Spotting black holes

Black holes remain among the more mysterious objects in the universe. Though John Michell and Pierre-Simon LaPlace first posited their existence back in the 18th century, nobody has ever actually seen a black hole. Dr. Sean O’Neill, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, attempted to shed some light on these objects that don’t emit any during a talk at this month’s meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.

Dr. Steve O’Neill of PLU spoke about black
holes at the December meeting of the Seattle
Astronomical Society. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

O’Neill’s talk was titled “If We Can’t See Black Holes, How Do We Know They Exist?” His answer to the question boiled down to the notion that scientists have not yet come up with any other plausible explanation for some of the phenomena that they have seen.

The professor noted that traditional methods of observing astronomical objects simply are not practical for viewing black holes.

It would not work to send a spacecraft for a look. O’Neill pointed out that the nearest likely black hole is some 1,300 light years away from Earth. It would take a craft like Voyager about 25 million years to get there, and then, even if it arrived with its power source and transmitter intact, you would still have to wait 1,300 years to receive any messages about its findings.

“Traveling there is a terrible option,” O’Neill understated. “The direct visit option is bad even for things in the outer solar system, let alone things outside of our solar system.”

Imaging is also well nigh impossible, O’Neill said, and not just because a black hole, by definition, does not emit any light. Black holes, though incredibly massive, are also dense and quite small. Today’s telescopes don’t offer adequate resolution for a visual or photographic look; it would take a scope about ten thousand times the size of Hubble to spot the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Other methods offer some hope. O’Neill says we might well be able to spot the gravitational effects of a black hole, especially one circling another or dancing gravitationally with another massive object. In such cases general relativity predicts gravitational waves in space-time, and these might be observed directly. The approach is to use laser interferometry to detect changes in light wavelength. O’Neill says it’s a complicated process from which it is difficult to separate observational noise.

“In practice, there have been no detections of this phenomenon happening yet, even though most people think it probably does happen,” O’Neill said.

O’Neill says gravitational lensing also holds some promise, especially as observing equipment gets better.

“It’s tough to pick out the individual little black holes, though,” he said, noting that the method is used to look at distant, large, massive objects that lens other distant objects.

Though we haven’t yet seen a black hole, there’s plenty of evidence that infers that they exist. O’Neill shared data from observations of stars orbiting the center of our galaxy, seen in the infrared to cut through the dust blocking our direct visual view. Using Newton’s laws on the data from a number of years to reconstruct the orbits of the stars suggests they’re going around something that is about 3.7 million times more massive than our Sun. Whatever it is, we can’t see it because it doesn’t emit any light of its own.

“It’s tough to come up with a good alternative of what this could be,” O’Neill said. “It’s tough to imagine that gravity just goes wrong at this one point, for some reason, at the center of our galaxy.”

“That’s where we get a lot of direct evidence for what we think is the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way,” he concluded.

Looking at other objects leads to similar conclusions. Cygnus X-1 is a huge source of x-rays that is pulling material from a donor star nearby. The material holds a great deal of potential energy because of the high gravity of the system.

“All of that energy has to be converted into some form,” O’Neill explained. “Some of it is certainly kinetic, because stuff will speed up, but some of it is also going to be thermal energy. It will hit other little particles of gas, all of this will heat up to the point that it starts emitting x-rays, and that’s the stuff that we think we can see.”

One of O’Neill’s research interests is computer modeling of the jets of material often spotted shooting out of the centers of galaxies, such as Centaurus A. He shared a number of these simulations, in which material plummets toward a presumed black hole, doesn’t quite fall in, and then shoots away at great velocity. The models can be rotated to simulate views from various angles and compare the results to actual observations. While it’s an active area of research, O’Neill says most scientists are on the same page with their thinking.

“The reigning theoretical model for these jets by far—there’s essentially no viable alternative—is that fundamentally they’re powered by black hole gravity at the source,” he said.

While O’Neill notes that computer simulations like the ones he creates are way cheaper than observing, he expects that actual observations of gravitational waves from merging black holes are not far off. He also thinks that high-resolution x-ray and radio observations will allow us to see the disks of material around black holes within his lifetime.

Asteroid mining: not such a crazy idea

When Bellevue-based Planetary Resources, Inc. first went public in April of 2012 with its plans to mine astroids for water and minerals there were many who reacted with an “Oh, pshaw.” Less than three years later, the successful landing by the ESA Rosetta mission of its probe Philae on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, out in the far reaches of the solar system, makes it all seem like a more plausible idea.

“I love seeing the success of this mission because it proves that what we are doing is technically feasible today,” said Caitlin O’Keefe, director of marketing for Planetary Resources, on Tuesday during a Science Café talk sponsored by the Pacific Science Center at The Swiss Pub in Tacoma. O’Keefe added that Philae and Rosetta are ten-year-old craft that have spent a decade traversing six billion kilometers of space. Technology has advanced during that time; think about what your cell phone couldn’t do in 2004.

Caitlin O’Keefe, marketing director for Planetary Resources,
spoke about asteroid mining at a Science Café event Tuesday
 in Tacoma. Photo borrowed from Facebook.

O’Keefe and everyone at Planetary Resources understand the skepticism. She quoted company co-founder Peter Diamandis as saying, “The day before something is a breakthrough it is a crazy idea.”

They’re creating the technology today to get themselves to that breakthrough. Advances in spacecraft control, avionics, communication systems, propulsion, and observation will help them identify and then get to resource-rich asteroids.

Unfortunately, one of their first tests of the technology went up in flames. Their Arkyd 3 satellite, which was to try out some of their new systems, blew up with the Antares rocket back in October.

“This was a bummer for our team to watch,” O’Keefe said. “There was a big hooray when it launched, and some not so nice words when it exploded six seconds later.”

But, she added, they’ve been able to shrug it off, in large part because their philosophy is to build a lot of small and relatively inexpensive spacecraft rather than putting all of their space-bound eggs into one billion-dollar basket.

“This is going to be a very important part of the space industry going forward: the ability to accept failure,” she said.

Many of the questions from the patrons of The Swiss during the talk centered around the financial aspects of mining in space. O’Keefe noted that there is a lot of potential. For example, one target astroid is thought to contain some $500 billion worth of platinum, which if mined would be more than has been extracted from Earth to date. While that could be a big payday, their first target is a more common substance: water. Water is good for drinking and protection from radiation, and can be turned into rocket fuel. And O’Keefe pointed out that it’s a lot cheaper to pick up water in space than it is to take it with you. To launch a bottle of water into low-Earth orbit you need about 50 times its mass in rocket fuel, and that pencils out to about $20,000. The savings add up, and it will make long space missions much more fiscally possible; a spacecraft can go all the way from Earth to Pluto on the same amount of fuel it takes just to launch into low-Earth orbit.

Mining may well be easier in the zero gravity of space, too, and the methods for doing it are pretty straightforward.

“Building this technology will be extremely difficult,” O’Keefe admitted. “I’m not downplaying the difficulty of a complicated system, but the theory of how to extract it is pretty well known.”

O’Keefe invited us all to join the asteroid mining effort. You can go to Asteroid Zoo, a venture launched this summer by Planetary Resources and Zooniverse, to help comb through data and identify potentially resource-rich asteroids.

Partial solar eclipse seen in Seattle

The partial solar eclipse of October 23, 2014 was a highly successful skywatching event by Seattle standards. Much of the first half of the eclipse was visible as it dodged clouds around the city. I viewed it from the sidewalk in front of Seattle Astronomy world headquarters in West Seattle.

Few observers held out much hope for seeing the eclipse. The weather forecast had been for rain and clouds for much of the Northwest. In the days leading up to the eclipse area astronomy message boards carried some talk of road trips to sites with better potential for clear skies, such as Yakima or other parts of Eastern Washington, though one seasoned observer wrote, “I have no confidence in finding anywhere drivable that reliably will have clear skies.” Clearly, a man who has been through this before.

Sure enough, we awoke on the morning of the eclipse to heavy rain and solid, dark, gray cloud cover. There seemed scant likelihood we would be seeing the eclipse. But by mid-morning the rain let up, and at about 11:37 a.m. I sent out this tweet and photo:

Blue sky over our world HQ! A chance to see the eclipse yet! http://t.co/9IB3YxBxUx
— Seattle Astronomy (@SeattleAstro) October 23, 2014

The blue sky held for the most part, and though the exact moment that the eclipse began was obscured by a cloud, the sun was out in full glory not long into it.

Just minutes into the partial solar eclipse of Oct. 23, 2014.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It didn’t last long. Not more than 15 minutes later a robust thunderstorm, including lots of hail, blew through the area, obscured the Sun from view and drove us for cover. The storm didn’t last long, but the cloud cover remained for a while. Perhaps 20 minutes to half an hour later, we spotted a patch of blue sky to the west and urged the Sun to steer into it. It did! For the next hour or so the eclipsing Sun played hide and seek with us, dodging under cloud cover and then peeking back out again.

Maximum eclipse happened right about 3 p.m., and about 15 minutes after that one of the neighbor kids who had come over for a look through the Seattle Astronomy telescope and eclipse shades spotted a flash of lightening. A rumbling thunderclap followed a few seconds later, and within a minute or two it was raining and hailing hard. Alas, we’d seen the last of the eclipse for the day. Another blue patch finally arrived right around 5 p.m., old Sol popped into view, but the disk of the new Moon had passed by and the eclipse was over.

The eclipse was especially interesting because of the giant sunspot aimed right at us. You can see it in the photos, which, I admit, aren’t that great. They were made with a little point-and-shoot camera stuck right up to the telescope eyepiece. I don’t claim any real talent for astrophotography, but like to grab a few snapshots, just to show that I was there.

The partial solar eclipse of October 23, 2014, right around the time of
maximum coverage as seen from Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The eclipse put me in mind of the 2012 Venus transit, when bad weather and a desire to see what was a once-in-a-lifetime event convinced me to drive as far as Corning, California for a chance to see the Sun. This time I decided to stay home, and it paid off. While I didn’t see the whole eclipse, I saw enough to enjoy and appreciate this awesome spectacle, and was able to share it with some neighbors too!

I can’t help but laugh at myself because I still audibly gasp most times at the start of these sorts of events. Seeing the solar eclipse or the Venus transit begin just when the scientists said it would just amazes me, and the spectacle itself is so awesome. Even just spotting Saturn again after it has been out of view, or up too early in the morning, tickles my astronomical fancy. The universe is such an amazing place.

I’m happy that Seattle weather gave us a break and let us have a good view of a great celestial show.

Science jargon and the all-there-is

Sometimes when scientists speak nobody has the foggiest idea what they’re talking about. Even other scientists can have trouble decoding the lingo of colleagues from other specialties.

Roberto Trotta thinks that’s a problem. A theoretical astrophysicist with Imperial College in London, Trotta is also passionate about good communication about science. As science communicators ourselves, Seattle Astronomy was excited to hear his recent talk at Town Hall Seattle.

“I’m very much interested in sharing the mysteries and the outstanding questions that cosmology raises with the public at large,” Trotta said. “It’s only fair that we share our ideas and the reasons why we do what we do with the people who are actually funding the work. To me, talking about science in a way that’s understandable and utterly engaging for the public is a very important concept.”

Trotta’s new book, The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is, uses just the 1,000 most common English words to explain what he does in his day job. That’s a tall order; Trotta had to write about cosmology without using words like telescope, galaxy, Big Bang, universe, and dark energy, none of which made the list.

“This book came out of a little idea that it should be possible to talk about very hard things in a straightforward way that all people can understand,” Trotta said.

It doesn’t always happen that way. Trottoa told the story of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964. The two were using a new antenna to detect radio waves, but were having trouble eliminating persistent background noise. Eventually they wrote a short paper titled “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 MC/S.”

Roberto Trotta talked about his 

book “The Edge of the Sky” 

Sept. 30 at Town Hall Seattle

“What these two gentlemen were trying to say is ‘We picked up the echo from the Big Bang!'” Trotta marveled. They had found the cosmic microwave background and eventually received a Nobel Prize for the work. Trotta gave other examples of scientific papers with language that he called “impenetrable” and “incomprehensible.”

“Jargon is in the way,” he said. “Jargon is one big obstacle in having a dialog with the public.”

Trotta’s first shot at the 1,000-word concept was describing his own job in this simple, straightforward language during a public lecture. It received a positive reaction at that talk, as it did at Town Hall, and so he decided to take the concept further.

“The book began very much as an experiment because I wanted to see how far I could stretch this language,” he explained. “Would it break? Would it become boring? Would it become impossible?” He wondered whether complicated concepts such as dark matter could be explained in such simple terms.

It worked, and early reviews of the book have been positive. Trotta said that writing the book was almost like learning a new language. There were a few hiccups along the way. He first thought of translating “Big Bang” to “Hot Flash.” This turned into “Big Flash” for obvious reasons. Other terms in The Edge of the Sky:

• Universe: The all-there-is
• Galaxy: Star crowd
• Telescope: Big seer
• Dark energy: Dark push
• Earth: Home world

Trotta said that since the book began as a thought experiment he really didn’t have a target readership in mind, but that he hopes it will appeal to readers from young adult on up who want to get a better grip on the sometimes challenging but always fascinating topics of cosmology.

New mystery novel set at Jacobsen Observatory

The University of Washington’s Theodor Jacobsen Observatory is the setting for some of the scenes in a new mystery novel from local author Bernadette Pajer. A celebration of the release of The Edison Effect, the fourth title in Pajer’s series of Professor Bradshaw mysteries, was held recently at the observatory.

Pajer’s protagonist Benjamin Bradshaw is a fictional professor of electrical engineering at the UW and solver of mysteries involving electricity. Seattle needs his expertise; the books are set in the early 1900s, and electricity is still something of a puzzle to people and the police. The tagline for the series is “Seattle in the time of Tesla.”

“It’s a very exciting time period to research,” Pajer says, “not only the city where I was born and raised, all of those details, but the scientific history, where we came from and how quickly.”

A happy coincidence brought Professor Bradshaw to the Jacobsen Observatory. In 2012 Pajer participated in a panel discussion about mysteries at the Taproot Theatre in Seattle, which was performing a stage version of the Dorothy Sayers story Gaudy Night. One of the people who attended the event was George Myers, whose great-great-grandfather was Joseph Taylor, the UW’s first math professor and first director of the observatory. After the discussion Myers emailed a photo of Taylor to Pajer.

Joseph Taylor, the first director of
the UW’s Theodor Jacobsen Observatory,
is a character in Bernadette Pajer’s new
mystery novel The Edison Effect.

“I just knew instantly when I saw that photo that professor Bradshaw knows this guy, and, not only that, they’re friends, so I wove him into The Edison Effect,” Pajer says. She notes that no astronomy happens in the book, but several key scenes occur at the observatory.

Myers and other relatives of Taylor attended the book launch at the observatory, and enjoyed learning a few new things that Pajer’s research turned up about their ancestor. For example, Taylor laid the cornerstone at Denny Hall, which was the first building on the current UW campus, known then as the Administration Building. Its basement is where Professor Bradshaw has his electricity lab. Interestingly, the Jacobsen Observatory was constructed of materials left over from the building of Denny Hall.

“It was fun!” Pajer says of the launch event. “I had the ghost of Bradshaw, and the real ghost of Joseph Taylor that were at the observatory. It was a really cool way that fact and fiction were mingling.”

The character of Bradshaw came to Pajer in part because of her own interest in science. She studied civil engineering at the UW, but dropped out to get married. Twenty years later she went back and earned an interdisciplinary degree in culture, literature, and the arts at UW Bothell.

“It just turned out that I was much better at writing about science than actually doing it,” Pajer says, adding that she finds it fascinating to blend art and science. “I think it makes it more entertaining. Peer science can often be very dry, but when you can present it in an entertaining way, it’s a great way to learn.”

Pajer takes pride in the scientific accuracy of her books. She consults experts during her research and writing, and the volumes have earned the stamp of approval after peer review by the Washington Academy of Sciences. She also works hard to get the historical details of Seattle and the UW right.

The first book in the Professor Bradshaw series was A Spark of Death, published in 2011, followed by Fatal Induction in 2012, Capacity for Murder in 2013, and then The Edison Effect this year. Pajer is just beginning to noodle on her next story, which she thinks may be set in 1907 at the time of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition.

The books are great for lovers of mysteries and science. Check ’em out!

Tessering around the universe with A Wrinkle in Time at OSF

It is a bonus when our interests in theater and astronomy intersect, and that is happening this season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland with its production of A Wrinkle in Time, based on the 1962 novel of the same title by Madeleine L’Engle. The OSF play is a world premiere adapted and directed by Tracy Young.

Alejandra Escalante as Meg Murry in the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival production of A Wrinkle in Time.

In A Wrinkle in Time math whiz Meg Murry (Alejandra Escalante), her über-genius little brother Charles Wallace Murry (Sara Bruner), and pal Calvin O’Keefe (Joe Wegner) zip around the universe in search of missing papa Murry (Dan Donohue). They accomplish their travel by bending time and space in a tesseract, or “tessering,” as explained by the helpful science fair project by Science Girl (Jada Rae Perry).

Kids traversing the universe make for some imaginative and wonderfully silly stage effects and costumes, and we think especially of the multi-tentacled Aunt Beast (Daniel T. Parker), for whose costume a good half-dozen vacuum cleaners must have given their lives, or at least their hoses.

The performances are top-notch. We single out Escalante and Bruner especially, as well as Judith-Marie Bergan, who was much fun as Mrs. Whatsit, something of an intergalactic tour guide for the adventurers. Bergan, we think, can play anything, from the comic to the manic (as we note my Sweetie, the official scorer’s, recent review of last year’s production of The Tenth Muse.)


For all of its goofiness, the play takes on some serious themes about the mysteries of the universe, the nature of time and space, the dangers and advantages of technology, and of the strength and importance of family ties and love. The science isn’t so heavy that you need to be a cosmologist or physicist or a math geek like Meg to get it, though a bit of sci-fi familiarity with the concept is helpful.

According to the program notes the book took criticism from all sides when it came out, some charging it with being too religious and others saying it is too secular. That feels like it hit the right spot! The book also has some Cold War undertones about how things would look under a totalitarian society.

We’ve not read the book but plan to pick it up when we return home from Ashland. The play runs at the Angus Bowmer Theatre through November 1. It’s great fun; check it out!

***

This review is republished from the West Seattle Weisenheimer.

Pops, the Perseids, and a trip back in time

August always makes me wistful these days, and its all because of my father and the Perseid meteor shower.

When I was 12 years old, about to turn 13, I was on a backpacking trip in the Washington Cascade Mountains with my Boy Scout troop and my dad, who was an avid hiker and later our Scoutmaster. By coincidence the hike was in early August. We had some heavy rain during the early part of our adventure, but one night, camped near the small village of Holden, the weather was glorious, the night was crystal clear, and we slept out under the stars. As the sky darkened to the pitch black of the deep wilderness, far away from population centers, we marveled at the near constant stream of shooting stars; it wasn’t planned, and I don’t think any of us even knew they had a name, but Perseid meteors of many colors sizzled through the sky. I don’t think I could have counted them; there must have been a hundred or more every hour!

The author, at right, with his father near Image
Lake after climbing Miner’s Ridge on a hike
in August 1970. Rain and clouds went away later
in the week, enabling the best possible view
of the Perseid meteor shower.

It was a sight like none any of us had ever seen, coming from the Seattle suburb of Renton, light polluted even then. It was a night I will never forget.

Part of the magic of astronomy is the perspective it gives us about time. We see the Moon as it looked about a second ago, the Sun as it was eight minutes in the past, and M31, on a collision course with us, as it looked 2.5 million years ago. The Hubble Space Telescope brings us views of things as they looked close to the birth of the universe.

Every time I see a meteor I’m transported back to 1970, in my sleeping bag in a wilderness clearing, watching hundreds of meteors shoot through the sky, on a hike with my father, who is young, vital, and alive.

Dad passed away in mid-August of 2000, just a few days after the peak of that year’s Perseid shower. The anniversary always makes me look back, and up.
My backyard in West Seattle isn’t ideal for meteor watching. For one thing, it’s in Seattle, where it’s usually cloudy, and if it’s not the city lights wash out all but the brightest of the Perseids. Still, ever the optimist, I always go out and look, just in case. This year was worse than usual for Perseid viewing. The Moon was near full, and though we’ve had a stretch of favorable weather this summer, there were thunderstorms and heavy rain the early morning of the Perseid peak. Shut out again.

The next evening was mostly clear, though, and I went out, grabbed a chair on the deck, and waited just to see if any stragglers would show up. It took about 20 minutes before a fabulous, bright Perseid blazed across the sky.

The astronomy buff in me knows that this meteor was just a little chunk of the ancient comet Swift-Tuttle, itself possibly a piece of the stuff of which the solar system is made. My inner 12-year-old viewed it as a signal from Pops. Things are all right, buddy. Keep looking up.

I have a great life. My wonderful wife tolerates and encourages my astronomy hobby, even though she’s not about to come out and freeze her tail off for a glimpse of the Cassini Division. We have a nice consulting practice, and sometimes people publish my writing. I don’t want to be 12 again. But I like having a time machine that takes me back to spend a little more time with the old man every once in a while.

I miss you, Pops.

Book review: Marketing the Moon

Public relations practitioners and space nuts alike should check out the new book Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. If you’re both, like myself and authors David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, you’ll enjoy it doubly so. The book details the public relations and marketing efforts that supported the Apollo program and the race to the Moon during the 1960s.

Especially interesting to me from the PR standpoint was the extent to which NASA and scores of contractors were able to pull in the same direction while helping to tell the tale of the people and the equipment that made the Moon landings possible and popular. Whether their particular piece of the quest was a rocket booster, a wristwatch, or a powdered breakfast drink, participants in the space program were able to share in the attention generated by Apollo without going so far as to say that Neil Armstrong endorsed Tang.

Also fascinating to me, as a former radio reporter who worked for mostly resource-strapped stations (is there any other kind?), was the tale of one small-town station reporter’s efforts to cover the Moon shots on the cheap. He filed his stories using the broadcast equivalent of baling wire and bubble gum.

Marketing the Moon is a large-format volume and a handsome, highly visual one, with lots of Apollo-era photos, print advertisements, and samples of public relations materials used by the various participants in the space program.

I’ve long been of the opinion that NASA public relations has been top-notch. I’ve spoken with former NASA administrator Michael Griffin and space historian Roger Launius about the notion that NASA PR may actually have been too good. Polling shows that people support NASA, but they also believe that its budget is too high, at least in part because they also have a greatly exaggerated impression of what the agency’s budget actually is.

That said, Marketing the Moon is also the story of public relations failure. While the race to the Moon was staggeringly popular, and Armstrong’s giant leap was watched by billions of people around the globe, the buzz didn’t last. Once the race was won, interest flagged among both the media and the public. One can debate which got bored first, but ultimately the attention span wasn’t there. The final three scheduled Apollo missions were canceled, and while missions such as the Mars rovers, and particularly the amazing landing of Curiosity on Mars two years ago, have generated some interest, we haven’t come close to the mania achieved by the effort to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.

Marketing the Moon is a recommended read.

Ride, Sally, ride

Journalist Lynn Sherr was good friends with astronaut Sally Ride for more than thirty years, but when Ride died in 2012 Sherr said she knew neither of Ride’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, nor knew for certain of her twenty-seven-year relationship with science writer Tam O’Shaughnessy.

“Sally was very good at keeping secrets,” Sherr said during a recent talk at Town Hall Seattle while promoting her biography of the astronaut, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space.

Sherr met Ride in 1981 when she was on track to fly on the space shuttle and Sherr was newly appointed to the ABC Television News team covering space missions. Sherr laughed at the notion of joining Frank Reynolds, who covered NASA from the beginning of the space program, and Jules Bergman, whom, she said, “practically invented the field of science journalism.”

“Then there was me—who took botany in college to get around my science requirement!” Sherr joked. “I was the color guy.” Ride was among her first interviews, and Sherr said they soon became fast friends.
“We shared a very healthy disregard for the overblown egos and the intransigence of both of our professions, and beneath her very unemotional demeanor, which some found icy, I found a caring and a witty friend,” Sherr said.

Sherr explained that she understands why it took a quarter century of the space program before NASA finally put a woman in space. In the beginning, the need was for military pilots with security clearances, which meant virtually all of the candidates were white men. But when the shuttle program came along, they had bigger crews and needed scientists, so NASA created the position of mission specialist.

“That’s what they started looking for when they reached out to women and minorities starting in 1976,” Sherr said. “All of this, of course, opened the door for people like Sally Ride.”

Ride originally wanted to be a tennis pro but was headed for an academic career when she saw a notice in the Stanford Daily that said NASA was recruiting women. She applied for the gig, and a year later was part of a thirty-five-member astronaut class that included six women, three African American men, and one Asian American man.

“NASA was suddenly looking like the poster child for multiculturalism,” Sherr said, “and all credit to them.”

Ride flew on the shuttle in 1983, and upon her return from being the first American woman in space received a call from President Ronald Reagan, who told Ride she was the best person for the job.
“Millions of other women agreed,” Sherr said. “I think what they did was translate her bold journey into their own tickets for success. Sally became an icon; the can-do symbol of what we can do in the world.”

Journalist Lynn Sherr spoke about Sally
Ride and her new biography of the first
American woman in space during an
appearance at Town Hall Seattle.

Sherr said she never fully appreciated the “psychic price” her friend Ride—an extreme introvert and naturally shy person—paid for her celebrity, and felt especially sorry that Ride didn’t feel able to go public with her romantic relationship with another woman, O’Shaughnessy.

“I think it’s also part of her story, because hers is a story of a particular time and a particular place and a woman who had the brains and the agility to sieze the moment,” Sherr said. “When Sally was born in 1951 outer space was science fiction and women’s rights were marginal. The social advances and the lucky timing that would enable both to intersect with this life of a very gifted young scientist I think makes hers an inspiring lesson in modern American history. She took full advantage of the ever-widening definition of a woman’s place, and spent much of her life making sure it was everywhere. That she could not or would not openly identify herself as a gay woman reflects not only her intense need for privacy, but the shame and the fear that an intolerant and ignorant society can inflict even on its heroes.”

Sherr said Ride’s life is one for the history books.

“She proved that you don’t need the right plumbing to have the right stuff, in any field or any endeavor.”

Celebrating 10 years at Saturn

The Cassini spacecraft went into orbit around Saturn ten years ago, on July 1, 2004 in universal time. Ron Hobbs, a solar system ambassador of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, says some of the mission’s most exciting science has occurred quite recently.

Hobbs spoke at the most recent meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society about Cassini’s decade at Saturn, and notes that recent measurements of the gravitational field of the moon Enceladus have yielded some interesting findings.

“We are very confident that there is body of liquid water at the south pole that extends at least to 50 degrees south latitude on Enceladus,” Hobbs says. “There’s a body of water that’s in contact with rock. We know that some of the ice particles that get shot out into the E-ring have salt and organics in them. This has become on a very short list of places in our own solar system where we might find life.”

Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa are two others on what Hobbs calls the “astrobiological short list.” Many scientists believe that life on Earth may have originated in hydrothermal ocean vents—a safe haven during the heavy bombardment era—and so it’s reasonable to suspect that life might thrive in similar environments elsewhere in the solar system.

Hobbs calls Cassini “the largest, most complex, and capable spacecraft ever built” and notes that we may owe its existence to persistent Europeans. There was some talk in the mid-’90s that Congress would scrap the mission before it got off the ground because of budget concerns. But the Europeans had already built the Huygens probe that hitched a ride on Cassini in order to do a study of the atmosphere of the moon Titan. Hobbs says word is that protests about the proposed cuts made it all the way to the vice president.

“The fact that we have Cassini, as far as I’m concerned, is in large part due to the fact that the Europeans had the guts to talk to the U.S. government and say, ‘You don’t renege on your promises,'” Hobbs says.

Like the Mars rover missions, Cassini has far exceeded the time allotted for its original scientific mission.

“The plan for Cassini when it arrived in July of 2004 was to study Saturn for four years,” Hobbs notes. “Cassini is still one of the healthiest spacecraft we have anywhere in the solar system. All of its instruments are working great, it’s got fuel.” Nonetheless, Hobbs says he occasionally hears talk that Congress again is considering pulling the plug on the mission. He says that would be a bad idea, as we still have a lot to learn.

The NASA video below gives a preview of the work they’re planning for Cassini over the next four years.

Sky Guide developers win Apple Design Award

A pair of Seattle-area software developers are getting some much-deserved recognition for their astronomy app. Chris Laurel and Nick Risinger, founders of Fifth Star Labs, recently received a 2014 Apple Design Award for their gorgeous iOS app Sky Guide.

Chris Laurel, left, and Nick Risinger, founders of Fifth
Star Labs and designers of Sky Guide, an astronomy
app that has received a 2014 Apple Design Award.

Laurel is a software developer whose titles include Celestia, an open-source application for astronomical visualization. He has consulted with NASA and the European Space Agency. Risinger is a renowned astrophotographer and designer perhaps best known for his panoramic photo survey of the Milky Way that consists of more than 37,000 individual images. Laurel tells Seattle Astronomy that the idea for Sky Guide germinated as a way to allow people to view Risinger’s imagery.

The first version of Sky Guide came out a little over a year ago, in May 2013, and Laurel says they’ve had the good fortune to be selling well right from the start.

“We have a good app, but it also takes some luck to get the exposure that you need to sell enough to keep yourself employed,” he says. A lot of the luck came in the form of support from Apple, which featured Sky Guide on the app store not long after it launched.

A screen shot from Sky Guide

“If you make something that the platform owners like, then they want to feature you because it shows off their devices and software,” Laurel notes of the support from Apple. Soon Sky Guide was featured as the Starbucks app of the week.

“That’s a free download; we don’t get money, but it gets you a lot of people looking at the app,” Laurel says, and that created some buzz. “Once you get enough users using it, then they tell their friends, so you have this sort of organic thing going.”

Laurel says the Apple Design Award came as something of a surprise, but says they’re deeply honored by the recognition from the company. Reviews have been great; Sky Guide was featured as one of the hot products for 2014 in the January issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.
Laurel, who is vice president for activities for the Seattle Astronomical Society, says he and Risinger are gratified at the interest the amateur astronomy community has shown in Sky Guide, but notes that this wasn’t their target customer group.

“We were going for a broader audience,” he says, explaining that Sky Guide doesn’t have features such as telescope controls that are offered by other astronomy apps. “We’re going for an audience of anyone who might look up in the night sky and say, ‘What’s that star?'”

We love Sky Guide for its gorgeous look and for its great depth. In addition to Risinger’s superb photography, the app features music and sounds by Mat Jarvis and a wealth of information about bright stars (by James B. Kaler) and about constellation mythology (by Ian Ridpath.) A cool filter feature lets the user see objects as they would appear in various wavelengths, including microwave, infrared, h-alpha, and x-ray.

The Apple Design Award is well-deserved! Sky Guide is available for iPhone and iPad for $1.99. Check it out!

First SHERPA launch from Spaceflight, Inc. set for next year

Seattle-based Spaceflight, Inc. will make a big leap in its business of shuttling small payloads into space with the launch next year of its first SHERPA mission. The company has helped get some three dozen payloads into space, but its president, Curt Blake, says this one will be different.

Drawing of SHERPA in orbit. Courtesy Spaceflight, Inc.

“Up until now we’ve integrated the satellites on board the launch vehicle,” he explains. “This time we’re integrating a whole bunch onto the SHERPA ring.” The ring—a “secondary payload adapter ring”—has five ports around its outside, each of which can carry one or several payloads, depending on their size and configuration. Payloads can be CubeSats or NanoSats as light as a couple of kilograms, or larger satellites up to 300 kilograms. The SHERPA is capable of carrying up to 1,500 kilograms total, though for the maiden mission, set for the third quarter of 2015, it will max out at 1,200 kilograms.

Spaceflight fills an interesting niche in the commercial space business, piggybacking on planned launches and brokering rides to smaller payloads for which it doesn’t make sense to launch on their own.

“The real selling point of this is that secondary payloads generally get a cheaper ride to space, because the primary payload is the one that drives the schedule,” Blake explains. Even more importantly, the folks sending up the primary payload decide where it’s going to go, which isn’t always the ideal place for the secondaries.

“Because of that we developed the SHERPA, which lets us be deployed where the primary is getting deployed, but then we can move around to a place that’s more suitable for the secondary payload,” Blake says.

Following next year’s launch, Blake says Spaceflight is planning two launches each year, one to low-Earth orbit, and the other to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

The first SHERPA will not have its own propulsion system, but future models will, enabling even greater maneuverability and precision in delivering satellites to their intended destinations.

Spaceflight, Inc. is looking beyond the orbit of Earth. Blake says they’re already talking about taking payloads to lunar orbit—it’s a relatively easy proposition to get to the Moon from GTO—and adds that SHERPA might even be able to take small payloads as far as Mars.

“The commercialization of space is definitely leading to rapid innovation,” Blake says.
SHERPA is not an acronym. Blake says the craft was named in homage to the Himalayan guides who lug stuff up to the top of the world. In SHERPA’s case, they’re aiming a bit higher.

Funding Opportunity a "no brainer"

As Congress debates NASA’s budget there’s been some talk about pulling the plug on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Red Planet for more than 10 years. Seattle-based Solar System Ambassador Ron Hobbs says that would be pure folly.

“We get so much bang for such a little buck for planetary sciences,” Hobbs says. He notes that Opportunity is a mere 600 meters away from what he calls “the promised land of clay” in the Endeavor crater—stratified clay that will give scientists a wealth of information about the geological history of Mars. It’s also a beautiful spot.

“For the photography alone it should be worth going, for the science alone it should be worth going,” Hobbs says. “Put the two together, to me, it’s a no-brainer” to keep Opportunity operating.

Opportunity took this self portrait in late March as wind storms
cleaned its solar panels. Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU

Hobbs notes that it’s just such a geological feature that caused scientists to pick Gale Crater as the destination for the Curiosity rover, which should reach its primary target later this year. Hobbs adds that, to some degree, the existence of Curiosity is a threat to Opportunity.

“If they shut down Opportunity it will be a victim of its own success and the success of all the things that JPL does,” he says.

Hobbs says Opportunity also may be a bit of a victim of over-delivering on its promise. The mission was originally slated to last 90 days, in large part because planners—a superstitious lot—didn’t want to jinx the mission by predicting a long life. Hobbs notes that we build robust spacecraft in America, but there’s a lot of uncertainty out in space.

“You’re going into an extreme environment, and who knows what could happen? You could get hit by a meteorite and be vaporized. Mission over right there,” he says. “You could not land, which is actually the biggest risk and why they sent two” rovers to land on Mars in 2004: Opportunity and Spirit, which worked until 2010. The longest anyone dared suggest the twin rovers would last is a year.

“I think everybody assumed that the first Martian winter would kill them,” Hobbs says. “They certainly thought that a dust storm would kill them. It’s blowing everybody away at this point that Opportunity is still around 10 years later. Nobody expected this.”

In fact, he says anyone who had suggested a rover would last for a decade would have been drummed out of the scientific community.

“They would have been dismissed as completely wacko!” he laughs. “Yet, here we are!”

In fact, Opportunity is working better than it has in several years. A recent wind storm cleaned off its solar panels, and they’re generating higher power than they have in a while.

Hobbs has a hunch that Opportunity ultimately will be funded. It’s continuing work on real science and the public’s love for the rover would likely generate an outcry were the plug pulled.
Stay tuned!

An Earth Day plea to help spot killer asteroids

Last year’s explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteor in the skies over Russia notwithstanding, most people still think that asteroid impacts on Earth are exceedingly rare events. In fact, over the last 13 years the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has detected 26 explosions of between one and 600 kilotons.

The B612 Foundation, established to give us some early warning of asteroid strikes, used the backdrop of Earth Day to release a new video that graphically depicts the data from these impacts. The video notes that “our current strategy for dealing with asteroid impacts is blind luck.”



“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said Ed Lu, CEO and co-founder of the B612 Foundation, at a news conference held at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. “We humans can actually go and change this, and there is nothing stoping us from doing that.”

The foundation is working to launch the Sentinel Mission space telescope to detect possibly one million or more undiscovered asteroids in Earth’s celestial neighborhood. The mission is planned for launch in 2018.

Former astronaut Ed Lu, CEO of the B612 Foundation, spoke at
an Earth Day news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle
about the organization’s plan for detecting Earth-threatening
asteroids. Seated behind Lu are former astronauts Tom Jones, left,
and Bill Anders, who shot the famed “Earthrise” photo behind
them from Apollo 8 at the Moon. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“This is what Earth Day is all about,” Lu said. “It’s looking at the big picture. It’s realizing that sometimes the most important thing isn’t what’s right in front of your face; it’s what you see when you look up.”
Lu said the object of the video isn’t to scare people.

“I think you should be inspired to do something,” he said. “The point of it is to roll up your sleeves and say, ‘Let’s just solve this.'”

Sentinel is based largely on the design of the Kepler Space Telescope. It would be launched into an orbit near that of Venus and would look back at Earth with infrared instruments in order to more readily spot asteroids. Lu said it will be able to spot a charcoal briquet at a distance of nearly 30,000 miles.

Former astronaut Tom Jones, president of the Association of Space Explorers, said his group is working with the UN to build international acceptance and cooperation in the effort. The association hopes to see an asteroid deflection demonstration—a process as easy as ramming a spacecraft into the object—within a decade.

“On Earth Day we focus on understanding and protecting our environment,” Jones noted. “It’s time to use our space skills to change the workings of the solar system and make sure that we protect humanity through our technology in space flight.”

A third former astronaut joined the panel to support the effort. Bill Anders shot the famed “Earthrise” photo from Apollo 8 that is sometimes called the most influential environmental image ever. While fairly new to the B612 family, Anders supports the mission, noting that it’s something NASA isn’t doing right now.

“These civilians have stepped forward and are doing something with their post-space careers that I view as quite significant, and I’m honored to be a small part of it,” Anders said.

It will cost about $250 million to build Sentinel. While Lu avoided giving any exact figures, he said they’re about 15 percent of the way to that in their fundraising. Noting that the cost is barely that of a freeway overpass, he expressed confidence that the foundation will reach that fundraising goal in time to meet their launch schedule.

“This is the only wholesale natural disaster that I know how to prevent, so that’s what I’m going to do,” Lu said.

Seattle as sundial capital of North America

“I am passionate about sundials,” says Woody Sullivan, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. “I have a goal to turn Seattle into the sundial capital of North America.”

Most of us don’t think of Seattle as the capital of anything related to the Sun, and we’re especially grumpy about it in the midst of a relentlessly gloppy March. But Sullivan points out that the second half of our year has long, clear days, and he observes that while people in, say, Phoenix often seek to escape from the Sun, we celebrate it.

“In Seattle, when the Sun comes out you go running out to see your sundial!” Sullivan says.
Sullivan gave a talk titled “Sundials Around Seattle and Beyond: Fascinating Mixtures of Astronomy, Art, Design, and History” at a recent meeting of the Eastside Astronomical Society in Bellevue. While the designation of sundial capital is hardly an official one, Sullivan thinks Seattle is on the way because of its large collection of interesting, well-cared-for public sundials.

The sundial on a SW-facing wall of the University of Washington
Physics/Astronomy building was the first Sullivan helped
build and design, 20 years ago.

Sullivan’s academic interests include astrobiology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the history of astronomy. His passion for sundials came about almost by accident. When the UW was constructing a new physics/astronomy building in the early ’90s, he suggested that a sundial should be placed on one of its large, outside walls. The architects went for it, and Sullivan spent a couple of years supervising the design and installation of the sundial.

“This is what got me into sundials, and ever since my life has been changed,” he says.
Inspired by the design of a sundial at the Sorbonne in Paris, the UW dial is on a wall that faces southwest. That means it’s design is asymmetrical, “which I think is more interesting from an aesthetic point of view,” Sullivan says.

Sullivan notes that all good sundials have a motto, and the one for the UW dial is “What you seek is but a shadow.”

“I thought that was good for a university,” he says. “It feels like it’s making progress.”
In a nod to our northwest weather the dial also is inscribed with a little poem:

I thrive on the Sun
Can’t work in the rain
So if I’m beclouded
Please come back again.

There’s a wealth of information about the UW dial on the web, including a webcam.

If you visit a Seattle sundial you will notice that the it doesn’t agree with your watch.
“Sundials do not tell you clock time,” Sullivan explains. “Your watch is off because we keep the same time as the people in Spokane. That ain’t right! Solar noon”—the moment when the Sun is due south and highest in the sky—”happens there 20 minutes before it happens here.”

Sullivan helped design pancam calibration targets like this
one that also serve as sundials on the three rovers on Mars.

Sullivan gave us a look at numerous other sundials in the area, and he’s had a hand in the design and construction of many of them. They’re in parks and at schools and even on picnic tables. He supported the Battle Point Astronomical Association in its successful effort to fund a new sundial on Bainbridge Island which is scheduled to be completed this summer.

In addition to all of those here on Earth, Sullivan also helped design three sundials that are now on Mars. The rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity all have targets that are used for color calibration of their cameras in light and in shade. Bill Nye the Science Guy, who is now CEO of the Planetary Society, saw a mockup of the target, a disk with a post in the middle of it, and immediately thought it should be a sundial. Nye got Sullivan involved in the design. Coincidentally, Tyler Nordgren, astronomer who keynoted the Seattle Astronomical Society‘s annual banquet in January, was also part of the team that put it together.

Woody Sullivan brought a variety of small sundial samples to his talk,
 and the conversation continued well past the end of his formal presentation.

There’s also a bit of baseball on the Red Planet. As Sullivan and Nye share a passion for baseball in addition to their love of sundials, they made weight-saving cutouts in the bases of the Mars dials in the shape of home plate. Seattle’s Museum of Flight has Sullivan’s copy of the Mars dial on display in its space gallery.

Sullivan’s talk was tremendously well received. One EAS member noted that she switched her scheduled night at the opera to be at the talk instead. Staff at the library at which the talk was held booted us out well after closing time, and even at that the discussion continued in the parking lot for a good 45 minutes more.

Check out Sullivan’s sundial trail website for a guide to visiting Seattle sundials.
Other reading:

• Seattle Times story about the sundial in Sullivan’s home study
• Planetary Society explanation of the face of the Mars dials
• Astrobiology Magazine interview with Sullivan

The destruction of Hogwarts and other science goofs in fiction

If Harry Potter’s Hogwarts existed in the real world and Professor Minerva McGonagall turned herself into a cat, it would blow the place to smithereens, according to Charles Adler, professor of physics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Adler, author of Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction, spoke earlier this month at Town Hall Seattle. He said the school for wizards would be toast because author J.K. Rowling didn’t follow one of the basic laws of science.

“By transforming herself into a cat, she is not conserving mass,” Adler noted, figuring that the cat probably weighs at least 90 pounds less than does McGonagall.

“If you convert that into pure energy, what ever that means, how much energy does she have to get rid of to turn herself into a cat?” he asked. “The math is pretty easy: e=mc². It turns out that basically you’ve got about 50 H-bombs of energy liberated when you do this. BOOM! There goes Hogwarts.”

Adler cuts Rowling some slack because the Potter books are pure fantasy. He is a big fan of science fiction and fantasy writing and says thinking about the accuracy of the science boosts his enjoyment of the genres. He doesn’t expect it to be completely accurate—it is fiction, after all—but he believes authors and their stories need to need to be reasonably grounded in reality.

“If you’re going to introduce something which is in variance with the laws of science, you have an obligation to explore how that idea is going to affect the world, how that idea is going to affect the story that you’re writing, how to make it consistent with everything else in the story,” Adler contended. “If you’re not doing that, you’re not really playing fair with the reader.”

Chuck Adler. 

Photo: St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Adler agrees with the approach of Poul Anderson, one of his favorite sci-fi writers to whom Wizards, Aliens, and Starships is dedicated. Anderson felt authors should use the laws of science to devise plausible settings for their stories.

“If you try to actually make your story obey the laws of science, at least mostly, you will have a better story, and it will also serve up ideas for how the story can go,” Adler explained.

Science fiction often runs into trouble with economics, according to Adler. In Star Trek, it would be preposterously expensive to produce enough antimatter to run just one starship, much less a fleet of them. There’s a practical problem, too.

“If we build a spacecraft like this anywhere near the Earth, merely turning the starship on will destroy the Earth” because of the gamma radiation it would emit, Adler said.

Even the food service raises questions. Adler said that making a cup of Earl Grey, hot, in the replicator for Captain Picard  would burn up enough energy to brew about two billion cups of tea.

“I’m not sure why they’re doing it this way on the Enterprise,” Adler said. “It looks cool, I will grant you that.”

We asked Alder to talk about authors who he thought got it right, who were almost visionary in coming up with gadgets or story lines that became fact. His top-of-the-head list included Larry Niven, who came up with the notion of the cellular phone in his 1974 story The Mote in God’s Eye; Arthur Clarke, who came up with the idea of the communication satellite; and Olaf Stapledon, who turned out to have a great grasp of the scope of cosmological history.

Adler’s fascinating talk included lots of analysis of space travel and human exploration, the engineering challenges of building space elevators, and a lot of math behind the science and magic of sci-fi and fantasy. The book includes even more analysis of the science in science fiction.

Half the park is after dark

Tyler Nordgren wears many hats: astronomy professor, author, artist, photographer, national park curriculum designer, and night-sky ambassador. The author of Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks was the keynote speaker at the recent annual banquet of the Seattle Astronomical Society.

Tyler Nordgren

Nordgren, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Redlands in California, pegs his early interest in astronomy to his suburban-Portland grade school principal, who happened to be the uncle of astronaut Bonnie Dunbar. Mr. Dunbar used his connections to bring NASA folks to the school for talks. Nordgren decided then that he wanted to be an astronaut, too. Then he was amazed by Carl Sagan’s TV series.

“When I saw Cosmos I realized why I wanted to be an astronaut, or if not an astronaut, to be an astronomer,” Nordgren said.

Coincidentally, Nordgren attended graduate school at Cornell University when Sagan was on the faculty. He never took a class from Sagan, but in one of his first teaching gigs Jeremy Sagan, Carl’s son, was in Nordgren’s class. He said Jeremy sat in the front row, asked a lot of questions, and then talked over the lectures with his famous dad. No pressure there.

“I learned to be on my toes!” Nordgren joked.

Nordgren’s posters like this one for
Chaco Culture National Historical Park
help call attention to the importance
of dark night skies in the parks.

A couple of events inspired Nordgren’s work in the national parks, which includes marvelous photography and a series of travel posters based on the style of the 1930s WPA graphics. The first was a visit to Palomar Observatory.

“My very first telescope was an eight-inch Celestron my father bought for me when I graduated from college,” Nordgren recalled. “My second telescope was the Palomar 200-inch” which he used in research about dark matter in spiral galaxies. When he returned 10 years later he was taken aback by the increased light pollution fueled by a housing boom in the area.

“It had been like a tidal wave of light had just swept out around the mountain,” he said. “It was stunning just how bad the skies now were at Palomar.”

Shortly after that trip, Nordgren celebrated gaining tenure by taking a trip to Yosemite National Park and attended an evening ranger talk about astronomy.

“For many, many people this was the first time they had seen a night sky, a truly pristine night sky,” Nordgren marveled.

He decided to spend an upcoming sabbatical in the National Park system helping rangers develop programs for park visitors to experience the night sky. He spent time in a dozen different parks over the course of 14 months, and came to realize that the preservation of the land that prevents development in the parks also, almost by accident, preserves the precious resource of truly dark skies. It’s a growing part of the appeal of the parks, articulated by the slogan “Half the park is after dark.”

“In those parks that offer night-sky programs the attendance they have is equal to if not better than the next two types of programs added together,” Nordgren noted. “Far and away these are the most popular ranger programs that are offered.”

Nordgren's Mars poster

Much of Nordgren’s work is to link what people can see in the sky to what they see in the national parks. For example, he compares Mars to parks in the American Southwest; both Earth and the Red Planet have similar geology and chemistry. Yellowstone National Park has numerous geysers, similar to those on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.

One of Nordgren’s favorite parks is the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, which was recognized last year as an International Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association. He noted that many of the ancient structures there serve as astronomical markers ala Stonehenge.

“People paid attention to the sky, people have been doing that for centuries, millennia,” Nordgren said. “Unfortunately we’ve made it tremendously difficult to keep doing that.”

As evidence he showed a photo of the sky above Chaco, which is still impressively dark and starry, but all around light pollution is encroaching from the cities of Gallup, Crownpoint, Albuquerque, and a nearby coal mine. Thus a big part of his aim is to get communities near the parks to recognize that the night sky is an attraction, and to encourage them to be good stewards of the dark sky. His spiel goes just as well for any city, regardless of its proximity to a national park.

“All that light that shines above the horizon doesn’t do anything useful,” Nordgren said. “So why are we lighting up the sky? There is nothing we need fear up there, so why are we paying for that light? Why are we generating that light? Why are we burning the natural resources to create that light?”

There really aren’t great answers to those questions, and Nordgren said the solutions are within reach.

“This can be a win-win situation for all of us,” he said. “We can get the stars back, we can save money, we can save natural resources. It really doesn’t have to be stars versus safety.”

Check out Nordgren’s posters and other artwork on his website.