From Dick Gala:
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Dear WAS members,
The September Macomb WAS meeting will be held on Thursday, September 18th at Macomb Community College, Building B at 7:30 pm. The feature presentation will be a discussion by David D'Onofrio of the 2008 Astronomy at the Beach Star Party at Kensington Metropark.
Please note that this is a change from what was published in the Sept WASP.
Dick
The new issue of the WASP, brought to you by Publications Director and Editor Larry Phipps, is available to download. It's a great issue, covering everything from the exciting presentation being given by Paul Goldsmith next month to Will Wright's single cell critter-to-ridiculous multilegged creature-to-interstellar exploration computer toy, Spore. There are items for sale, club events, and more. Enjoy!
Read more...From Dick Gala, WAS mailing list manager:
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Dear WAS members,
The September 2008 Cranbrook WAS meeting will be held on Monday, September 8th at 7:30 pm at the Cranbrook Institute of Science auditorium.
The main speaker will be Phil Martin and the title of his presentation will be "Astronomy for Gearheads".
It will be a picture tour and tutorial of how to set up a "portable computer controlled observatory" in 90 minutes (or less). Phil will also included a section on how to build a desktop PC from scratch (since you need one if you want computer control! LOL), and will finish with a short slide show of any presentable images (according to Phil) that he has taken since he started on this odyssey only a few short years ago.
Dr. Phil Martin was the former treasurer of WAS and has been a Senior Research Scientist at Wayne State University's Medical School for the past 30 years. He has over 50 publications in major peered scientific journals, mostly in the field of Macromolecular X-ray Crystallography. In fact, Phil has a first author on a paper with Nobel Prize winner Robert Huber on the structure of the blood clotting enzyme, thrombin. Most recently he has switched fields by going from crystallography, which he considers way too easy now, and has gone into Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics applications to macromolecular enzyme systems.
It is obvious that Phil is an astronomy "gear head". While others are setting up their telescopes for observing, Phil is busy doing the same, but also making the appropriate electrical connections to his portable observatory. The ongoing joke is that Phil never observes, and doesn't even own any eye pieces. Not true, not true, he says!! Phil has a nice array of various eyepieces, including 9 and 16 mm Naglers. Since imaging an object usually takes over two hours, and is completely automated, Phil wanders around at star parties and looks through other people's telescopes. And, when he gets tired of imaging, he gets excellent views through the 78 mm Tak or 11 inch CGE 1100. In fact, just last week he "observed" both Venus and Mercury at sunset.
Phil also builds computers from scratch. He has built his own cluster of five high speed computational nodes to do computational chemistry at Wayne, has 4 desktops and two laptops at home, and will show you how easy it is to build your own "screamer" for home and observatory in his upcoming seminar, "Astronomy For Gearheads."
In addition Ken Bertin will take a few minutes to share with us his trip to China to view the August Total Solar Eclipse.
Dick
Dr. Mary Putnam of the University of Michigan was the keynote speaker.
WAS Treasurer Stephen Uitti and friends
The WAS information and merchandise table
From Dick Gala, WAS mailing list manager - just in case you missed it:
Read more...Dear WAS members,This weekend the 12th annual Astronomy at the Beach star party will be held. It is a 2-day event starting at 6 pm this Friday, Sept 5th and again Saturday, September 6th. For those of us that will be setting up a telescope, the area will be open at 5 pm each day. Unlike previous years the event will NOT be held at Martindale Beach but has been moved to Maple Beach for this year because of construction at the Martindale Beach area. Support by Kensington park attendants in the form of electric carts will be provided to move our equipment from the parking lot to the viewing area. The keynote speaker for the event will be Dr. Mary Putman from the Astronomy Dept of U. of Michigan. Her talk for each of the evenings will be "How Do You Feed a Galaxy". For more info about the event one can go to the following web site:The schedule of events and talks for each evening can be found on the following web site:On Saturday, September 6th Dr. Putman will meet with members of the amateur astronomy clubs involved with the event to present a talk in greater depth about feeding galaxies and there will be an opportunity for informal discussion and questions and answers after the talk. This is an additional event that is not open to the public but open only to members of amateur astronomy clubs. The event will start at 1:30 pm and last for about 2 hours. Contact the club for more information about it.This is a fantastic event. In past years 1 to 2 thousand of the public has shown up to hear the talks and look through our telescopes. Many of the talks and events are geared towards young people but people of all ages will learn more about the sky and what we do as amateur astronomers. Do plan to attend and bring your neighbors, friends and relatives. A good time will be had by all!Dick
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