Science is heavy! Teasing out faint signals from the most remote and extreme places in the universe is challenging scientifically, and technically. It takes tons (literally) of data storage, and a lot of computational capacity to collect and sift through the data looking for interesting signals. Steve Barnet has worked on the computing and data collection systems for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory for over 15 years. In this talk, he will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the computing systems powering one of the most unique instruments ever built.

Steve Barnet earned his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 1994. After a brief stint with Cray Research, he worked for several academic and research units at UW-Madison before landing at the IceCube project. There he manages the talented team that provides the infrastructure powering the IceCube Scientific Collaboration.

Due to the continuing high levels of infection and hospitalization rate due to COVID-19, MAS HAS MADE THE DECISION TO REMAIN VIRTUAL FOR OUR JANUARY MEETING. The meeting will be hosted with Zoom as before. MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL WITH LINKS AND INSTRUCTIONS a day or so before the event. Again, this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, January 14th to let us know of your interest. We will email you the instructions and link by 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

If it’s December, it’s time for the telescope clinic. Gift-giving season means you may be on the giving or receiving end of a telescope gift soon. Let’s make sure you can avoid the most common mistakes when purchasing a telescope.

We’ve been doing this event for years, usually live. This meeting will be our second consecutive virtual version of the telescope clinic. We’ll do our best to share the critical info with you, and then allow plenty of time for questions and answers.

We hope you can join us!

Whether you are speaking to a third grader or an adult, understanding science can be easy when the ideas are communicated effectively. I will give a brief history of my time as outreach specialist with the UW Space Place and explain why I think outreach is a vital part of the UW’s mission. I will then list the top ten things I have learned over the past 20+ years about presenting science to the general public.

Kay Kriewald has a background in teaching and tutoring elementary and middle school students in science and math. She has been an outreach specialist at Space Place since 1995. She hopes to retire soon but she is still having too much fun.

Due to the continuing high levels of infection and hospitalization rate due to COVID-19 Delta, MAS HAS MADE THE DECISION TO STAY VIRTUAL FOR OUR NOVEMBER MEETING. The November meeting will be hosted with Zoom as before. MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL WITH LINKS AND INSTRUCTIONS a day or so before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, November 12 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the instructions and link by 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

In this talk, I discuss my light pollution atlas, light pollution modeling, and recent trends in light pollution across the world. A light pollution atlas (artificial night sky brightness) is distinct from the maps that show the lights as they would appear from orbit in space looking down. These space-view maps are the input data to a model of the propagation, extinction, and scattering of light in the atmosphere. The output of the model is the estimated artificial light pollution at zenith. I will also use the light pollution model to understand 1) the role of atmospheric aerosols (fine solid particles or liquid droplets suspended in the air) on light pollution and 2) the role of the direction of light propagation from light sources on light pollution (nearly horizontal light beams are the most harmful).

David Lorenz is an amateur astronomer with a professional background in the atmospheric sciences. His favorite astronomical target is the milky way from dark skies with naked-eye and binoculars. In the past, when seeking out dark skies, he relied heavily on the original global light pollution atlas created by Cinzano et al in 2001. Later on, when he grew impatient with the lack of updates to the atlas, he decided to repeat the calculations of Cinzano on more recent satellite data. He has continued to update the atlas through the present. He currently works at the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Due to the accelerating infection and hospitalization rate due to COVID-19 Delta, MAS HAS MADE THE DECISION TO STAY VIRTUAL FOR OUR OCTOBER MEETING. The October meeting will be hosted with Zoom as before. MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL WITH LINKS AND INSTRUCTIONS a day or so before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, Oct. 8 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the instructions and link by 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

Our nearest star – the Sun – offers an ever-changing variety of astronomical phenomena, including prominences, sunspots, filaments, and prominences, that reveal the sun’s weather and can be observed from earth. As we come out of the solar minimum, solar activity is already rapidly ramping up with sunspots and solar storms. In this talk, I will give an introduction to solar imaging, some of the equipment and techniques involved used by amateur astronomers, with some examples from my own work.

Bob Hamers is a professor of chemistry at UW-Madison with a longstanding interest in space and astronomy. At UW his research centers on using light and electrons to characterize solids and nanomaterials. As an amateur astronomer, he discovered MAS about 5 years ago and enjoys both deep-sky imaging and solar imaging.

Due to the accelerating infection and hospitalization rate due to COVID-19 Delta, MAS HAS MADE THE DECISION TO STAY VIRTUAL FOR OUR SEPTEMBER MEETING. The September meeting will be hosted with Zoom as before. MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL WITH LINKS AND INSTRUCTIONS a day or so before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, Sept. 10 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the instructions and link by 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

Stories of the Milky Way casting a shadow are common but details are elusive. Whenever someone wants to brag about the great dark skies they experienced they often trot out the “it was so dark you could see your shadow by the light of the Milky Way” line. Asking follow-up questions results in repetition and hand-waving.

But could it be true? Is it possible? After all, the Milky Way is large, diffuse, low contrast, and faint. The sun and moon cast shadows. Bright point sources cast shadows. It’s even said that Venus or Jupiter can cast shadows. Can the huge Milky Way, spread across 90 degrees of sky (or more), cast a shadow? In this talk, we move beyond hearsay, legend, and myth and attempt to nail down some facts and experimental results. I have been working on this talk in some form for more than 10 years and I’ve finally got some photographic evidence to show. Don’t miss this one. It may change the way you think about dark skies!

John Rummel is a long-time member and former president of the MAS. He has put an embarrassing number of miles on his car in pursuit of dark skies in the contiguous United States.

Due to the accelerating infection and hospitalization rate due to COVID-19 Delta, MAS HAS MADE THE DECISION TO STAY VIRTUAL FOR OUR AUGUST MEETING. The August meeting will either be hosted with Zoom as before, or streamed via our Youtube channel. MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL WITH LINKS AND INSTRUCTIONS a day or so before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, August 13 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the instructions and link by 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

View the MAS YouTube channel by following this link.

Telescopes for astrophotography can be large and heavy instruments, costing thousands of dollars. For those who own DSLR cameras, there are a wide selection of available lenses that make an excellent lightweight, low cost, and easy to use platform for starting in astrophotography. We will look at some advantages (and disadvantages) of using camera lenses when photographing the night sky and examine characteristics of lenses ideally suited for astrophotography. In the second half of the presentation, we will take an introductory look at using narrowband filters for astrophotography, with emphasis on wide-field astrophotography. When narrowband filters are combined with a fast lens, a universe of otherwise hidden objects is within reach to those imaging in light polluted skies, in what can be a very lightweight and portable setup.

Martin Mika is currently serving as the Observatory Director for MAS and Laboratory Manager for Columbus Chemical Industries. He has a background in chemistry and astronomy, and currently works as a chemist performing trace level chemical analysis.

MAS has been holding virtual meetings for the duration of the COVID pandemic. While we expect to be returning to in-person meetings soon, as of the planning of this event, the July meeting is being treated as a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, July 9 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are an emerging sensor technology capable of detecting and time-tagging individual photons with picosecond precision. Despite (or perhaps, due to) these capabilities, SPADs are considered specialized devices suitable only for photon-starved scenarios, and restricted to a limited set of niche applications. This raises the following questions: Can SPADs operate not just in low light, but in bright scenes as well? Can SPADs be used not just with precisely controlled active light sources such as pulsed lasers, but under passive, uncontrolled illumination like cellphone or machine vision cameras?

I will describe our recent work on designing computational imaging techniques that (a) enable single-photon sensors to operate across the entire gamut of imaging conditions including high-flux scenes, and (b) leverages SPADs as passive imaging devices for ultra-low light photography. The overall goal is to transform SPADs into all-weather, general-purpose sensors capable of both active and passive imaging, across photon-starved and photon-flooded environments.

Mohit Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received B. Tech in Computer Science from IIT-Delhi, Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University. He directs the WISION Lab with research interests broadly in computer vision and computational imaging. He has received best paper honorable mention awards at computer vision and photography conferences in 2014 and 2019. His research is supported by NSF, ONR, DARPA, Sony, Intel and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The June meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, June 11 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

In a modern world whose immediate history remains informed by the Cold War, it is easy for us to see the ways in which science and geopolitics intermingle. It is no secret, for example, that the rockets that power our modern space missions are products of Cold War weapons programs, nor is it a secret that the Apollo program was itself a direct response to the Soviet Union’s own triumphs in space exploration. Just as one cannot speak of the Cold War without conjuring the specter of nuclear weapons, one likewise cannot speak of the Cold War without remembering an era when espionage and spycraft came fully into the modern age. But espionage and the guarding of scientific secrets is not unique to modernity. Between 1614 and 1626, the Italian nobleman Pietro della Valle journeyed throughout much of what we today call North Africa, the Middle East, and the West-Indian coast. His long journey had a single purpose: to obtain lost books and ancient knowledge that he and his patrons believed would vindicate Copernican cosmology. He also sought targets of opportunity, purchasing books on science and magic, any scriptures pre-dating the Vulgate, and any maps he encountered. Beyond this, his diaries reveal a keen interest in local fortifications and water sources, often describing them in detail and commenting on their seeming strengths and weaknesses. These activities unsurprisingly piqued the interest of local authorities who often forbade local merchants and book sellers from trading with or revealing craft secrets to him. This talk will tell the story of how della Valle conspired with the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Borri to convert the Muslim astronomer Zayyn al-dīn al-Lārī, and how Tycho Brahe’s novel discoveries came to be at the heart of that plan. My goal is to provide an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which regional and factional intrigue helped shape astronomy in the seventeenth century, as well as the ways in which della Valle used astronomical knowledge as capital for extracting secrets and enticing forbidden transactions.

Biographical Sketch:

James Barnes is currently a dissertator and Lindberg Distinguished Graduate Fellow in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include the history of astronomy and cosmology, navigation, scientific practice, science and religion, and knowledge production across cultures. His current research focuses on the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Borri, the institutionalization of science in Europe beginning in the 17th century, and the relationship between science and the state.

The May meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to our web followers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, May 14 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening. See Less