Astronomy magazine columnist
Stephen James O’Meara’s sent us two blogs from the 2009 Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show.
Many thanks to Steve for sending these reports!
Day One
Arrived in Pasadena Saturday morning and immediately immersed myself in the telescope fever at the Pacific Astronomy Telescope Show (PATS), organized by the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference. This is not a telescope-making convention. It's a telescope expo with more than 60 vendors catering to an expected crowd of 1,000 or more over the weekend.
Before I entered the Pasadena Convention Center's doors, I found myself standing in line behind a 90mm Coronado solar telescope looking in hydrogen-alpha light at a fantastic prominence lifting off the Sun's limb like a fiery fountain with a spray of "molten flames" arcing back to the Sun's surface. Several other hedgerow prominences lifted off the surface in other places. Then, Andy Lundt displayed the H-alpha Sun through his 60mm solar systems scope with doppler shifting: With the turn of a knob, I could investigate different layers of the Sun's chromosphere, which had the effect of looking through a kaleidoscope.
I then took in a few talks.
Al Nagler, founder of Tele Vue Optics, described, among other things, how to choose the lowest high-power eyepiece that reveals the detail you're looking for, so that you have a sharper, better image in your scope. For deep-sky viewing, he says to use the highest power that frames the subject so long as the sky is not black and the atmosphere does not degrade resolution. He also said not to be afraid on the best nights to use 60x per inch of aperture.
Wally Pachoka gave an inspirational showing of his night-sky landscapes over famous monuments and attractions in our national parks. What's amazing is that he used, in most cases, a combination of natural and artificial lighting — such as nearby sodium vapor lamps, the crescent Moon, city lights, and a flashlight — to illuminate foreground objects while using a simple digital SLR camera and 35mm to 50mm lens to capture the Milky Way in color rising above these national treasures. The photography was beautiful and his passion inspirational. His work and others from around the globe have been made into a traveling exhibition that proves astronomy has no borders.
Sean Walker treated guests to an equally stunning display of his planetary photography.
But the highlight of Day One for me was meeting Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who gave a revealing talk about his quest to educate the public and world leaders about the very real threat posed by near-Earth asteroids. Schweickart, who heads the Association of Space Exploration and the B612 Foundation — B612 is the asteroid that the Little Prince, from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's children’s story The Little Prince, lived on — has dedicated the last 7-8 years of his life to this project, which deals with the technology of deflecting a threatening object in its orbit as well as the geopolitical issues facing all nations on Earth in case of a pending threat.
The mission requires an early warning system, proven deflection capability, and international decision-making protocol. The task itself requires brute force and precision, but the technology exists to make it happen. The fact is we know of only 0.1 percent of the objects that could be a threat. B612's goal is to be able to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015. The probability of a near-Earth asteroid collision in this century is about 2 percent, and not being prepared to avert disaster is “unacceptable.”
Well. That's it for Day One!
Related: "
Day 1 at PATS 2009 is a success," by Michael E. Bakich, senior editor
Day Two
Day Two at PATS was equally exciting as Day One. I spent most of the day trying to take in as many vendor displays as possible. I also spent a lot of time talking to amateur astronomers who wanted to share the wonderful things they're doing, or observing.
I was able to catch Mike Reynolds’ wonderful talk on identifying meteorites, in which he passed around numerous samples (iron, stony, and mixed) — including one now worth $25,000! I bet most of us at some point in our careers believed we have encountered a piece of outer space in our perusals of our yards or neighborhoods, but Mike made it clear how to identify "meteorWRONGS" — humor intended. At the end we were even given a chance to touch a piece of the Moon and Mars. A great experience.
Also interesting was Will Marchant's talk on the StarDust comet mission. What I didn't know is that if amateur astronomers want to help in professional science, they can volunteer on-line to become a "duster" — that is, help astronomers working on the Stardust mission find micron-sized dust particles on the craft's returned collector plate.
To find out how you can join this international community of fellow enthusiasts, go to stardust@home. Once you sign up, you are quickly training via the Web, which allows you to scan one of the 1.6 million selected areas on the collector.
Whoever finds a particle gets to name it (and get an official certificate from the Planetary Society)! As it stands, the 25,000 dusters worldwide have scanned about one-third of the collector plate. So there's a lot more to explore and discover.