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

This talk analyzes a solar eclipse that is described as annular, but that other reports and modern calculations show to have been very total. I explore the reasons for this odd state of affairs, since most eclipse observers are impressed by the darkness, not what’s happening immediately around the Sun. I argue that the report comes from a theoretically sophisticated observer with access to a 14th c. annular eclipse report that shaped his observation, which was then used to refute the concentric-sphere astronomy of al-Bitruji, an influential 12-13th century Arab astronomer.

Michael H. Shank is Professor emeritus in the now-defunct Department of the History of Science at the UW-Madison, specializing in 14-15th-c. natural philosophy and astronomy. Most recently, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University (Beijing; fall 2017, fall 2019) and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Zhejiang University (Hangzhou; fall 2018).

The April 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 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, April 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.

Pretend it is 1815 and you are a student at Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., could you, with the aid of a terrestrial globe, determine the latitude and longitude of Washington City? Or maybe the more taxing problem to find the time of the sun’s rising and setting, and the length of the day and night at any place? These and over a hundred other problems awaited you in an 1812 book on the use of the globes and practical astronomy employed at this Jesuit college founded in 1789. Written by the Irish-born Jesuit James Wallace, this volume is one example of how the sciences like astronomy enjoyed a confirmed place in American Catholic colleges in the nineteenth century. My talk will explore this and two other later historical episodes to show how astronomy figured into Catholic higher education for students and their teachers alike.

Dana A. Freiburger, Doctoral CandidateHistory of Science Program, UW-MadisonDana holds broad interests in histories of science and technology in the United States and Japan over the last two hundred years.

He received a B.S. in Computer Science in 1979 and enjoyed a career in the computer industry until smitten by history of science. Dana escaped Silicon Valley and went on to earn masters degrees in history of science from the University of Oxford in 1999 and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002 where he now works to finish his dissertation on the place of science in nineteenth-century American Catholic higher education; his talk today draws from that ongoing project.

The March 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, March 12 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.

Our Milky Way Galaxy is an “island” of stars, interstellar gas, and dark matter in the vast expanses of intergalactic space. In this talk, I will focus on the interstellar (mostly hydrogen) gas. This gas fills the space between the stars, and some fraction of it is ionized: radiation from the stars has enough energy to remove the electron from the proton. By studying the resulting emission lines from this gas with the Wisconsin H-alpha Mapper, we have discovered that the central parts of the Milky Way are permeated by an unusual radiation field. I describe how we ended up making the discovery and why it is significant. As a bonus, I will describe the discovery of a thirty-degree arc of ionizing gas centered on the handle of the Big Dipper.

Prof. Bob Benjamin obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and joined the physics faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2003. He is interested in all things Milky Way, having participated in two major Wisconsin surveys of the Milky Way galaxy: the Wisconsin H-alpha Mapper and the NASA-sponsored Spitzer Space Telescope GLIMPSE survey of the galactic plane.

The February 12th 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, Feb 12 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.

Understanding the past habitable conditions on Mars is a primary scientific driver for NASA’s Curiosity rover. During the last eight years, Curiosity has traversed across diverse terrain within Gale crater and drilled the martian surface over two dozen times. Dr. Williams will provide an update on the latest scientific findings and share spectacular snapshots from along the rover’s journey. In addition, she will present an overview of NASA’s next robotic mission to Mars, Perseverance, which will land at Jezero crater in February 2021. 

Rebecca M. E. Williams is a planetary geologist who studies the history of water on Mars through orbiter and rover observations in conjunction with field-based analog studies on Earth. The overarching objective in her research is to understand the role of water in shaping the surface of Mars through comparison with similar landforms on Earth. She has led fieldwork at sites in Utah, California, Australia, Patagonia, and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to investigate river, lake and alluvial fan deposits. She was selected as a Participating Scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover in 2011. She has served in the role of principal investigator in eleven NASA-funded projects and as a team member with the MOC, CTX and THEMIS VIS cameras on spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Dr. Williams received her BA in physics and geology in 1995 from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 2000, she earned her Ph.D. in planetary science from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She was awarded the NASA Carl Sagan Fellowship for Early Career Researchers in 2006, and a 2017 Friend of Education by the Waunakee Teachers Association for her multi-year education and public outreach activities with students at all levels in the school district. Dr. Williams conducts research and rover operations from her home office in Waunakee, WI, where she lives with her husband and two daughters (8th & 12th grade).

The January 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 nonmembers 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, Jan 8 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.

MAS’s annual telescope clinic is a chance for people in the Madison area to get their questions answered about telescopes and binoculars. It may also help you with some ideas for the gift-giving season.

Do you have an old telescope that’s gathering dust because you don’t know how to use it?Or are you looking to buy a new one? Whatever the case, join us Friday online and learn something. MAS members will be on hand to answer your questions about your existing telescope or give you ideas for your next purchase.

The December 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.

This month we are opening the virtual meeting up to non-MAS members who may want to attend the meeting. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, Dec 11 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm Friday, Dec 11 that will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

Dr. Brady will talk about the generation of gravitational waves by colliding black holes and neutron stars, and how they are measured here on Earth using the LIGO detectors. He will tell the story of the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2017, through to the exciting observations that are becoming almost routine.

Patrick Brady received his B.Sc. from University College Dublin in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Alberta in 1994 where he studied with Werner Israel. He has held research positions at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Caltech, University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1999, Brady has been at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he holds the rank of Professor and is Director of the Leonard E Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology, and Astrophysics. Brady has been a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a Sloan Research Fellow, and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. Brady is a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and currently serves as Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. His research focuses on the analysis and interpretation of data from the worldwide network of gravitational-wave detectors.

The November 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.