Cranbrook Meeting, Sept. 8

From Dick Gala, WAS mailing list manager:

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