also used to have a small plane airport (Meigs Field). The airport was demolished in 2003 and "North Island" is now entirely park land, as is much of the lakeside. From the base of the stairs at the entrance, mostly only the original marble building is visible with the projection dome at center.

The original building was a 12-sided structure, and perhaps you can make out in the wide shot above, that each corner of the building had one of the signs of the zodiac. Four of them are collected in the collage at left - I just love the art deco design of these! Unfortunately, most are hidden by building expansion and while some are visible inside the additions, I suspect not all 12 can be located (I didn't have the time!). If you get a little further from the structure, you can see some of the newer additions that wrap around the lakefront side of the original building, also, you can pick up the figure of Copernicus seated on a marble plinth in front of the planetarium! The photo at left was taken shortly before sunset...


And you can imagine that with Adler located on a spit of land so close to Chicago, that the view of the city is great - and you would be right! At left is a 2-frame panorama looking down Solidarity Drive towards the west. Not exactly looking towards the skyline, which is a little more to the north, that would be the image at right! The image needed someone in it and luckily these two girls served the purpose well! The skyline view is great and in fact, there is a webcam atop the Adler dome, but I've not found a public-available view of it! It is used for several of the local TV weathercasts as it is a good indicator of weather and cloud cover, so perhaps it is now a "pay for play" camera!

Fortunately, I had an escort to make sure I got to the Adler from "Ketelsen East" in the far-western suburbs! Mark met me at the Geneva, IL train station and guided me through the station downtown where we were picked up by Tony of the CAS for the drive to Adler. If not for all this, it would have been tough for me to make it on my own! Melinda and I made it to Adler once in the last 10 years, and it was a tough drive, needing a navigator, then paying $20 for parking once arrived. The train was a nice method, but introduced its own set of "need to know" facts!

Anaglyph - use red/blue glasses to see Gemini 12 in 3D!

We had a couple hours to go through some of the displays. One of my favorites was an entire gallery devoted to "local boy" astronaut Jim Lovell. There was quite a collection of his papers and artifacts of his growing up and time in NASA, including the Gemini 12 spacecraft on display! That is it on at left - amazingly small for 2 people to spend 4 days out in space! BTW, that is a 3D anaglyph at left, so get out your red/blue glasses to see it in 3D. For those of you without glasses or only one eye, check out the similar image at right...





At an institution like this, you expect a good collection of instruments both historical and more recent, and they had a very good collection. At right is a selfie image of me taken with a thermal IR camera demonstrating invisible wavelengths not visible to the eye. I was wearing glasses, and carrying my camera that took this photo of the monitor, so they are near room temperature, and it appears my cheeks are the hottest (brightest) exposed part of me... I was also wearing a hat, so the top of my head is clipped too... At right, Tony and Mark examine a collection of antique telescopes from the early 1800s...

Of particular interest to Tony and Mark was a large refractor (18.6" diameter) Clark refractor that was on display. There was some discussion whether it still belonged to the Chicago Astronomical Society as it once was. There was some uncertainty in that...


Adler officially closed at 4:30 until the evening programs started, but we had arranged a tour of the adjacent Doane Observatory which serves as a public telescope at the facility. Located on the lake side of Adler, it is blocked from direct lights of the city. Our tour was given by long-time employee Michelle Nichols who apparently wears many hats including director of public observing. That is her standing in front of the facility at left, and in front of the 20 inch telescope at right. We were debating the various effects on seeing of the building - Mark thought the concrete walls would heat up during the day, but my thought was that the ivy shaded much of that effect. The dome is a little unusual in that it is the truncated cylinder as shown in the image. Because one side of the "dome" is heavier, the wheels wear unevenly and require frequent inspections. There also seemed to be an ongoing issue with collimation of the telescope affecting the image quality, of which all three of us offered assistance to inspect and adjust. While my time in Chicago is limited, Tony and Mark may get put to work to try to improve the images.


After Michelle's tour, we had "dinner time" on the schedule and while we had talked about a ride over to Millennium Park to enjoy "The Bean" and get a snack, we stayed adjacent to the planetarium and talked about things over a couple chili dogs at the stand a few feet from the steps.

Eventually my time came and my talk about working on the GMT project at the Mirror Lab was very well received. It was under attended though - evidently the thinking was that with a local concert, the parking was enforced at $35, which might have turned off a lot of club members - a significant jump over the normal $4 for night time parking! And even with us amateur astronomers preaching against light pollution, I had to admit that the night time view of the Chicago skyline was quite striking! I've got more from this visit to post - stay tuned!

TAAA Meeting Night!

Most Tucson amateur astronomers know what happens on the first Friday of the month - the monthly meeting of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association (TAAA)! Arguably living in the astronomy capital of the world, we have some pretty good meetings. With the Kitt Peak National Observatory, the Planetary Sciences Institute, Steward Observatory and the Lunar and Planetary Lab all headquartered in central Tucson, we are rarely lacking for world-class lectures about the universe or latest data from spacecraft. We even get great lectures from TAAA members themselves, some of them working at the above institutions!


Last night was the first Friday, so of course, we got together, but our normal lecture hall at Steward Observatory was being used for final exams - it is that time of year! So we arranged to meet across the street at the auditorium of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The location fell into the theme of the evening - celebrating the history of LPL. The traditional Beginner's Lecture was a showing of the great documentary "Desert Moon", a 2014 movie by Jason Davis. Using archival footage as well as interviews with early employees, it tells the story of how LPL played a central role in the space race and eventual landing on the Moon. Gerard Kuiper, who founded LPL in 1960 is at center in the right image, and Ewen Whitaker, one of the main interviewees, is at right.


The movie is a testament to Kuiper's leadership and assembling this team around him, most just barely out of their teens! They played central roles as Kennedy surprised scientists by declaring the Moon as a goal for NASA. Starting with the lunar atlas Kuiper started at Yerkes Observatory, after founding LPL they supported virtually all the lunar missions leading up to the landing. Fortunately, the movie Desert Moon is free for viewing on-line, and at 35 minutes long, is a great watch, even on a computer screen. My favorite scene is the un-narrated final scene when some of the now "old-timers" who played such central roles, put their swagger on and strutted down the University Mall - shown at left!

The main meeting started promptly at 7:30, and after a few announcements and business (Springtime Board Elections!) the main lecture started - given by LPL director Timothy Swindle. He admitted that the first half dozen slides of his normal talk were well covered by "Desert Moon", so modified his presentation somewhat. He also announced that much of what he presented was covered in a recent book, recently published by UA press - Under Desert Skies by Melissa Sevigny. Reading her book would likely be a great addition to the information gleaned from Dr. Swindle's presentation.



Dr. Swindle points to the launch of Sputnik in the 50s, and the 6 week period in Spring of '61 in forming the direction of LPL's mission to the Moon and beyond.  So the developing space race kept funding levels high and the department focused both on the Moon and a fledgling planetary space program.  After the successes in the Moon landings, UA continued involvement in the Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini and Mars missions.



He told the story of Lujendra Ojha, an undergraduate from Nepal working on a student project with data from HiRISE, under the direction of principle investigator Alfred McEwen, and discovered "streaks" on the inner walls of craters and gorges that follow up spectroscopy showed was briny water - one of the first direct indicators of water on Mars.




He also told the story of Richard Kowalski. One of the primary research works of Steward and LPL consists of searching for Near-Earth Asteroids with the Spacewatch and Catalina Sky Surveys. Kowalski is the ONLY observer to discover objects BEFORE they struck the Earth, one exploding over Sudan, the other striking the Atlantic Ocean. He is shown at right holding a small piece of the asteroid/meteor that landed over Sudan.

He closed out his talk with the latest mission coming out of LPL - the OSIRIS-REx mapping and sample return mission to an asteroid. Facing a launch this September, it arrives at Bennu in 2018, and returning with its precious cargo in 2023. Answering questions for a good long time, it was a great talk and enjoyed by all.

After the meeting's conclusion, most stayed to interact outside the auditorium over snacks. Another great meeting!  The next one will be the day before the Grand Canyon Star Party starts the first weekend of June!

A New Life for an Old Friend!

If you can have favorite telescope, mine would likely be the 2.1-Meter Telescope atop Kitt Peak. Dedicated and brought on-line in 1964, it is a beautiful, classical, equatorial fork-mounted telescope. When I worked there back in the early 80s, it was a favorite of mine - beautiful, easy to work on and change instruments, simple and elegant in design. The mechanicals were built by Willamette Iron and Steel from Portland, Oregon, normally making ocean-going ships and large steam boilers. The mirror was polished in the basement of the NOAO offices optics shop on Cherry Street, from a Pyrex disk cast at Corning Glass. Shown at left, the white telescope moves north-south inside the fork, which rotates east-west to allow access to all parts of the sky. Once an object is aligned, a simple rotation of the fork will keep it centered, since the fork axis is aligned to the Earth's axis. In the rear at ground level is the console room, from which it is operated (built on my watch in 1980!), and the ever-present white spot used to calibrate CCD detectors. The instrument shown here at left is Phoenix, an IR spectrometer.

The past few decades, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has slowly been divesting itself of support of the telescopes at Kitt Peak as budgets get tight. Back in the 80s, the staff supported 9 stellar telescopes, all of which could be used by astronomers around the country if their research was deemed important enough. Kitt Peak is no longer so much a National Observatory, as a collection of private, consortium-operated telescopes as various groups have stepped in to operate them. Only the WIYN and 4-meter have any time available for access, and that is severely restricted to a few blocks of time, or administered thru NASA (for WIYN). It was sad to see the announcement nearly 2 years ago when new tenants for the 2.1 were sought.

Courtesy Robo-AO and Caltech

There were four serious candidates, and finally this last September, it was announced that California Institute of Technology's (Caltech) Robo-AO program would take over the facility. There was some word of an adaptive-optics (AO) program, but details were not quickly forthcoming. AO is exciting stuff - a product of "Star Wars" technology of the late 80s that use deformable mirrors to correct the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere. It has been the goal of many astronomer teams to get images similar in sharpness to that of the Space Telescope, from within this ocean of air we live in, with various amounts of success.



Laser Projector, dome lights on, off. 
Courtesy Robo-AO, Caltech

I didn't know much about the Caltech program, but last night I scored an invite to a lecture by one of the scientists from the program - Reed Riddle talked to the Kitt Peak docents about the program and some of their results. Shown at left is the dome of the 2.1 meter telescope, now in use by Robo-AO, since they moved in early November! The image is misleading - the instrument uses a laser to create an artificial guide star, but it emits a beam in the ultraviolet that is invisible to the eye. Shown here is an image from a camera that has been modified - the UV blocking filter has been removed and the laser is now visible by UV leaks in the bayer filter matrix, now visible to the sensor, but still not to the eye.

Otherwise the system is similar to others. Because the laser works in the UV, it has the benefit that it does not bother pilots or airplanes, so the FAA has no objections to its use. Also because of the short wavelength used, corrections can be made in the visible part of the spectrum. Most artificial guide stars use visible light, so would interfere with visible applications. Most of these systems do their science in the near infrared wavelengths. The 10 watt laser is diverged to about 15cm before projecting, and is precisely aligned with the telescope view. Focused about 10km altitude (6 miles up), it makes an artificial guide star about 2cm diameter visible from Rayleigh scattering. While not quite at the top of the atmosphere, it can be used to correct much of the effects of atmospheric turbulence. The artificial star is imaged by the telescope, and run through a Schack-Hartmann sensor which controls a 140-segment flexible mirror in a feedback loop to correct for turbulence.

You can't argue with the results! Shown here is a video of Saturn from their early results with the Palomar 60" - the first half of the clip is without the AO turned on, the second half shows the results when turned on:



They literally walked into the facility 2 months ago and are really still getting things working, but early results are encouraging. Reed showed us star images that readily showed diffraction rings, and you can't really do better than that! They have extensive programs in observing Kepler objects that show exoplanets, as well as a number of high-resolution imaging including planetary disks, multiple stars and centers of star clusters. They are still looking for observing ideas, since instead of a week or two of observing time, they will now have unlimited telescope use at the 2.1 meter. Lucky them!

If you are interested in the gritty details of their instrument, check out this 10 minute video, or if you are really hardcore, you can watch this hour-long Caltech Astronomy Colloquium presentation... I'm just glad one of my lil' beauties is enjoying a new life!

ADDENDUM: I had an e-mail discussion with one of the administrators at Kitt Peak, about my concerns it was really no longer a "National Observatory", since most of the telescopes have been transitioned to private control. He correctly pointed out that the 4-Meter Mayall, the 3.2 Meter WIYN and the 2.1 Meter, now controlled by the Caltech Robo-AO are all promising a percentage of their time to competively-awarded research projects. In addition, many of the major projects these large telescopes are transitioning to will have data publicly-available, so able to be widely used by the astronomical community. So while directly-assigned telescope time is continues to be a rarity, the treasure-trove of data that will become available to the public could still qualify it as a true National Observatory!

The Subject Was Dwarfs!

Dr. Mark Sykes and Dr. Tom Fleming

Dwarf planets, that is... I frequently attend the Steward Observatory Public Evening Lecture Series, which usually meet a couple Monday nights per month (while school is in session) at the big lecture hall at Steward Observatory - the same location that the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association meets. The lecture series has been going on since the Observatory was started over 90 years ago! Of course, the University of Arizona is well known for its astronomy department, but it is across the street from the headquarters of Kitt Peak National Observatory, as well as the Lunar and Planetary Lab. So you can imagine the speakers and variety of topics is second to none! And as if you needed another excuse to go, they open the 21" telescope in the old dome for observing if the weather permits!

Such was the case last month when I attended the last talk of the semester - Dr. Mark Sykes CEO and Director of the Planetary Sciences Institute (also in Tucson!) gave a talk on recent discoveries on Ceres, Charon and Pluto. Since New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto last July, data has been trickling out as the data is downloaded from across the solar system. So It was going to be great to see the latest images and hear early interpretations of what is being seen.


The lectures are great - well attended by a wide variety of folks - both older people, of which group I include myself, and a good percentage of young college students, some of which obtain extra credit for attending the lecture. Dr. Tom Fleming, Sr. Lecturer at Steward acts as emcee, making announcements, introducing the speaker, and marking off students attendance for their class credit. At left is a 2-frame mosaic of some of the crowd as Tom makes his introductions.

Of course, the first thing Dr. Sykes had to do was talk about the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, one of his first slides shown at right. It turns out that the issue isn't a matter of size, but rather if it has "cleared" its orbit of other bodies. As the plot shows, even if Pluto was the size of the Earth (red arrow), it wouldn't be considered a planet! The former asteroid Ceres, now considered a dwarf planet, is the question mark symbol near the bottom - also way too small to be considered a planet.


It has been a golden age recently in spacecraft missions to the planets. Not only the big missions everyone has heard of like Cassini at Saturn, and the parade of Mars landers, but smaller missions like Dawn, spending a year at asteroid Vesta, now orbiting Ceres. And of course, the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto last year. Of course, when the mission was developed and finally launched in 2006, Pluto hadn't been demoted, and was considered off to the final planet of the solar system yet to be explored.

Mark started out with the ongoing Dawn mission at Ceres. One of the greatest mysteries as it approached were the bright spots associated with several craters seen from millions of miles away. At left is his closeup of crater Occator. Dr. Sykes said that scientists were ready to announce that the bright spots were salts or brine likely containing magnesium sulfate hexahydrite. Moving on to the New Horizons results, he showed some incredible images, including the two at right. Scientists had thought it would be a quiet icy world, but has been found to be incredibly diverse, both geologically and chemically.


Another thing that Mark talked about was naming issues. Almost as fast as the images came down, scientists starting naming plains, craters, features, which is generally a no-no unless approved by the IAU, conforming to naming conventions. He showed a map of Pluto's moon Charon showing jokingly (I think!) features named after characters from Star Trek, Star Wars, and other works of fiction (map shown at left).

I almost forgot! There are podcasts of the lectures, so if you want to peruse past lectures, check out the podcast link to the Public Evenings page above. When you do that you can actually watch the slides of the lecture on your computer while you listen - it is great! That means also you can hear/see Dr Sykes' talk there too!