ASTRONOMY ON A HIGHWAY OVERPASS
-----------------------------
John Pazmino
NYSkies Astronomy Inc
nyskies@nyskies.org
www.nyskies.org
2009 November 8
Introduction
----------
The fall meeting of the American Association of variable Star
Observers was held on 2009 November 5-7 in Newton, Massachusetts. The
entire event, except for a visit to the new AAVSO offices, was at the
Crowne Plaza hotel, sitting on an overpass above the Massachusetts
Turnpike.
This is the first AAVSO convention I attended since the fall 2006
meeting. I missed the fall 2007 meeting because it conflicted with our
Allies in Space show in New York. The 2008 fall convention was missed
because I found no rational and sane airfare from the City to
Nantucket, where the meeting was held at Maria Mitchell Observatory.
I elaborate on some of the presentations, with addition of
discussion taken from the corridor chat during the breaks and lunch.
Going to Newton
-------------
The easiest and sanest way to go to Newton, a suburb of Boston, is
by train. I rode from Penn Station to Back Bay, near Boston, and took
a taxi from there to the hotel. I got off at BAck Bay because it is
substantially closer to Newton than the Boston main station, the end
of the Amtrak line, at South Street Station. The cab ride is much
shorter and cheaper.
There are buses from the Port of Authority to various towns around
Boston, including Newton, but they would call for a taxi ride from the
local bus station. Besides, the bus ride is pretty awful compared to
the train.
There was no need for local traveling in Newton. The group went
for an informal supper on Thursday evening by walking to a nearby
restaurant. There was really no free time for sightseeing, of which
Newton and surrounds offered a good dose of in the fall season.
The visit to AAVSO was by hired bus, but a few local attendees,
who drove to the meeting, went there by their own cars.
General program
-------------
The convention followed a long-established program that enjoyed
virtually universal favor from its attendees. On Thursday the 5th the
early arrivers bantered in the hotel lobby or restaurant, then went
for supper at a nearby restaurant. This was always a feature of the
meetings, yet not a formal part of them. It let the early folk, who
figured to stay at the hotel overnight on Thursday, to be up and at it
for the Friday morning sessions, a way to loosen up, get acquainted,
and catch up on news.
Friday is usually given to tours or special sessions, like
workshops. This meeting had three workshops, more like a short
presentation and an open dialog. They were on the AAVSO Citizen Sky
project, the Photometrica computer program, and CCD observing. I went
to all three, as discussed below.
On Friday evening we boarded a bus to visit the AAVSO
headquarters. It was inaugurated at the fall 2007 session, soon after
it was bought from Sky & Telescope.
The magazine, just bought by a new publisher, vacated its offices,
around the corner form AAVSO in northern Cambridge, to relocate with
other magazines of its new owner, elsewhere in the town.
Because I missed the fall 2007 meeting, this year was the first
time I saw the new digs. This part of the meeting was a new highlight
for me.
Saturday the 7th started with a session for various AAVSO
committee reports These were a mix of business reports and project
reports.
The rest of the morning and all of the afternoon was the
Scientific paper session, for attendees who had presentations on just
about any aspect of astronomy. The theme is not restricted to variable
star work. Over the years I heard talks on astronomy history, culture,
biography, societal issues, as well as reports on specific kinds or
examples of variable star. This year's Scientific Paper session
continued this pattern.
Saturday evening is the closing banquet, with awards and a keynote
speaker. The speaker is a capital person associated with a major
astronomy project of importance to variable star astronomers. This
year we herd Dr Howell about the new Kepler stellar photometry
satellite.
The convention ends by declaration of the chair after the dinner
and speaker. After then most local attendees went home. Remote
attendees, like me, stayed at the hotel thru the night and went home
on Sunday the 8th.
AAVSO venues
----------
AAVSO has been roving around the Boston area, sometimes rather far
from it, to meet at a venue of bearable expense. Boston and some other
Massachusetts towns have exorbitant hotel rates, even if the meeting
itself was in a free or cheap place. The attendees need lodgings for
the multi-day meeting.
For a run of years in the 1980s and 1990s AAVSO enjoyed the use of
facilities at Harvard College Observatory and a modest Best Western
motel. The motel either closed or went upscale (different accounts I
heard), and there is no other choice within walking distance of the
Observatory.
AAVSO was forced to hunt for a more rational lodging, which at
times caused the meeting to held away from headquarters. Such was the
case this year, except for the bus trip to visit the new offices in
Cambridge. The ride was only about 20 minutes, but the route was along
curly-cue suburban roads. It was not practical to go by local transit,
there really being none outside the rush hours.
In some years, like fall 2008, an other astronomy center hosts the
meeting. Maria Mitchell Observatory, on Nantucket island, was the
host. Lodging was in a local hotel, with rates fortunately bearable
due to the off-season dates of the meeting.
The Crowne Plaza
--------------
This was the hotel where the fall 2006 meeting was held, before
AAVSO had its new headquarters. It was then under a former management,
whom I forget. It is a newish structure built on a broad overpass
bridging the Massachusetts Turnpike and a branch of the Boston
regional rail.
Road and rail traffic flowed constantly under the hotel at all
hours of the day and night. The traffic was noisy, yet not disturbing,
during the day. At night, it was annoying and some attendees noted
sleeping troubles from it.
Service was excellent under the present management. Any problem we
brought to its attention was promptly fixed in our favor. ALtho I
suffered only very minor trouble, I note them here as examples of how
the hotel tended to them.
In the restaurant the steam tables were large pots with swing-up
lids. They stood on a tablecloth, not a solid surface. When I swang
open one of the lids to fetch food, the whole pot started to slide on
the tablecloth! I pointed this out to a nearby atttendent, noting that
the pot could easily slide off of the tale and spill hot water and
food on a guest.
The attendent quickly offered to ladle out the food for me, as I
picked out the pots! He already grabbed up a clean plate and slopped
some food from my pot into it. I let him fill the plate from the other
pots and set it on my table.
I next went for coffee. The cups were black or a very dark color,
making it impossible to tell when it was filled with black coffee. An
other guest, not from AAVSO, overflowed her cup, happily with no
spillage onto her. The attendent was momentarily gone. I showed the
guest my old traveling trick of splashing a fe drops of milk into the
cup first then pouring the coffee. The coffee is lightened by the milk
to show it against the black cup rim. An added bonus is that if you
want might coffee, the milk in the cup instantly mixes with the coffee
poured over it, needing no farther stirring.
In my hotel room the box of tissues in the bathroom and a too-
stiff throat. The tissues ripped against it and came out in shredded
pieces. Here I tore out the plastic throat, leaving a wide hole that
let the tissue come out in whole sheets.
The banquet was catered by the Crowne Plaza as a buffet. This
method avoids the silliness of choosing your meal several weeks in
advance. A variety of meats, poultry, fish, pasta, pastries were set
out. A deli counter did up sandwiches or sliced meat and a cash bar
handled the liquid requirements.
I recall the 2006 banquet, with meal choice, as a so-so meal. The
portions were small and I left much of it uneaten. The buffet allowed
for heaping the portion you need and going back for seconds. The food
was also overall much tastier and more filling.
In the main meeting room (which became the banquet hall on
Saturday night) one of the dome lighting fixtures was missing. It's
mounting place in the ceiling was neatly patched but that corner of
the room was under-lighted.
Exhibits
------
This year there were no posters and only one exhibit. AAVSO asks
if you are giving a poster or oral (spoken) show. Once, in the early
2000s, I gave a poster 'talk' about the American Urban Star Fest. From
time to time I saw posters from other attendees taped to walls around
the meeting room. This year there were none at all. All presentations
were given on the speaker's schedule.
The exhibit wa from Adirondack Astronomy, crewed by its owner John
Cordiale. He showed new spectrometers for home astronomy and books
about spectrometry of stars and photometry of extrasolar planets.
His table attracted vigorous attention, mainly from attendees from
colleges or observatories, who here to fore really had no credible
competent spectrometers suitable for student or home use.
Citizen Sky
---------
Citizin Sky is an effort of AAVSO, with collaboration from other
astronomy centers, to entice more lay people into the profession. For
the most part, it hopes to enlarge the ranks of home astronomers, a
prospect hopefully a goal for astronomy clubs.
The Friday morning workshop about Citizen Sky was chaired by
ebecca Turner of AAVSO. The hook for Citizon Sky is epsilon Aurigae,
now n November 2009 about half way thru its partial phase before
totality. Total phase is expected to begin in early December.
The idea is to emphasize the rarity of this eclipse, only once in
27 years. If the instant generation misses it now, it's a long wait
for the next round.
Along with epsilon, the program has several other bright variable
stars, of various types, mentioned but not discussed in this workshop.
A parallel idea is to collect as many observations of this star
from the lay public as possible for the AAVSO database. Materials
available, shown in the slide show from the AAVSO website, include
maps and report forms that astronomers should hand out at public
starviewings.
While the intent to attract more people into the profession, make
them more aware and receptive of astronomy, and all that is a valued
one, many delegates during the break had severe misgivings.
The biggest was the choice of target, epsilon Aurigae. First, the
Citizen Sky crew consistently mispronounced it as 'EPP-sih-lon aw-
RIGH-jee', a linguisticly wrong sounding for a regular Latin word and
name of a constellation. Auriga is a regular word prnounced 'au-REE-
ga' with its genitive as 'au-REE--gigh' or '...-jigh'.
It corrodes the credibility of Citizen Sky if it can't sound its
star correctly. It's like consistently saying our US President is
'BAA-rakk OH-bay-mah' by a vocary from his office!
The other objection to epsilon is that it is a lousy star for the
public to exercise on. It has a shallow amplitude of 0.8 magnitude, a
tough interval for an untutored lay person to guesstimate within. And
it is a slowly changing star, taking two months fro the ingress before
totality. In fact, if a person began in Citizen Sky right now, early
November, he faces a one month shift of about 0.4 magnitude!
What will likely happen is that the layfolk will get tired of
seeing about the same aspect of epsilon for many days, turn in the
same magnitude assessment, and corrupt the observational database.
A third problem with epsilon is the lack of comparison stars
nearby. There are a few within many degrees at irregular steps of
brightness, among which the layfolk tries to place the brightness of
epsilon. It is hard enough for us astronomers to do this, as mentioned
in other parts of this meeting!, without some experience in observing
variable stars.
It probably will not help matters to offer up theoretical models
and observatory work to boost interest. The star, to the ordinary
person, looks like any other star, well, maybe it DID get fainter over
two months.
On the other hand, some delegates hazarded that it could be well
to let the public inspect the star under direct supervision during a
starviewing meet. The person and astronomer work together with chart
to ensure that the person is looking at the right star, following
instructions, marking the report form correctly. They will not hand
out forms and let the person do his work outside of supervision.
The latter point was emphaticly dismissed for schools. Giving a
talk to a school class, then handing out the papers, is about the
worst thing to do for chronicling this star. The kids WILL look in the
sky, WILL mark the forms, WILL hand them in. Teacher WILL be proud as
a peacock, WILL send the reports to AAVSO. The result is utter garbage
in the database.
Who knows, or CAN know, what the student actually did at home,
outside of the astronomer's oversight? The short answer is that you
can not capture the circumstances of the observation. For one issue,
schools in general are extremely wary of outsiders, the astronomer
giving the talk, trying to contact the students beyond the classroom.
In fact, the teacher could be under policy not to give out personalia
to the astronomer, thus destroying the link between the observation
and the observer.
One delegate made his point in the hallway banter about the
crucial attachment of observation to observer. He recounted that AAVSO
director Arne Henden wrote an interesting letter to the Hopkins
Phoenix Observatory for its newsletter #14. It was in response to the
HPO's inquiry about crediting work done thru AAVSO. Henden, among
other points, assured that AAVSO keeps careful records of the observer
with the report, so that a question about the report can be taken up
with the observer. AAVSO will try to get the astronomer using the
report in touch with the observer. He noted that some observers may be
lost because they moved or died.
Against this situation, Citizen Sky seemed to many delegates to be
an awful way to encourage newcomers to astronomy and to obtain epsilon
Aurigae data. Some said they'll pass over this effort and work with
the public under supervision at their own meetings.
Photometry
--------
The workshop on photometry was headed by Geir Lingenberg, who
developed a new software for handling photometric data. Attendees were
advised to have their laptops to hand to follow along via the hotel's
wireless Internet service.
I have to admit I really didn't understand this session well.
There were so many interruptions to fiddle with delegates's computers
that little forward progress was made for the presentation. I'll have
to inquire after the program, called 'Photometrica' later in the
month.
For one thing, many delegates didn't have wireless network on
their computers and were shut out from the online demonstrations.
Others were in a low-signal part of the meeting room and were
constantly thrown off the net. Others had low battery power with no
handy power point to plug their machine into.
The session crew circulated around trying to get people hooked
properly. I suppose they were reasonably helpful and successful but
the effort squandered a substantial piece of the session's timespan.
Having no laptop to bring to the meeting, I was left out. Yet with
the trouble suffered by so many others with computers, maybe I wasn't
so far out of step after all.
CCD techniques
------------
As a welcome comeback from the photometry session, the one on CCD
observing methods was a smooth and clean workshop! Chaired by Arne
Henden, it discussed glitches and faults that can infect CCD
observations. A lively dialog followed.
In CCD work, the photons from the target star and comparison are
counted by computer and recorded in a datafile. The human has to
acquire and lock on the target with his telescope and then process the
datafile for sending to AAVSO.
Merely by using a computer-based method of assessing the
brightness of stars is no assurance that the collected data are good.
The plots you can make with the usual photometry softwares look great,
but could in fact be misleading when combined with data from other
astronomers.
The Park in the Sky
-----------------
My own presentation, a slideshow on Saturday the 7th, showed the
brand-new High Line park on Manhattan and its potential for in-town
starviewing. The High Line is built on an abandoned cargo el along the
west side of Manhattan as a linear park reached by stairs and
elevator.
The first segment, Gansevoort St to 22nd St, opened in summer
2009. The other two will open in 2010 and 2011. These extend High Line
22nd St-30th St and then 30th st-34th St. The full length when
complete is 2-1/2 kilometers. North of 34th St the el ramps into a
trench where it still handles rail traffic with Penn Station.
The original rail alignment since the 19th century was in 12th Av
to work the piers on the Hudson River. The mixing of foot, hoof, and
rail in the same street was intolerable.
In the 1920s the railline was raised onto a new el along 11th Av,
and a new elevated highway, the West Side Drive, was built along 12th
Av. In the 1980s both ended operations. The West Side Drive self-
collapsed in several places and was in the 1990s demolished. The
railline was left intact to deteriorate.
.The highway was replaced by a grade-level boulevard while the
railroad was rebuilt into the park, both in the 2-thous.
The High Line is narrow, some 10 meters, that of the former two-
lane railroad, with no room for large fields and pavilions. It is
mostly plantings, footpaths, trees, art pieces, small grasslands,
benches.
One fascinating feature preserved is the penetration of tracks,
now embedded in smooth concrete, INSIDE wayside buildings! The tracks
served former factories and warehouses with interior cargo transfer.
Visitors actually walk THRU these buildings, which are handy shelters
from rain.
The High Line has an incredibly open sky from its elevation and
the lower skyline around it. In most directions the lower altitude is
about 10 degrees, depending on observer's location along the High
Line. it also is in a newly developed district for the growing
cerebral industries and high-end housing, that don't trash the sky
with luminous graffiti. An other amazing feature is the total absence
of lamppoles. All lighting at night is by thoroly shielded luminaries
UNDER the benches and INSIDE fence rails. No light shines onto the
visitor from above. Attendees were awed by the twilight pictures of
High Line with the soft, yet ample, lighting.
Starviewing isn't yet staged on High Line but preliminary tests
prove it can be a runaway hit for cityfolk. From it on clear nights,
transparency of 4-182 magnitude is routine -- only a kilometer from
the core of midtown Manhattan!
Kepler spaceprobe
---------------
The keynote speaker at the banquet, DrSteve Howell Ball
aerospace and Technologies, who built and operates Kepler, described
the recently-launched Kepler spaceprobe. It will examine about 150,000
stars in the Milky Way band for Earth-size planets. Here to fore
almost all planets at other stars are much larger than Earth. These
are detectable by instruments to hand on Earth.
Kepler uses the photometric method of exoplanet detection,
measurig the changes in brightness of stars as a planet transits in
front of it. He showed that an Earth-size planet in front of a Sun-
size star obscures about 1/10,000of the star's light, too small to
confidently measure from the ground.
Launched in March 2009, Kepler took a couple months to reach its
observing station in solar orbit just outside Earth with a period of a
few days longer than one year. The probe fixates on a 10-degree square
about 1/2 between Vega and Deneb. Mission duration is four years,
which may be extended if the satellite remains in good working order.
Each star
There is only one instrument on Kepler, a CCD grid of about 95
million pixels. Each pixel continuously counts photons from the star
imaging on it. The counts are related to Earth for study, hopefully
finding instances of planet transits.
The grid is served by a 1.4m mirror of a Schmidt telescope and the
craft has mass of about one ton.
Kepler will not 'take pictures'. A synthetic picture can be built
by plotting the pixels in a raster form. To guard against bad or out-
of-spec pixels, the telescope is defocused to make each star hit a
small cluster of pixels. The readings of all pixels must be consistent
for a good observation.
Kepler can not view bright stars, which will overpower the
electronics. The CCD grid is an 6 x 7 array of calls, each with 2.5
megapixels. The cells are spaced and aligned such that any bright star
in the field falls between them and not strike a pixel.
By July observations began with Kepler well behind Earth, away
from interfering light and gravity from our planet. Kepler already
confirmed previously known transit planets, as a test of its function
and operation.
Howell stressed that Kepler does not actually 'find planets'. It
looks for dips in a star's brightness with profile matching the model
of a transit planet an then refers the star to other observatories to
study. The four-year program hopes to obtain at least two transits of
a planet, if it is in an orbit like Earth's with roughly 1-year
period.
Attendees were eager to suggest that Kepler could measure actual
variable stars. If any are in the field they will be captured in the
data. New ones could be discovered by Kepler. with the precision of
Kepler's photometry of some 20 parts per million in illumination, some
of us wondered if entirely new kinds of low-amplitude variables will
be discovered.
AAVSO offices
-----------
I knew about the move of AAVSO from its old house on Birch Street
in CAmbridge to the former house of Sky & Telescope on Bay State Road,
around the corner. This happened about January 2007. After months of
renovating the house, it was formally dedicated at the fall 2007 AAVSO
convention, which I missed.
Until now I never saw the new place, altho I visited it many times
when it housed S&T. As luck had it, the visit at this AAVSO meeting
was at night, so I could not see what changes were made to the
exterior of the building. My entire prospect was from the inside
during the visit.
The visit was a buffet supper and social. The food and drink were
great, with fish and lasagna for me. AAVSO put standup tables around
the floor, but no where enough for the crowd of about 60 who showed
up. Many stood or sat at desks, worktables, bookcases here and there.
On the other hand, there was plenty of trash baskets to handle the
discarded plates, cups, and what ever.
Only the street floor was open, the upstairs being private rooms.
Just this ground floor was larger than the two full floors of the old
house on Birch Street and the layout was more open and airy. The
furniture seemed to be a mix of items from the old office and newly
acquired ones.
I photoessayed the headquarters and social to illustrate its blend
of new features and historical artifacts. One, as example, was a pair
of cabinets, like the card catalog of a library, stuffed with hand-
written cards for each individual observation from the 1880s to 1920s.
At least this was the range covered by the particular cards I
inspected.
Each card had the star name, with adhoc abbreviations for the
constellations -- they preceded the IAU system of abbreves -- the
calendar date, observer's name, and the star's magnitude, plus
occasional extra notes. An AAVSO staffer explained that these were
observations made outside AAVSO and culled from magazines, journals,
logbooks. Most had also the star's AAVSO designation, the coded RA-De
(epoch 1900), a scheme still in use today. It is NOT precessed to
later epochs, but is a unique identifier for each star. New variable
stars, even those in the 21st century, have designations in the 1900
epoch.
There were many historical pictures on the walls and sevreral
small astronomy instruments in cases. Most of these I recall from the
old office.
One specially intriguing new wall picture was a poster from the
Chandra base at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics. It plotted star
mass against time during its life. At the appropriate time was an
illustration of its state of evolution, like protoplanetary nebula,
nascent star, main sequence, giant, nova, globular nebula, white
dwarf.
Each example mass was a horizontal timeline for it that compared
with timelines for other mass of star above and below it. By standing
back to take in the whole chart, you get a graphic view of how stars
go thru their life with certain regions occupied by white dwarfs,
neutron stars, brown dwarfs, and so on. I'll call the Chandra office
during the coming week to get one of these posters.
Altho by now the new office is two years old, it has a clean
mature look, with nothing obviously out of order, broken, wanting
repair. It was clean, of course, made so by the crew for the visit,
and the flowers in jars here and there were freshly deployed.
A curious new feature is that the restroom is unisex with the male
and female symbol on the door. AAVSO clicked into the 21st century
conclusion
--------
On Sunday morning during breakfast we were all excited at the
future 100th anniversary meeting of AAVSO. It will be in the Boston
area in 2011, probably jointly with the annual meeting of American
Astronomical Society. As breakfast winded down we drifted off for the
trip home. A colleague Charles Scovil offered to give me a ride to
Stamford CT, where he works at the Stamford Observatory in that town
and is handles compiling and printing of AAVSO star charts.
I figured that at Stamford I can hop a Metro North train for the
rest of the way to New York. The ride was a lazy one, with a brief
stop for lunch at a fast-food hut. He took me to the observatory to
chat up some astronomy and take some coffee.
He worried about public astronomy in Stamford and generally.
Science is no longer a specific subject in the public schools and
there is little promotion for it else where. He noted difficulty in
hiring workers for the observatory. The mechanics and science
litteracy of applicants is dismal, so low that instruction in the
observatory operation won't make up for the deficiency. One applicant
was showed how to work a slide projector for public talks. The person
asked what the little plastic squares in the round thing were!
He noted that he's dropping the weekend sunviewing sessions, run
by an other staffer when he is away, like now for AAVSO. Even on clear
days, usually only one or two people show up.
In late afternoon Scovil drived me to the Stqamford train station,
where I exchanged by return half of my Amtrak ticket for a Metro North
ticket. The train came in a few minutes, this line being busy even on
Sunday. I rode to the City7777.