A photographer’s personal journey into deep-sky astrophotography, from mild interest through the slow but inexorable descent into madness. Lessons learned. Pitfalls explored (from the bottom). Equipment choices, techniques and resources for beginners: how to put a toe in the deep-sky or planetary waters and avoid most of the piranhas.

Rick Wayne is a husband, a dad, and a software engineer for UW Soils, where he writes agronomic decision-support software (motto: “Sweet Bog where do I put all these tons of cow poop?”)

He is an Outdoor Emergency Care instructor and runs the regional instructor-development program for the Ski Patrol, and holds National Appointment #11910. His lifelong interest in photography led to his education (though not to his employment) as a photojournalist. He sort of toppled into deep-sky astrophotography on the way to something else.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

There are two important solar eclipse events coming up: the October 14 2023 Annular Solar Eclipse, and the April 8 2024 Total Solar Eclipse. This talk will be a general introduction to solar eclipses with a quick look back at the August 2017 event (seen by many MAS members) but a thorough look ahead to the two upcoming events. Why should you care and how should you prepare? Everything you need to know about planning for and then observing these two events will be covered.

John Rummel is a long-time member and past president of the Madison Astronomical Society. He made his reservations for a place to stay in Texas nearly 3 years ahead of the April 2024 total eclipse!

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

Though we may think of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as primarily intended to observe the early universe and the most distant galaxies, it also counts observing bodies in our own solar system as part of its mission. As part of JWST’s Early Release Science program, a group of astronomers and planetary scientists proposed and and was selected to observe the Jupiter system, including its atmosphere, rings, and several satellites. Many of that progam’s observations have now been completed and results are being published. This talk will discuss the capabilities of several of JWST’s instruments including the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI), and what observations they conducted. (Jupiter image processing by Ricardo Hueso and Judy Schmidt.)

Dr. Pat Fry is a researcher at UW-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center. During his career, he has acquired, processed, and analyzed solar system data from the Galileo Probe’s Net Flux Radiometer, Hubble’s series of visible and near infrared cameras, Cassini’s imaging camera and imaging spectrograph, as well as conducting observations of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and the Keck Observatory on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountaintop.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

Teledyne Imaging’s image sensors, cameras, and imaging components have played central roles in groundbreaking projects like the Hubble Telescope, the Mars Rovers, and the James Webb Telescope. We will explore the latest industry trends in CCD and CMOS sensors, and delve into Teledyne’s extensive influence on astronomy and the space program, revolutionizing the way we observe and explore the cosmos.

Chris Draves is an accomplished professional with over 20 years of experience in the scientific camera and image sensor industry. Having worked with leading brands like Princeton Instruments, Andor Technology, Fairchild Imaging, and currently Teledyne Imaging, he has held various positions in technical sales, business development, and product management. Throughout his career, Draves has provided high-performance cameras to research labs worldwide, supporting a wide range of applications. He currently resides in Madison, WI.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

Dr. Carlsmith will describe innovations in an introductory physics course providing modern research skills through immersion in big and small, arcane and applied science. Astrophysical topics include asteroids, exoplanets, black holes. Fun topics include computer vision, dappled light, the world’s simplest digital microscope, and mobile phone astrometry.

Professor Carlsmith is a faculty member of the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research in experimental elementary particle physics has spanned proton-antiproton collisions with the Collider Detector Facility at Fermilab Tevatron, detector development for the SDC experiment at the SSC, proton-proton collisions with the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and a search for WIMP dark matter with the LZ two-phase liquid xenon detector at SURF.

Dr. Carlsmith is presently focused on innovation in teaching and learning, especially the introduction of computation into the physics curriculum, and is engaged in a variety of interdisciplinary research projects.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

At the May 12, 2023 meeting of the Madison Astronomical Society, we’ll have a special presentation by Dr. Ellen Zweibel of the UW Madison Astronomy and Physics departments: “Cosmic Messengers.”

Astronomers have long observed the Universe in visible light and its shorter and longer wavelength cousins. Now, subatomic particles and ripples in spacetime have been added to the mix. I’ll describe how these different sources of information can be pieced together to observe some of the most energetic events in the Universe, now and in the past.

Bio: Ellen Zweibel has been a professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Wisconsin since 2003. Prior to that, she served on the faculty of the University of Colorado. She grew up in New Jersey, and was educated at the University of Chicago and Princeton University.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

Could Madison WI be a dark sky community? The Common Council seems to think so and has taken action to this end. This talk will focus mainly on the problem of light pollution generally, how Madison is faring specifically, what the future may hold if we do nothing, and will end with the Common Council’s recent action, and why this is reason for us all to hope.

John is a long-time member and former president of the MAS and has recently taken an active role in advocacy of dark skies and adoption of smart lighting choices in places like Madison.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location (2300 S. Park St., Madison) at 7:15pm. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

This talk will consider the origins and history of the UW Student Observatory, the telescopes it has been home to, and the scientific research carried out there up until its removal from the UW campus in 1960.

Jim Lattis is director of UW Space Place and Faculty Associate in the UW-Madison Astronomy Dept. Lattis is a historian of astronomy with specialties and publications in several areas including astronomy in the age of Galileo, astronomy in Italy, and astronomy in Wisconsin. Lattis also teaches introductory astronomy courses, including a course on the History of Astronomy and Cosmology. He holds a PhD in History of Science from UW-Madison.

This meeting will take place remotely via Zoom.

Bacteriophages, or ‘phages’, are bacterial viruses that are the most abundant organism on Earth. While phage research has progressed considerably terrestrially, how phages and bacteria interact in microgravity is largely unknown. Microgravity presents enormous challenge for microorganisms, which are greatly affected by gravity to mediate cell-cell and cell-phage interactions. To elucidate these interactions, we explore how T7 bacteriophage interacts with E. coli BL21 in microgravity onboard the International Space Station (ISS). We incubated samples in gravity and microgravity for short- and long-term experiments, finding that lysis is delayed in microgravity conditions and suggesting this phage is inhibited in microgravity. We identified novel mutations in phage proteins that influence activity in microgravity using whole genome sequencing and examine how microgravity influences selection in phage structural proteins. Our study provides a preliminary examination of the influence of microgravity on phage-host interactions. The success of the approach used in this study provides a foundation for future research in microgravity to explore interactions between phages and bacteria that define microbial communities.

Biographical sketch: Vatsan Raman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is an affiliate in the Departments of Bacteriology, and Chemical and Biological Engineering. His research group aims to develop technologies at the intersection of biochemistry, microbiology, computation, and engineering to understand the fundamental principles of biomolecular and cellular systems. Before joining the UW-Madison, he was a Wyss Technology Development Fellow at the Harvard Medical School where he developed foundational technologies to engineer microbes using biosensors to sustainably produce fuels and chemicals. In his graduate work, he developed computational methods in the Rosetta biomolecular modeling software suite for predicting protein structures at atomic-level accuracy at the University of Washington, Seattle.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety.

The January MAS meeting will feature a focus on astrophotography with presentations by two experienced practitioners:

Randy Trank on “Lucky Imaging and the Moon”

“Lucky Imaging” is a phrase used for certain types of astrophotography so I’ll explain that and show an example by processing a lunar photo.

Randy’s background:
Randy became interested in astronomy under the dark skies of Lake Ripley when he was 12 with an Edmund Scientific scope. He loved the Apollo missions. Randy has dabbled in astrophotography for 50 years, avoiding the moon. He is now returning to his lunar roots and wishing he hadn’t avoided the moon for so long! Randy is a member of the Rockford Amateur Astronomers.

Tim Wilson on “Data collection, Organization, and Preprocessing”

Tim will cover: Light Frames: Inspection for bad images, planes, satellites, movement of mount, Dark Frames: Same temperature and Exposure Time,
Flat Frames: Different methods, White Screen or T-Shirt Method, also touch on flat frames acquisition by using APT or SGP software, Bias Frames, Deep Sky Stacker: Loading files, basic settings, registration, image scores and stacking.

Tim’s background:
Tim is a retired CNC and Manual Machinist; retired in 2016 from the Savannah Company in Waunakee, WI. Tim has done visual astronomy for the las 40 years, but finally tried his hand at astrophotography in 2014 and has been doing it ever since. Some of his other interests are Electronics, 3D Printing, CNC Router, CO2 laser cutting and Guitar. He has a love of science and technology and enjoys reading books on physics and astronomy. Tim is a long-time member of the MAS.

This meeting will take place in-person at our usual Space Place classroom location. It will also be streamed live to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@madisonastronomicalsociety