December 22, 2012

Apollo 13 rumbles into Tacoma

Several dozen of us journeyed back to 1970 Thursday evening and helped bring Apollo 13 safely back to Earth after one of its oxygen tanks exploded en route to the Moon. Our time machine was the set of Apollo 13: Mission Control, an interactive theater event running at the Tacoma Dome Exhibition Hall through Dec. 30.

The audience at Apollo 13: Mission Control sits at
realistic, working, retro consoles at Mission Control.
Producers of the show have created a believable replica of Mission Control in the hall, and audience members sit at consoles and become members of the NASA “White Team” led by flight director Gene Kranz (played by actor Jason Whyte.) The retro realism of the control center, complete with video monitors, communication devices, and myriad warning lights, gives the audience role-playing a certain unexpected urgency. The plight of the flight is especially urgent for one audience member, pressed into service as the third astronaut on the mission–a nod to a late crew change made before the real Apollo 13 mission.

We mission controllers were not in the same room as the astronauts. Instead, the crew was off in a back room, on sets depicting the command and lunar modules of the mission, and we watched them on video from space and communicated by radio. Similarly, mission control often tapped in to Walter Cronkite (played by Gareth Williams) and his news reports about the mission and efforts to bring the astronauts home.

Your author informs “flight” of the figures for the 
proper engine burn time for the perfect return flight.
The audience participation was real; we solved math problems to determine the proper engine “burn time” for an accurate course correction for the return to Earth, combed through flight procedures trying to find a way to scrub excess carbon dioxide from the spacecraft, and had various other tasks and puzzles throughout the evening. And the rumbling of the Saturn V engines as the mission blasted off from Florida was felt all the way in Houston!

A cast of six professional actors portrayed the key figures of the mission, and also helped give us rookie controllers the tools we needed to play our parts. There was no real pressure to this audience participation; though shy participants had the option to sit in the press section and just observe. Nobody took them up on that option on preview night Thursday.

Kids at the performance seemed to especially enjoy playing mission control, but the adults I was with had a marvelous time as well, and many folks stayed after splashdown to have their photos taken with the astronauts.

Apollo 13: Mission Control was created and is directed by Kip Chapman and Brad Knewstubb; it was first produced for the BATS Theatre in New Zealand, and has enjoyed critical success there and in Australia. The show runs in Tacoma through Dec. 30, then plays at the Spokane Convention Center from Jan. 9-20. If you’re a space nut, or enjoyed the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film about the mission, you should check it out; it makes for a fun evening. Ticket info is available through the mission website, and tickets also are available on Ticketmaster.

August 14, 2012

Astronomy Magazine Blues Band on YouTube

Can you name the galaxy featured on the AMBB's drum kit?
One of the reasons I attended the annual conference of the Astronomical League last month was to catch the performance of the Astronomy Magazine Blues Band at the League’s awards banquet on the final day of the event. The band, led by drummer and Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher, was a lot of fun, playing a first set that was rock oriented and a second focused on more bluesy numbers. I gave the sets thumbs up in my dispatch from ALCon.

Now for those of you who weren’t fortunate enough to see it in person, the AMBB now has a video site on YouTube. The first two tracks are posted: covers of the CCR standard “Green River” and the Tom Petty tune “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” As noted on Eicher’s blog, Dave’s Universe, the videos were shot and edited by his son Chris Eicher, who is 19 and a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Chris is studying chemistry (not astronomy, journalism, music, or film!)  We wonder if the band got any product-placement revenue for the Pepsi that appears in the “Green River” video—especially given that the conference was near Chicago, home of Green River soda!

I share the videos below for your viewing pleasure.


August 6, 2012

Touchdown confirmed! Curiosity lands safely on Mars!

In what is arguably the nation’s greatest engineering achievement in space, NASA‘s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed safely on Mars a little after 10:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time Sunday. Because of the distance from Earth to Mars and the time it takes communication to travel between the two, we didn’t know until 14 minutes after it happened that a complicated landing plan worked.

Alice Enevoldsen of Alice’s Astro Info, a NASA Solar System Ambassador, hosted a gathering at the Kenney in West Seattle to watch NASA TV coverage of the landing. “This has already happened,” Enevoldsen said of the time delay. “It’s just like the NBC Olympics!” she quipped.

More than 50 people attended the event, and the tension was palpable in the viewing room. Here’s Seattle Astronomy video from the landing:



“Shake hands with the person next to you,” Enevoldsen said after the landing was confirmed. “That crazy landing maneuver worked!”

The Curiosity landing has at least one big Washington state connection. Rob Manning, flight system chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, attended high school in Burlington and is a 1980 graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla. Coincidentally, Enevoldsen also is a Whitman alum.

Mars fans gather after the successful landing
of "Curiosity" to check out model rovers and
Mars maps to learn more about the science
mission. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
It’s interesting and encouraging that the landing drew such a crowd late on a warm summer Sunday evening. While a number of those who attended are residents of the Kenney, a retirement community in West Seattle, local media such as the West Seattle Blog and Seattle Astronomy spread the word, and many visitors attended as well. After the excitement of the landing many of the attendees gathered around a table set up with model rovers—including some made from Lego blocks—and looked at maps of Mars with the various spacecraft landing sites marked. Enevoldsen fielded questions from many of those in attendance.

We understand there was a good crowd at the Mars Fest at the Museum of Flight as well.

It’s encouraging to see the interest in the mission and the excitement about the successful landing. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was clearly both relieved and elated with the successful landing. The mission is a pricey one, at $2.5 billion, and a crash landing would have been demoralizing to say the least. Afterwards Bolden, speaking to the NASA TV audience, called it “a huge day for the American people.” National pride aside, it has to be good for NASA to pull off a big success in these days of shrinking budgets. Energizing the public and impressing the folks with the purse strings can only help.

Getting to Mars was the hard part; now Curiosity and its arsenal of scientific instruments can go about the business of poking around Mars for evidence that our neighbor planet has supported or could support life.

We’re curious to see what it finds.

July 11, 2012

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day 4

The fourth and final day of ALCon 2012 in Chicago was a fun end to what was a good event.
There were no field trips on this final day, after outings to the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, Fermilab, and Yerkes Observatory during the first three days of the Astronomical League conference. Many attendees, including yours truly, had grown a little road weary and were happy to have a day devoted to events in the friendly confines of the Marriott Resort in Lincolnshire, Illinois, home base for ALCon.

An iPhone shot taken in a dark room doesn't do much justice to the
righteous Astronomy Magazine Blues Band, which played a couple
of boffo sets bracketing the banquet and awards ceremony at the
annual conference of the Astronomical League July 7 in
Lincolnshire, Illinois.
Morning sessions focused on a variety of observing techniques, and the afternoon was devoted to an excellent, if lengthy, discussion of various aspects of light pollution. This was the general theme of the conference—the theme was “Celebrate Starlight”—and talks were given by International Dark-Sky Association co-founder David Crawford, Sue Bennett from Dark-Sky park Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Audrey Fischer, the conference co-chair and founder of One Star at a Time, and several experts who talked about the latest research on the proven or suspected health effects of excessive night-time lighting.

That’s all well and good, but I was most looking forward to the session that drew me to the conference in the first place: a couple of sets from the Astronomy Magazine Blues Band! The band featured Steve Kryscio, Keith Bauer, Jeff Felbab, Mike Soliday, Ron Kovach, and was anchored by drummer and Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher. The band played before and after the banquet and awards ceremony, and they rocked it! The pre-dinner set included some rock classics: The Credence standards “Born on the Bayou” and “Green River,” Cream/Clapton tunes “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room”, The Who’s “Squeeze Box”, the Band’s “The Weight”, and the Hendrix tune “Voodoo Chile”.

A second set after the banquet featured vocals by Wisconsin’s Megan Bobo, a former “American Idol” contestant, and included the blues standard “Key to the Highway,” Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”, “Voodoo Woman”, Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues”, and B.B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone.”

The drum kit for the out-of-this-world Astronomy 
Magazine Blues Band. Can you name that galaxy?
Ironically, after that tune the band was gone, as hotel brass came around and said it was time for some quiet time. I’m sad to report that, as excellent as the band was, it was not universally well-received. Though it was a visibly advertised part of the conference, some attendees seemed distressed by the live music. Seattle Astronomy enjoyed it a lot.

All in all the conference was great, but the snafu about the music was emblematic of some of the logistical glitches that marred the conference somewhat. It has to be difficult getting a couple of hundred people from place to place, but one can’t help but think it could have gone more smoothly, and that the outstanding Astronomy Magazine Blues Band would have received the rousing reception it deserved.

Next year’s Astronomical League conference will be held in Atlanta. They’ll have to put together quite a program to lure Seattle Astronomy down to Georgia.

July 7, 2012

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day three

Attendees of the Astronomical League conference were fortunate
enough to visit the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin
July 6. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
After an eight-year wait I finally got a look inside Yerkes Observatory, the University of Chicago facility in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. The intrepid travelers who are the attendees of the national conference of the Astronomical League visited Yerkes July 6, the third day of the conference.

My wait was eight years because in 2004 I attended another business conference just a hop and a skip away in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The observatory was closed during the entire time I was here, and I hadn’t had an excuse to pass through the area since. In fact, the Yerkes trip was one of the major draws of the conference for me.

Yerkes bills itself as “the birthplace of modern astrophysics.” It was founded in 1897 by George Ellery Hale and William Harper, president of the Univerisity of Chicago at the time, and financed by Chicago railroad magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. It was great to share the same space as some of the greats. Names who have worked at Yerkes include Hubble, Burnham, Barnard, Nichols, Ross, Struve, Morgan, Kuiper, Adams, and Wright. Einstein paid a visit to Yerkes in 1921. The 60-foot-long telescope with 40-inch lenses was the biggest refractor ever made for astronomy. Building bigger lenses just wasn’t practical. The Alvan Clark instrument makes the one in the UW’s Theodor Jacobsen Observatory look like a pipsqueak! Hale eventually lured many of the big names out west to look through even bigger reflecting scopes at Mt. Wilson.

The 40-inch Alvan Clark refractor, 60-feet long, is the biggest
refractor ever used successfully in astronomy. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
It was super cool to visit Yerkes and soak in its history, and also to learn about some of the work being done there to improve the astronomy experience for the visually and hearing impaired.

The morning was filled with talks, including one by Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher, who also has been here blogging. You can read his dispatches of day one, day two, and day three and see if you think he’s having as much fun as I am!

After the Yerkes tour we went to Ravinia for an outdoor chamber music concert by the Emerson String Quartet, a star-b-que, and a bit of observing before heading back to HQ for a little shuteye. Had our timing been a little better we could have attended quite a contextually appropriate concert: The Chicago Symphony will perform “The Planets” by Gustav Holst on July 31.

Tonight the Astronomy Magazine Blues Band plays to highlight the ALCon banquet and awards ceremony.

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day two

A trip through the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a play about creation’s birthday, and a sailing trip on Lake Michigan were the highlights of the second day of the national conference of the Astronomical League July 5.

Wilson Hall, the administrative building
 at Fermilab, has a spectacular 16-story atrium.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
Given the recent news about the Higgs boson, things were relatively quiet at Fermilab, where something of an “I knew that” air seemed about the place. There wasn’t much talk of the Higgs at all, though Fermilab has a FAQ document about the boson among its many handouts for visitors. The document describes the Higgs field as like “a giant vat of molasses spread throughout the universe” and the boson as “a particle that helps transmit the mass-giving Higgs force field, similar to the way a particle of light, the photon, transmits the electromagnetic field.” The universe seems really sticky.

Dr. Jason Steffen, who gave league members a talk about his work on the Kepler project, did give a shoutout to the particle, noting that without it he wouldn’t have a job, as there would be no extrasolar planets to detect and study. Not to worry; Steffen and his colleagues will be busy, as he said the current thinking is that up to 30 percent of stars have planetary systems. “Planets are all over the place,” he said.

The tour of Fermilab was interesting; many of the workers there are in something of a fishbowl, as their offices are glass-walled and visiting gawkers can peer right in. Among the offices at which we gawked was Fermilab’s remote operation center for the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is bigger and packs more electrical oomph than does Fermilab’s Tevatron, which has been shut down now as physicists dream up new experiments for the infrastructure.

ALCon continued to mix art and science. While at Fermilab we watched the play Creation’s Birthday written and directed by Dr. Hasan Padamsee, who spoke on day one of the conference. The play is at its heart about the work of Edwin Hubble and Father George Lemaitre to convince Einstein that the universe is expanding. There was plenty of math and physics in there—Padamsee is a physicist at Cornell—but he’s weaved in themes of religion, philosophy, art, sports, international politics, office politics, war, and a love story to make for a fascinating narrative. We especially enjoyed Julia Weed’s performance in the role of Einstein.

After the show we headed for the sailing ship “Windy” for an evening cruise on Lake Michigan in view of the Chicago night-time skyline. The cruise featured a presentation on navigating by the stars, some constellation lore, and singing of sea shanties. The best part of the show, though, was unplanned. A cool thunderstorm was lurking near us on the lake, flashing occasional lightning from cloud to cloud. Amid all of this the Moon rose, shining through the clouds and fog as a bright red-orange. This led one astronomy wag (me) to declare that, dang, it’s true–Mars really DOES look as big as the Moon!

It was a long but entertaining day of astronomy fun. Friday: a trip to the historic Yerkes Observatory.

July 5, 2012

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day one

Happy Independence Day, and greetings from Chicago, where we’re celebrating the 150th anniversary of amateur astronomy in the United States and the first day of the annual convention of the Astronomical League.

It’s pretty likely that people who do not have Ph.D. degrees in astronomy have been participating in the hobby for more than 150 years. But the Chicago Astronomical Society, a co-host of this event, was founded in 1862 and is still going strong as the oldest such organization in the Western Hemisphere.

Michael E. Bakich, a senior editor of Astronomy magazine, opened the day’s talks with a retrospective of the last century and a half in amateur astronomy. Bakich touched on a number of milestones of that time, notably the birth of John Dobson in 1915, and his creation, in 1967, of the Newtonian reflector mount that bears his name.

“Amateur astronomy really hasn’t been the same since,” Bakich said of the invention of the Dobsonian mount, a telescope that’s easy to use and easy for an amateur to build.

Three key developments occurred in 1980: The release of the Coulter Odyssey I telescope, a 13.1-inch Dobsonian scope that sold for just $400 (a 17.5-inch went for $600), and that Bakich said was the first commercially available Dob; the debut of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television series on PBS; and the first sales of the TeleVue 13mm Nagler, which Bakich called “the eyepiece that changed observing.” It offers both sharp images and a large apparent field of view.

Bakich noted that four transits of Venus happened during this time, though the one last month will be the last until 2117.

“The last 150 years have been a blast,” he said. “Here’s to the next 150!”

Mike Simmons
Mike Simmons, president of Astronomers Without Borders, also spoke in the morning session. The motto of the organization is “One People, One Sky” and Simmons explained the efforts to get past geopolitical differences and find common ground through astronomy.

“We’re all looking at the same thing everywhere,” Simmons said, making frequent references to trips to what he feels is a most misunderstood country: Iran.

“Iran is the most pro-American country I’ve ever been to, and I travel a lot,” Simmons said. “Whatever ideas you get from the news… you can’t trust the sound bites.”

He added that the people of Iran are typically delighted to be in contact with Americans.

“They love everything about America except what goes on between our governments,” he said.
Jan van Muijlwijk and Daniela De Paulis talked about their artistic endeavor, Moonbounce. It’s an interesting concept in which images are converted to sound, which is broadcast and bounced off the Moon. The return signal is caught on the rebound and then converted back into an image using the same software. The distortion of the image, resulting from the imperfect return of the data, is sort of the Moon’s take on the original.

Dr. Hasan Padamsee, a playwright and physicist from Cornell, closed out the morning’s lecture sessions with a talk about Edwin Hubble and various others involved in the physics of 100 years ago. We’re fortunate to be headed out Thursday to see Padamsee’s play about Hubble and Einstein, “Creation’s Birthday,” out at Fermilab. I expect we’ll also get some first-hand dope on the Higgs boson.

Astronomical League conventioneers mull about outside the
Adler Planetarium in Chicago during a field trip July 4.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
Our afternoon consisted of a fabulous roadtrip to the Chicago lakeshore to visit a pair of great institutions: The Field Museum and the Adler Planetarium.

At Field we had special presentations from Adler’s Mark Hammergren about asteroids and meteorites and from Field’s Philipp Heck about cosmic dust. Seattle Astronomy asked Hammergren about Seattle-area company Planetary Resources and its plan to mine asteroids for natural resources. Hammergren gave a mixed opinion. He called the notion of getting precious metals from asteroids a “red herring.”

“They’re not present in meteorites in high enough concentrations that would make it economically viable.” he said. “In the present day you’d be far better off looking at recycling materials. Concentrations of precious metals are much higher in today’s dumps.”

Hammergren did allow that space miners could find water and turn it into rocket fuel and other resources needed for future space exploration, but even with that was somewhat dubious.

“We don’t have enough infrastructure in space to justify that kind of investment,” he said. “The only thing that makes any kind of sense, economically speaking, is that if we move, in the next few decades, toward the mass colonization of space. Maybe that’s what they’re going for. You’ve got some eccentric billionaires who are trying to live the childhood dream. This is one way to jump start the colonization of our solar system.”

Also at Adler we were treated to the work of Jeff Talman, who has converted acoustic resonances of stars into musical compositions that are fascinating. It was great to see the spectacular imagery in Adler’s Grainger Sky Theater; the auditorium was closed for renovations when I last visited the Adler in 2010.

Friday’s agenda includes a trip to Fermilab for a tour and the “Creation’s Birthday” play, and then a tall ship sail on Lake Michigan for a cruise and a look at navigation by starlight.

Until then, I sign off from the Windy City.

June 23, 2012

A hell of a good universe: let's go!

“This is the century of human exploration in space,” astronaut Bonnie Dunbar told the audience at a Science Luminaries event, part of the Seattle Science Festival, last night at the Museum of Flight. It was an interesting declaration as Dunbar and fellow space shuttle astronaut George “Pinky” Nelson, who also spoke at the event, are among the space pioneers of the previous century.

The Pacific Science Center has been the lead organizer of the festival. The Space Luminaries event leaned heavily toward the awe and wonder and dreams of science. It included art, too, as members of Seattle Opera performed selections from “The Little Prince”  and members of Seattle Aerial Arts performed dances called “Weightlessness” and “Space.”

Bonnie Dunbar. Photo: NASA.
Dunbar told her story of being inspired by the night sky while growing up in the tiny town of Outlook in the Yakima Valley. The stars got her reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and dreaming about building her own spaceship and flying in it. Her eighth-grade teacher encouraged her to take algebra, a college physics professor nudged her toward engineering, and she eventually did build spaceships and flew on five shuttle missions.

“I was lucky because along the way I had very special people who let me dream,” Dunbar said. “I was always encouraged to share my goals, not to be bashful about them. Always to try to achieve excellence and do the best I could at everything, because in the end that’s really what helps us go forward.”

Nelson’s first shuttle mission was to repair the Solar Maximum satellite, the first time NASA had tried to rendezvous with and fix something already in orbit. He said there were two main objectives for the mission.

“One, it was an expensive solar observatory and we wanted to restore it so the scientists could do their work,” Nelson said. “The other—this was in 1984, at the height of the Cold War—we wanted to show the Russians that we could pluck a satellite out of the sky and do whatever we wanted with it.”
Even with such a serious mission, Nelson said that, as he left the shuttle un-tethered and floated out toward SolarMax, the little kid in him took over.

George "Pinky" Nelson. Photo: NASA.
“One of the coolest things that an astronaut gets to do is go outside,” he said of the experience. He recalled looking around, at the shuttle and the Earth below and thinking, “I can’t believe they let me do this!”

Nelson, now director of science, mathematics, and technology education at Western Washington University, is not shedding any tears at the end of the space shuttle era.

“The space shuttle is an amazing engineering achievement,” he said, adding, “I think it’s appropriate that they retired it. The technology is pretty old. It’s time to move on and do something else.”

The something else is private industry, and various companies are working on spacecraft to get people and cargo to and from low-Earth orbit.

“They are incredibly important and valuable, and I wish them success,” Nelson said. “I hope they all get filthy rich and bring a lot more people into space than we have in the past. But it’s not an easy thing to do.”

One of those giving it a shot is Sierra Nevada Space Systems, whose head Mark Sirangelo was the evening’s final speaker. Sirangelo is another dreamer who was flying airplanes before he could drive motor vehicles.

Mark Sirangelo. Photo: Sierra
Nevada Space Systems.
“Life is really about passion and love,” Sirangelo said. “One of the wonderful things about being in this industry is that you really get the sense of passion. You get a lot of people like Pinky and Bonnie who looked up to the stars and said, ‘I want to do something.’”

Sirangelo has certainly done something, too. Sierra Nevada has been part of missions to the Sun, Moon, and seven planets. It built part of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity that is on its way to the Red Planet, and worked on the system that we hope will land it there safely in August. Their big project is a re-usable spacecraft—the Dream Chaser.

“We called it the Dream Chaser for a reason,” Sirangelo said. “You can follow your dreams. You can go out and do things that are amazing. You can go out and push the boundaries.”

Sirangelo said they did some testing of Dream Chaser just a few weeks ago, and it seemed to excite and energize people. They tried to keep it low-key, but he drily noted that flying a spaceship over Denver was bound to attract attention, and the company received much correspondence and art inspired by the spacecraft.

“That’s what this is really about,” he said, “to be able to inspire the future of who we are and what we’re about. That’s how I was inspired as a little boy to start building things and looking to the stars.”
“Virtually everybody who is in the industry felt that way,” he added.

Dunbar, who is heading up Boeing‘s efforts on higher education and STEM strategic workforce planning, continues to dream of a Moon base or a human flight to Mars and figures it’s not “if” but “who” and “when.”

“We must not forget to explore,” Dunbar said. “We need to inspire the next generation to help us go forward. No nation has ever suffered from exploring, but those nations that have stopped exploring have disappeared into history.”

Nelson said he thinks that art and exploration are the most important things we can do to improve our quality of life and standard of living.

“I’ve been lucky as an educator and a scientist and as an astronaut to be a part of exploration in lots of ways,” he said. “Exploration of physical space, exploration of  ideas; to me there’s nothing more important than that.”

He finished his talk by quoting a line from a favorite poem by e.e. cummings:

“There’s a hell of a good universe next door. Let’s go!”

June 9, 2012

Transit of Venus

What a great day June 5 turned out to be! My three-day trek to see one of the rarest predictable astronomical events was a success, and I had a marvelous time watching Venus in transit across the face of the Sun.

Though I spent three days on the road to get to weather more
conducive to Venus transit viewing than we have in Seattle,
there were still clouds, and they made for interesting photos!
Shot near Corning, California. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
The beginning of the day didn’t look very promising. I awoke at about 6 a.m. in Canyonville, Oregon and looked out the window to see pouring rain. I looked at several online weather forecasts, and the outlook had worsened a bit since my last check the previous evening. Still, the prediction was for mostly sunny skies in my target area of Red Bluff, California.

The rain had let up some by the time I hit I-5 southbound at 7:30, but the overcast was complete. Clouds predominated the trip through the Siskiyou and Klamath Mountains; Mt. Shasta was completely socked in, and it was raining off and on as I worked my way south. Once I cleared Shasta Lake and headed into Redding and the Sacramento Valley, the clouds parted somewhat, but there was reason to worry. There was some nasty looking rain in the hills to the west, and plenty of clouds dotted the sky in Redding.

I pushed south. I had targeted Red Bluff as my viewing site because it was the closest spot with a forecast that gave good odds for transit viewing. The National Weather Service had it at less than 20 percent cloud cover for the afternoon. I’d done some internet searching and had three candidate viewing sites in mind: an I-5 rest stop just north of Red Bluff, a city park on the river in downtown Red Bluff, and the Woodson Bridge State Recreation Area just east of Corning, the next town south of Red Bluff. If none of those worked out, or if the weather looked iffy, I could probably get at least as far as Sacramento before the transit began.

I checked out the rest stop, but it had too many trees and limited views to the west. The city park in Red Bluff was OK, but also had lots of obstructions. So I headed for Corning. I got to the state park, and it was closed, with a locked gate across the driveway! (Shouldn’t that be noted on the website?) However, Tehama County River Park was just on the other side of the highway, and it was open! It turned out to be perfect! The park is right on the Sacramento River, has a good view to the west, and hardly anyone else was there. There was still a big rain storm to the west, but it looked like it was moving north, so a little after 1 p.m. I decided that Tehama was my place. I still couldn’t stop thinking how badly it would suck if the rain moved in on my California vantage point while there were clear skies back home in West Seattle. Was Captain Cook all wigged out about the weather when he went all the way to Tahiti to view the Venus transit in 1769?

By 2 p.m. I had my telescope set up and collimated, and so had about an hour just to chill and have a little lunch before the transit began. I shortly was visited by the manager of the park, who wanted to find out what I was up to. (A Dobsonian telescope looks a little like a cannon, or a water heater, depending on the direction in which it is pointed.) When I explained that I’d driven all the way from Seattle to find the Sun in order to watch the transit of Venus, this seemed to satisfy, if not necessarily interest, him. He mentioned that, a couple of weeks ago, this same park was packed wall-to-wall with people viewing the annular eclipse of the Sun. (It was well within the path of annularity.) I found this interesting; I didn’t think much of the eclipse, but would have despaired at missing the transit of Venus.

The sky view from Tehama County River Park as I set up
to view the Venus transit June 5. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
The weather held, the rain moved north, not east, and there were only a few clouds around Tehama Park as the start time for the transit approached. As luck would have it, one of those clouds was covering the Sun at the moment of “first contact” as the transit began. But, within a few minutes, the Sun shone through and I let out a gasp! There was the shadow of Venus, taking a little bite out of the Sun!

At right about this time another astronomy buff pulled into the parking lot of the park, well across from where I was, and set up a telescope. And four local picnickers chose a table near where I was in the park, but didn’t seem interested in what the telescope guys were up to.

There were several stretches during the 4 p.m. hour when clouds obstructed our view of the transit, but mostly the weather held and I enjoyed watching the transit and the sunspots and the activity on the Sacramento River. Then around 5 p.m. my picnic neighbors got up from their table, walked closer to the river, put on their eclipse glasses, and looked up at the Sun! Amazing! They knew what was going on, but didn’t bug the telescope guys for a look! Of course, I went over and offered to share my telescope view with them, and they were delighted by the view of the transit. This quartet, too, had been in the park for the solar eclipse on May 20. A couple of them came back repeatedly over the next couple of hours for another look at the transit.

A little before 6 p.m. my neighbor telescope user came by. To my surprise, he was wearing an old-school Seattle Mariners cap! (My own cap of the day was of the Albuquerque Isotopes, the “A” in this case standing for “Astronomy.”) It turns out Kenny, from Port Orchard, Washington, is an astronomy enthusiast, and he and his family were on vacation in California in hopes of finding a good spot to view the Venus transit. How amazing that the two astronomy buffs in an out-of-the-way park near Corning, California turned out to be from the Puget Sound area!

I watched the transit progress for about 4 1/2 hours before the Sun sank into a bank of haze and clouds that degraded the view substantially. I decided to pack it up then and head back to Redding, find a place to rest my head for the night, and then head back home on Wednesday.

Self portrait with telescope on Venus transit day.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
Viewing the transit of Venus is the high point of my amateur astronomy experience. Part of it is the rarity of the event. The next one won’t happen until the year 2117. That’s 105 years away, and while I’ve decided to try to make it, the odds are against me! More than this, though, it’s understanding of the scale of the universe that makes a Venus transit such an awesome experience. Earth and Venus are pretty close in size, and Venus appears as just a tiny dot on the face of the Sun. I feel so lucky to have been able to see it happen.

As it turns out, if I’d just stayed home, I would have seen the transit, however briefly. Alice Enevoldsen of Alice’s Astro Info, a friend of Seattle Astronomy, held a viewing event at Solstice Park in West Seattle. They had a few glimpses of the transit through occasional breaks in the clouds. Others saw it in the Puget Sound area, too.
I don’t consider myself much of an astrophotographer, but on occasions like this I try to grab a few snapshots just to prove I was there. This Facebook album includes a handful of photos made by pointing my Canon Powershot A530 through the eyepiece of my telescope.

What a memorable day! I drove home from Redding Wednesday and had a wonderful dinner with my sweetie when I got back, right around 7 p.m., about 24 hours after I packed it in on viewing of the transit.

Now to start planning for the next transit of Mercury–May 9, 2016.

June 5, 2012

My quest for the Sun

Since the 1760s explorers have been traveling hither and yon for a look at a transit of Venus across the Sun. Captain Cook went to Tahiti. Mason and Dixon, before they started drawing lines, went to South Africa. So, too, I follow in that same tradition with a perilous trek from Seattle to Red Bluff, California in an attempt to view the last Venus transit until the year 2117.

The first day of my journey gave only the slightest glimpse of the Sun, which drilled through the clouds south of Salem, Oregon only for a few moments before going into hiding. There was a spectacular thunderstorm going on as I passed through Eugene, featuring the sort of overwrought clouds that are typically associated with the eye of Sauron.

I took up lodging in Canyonville, Oregon, known principally as the home of the Seven Feathers Resort and Casino. I opted for somewhat more mundane lodging at the Holiday Inn Express in town, opening up a rich possibility of Tuesday quips, “I’m not an astronomer…” The Inn has a marvelous view of the casino, and of I-5.

The life of a traveling astronomer is fraught
with peril. The top dining choice in Canyonville,
Serafino's, was closed Monday night. Best
of luck to Katie and JD.
The Inn’s guest guide listed four local restaurants, and Internet research helped me decide on Serafino’s Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria, a small, family-style joint in town. As I headed toward the restaurant on a drizzly Monday night, I passed another of the inn’s choices, a Mexican restaurant–closed. Soo, too, was Serafino’s. Normally open on Monday’s, the eatery had a sign on the door explaining they’d be closed June 3-5 for a wedding. Missed it by that much.

Thus, it was back to the Creekside, right next door to the inn, but part of a big truck stop complex connected with the casino. I’ve never before been in a restaurant that included ads for tires and motor oil on the menu. It also had phones in every booth, presumably so truckers could keep in touch with their sweeties. Trepidation aside, my ribeye steak with steamed veggies and rice pilaf was just fine. That, plus two glasses of Firesteed Pinot Noir, a slice of carrot cake as big as my head, and tip came to just $39.

There’s no sign of the Sun here on transit morning (apart from the fact that it is light outside.) Cloudy and rainy. Onward to California, where the forecast is favorable for Venus viewing.

June 2, 2012

Weather angst and the Venus transit

Venus will transit across the face of the Sun Tuesday afternoon. This rare celestial event won’t happen again until the year 2117, and Northwest astronomy hobbyists, for good reason a highly pessimistic bunch when it comes to matters of cloud cover, have been warily watching the long-range forecasts since June 5 started to show up on the weather radar.

It is not looking pretty.

The 2004 Venus transit was captured from
Germany in this image by Jan Herold. Creative
Commons, GNU free documentation license.
As of this writing, Saturday, June 2 at 4 p.m., the Seattle forecast for Tuesday afternoon was for clouds and a 30 percent chance of rain. The prediction for much of the Northwest looks similar. Our best bet as of the moment looks like Goldendale, with a forecast of merely partly cloudy and just a 10 percent chance of rain. (Really, we don’t care so much if it rains as long as it’s not cloudy!) Yesterday Moses Lake and Wenatchee looked promising, but those forecasts have flipped. We’d also been eyeballing the “rain shadow” of Sequim, but even that Olympic Peninsula town now has a wet forecast for Tuesday. The closest “sunny” forecast I am able to find is for Red Bluff, California. Do you roll the dice on an 11- or 12-hour drive, or hope for the best somewhere a little closer?

Many of us will likely be watching the weather forecasts up until Monday evening or Tuesday morning, making some last-minute decisions about where our chances look best for transit viewing, and then high-tailing it to those spots.

Of course, it’s possible, maybe even likely, that we’ll out-think ourselves on this decision. The lore of celestial event chasing is full of accounts of people who have made extreme travel efforts to get to places certain to be clear, only to find those locations socked in while the sky above their own backyards was crystal clear.

Why are we making such a big deal of this? Due to the peculiar geometry of the orbits of Earth and Venus around the Sun, we can only see a Venus transit occasionally. They come in pairs separated by eight years, and either 105.5 or 121.5 years go by before the next pair comes along. Tuesday’s transit is the second of a close pair. Unfortunately, the 2004 event wasn’t visible from the West Coast, and only the end of the transit was visible from the Eastern U.S. as the Sun rose that day. Europe, Asia, and Africa had the best views last time. So this is your last chance unless you make it to December of 2117.

There will be plenty of opportunities to enjoy the 2012 transit from Seattle if the weather cooperates. Events actually begin the evening before, Monday, June 4, at the University of Washington. Astronomy Professors Woody Sullivan and Victoria Meadows will give lectures about the significance and history of Venus transits. The talks begin at 7 p.m. in room 120 of Kane Hall on the UW’s Seattle campus. It’s free, but registration is required.

The UW will have several locations for viewing the transit when it begins at about 3 p.m. June 5. Viewing will also take place at the Pacific Science Center, Solstice Park in West Seattle hosted by Alice’s Astro Info, Battle Point Park on Bainbridge Island hosted by the Battle Point Astronomical Association, and others listed here by the Seattle Science Festival. Many of these sites will at least have online feeds, so participants can watch the transit as viewed from less weather-challenged areas. Other astronomy clubs are likely to be holding formal or informal transit viewings.

Seattle Astronomy will likely be at the Solstice Park event, unless we’re beating it to Goldendale.
Remember, don’t look at the Sun without proper protection. You’ll zap your eyeballs. Standard sunglasses are not good enough. This NASA website has some good pointers about transit viewing, eye protection, and pinhole projectors, as does transitofvenus.org.

Let’s hope we don’t miss our chance to see an astronomical rarity!

April 24, 2012

Company aims to turn sci-fi of asteroid mining into profitable fact

Planetary Resources, Inc. held a coming-out party at Seattle’s Museum of Flight Tuesday morning, with co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis spelling out the simple, yet audacious, aim of the company.

“The vision of Planetary Resources is to make the resources of space available to man both in space and here on Earth,” he said.

The leadership of Planetary Resources, Inc. gathered at the
Museum of Flight April 24 for a news conference to talk
about the company's plans to mine asteroids. From L-R:
Peter Diamandis, Eric Anderson, Chris Lewicki, and
Tom Jones. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
Diamandis acknowledged the wild, science-fiction nature of the notion of sending robots to asteroids to mine them for the resources we need on Earth and to further explore space. In fact, he gives sci-fi credit for shaping his personal dreams, held since his early teens, of being an asteroid miner.

“Part of it is the spirit of extraordinary writers and artists like Heinlein and Clarke and Bonestell who envisioned what the future would look like,” he said. “Ultimately my passion about opening up space makes the vision of asteroid mining not only a reality, but something that we need to do.”

The company is on a fast track. Eric Anderson, co-founder and co-chairman, said they plan to launch their first spacecraft within 24 months, and seemed a bit taken aback at the enthusiastic applause the announcement generated.

“This company is not about paper studies. This company is not about thinking and dreaming about asteroid mining,” Anderson said. “This company is about creating a space economy beyond the Earth. It’s about building real hardware. It’s about doing real things in space to move the needle forward.”

The concept is attractively simple. Use private investors and innovators to drive down the cost of space exploration. Get the technology up in space to start examining the nine thousand near-Earth asteroids to determine which might be rich in water and precious minerals useful here on the home planet and to those who may further explore space. Send up robots to mine those materials and bring them home.

Sure, it may sound easy.

“It’s very difficult, no question,” Diamandis said, “but the return economically and the benefits for humanity are extraordinary.”

Anderson agreed.

“There will be times when we fail, there will be times when we have to pick up the pieces and try again. But we’re going to do it,” he said. “We’re not going to talk about it, we’re just going to do it.”

Planetary Resources is based in Bellevue, Wash. Chris Lewicki, the company’s president and chief engineer, said they looked at a lot of places before settling on the Seattle area.

A model of the Arkyd 101, the space telescope Planetary Resources
plans to launch within the next 24 months to start prospecting for
asteroids to mine. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“Some of our investors were here, some of our partners were here, and it’s a beautiful place to live,” Lewicki said in explaining the choice. “All of the infrastructure and the industry that’s in the area is what we need to be able to do this.”

The company has been in existence since 2009 under the name Arkyd Aeronautics. Planetary Resources spacecraft will bear the Arkyd name. Part of the reason they’re going public with a big splash now is that they need to hire more engineers, according to Lewicki. Diamandis added that the game has changed.

“There’s a rising tide going on right now in commercial space,” he said, noting the booming investment in launch technology and in lunar and asteroid missions. Having more capital is a big deal. “That changes the equation and allows us to go much further much faster than ever before in opening up space for the benefit of all.”

The investors, for the most part, remained on the sideline, though one of them, Ross Perot, Jr., praised the effort by telephone and Charles Simonyi was on hand to make a few remarks.

“I don’t think this would be an appropriate investment for NASA,” Simonyi said of the venture. “I think that this is where private enterprise comes in. The genius of the system is that private investors can take the risks.”

“I’m very excited about what you guys are doing, I’m very proud of you and feel privileged to be a part of it,” he added.

They’ve certainly generated some buzz. A large group of reporters turned out for the news conference and hundreds of people chipped in $25 for lunch to hear about it first hand. It’s fair to say most of them are boosters. It will be interesting to watch the dream unfold.

April 6, 2012

Astronomy, theatre, baseball, and the blues

In addition to gazing at stars, Seattle Astronomy loves theatre, baseball, and the blues. So when I found out today that this year’s Astronomical League convention in Chicago includes visits to the Yerkes Observatory and Adler Planetarium, a play, and a gig by the rockin’ Astronomy Magazine Blues Band, I started making plans to visit the Windy City on the Fourth of July.

The Astronomy Magazine Blues Band will play a couple of
sets on the final day of this year's Astronomical League Convention
in Chicago. The band, L-R, is Mike Soliday, Jeff Felbab, Keith
Bauer, and Astronomy editor Dave Eicher.
Photo: Astronomy Magazine Blues Band.
I have to admit that AlCon 2012 wasn’t even on my radar until this item turned up in my newsreader this morning. The notion that Astronomy magazine staffers have a blues band covering the likes of Hendrix, Cream, The Band, Koko Taylor, Muddy Waters, and more was just so mind-bogglingly cool that I immediately started investigating the event. It turns out that there is a lot of fun stuff to do in connection with the convention. I love a good astronomy lecture more than most guys, but the real fun is in the extracurricular activities.

July 4 features a field trip to the Adler Planetarium and the Field Museum of Natural History. We paid a visit to Adler in November 2010 during a Chicago layover on a cross-country train trip. It’s chock full of great stuff, including lots of Apollo 13 memorabilia from Jim Lovell, who is a trustee of Adler and now runs a steak house in the Chicago area. The planetarium itself was closed for renovations during our last visit, so I’m looking forward to a longer stay, to seeing a planetarium show, and to tacking the Field Museum onto the itinerary.

The next day features a road trip to Batavia and Fermilab, where conventioneers will learn about particle physics and dark matter, and then see the play Creation’s Birthday, which is all about understanding the science and philosophies of 100 years ago. Characters include Edwin Hubble, Henrietta Leavitt, Father Georges Lemaitre, and Albert Einstein. The convention materials describe presenter Hassam Padamsee as a “playwright and CERN scientist”, a description that puts me in mind of today’s drive to educate scientists and engineers at the expense of education in the arts. As noted above we love science and arts, and don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.

July 6 is the day for the field trip to Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and a look at the famed Alvin Clark 40-inch refractor. About eight years ago I attended a business meeting in Lake Geneva, just a hop and a skip away. Unfortunately, Yerkes was closed during my entire time there. The observatory is only open for public tours on Saturdays, so we’re lucky to get a look on a Friday with the AL group.

Finally on Saturday the Astronomical League holds its awards banquet and the Astronomy Magazine Blues Band plays a couple of sets. It all happens July 4-7 at the Lincolnshire Marriott Resort in the North Chicago suburbs. Registration materials are online here. If you can’t make it, Seattle Astronomy will likely be on hand and will post dispatches (if there’s time amid all the fun!)

Oh, yes, and there is baseball. The Cubs are on the road during this week, but the White Sox are at home. I expect I’ll sneak away for a ballgame.

Seattle Astronomy may well be a dork, but this sounds like a heavenly trip. And Astronomical League, take note: the sale was made by a blues band!

February 21, 2012

Celebrating 50 years in orbit

The Mercury 7 astronauts were enormous American heroes, and
John Glenn was the biggest name of them all. Glenn became
 the first American to orbit the Earth 50 years ago, on
Feb. 20, 1962. Photo: NASA.
For a nation that sometimes seems obsessed with meaningless milestones, there sure wasn’t much hullabaloo today to mark the 50th anniversary of the first American orbital space flight. On this date in 1962 John Glenn orbited the Earth three times, and it was the first small step of the giant leap to the Moon by the end of the decade.

Roger Launius, curator of the space section of the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian and a former NASA chief historian, spoke Sunday at the Museum of Flight in Seattle about the historical significance of that first orbital mission.

“John Glenn, the most popular of the Mercury 7 astronauts, the one who was the most glib, the most forthcoming, the most extroverted, the one who spoke so incredibly well about everything, was the man who carried the standard for Americans into Earth orbit,” Launius said. “It seems quite fitting that he did so.”

Launuis spoke with true affection for Glenn, whom he knows well and describes as one of the nicest men he has ever met. One of the more interesting stories Launius told during the talk was about how Glenn practically smuggled a drugstore camera onto his Friendship 7 flight.

“Nobody at NASA at the time seemed to realize that people would want pictures of Earth from space,” Launius marveled about the agency that now puts out terabytes worth of photos. “Hard to believe. But they were engineers and they were mostly concerned with the technical stuff.”

GI Joe was NOT the first man in space, but many of us who grew
up in the 1960s had the GI Joe Mercury capsule, and splashed
 it down in whatever bodies of water we could create in our
backyards. This one is on display at Seattle's Museum of Flight.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“[Glenn] took those pictures, they were developed and released to the public, and everybody went crazy, and everybody at NASA said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” Launius said. “It set a standard for what would become normal activity of all human spaceflight missions up to the present.”

The Mercury 7 astronauts achieved hero status even before they accomplished much of anything, which Launius said baffled most of them. But he said the recognition was deserved as the astronauts were the point people for an enormous effort.

“It’s important to remember that while these guys get the fame and the accolades—and clearly they deserve that; they’re the ones risking their lives in a very difficult setting—they have thousands of people behind them making it possible for them to do that,” Launius said.

Glenn had the right stuff to achieve greater fame than any of the others. Launius said that Glenn quit the space program out of concern he would never get to fly again; NASA probably would not want to risk losing the most visible icon of the space age. When Glenn finally did fly again he created quite a stir. It was 1998 when he flew on a mission of the space shuttle Discovery and became, at 77, the oldest person to travel in space. Launius noted that by then the shuttle missions had become mundane in the public eye.

Astronauts rode in Mercury capsules less than 10 feet long and
barely six feet in diameter at the base. The thing hurtled through
 space at speeds greater than 17,000 MPH. This mockup is
at the Museum of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“John Glenn is approved to fly into space a second time, and it again is like 1962,” Launius said. “Everybody is excited, all the media show up, and the public is energized in ways I had never seen previously. It was a stunning accomplishment, and it says a lot about the character and the mindset of the public in relationship to this hero that goes back now 50 years.”

Launius is amazed at what we accomplished in such a short time after the Mercury 7 astronauts were introduced in 1959.

“Within a decade we were standing on the Moon and putting the American flag on it, and demonstrating to the world that we are second to none when it comes to science and technology,” he said. “That’s fundamentally what Apollo was about.”

Now, Launius says, we’re poised to take the next giant leap.

“Earth orbit is no longer a frontier. When John Glenn flew in 1962 it was very much a frontier,” he said. “This is now a normal realm of human activity.”

“In 50 years we’ve gone a long way,” he added. “One would like to think in the next 50 years we will go much beyond this.”

February 19, 2012

Debunking 2012's doomsday

Alice Enevoldsen says the notion that the world is going to end this December has become something of a “kitchen sink” of hoaxes. Fully seven different doomsday scenarios are being put forward as causes of our imminent demise.

Predictions that the world is coming to an end
in December represent a kitchen sink of hoaxes,
according to Alice Enevoldsen, author of Alice's
Astro Info and an educator at the Pacific Science
Center. Enevoldsen debunked the doomsayers at
this week's meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
“It’s really cool how wrong they are,” Enevoldsen, planetarium specialist for the Pacific Science Center and author of Alice’s Astro Info, said during a talk this week at a meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society. It was difficult to detect any signs of panic among the society membership, and there was much levity in the discussion. Enevoldsen said that while she’s not concerned about the destruction of Earth, the hoax is not entirely a laughing matter.

“The thing about the 2012 hoax is that it is hurting people. There are children writing to scientists saying ‘I’m scared that I’m not going to grow up.’ That just gives me the shivers,” she said. “There are children threatening to kill themselves. This is not OK with me.”

“That’s one of the reasons I use the word hoax. Anybody who supports this non-science stuff about how the world is going to end in 2012 is supporting children threatening to kill themselves.”

Much of the talk about impending doom is fueled by a strange mashup of three stories: the fictional planet Nibiru (and its ancient astronauts) cooked up by novelist Zecharia Sitchin, predictions by “psychic” Nancy Lieder that a “Planet X” would slam into Earth, and the 2009 disaster film 2012. Enevoldsen expressed dismay that people can be swayed by movies, pointed out Lieder’s original prediction was that “X” would smack us in 2003, and noted that astronomers have found no evidence of anything large with the remotest chance of colliding with us.

“You guys all know if there’s a planet that’s close enough to hit Earth at the end of this year we would be able to see it by now,” she told the society gathering.

Another misconception that is driving talk that the end of the world is nigh is that the Mayan calendar “ends” on Dec. 21 because the Maya somehow knew that was the last day.

“Today’s Maya all think we’re insane talking about how they think the world’s going to end,” Enevoldsen said. She explained that while we use month, day, and year to describe any date, the Maya “long count” uses five numbers to do so. A kin is a day, a uinal is about 20 days, a tun is about a year, a katun is roughly 20 years, and a baktun is about 400 years. By coincidence, they all re-set in December.

“It just rolls over. It’s like an odometer,” Enevoldsen said. “It’s not ending, we’re rolling over to the next count.” She said it is something like our turn of the century.

“If I were using the Mayan long count I would be pretty excited on Dec. 20 of this year because it means I get to change over all the numbers on my calendar,” she said. “This is a cool thing, but it’s kind of meaningless.”

Several other apocalyptic notions are included in the kitchen sink, some of them with at least a grain of truth.
  • The Earth’s magnetic poles will shift, causing earthquakes and leaving us exposed to radiation. Enevoldsen said we’re sort of due for a shift, but there’s no reason to believe it will happen this year. It’s happened before and we’re still here.
  • The Earth’s rotational poles will shift. Enevoldsen said it would take a collision with a massive object to make that happen. There’s nothing on the radar that is on a collision course.
  • Solar maximum will arrive and the Sun will zap us with cosmic rays. 2012 does promise to be an active year for sunspots and such, but scientists think the true maximum won’t get here until 2013. This is a roughly 11-year cycle that hasn’t wiped us out yet.
  • The planets will align, causing lots of disruption. Enevoldsen pointed out that this simply isn’t true.
  • We’ll be lined up with the galactic plane and the center of the galaxy, causing lots of disruption. Enevoldsen said there are some half a dozen definitions of the galactic plane, and there’s no reason to believe that our periodic passes through it mean anything. And we’re aligned with the center of the galaxy every year around the winter solstice.
Enevoldsen suggested not simply dismissing people who have concern about 2012, but instead validating their interest in the subject. But, she said it’s important to share the facts in order to quash the hoax, and suggest astronomical activities to share, such as this year’s solar eclipse or the transit of Venus. She added that professional help might be in order for those truly gripped by fear that the world is doomed.

The 2012 hoax has received enough attention that many mainstream media have taken on the task of providing more information. Enevoldsen suggested the website 2012hoax.org as a great source about the topic. She’s also written her own paper, published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and aimed at educators, that explains many of these concepts in greater detail.

February 14, 2012

Astronaut Harris talks about the dream of space

Dr. Bernard Harris is like many of us who grew up in the 1960s, with dreams and interests inspired by the space race and the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It was a little different for Harris, an African American who was 13 when Neil Armstrong took that one small step.

Dr. Bernard Harris, retired astronaut and
founder of the Harris Foundation, spoke
Feb. 4 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.
“It was not only a giant leap for them, but for this little boy to look at that little back and white television and say that he wanted to follow in their footsteps was powerful, because for someone like me, it had never been done before,” Harris explained. “As I looked at who America chose as their right stuff, as you recall there were seven white guys that started that program. There were no minorities, certainly no African Americans, none that I could see out front, and there were no women in the program. Thank God things have changed since that time.”

Harris, who in 1995 became the first African American to walk in space, spoke Feb. 4 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle as part of the museum’s observation of Black History Month and in connection with its Michael P. Anderson Memorial Aerospace Program. Harris told the audience at the museum that he didn’t let the all-white nature of the early space program deter him.

“The lesson for the young folks is that if you have a dream, don’t let what you might see around you that you might think of as an obstacle,” he said. “I would say reverse it and think of it as a challenge. Don’t let that interfere with you accomplishing your dream.”

Harris is big on dreams. He has written a book titled Dream Walker, and he calls dreams the “reality of the future.”

“In order to have a future, you must have a dream,” Harris said. “In order to have a future you must have the ability to see yourself doing whatever it is that you want to do in life.”

Harris is not just a retired astronaut, he’s a scientist and a doctor and a businessman who heads a venture capital firm and established the Harris Foundation to support science, technology, engineering, and math education. Given that background, and the fact that the Anderson program also is focused on education, it wasn’t surprising to hear Harris build a close tie between dreams and education.

“Education is the way to fulfill dreams,” he said. “I see education as the value proposition for human achievement.”

Anderson was a Spokane native who died in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia wrecked. Harris said astronauts know the danger they’re getting into, but carry on.

“At the heart of all of this is this notion that we would rather die doing what we want to do in life and accomplishing a dream than sit around and let life pass us by,” he said.

Harris gets a little agitated when he hears talk about the “end” of the space program.

“We still have the mandate as an agency to go forward; to put people on the Moon, to put people on near earth asteroids, and perhaps put people on Mars,” Harris said. “All of that work is still being done. The only significant change is that the next generation vehicle is going to be done by private industry.”

“The space program is not going away, it’s just beginning,” he added. “I think it’s going to allow us to do things that have not been done before, and we won’t be held hostage by government restraints and budgets.”