The return of the Madison Astronomical Society’s annual Holiday Party and Telescope Clinic.

Do you have a telescope that’s giving you problems? Has it been gathering dust in your closet instead of giving great views of the moon and planets? Are you stuck and can’t get to the next step? Our experts can help you diagnose the issues and get it figured out. Bring your telescope to this meeting and we’ll take a look at it with you.

Also, feel free to bring a holiday snack to share with the group. Cookies, brownies or other finger foods preferred.

There will be a short presentation by John Wunderlin, co-founder of the Iowa County Astronomers:

Title: So You Want To Buy a Telescope?

John will share his thoughts on telescope gear after almost 20 years in the hobby

John Wunderlin has been an active amateur astronomer for nearly 20 years. He co-founded the Iowa County Astronomers club in Dodgeville, Wisconsin and estimates that more than 5000 people have looked through his telescopes at outreach events over the years. He was an avid astrophotographer spending every clear night in his backyard observatory for a decade but since moving to Madison in 2014 has mostly stuck to weekend visual excursions with his 10″ Dobsonian. John founded his Spike-a.com astronomy business bringing the first commercial Bahtinov focusing masks and other astrophotography gear to the public in 2008.

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/channel/UCapyLmVtazhO6gB3dRjrjlQ.

Summary: Molecules make up the world around us and serve as the building blocks to life as we know it on Earth. The questions remain as to how these molecules form and are incorporated into planets, and whether life might form elsewhere in the universe. Astrochemists study the chemistry of space and the evolution of molecules as stars and planets form. In this talk, I will overview my astrochemistry research program that incorporates laboratory spectroscopy, observational astronomy, and astrochemical modeling to decipher the chemistry that might lead to life in the universe.

Susanna Widicus Weaver, Vozza Professor of Chemistry and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin is an expert in prebiotic astrochemistry. Her research, combining laboratory spectroscopy, observational astronomy, and chemical modeling, is aimed at understanding the mechanisms driving interstellar chemistry and the pathways for the formation of life. She received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Illinois Wesleyan University (2000) and her Ph.D. in chemistry at Caltech (2005). She was a postdoctoral fellow in Chemistry and Astronomy at the University of Illinois from 2005-2008. Before moving to Wisconsin, she was a Professor of Chemistry at Emory University. She is a passionate teacher and leads an active and diverse research group involving many students (https://widicusweaver.chem.wisc.edu).

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/channel/UCapyLmVtazhO6gB3dRjrjlQ.

A presentation by John Rummel. In the mid-1930s, as the Great Depression continued to ravage the nation, group of Madison men and women came together around their common interest in astronomy and formed a club. Remarkably, almost 90 years later, today’s MAS still bears a striking resemblance to the original group as it took its first steps. This presentation will introduce a few of those founders and share a few of the stories that have come to light after lying forgotten for decades.

This meeting of the Madison Astronomical Society will be presented both live in-person at Space Place and online via YouYube. To watch online, visit our YouTube channel.

Is it going to be clear tonight? What’s the moon’s phase and what will I be able to see along the terminator? How bad is the smoke going to impact transparency for imaging tomorrow? Which moon of Jupiter just snuck out from behind the limb of the planet? How should I best orient my camera field of view to frame the DSO I want to shoot tonight? I haven’t seen the sky in months, what’s going to be up there this weekend when it is supposed to clear out?

Any of these questions sound familiar? If so, join Jeff as he shares his favorite “go-to” mobile, laptop, and browser-based applications and software for amateur astronomy. These range from free, on-line resources and “shareware,” to inexpensive but powerful mobile apps, to somewhat pricey desktop applications for image calibration, stacking, and processing. In his talk Jeff will cover software and apps to meet the wide-ranging needs of most amateur astronomers and astrophotographers including resources for weather forecasts and astronomical observing/imaging conditions, planetarium and simulation software for planning and learning, and much more!

Jeffrey Shokler is an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer with over three decades of experience in the hobby. He is a long-time member and past President, Vice-President, and Board Member of the Madison Astronomical Society. Jeff’s educational background is in anthropology, archaeology, and geoscience from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He currently works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the Director for Technology and Assessment for the Office of Undergraduate Advising.

This meeting of the Madison Astronomical Society will be presented both live in-person at Space Place and online via Youtube.

Dr. Jim Lawler, UW Madison Dept of Physics, the Arthur and Aurelia Schawlow Professorship

I will talk about how we measure spontaneous decay rates between two energy levels of an atom or ion, how stars produce spectra, and links between basic spectroscopy (like my group’s activities) and astronomy. Nearly everything humanity knows, or may every learn, about the detailed physics and chemistry of the remote Universe is from spectroscopy. I will mention the importance of quantization and the future of the quantum internet if time allows.

Before retiring in May of this year, Jim Lawler was the Arthur and Aurelia Schawlow Professor of Physics at the UW Madison. Lawler spent his career in atomic, molecular & optical physics with a focus on developing and applying laser spectroscopic techniques to determine accurate absolute atomic transition probabilities.

Lawler received his MS (’74) and PhD (’78) from this department, studying with now-professor emeritus Wilmer Anderson. In the two years after earning his doctorate, he was a research associate at Stanford University, and returned to UW–Madison as an assistant professor in 1980.

Lawler has accumulated numerous awards and honors over his distinguished career. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the U.K. Institute of Physics, and in 2020 he was elected a Legacy Fellow of the inaugural class of American Astronomical Society Fellows. He won the 1992 W. P. Allis Prize of the American Physical Society and the 1995 Penning Award from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics for research in plasma physics, the two highest National and International Awards in the field of Low Temperature Plasma Physics. In 2017, he won Laboratory Astrophysics Prize of the American Astronomical Society for research in spectroscopy.

The August MAS meeting live stream on YouTube has been scheduled. If you haven’t done so, go to the Madison Astronomical Society YouTube channel and click on the subscribe button. If you watch any of the MAS videos please click on the “Thumbs up” button. It helps to make the channel more visible to others on YouTube.

Two of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, have been dancing around each other for billions of years. This dance has led to a huge amount of gas getting thrown from their disks and out into what we know as the Magellanic Stream. In my work, I run high resolution simulations of these interactions to better constrain the history and future of the Magellanic System. Some of our recent results have shown that a warm circumgalactic medium of warm gas around the Magellanic Clouds may play a large role in the formation and current properties of the Stream and that the Stream may be up to five times closer than previously thought. In this talk I will discuss these simulations and their development as well as their predictions and how we may be able to confirm or refute them in future work.

Scott Lucchini is a PhD student working with Elena D’Onghia on hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy interactions. He is specifically studying the history and formation of the Magellanic Stream through tidal interactions between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. In his spare time he enjoys swing dancing, driving and working on his 1995 Mazda Miata, and landscape and architectural photography.

This meeting is planned to be in-person at UW Space Place. We will make arrangements for people who can’t attend to stream the event live.

UW undergraduate astronomy student Gage Siebert will present a talk on his research in radio astronomy:

The Tianlai radio telescope array is one of several experiments working to map hydrogen density over large volumes of the universe. I’ll talk a little about how I came to work on Tianlai and describe how the experiment works. Then, we’ll talk about how these measurements relate to the earliest times in the universe and what they can teach us about the expansion of the universe and dark energy. Finally, I will describe how Tianlai is also used to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Gage Siebert graduated from UW Madison in May of this year with his bachelor’s degree and will be attending Arizona State University for graduate school beginning in the fall of 2022.

This meeting will be held on-line via Zoom.

Our observations of galaxies, from nearby to the edges of the observable universe, reveal striking diversity of size, environment, composition, and apparent structure. Ranging from the clumpy irregulars, through the massive round ellipticals, to the coherent disks — probing the mechanisms responsible for these formations in nature requires a wide range of investigative tools from theoretical observations to detailed spectroscopic observations. Barred spirals comprise >50% of the observed population of nearby disk galaxies yet the physical mechanisms that create and sustain these features are not well understood despite persistent study for nearly 200 years. In this talk, we will take a tour through the features that populate our local galaxies, explore their dynamical origins, and dive into some forthcoming results on bar supporting orbital populations.

Rachel Lee McClure is a National Research Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the third year of her PhD at the UW — Madison Astronomy Department in the MadAstroDynamics Group. Her research is an exploration of the formation and maintenance of bars in disk galaxies throughout the universe in collaboration with advisor Prof. Elena D’Onghia. Through her work, McClure characterizes the orbital dynamics of individual stars in large particle number simulations of galaxies to identify observable signatures for investigation with spatially resolved observational surveys of galaxies. Besides research, she is a passionate and dedicated educator focused on building inquiry-based structures into accessible astronomy coursework at the high-school and university level.

This MAS meeting will mark our return to IN-PERSON MEETINGS at Space Place.