A visit to West Seattle's Constellation Park

If you are looking for a low-key spot to visit and get away from it all a little during holiday week, Constellation Park and Marine Reserve in West Seattle would be an excellent choice. One can hardly call this a hidden gem, given that it is right out in the open along Beach Drive SW west of 63rd Avenue SW, but although we’ve ridden our bicycles right down that street many times, we didn’t realize there was an astronomy feature there until we stumbled across it recently on the Seattle Parks website.

It appears that Constellation Park was dedicated in 1999, according to a plaque on the site. It is one of several small parks that were created in the neighborhood during the 1990s, all of which came about through partnerships between local artist Lezlie Jane, the Alki Community Council, and the City’s Neighborhood Matching Fund. Part of the reason for the limited visibility of the park is that, formally, it is attached to the Charles Richey Sr. Viewpoint, which itself is an extension of Alki Beach Park. It is along Beach Drive south of the Alki Point Lighthouse and south of the main business district along Alki. It is a popular destination for whale watching and, during low tides or after storms, is a paradise for beachcombers.

There are three main attractions at Constellation Park and Marine Reserve: an interpretive marine reserve, a commemoration of a rare planetary alignment, and the Avenue of Stars.

Marine reserve

The marine reserve includes a tidepool sculpture by artist Jane that features starfish, snails, clams, and an octopus. A nearby interpretive wall done in tile sports illustrations of intertidal flora and fauna that can be found on local beaches.

Planetary alignment

There was a rare alignment of planets on Dec. 5, 1997, when seven of the eight planets other than Earth were all in the same section of the sky. The positions of the planets during that alignment are noted by brass markers set into the sidewalk right at the end of the park near 63rd and Beach.

It would have been impossible to see Pluto at that time and place; you always need a good telescope and pretty dark skies to spot it. Uranus and Neptune would have been extremely challenging, too, until the sky got a bit darker. But Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury would have been pretty easy to spot, given clear weather. Saturn was the only planet not involved. It’s fun to note that, at least at Constellation Park, Pluto is still and always will be a planet. There were some sidewalk markings at the site on our most recent visit, indicating possible construction or utility activity in the future. We hope it doesn’t disrupt the solar system!

Avenue of Stars

The highlight of Constellation Park is the Avenue of Stars, which begins at about 64th and Beach Drive and runs along Beach almost to Benton Place. Representations of 27 constellations are embedded in the sidewalk, with one brass star for each star of the given constellation’s well-known asterism. The biggest and brightest stars are identified by name. The constellations are grouped on the sidewalk by the season during which they’re visible at around 10 p.m. from Constellation Park. It’s a good spot for stargazing, as the park essentially looks out over Puget Sound to the south and west, with good horizons for spotting constellations and other celestial objects in all directions.

Woody Sullivan, a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Washington, is listed as an in-kind donor to the project, no doubt lending his scientific expertise to the art of the project. Sullivan has had a hand in much public astronomy art and information, particularly on a number of sundials in the area.

Orion as depicted in brass on the
Avenue of the Stars in West Seattle.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Each constellation in the park is accompanied by a plaque that identifies the constellation, notes the season during which it is best visible, and includes a message from one of the donors who helped fund the project. Some of these notes are memorials to loved ones or simply positive vibes for the universe. We’re especially fond of the thought that was placed by Timothy Michael Holtschlag on the marker that accompanies the constellation Scorpius:

“Gazing at the stars I see light that has traveled vast distances of time and space and know that I am connected to everything.”

We couldn’t find this specific quote with a quick Internet search, so presume it is an original written by Mr. Holtschlag. Certainly a similar sentiment has been expressed many times, from Galileo and Einstein to Tennyson and Chief Seattle, and it captures the allure astronomy has for many of us, amateur or professional.

So, wander down to Constellation Park a little before sunset on the next clear evening. Find the constellations that are visible on the season. Then wait for night to fall and enjoy some ancient light from far across the universe.

The power of unseen light

Megan Watzke thinks about light a lot. Watzke is press officer for the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and she’s the co-author of three books: Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2015); Your Ticket to the Universe: A Guide to Exploring the Cosmos (Smithsonian Books, 2013); and Coloring the Universe: An Insider’s Look at Making Spectacular Images of Space (University of Alaska Press, 2015). Watzke gave a talk about Light at Town Hall Seattle last week.

Watzke pointed out that there are seven different categories of light, and we’re all familiar with them all, and yet sometimes we forget that it’s all just light.

“Light in its various forms is not different,” she said. “It’s the same phenomenon, it’s just different wavelengths.”

“We use these different types of light every single day,” Watzke added, “or we’re affected by them every single day.”

Watzke said the seven categories are a bit arbitrary and move around a bit depending on the science being done. But they all share similar characteristics. They travel at the same speed, and can bounce and bend or be absorbed or blocked. It’s at different wavelengths that it does different things, and the wavelengths can vary from miles to less than the width of an atom.

Seven categories of light

Radio waves. The longest wavelength, Watzke pointed out that we don’t actually hear radio waves, but that electronics translate the changes in compressed air created by sound. But our mobile phones, GPS devices, bluetooth headsets, MRI tests, and garage door openers all use radio waves.

Microwaves. We use them to cook things, and satellite TV trucks use them to beam video around the world.

Infrared light. Infrared light has many uses. Your TV remote control employs infrared, which can also be used to create warmth. Astronomers can see celestial objects in the infrared when visible light is blocked by interstellar dust.

Visible light. A tiny part of the spectrum. Watzke said that if all of light was a piano keyboard, what we can see would be a few keys around middle-C. But it’s important, as it is why we can see things, is a source of sustainable, non-fossil-fuel energy, and is a key to photosynthesis.

Ultraviolet. UV light can cause sunburn, but can also be useful to destroy microbes, and is used for security on currency or credit cards. Ultraviolet also includes black light, which Watzke joked is an “important part of raves and Halloween parties.”

X-rays. We all know about the medical uses of X-rays, which can cause cancer or be used to combat it. In astronomy objects emit X-rays if they’re extremely hot or energetic, like material falling into a black hole.

Gamma Rays. Watzke called gamma rays the “most energetic thing we know about.” They can be harmful, but like ultraviolet can kill microbes and also has uses such as the sterilization of food.

False color

Author Megan Watzke explained the powers
of the different wavelengths of light during
her talk Dec. 8, 2015 at Town Hall Seattle.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Watzke took some time to talk about the term “false color,” which she finds to be a misnomer. She said false color is not fake color. When scientists create images in false color they are simply trying to represent light that we cannot actually see.

“What is done with scientific images that involve invisible wavelengths is that color is applied to wavelengths and then stacked together, frequently, so you have multiple layers that look like a multiple-color image,” Watzke said. “These are real data, but a layer of color is applied.”

“It’s translating the data that is invisible into something that you can actually see,” she added, comparing the process to the way one would use color to represent different temperatures on a weather map.

She would prefer the term representative color; perhaps it will catch on!

Watzke will talk more about the creation of astronomical images when she discusses Coloring the Universe along with co-author Travis Rector at Wednesday’s meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.

Watzke said that she wrote Light to make the topic a little more accessible.

“I want people to understand that light is all around us and that science is all around us,” she said. “Science isn’t something to be scared of or be intimidated by. It’s something that we all should be able to enjoy and pursue.”

More information:

• Recording of Watzke’s talk from Town Hall Seattle
• The trailer for Light, below

Answering the ultimate questions

There is a crisis in physics today, but Adam Frank sees it as an opportunity rather than a threat. Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and co-founder of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, gave a talk last week at the University of Washington titled, “Beyond the Big Bang: Cosmology and Ultimate Questions.” Frank, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the UW, was back on campus for the last in a series of lectures titled The Big Bang and Beyond, which was sponsored by the university’s alumni association as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Astronomy.

Modern mythology

Frank called the Big Bang a bit of “modern mythology,” an origin narrative that puts us into a cosmic context and gives the universe meaning.

Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of
Rochester and frequent NPR science commentator, gave a
lecture at the University of Washington Dec. 2, 2015.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“Science tells us that there is no meaning,” Frank noted. “We can argue about that. But even not having a meaning is meaning. In that sense the Big Bang is a powerful origin myth for our culture.”

While he called it an origin narrative, Frank pointed out that many people have a misconception about the Big Bang Theory.

“It is not a theory of the beginning,” he pointed out. “The Big Bang never tells you why it’s there.”

It gets close; within about 10^-32 seconds of the start.

“We can do a pretty good job of telling you in detail what the history of the universe had been going back to some tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang,” Frank said.

Fine tuning

That tiny fraction of a second is where some weighty riddles reside. For the Big Bang to work, we have to assume that the initial conditions were the same as they are now. There’s a lengthy list of constants in the math that describes the universe, such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant. All of them have to be just so.

“You change one of those numbers by just a tiny amount and life could never form,” Frank noted. So how did we end up in a universe that is perfectly fine tuned for us to arrive on the scene?

“If you’re an intelligent design person you say, ‘Oh, it’s God that did it,’” Frank said. “If you’re a physicist, that’s not going to work very well for you. What you want as a physicist is a theory that predicts these.”

“People often talk about cosmology as being the place where science butts up against theology, but physicists don’t want that to be the case,” he continued. “They want to have coherent physical explanations for something like where the Big Bang came from.”

Coherent is in the mind of the beholder, but it may well be that such an explanation has yet to emerge. Frank refers to the most prominent ideas so far as the “standard crazy” and the “alternative crazy.” And it’s from these crazy ideas that the crisis emerges.

Standard crazy

The first standard crazy idea is that of multiverses. With an infinite number of universes popping up all over, fine tuning is no longer an issue. There’s bound to be a universe with our exact conditions, and that’s the one we live in.

Then there is string theory, which arose out of the search for a quantum theory of gravity. String theory can reproduce standard-model particles, and it includes a gravity particle. People got pretty excited about a “theory of everything.”

There are problems within the standard crazy. Unobservable multiverses. Hidden dimensions. The existence of 10⁵⁰⁰ universes. And it all may lie beyond possible experimentation.

“People are really starting to push back on multiverse and string theory—these ‘standard crazy’ ideas—saying these things may be untestable,” Frank said. “If they’re untestable they’re not science, and if they’re not science it’s time for people to stop talking about them.”

“All of the work that was done on string theory and the multiverse may, in the end, turn out to be, in some sense, a wrong direction,” he added.

Alternative crazy

Other far-out ideas have been proposed. British physicist Julian Barbour puts forward the notion that time doesn’t exist, and that every moment is a distinct and separate now. Lee Smolin suggests that we reboot cosmology entirely, and consider that our “timeless” laws are anything but; that physical laws may in fact be evolving.

“It could be totally wrong, but it’s illustrative of the difference of where you have to go to try and think about going beyond and before the Big Bang without getting into the conceptual problems that string theory and the multiverse lead to,” Frank said.

A good crisis

Frank sees this crisis in physics as an opportunity.

“The crisis in physics is great because what it’s going to mean is that we’re going to have to come up with even different ideas,” he said. “We’re going to have to probe our understanding of reality even deeper, and what we’re slowly heading toward is some kind of truth. It may not be the ultimate truth, but we’ve been approaching a better understanding of the world since science has begun.”

Frank said that, with a seemingly endless stream of terrible headlines in the news, he sees the search for this ultimate reality as an example of what we do best.

“Humanity is capable of such incredible stupidity and horror, and yet we’re also capable of such compassion, and such wonder, and the ability to experience such awe,” Frank said. “The quest for ultimate reality is a fundamental expression of human goodness and hope.”

More reading

• NY Times op-ed: A Crisis at the Edge of Physics
• Adam Frank website

Books by Adam Frank

Aperture fever strikes in the hunt for dark matter

There’s a truism in astronomy that aperture rules. The wider your telescope mirror or lens the more photons you can capture and the better views you’ll get of celestial objects. It turns out that aperture fever strikes professional astronomers as well as amateurs. The latest to fall victim to this malady is Julianne Dalcanton, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. Last week Dalcanton gave a talk at the UW titled “Building the Universe Piece by Piece.” It was part of the lecture series The Big Bang and Beyond being presented by the UW Alumni Association in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the university’s Department of Astronomy.

Prof. Julianne Dalcanton spoke about galaxy formation and
evolution at the UW Nov. 18. 2015. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Dalcanton’s bailiwick is the study of the formation and evolution of galaxies, and she picked up that story where Miguel Morales left off two weeks before in the second lecture of the series. Morales took us up to the “end of the beginning,” the release of the cosmic microwave background, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Once things cooled down after that, the universe developed more complexity.

“You have intergalactic gas that originally permeated the universe mixed with the dark matter and the light of the cosmic microwave background,” Dalcanton said. “This gas has funneled, along with the dark matter, into these increasingly rich structures and then funneled into galaxies.”

As the galaxies formed, so did stars out of even more densely concentrated areas of gas. Dalcanton noted that the Hubble Space Telescope has given us marvelous photos of stars being born in places like the Orion Nebula or the Eagle Nebula, subject of the now-famous photo “Pillars of Creation.”

Beautiful and deadly

“The Pillars of Creation” is arguably Hubble’s most famous photo.
Image: NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University)

“These scenes of great beauty are scenes of great destruction,” Dalcanton said. “The stars that are born here are the ultimate in ungrateful children. They are just going about their business absolutely destroying the cloud from which they were born.”

Dalcanton pointed out that we can recognize young stars easily because they’re massive, bright, blue, large, and hot. They tend to flame out quickly. On the other hand, smaller, cooler, dimmer red stars like our Sun last a lot longer.

“They all seem so different,” Dalcanton said. “There’s a clear regularity in their properties that must be directly linked to the physics that’s going on inside the stars.”

By looking at other galaxies and noting the distribution of young and old stars, astronomers get clues about how the galaxies evolved and how elusive dark matter works. Then they make computer models and compare the results to what they see around the universe. The theoretical models match the observations pretty well so far.

“Just because you can make it in the computer doesn’t mean that it’s true,” Dalcanton cautioned. “The study of the individual stars and the actual histories of individual galaxies, where we can pick them apart into their individual pieces, gives us a really strong constraint on all of these models. That then gives us the additional leverage to try to break apart various possible theories of dark matter.”

“The key ingredient to all of this is actually detecting individual stars,” she added.

We need a bigger telescope

This is where the aperture fever comes in.

Dalcanton heads up PHAT, the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, a project in which Hubble made nearly 13,000 images of the Andromeda Galaxy and did a billion measurements of 110 million stars. Volunteers in the Andromeda Project helped sift through nearly a terabyte of data, and we learned a lot.

“As awesome as this is, Hubble is not enough,” Dalcanton said. “Hubble’s my babe, but it’s got its limitations.”

She said Andromeda was chosen for this survey because it is the closest, most massive spiral galaxy we can get a good look at.

“Even with the Hubble Space Telescope we can’t really pick apart all of the stars that we actually want to,” Dalcanton said.

HDST is the answer

The HDST would dwarf Hubble or the James Webb Space
Telescope, planned for launch in 2018. Image: C. Godfrey, STscI.

That’s why she’s a big advocate for a new project on the drawing boards called the High Definition Space Telescope (HDST). Hubble’s mirror is 2.4 meters. HDST’s would be nearly 12 meters, and would have 25 times the surface area of Hubble. Dalcanton said that would give it vastly superior sensitivity and clarity.

“We would see fainter stars and we would see them in regions of the universe where they were much more closely packed together,” she said. It would be like going from an old tube TV to your new 60-inch high-definition television. HDST would be strong enough to spot planets orbiting relatively nearby stars, and could see more and more stellar nurseries like the Eagle Nebula.

“We would be able to see those in individual galaxies anywhere in the universe,” with the HDST, Dalcanton said.

“That’s what I’m rooting for.”

Museum of Flight receives F-1 engines that launched Apollo

Forty-six years ago today Apollo 12 became the second craft to land people on the Moon. Today the Museum of Flight received an incredible treasure: parts of the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that blasted Apollo into orbit.

Doug King, president of the Museum
of Flight, announces the gift of the Apollo
F-1 engines at a news conference
Nov. 19, 2015. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The engines were found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 2013 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his team from Bezos Expeditions. Bezos requested that the engines be donated to the museum and NASA honored that request.

“This is truly a historic day for the museum, for our community,” said Doug King, president and CEO of the Museum of Flight. “I don’t think it’s too grandiose to say for our country and maybe even for humankind.”

“Exhibiting these historic engines not only shares NASA’s storied history, it also helps America educate to innovate,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a news release. “This display of spaceflight greatness can help inspire our next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and explorers to build upon past successes and create the new knowledge and capabilities needed to enable our journey to Mars.”

Bezos said he became interested in science and exploration as a five-year-old watching Neil Armstrong’s first small step on the Moon.

“You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you,” he said. Bezos said he thinks about rockets at lot, and one day it occurred to him that it would be great to find and restore those F-1 engines. The engineers who built them were working to send people to the Moon, and few folks at the time were thinking about posterity.

Expendable stuff

“That first stage with these gigantic engines is expendable; it’s supposed to crash into the ocean, that was the whole plan,” Bezos said.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos talks
about his passion for space and the
project to recover the F-1 engines.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“We’re working on changing that plan,” he continued. “I have this space company called Blue Origin; we’re trying to make reusable rockets because we don’t like throwing the hardware away.”

It took Bezos all of ten minutes of Internet searching to find the coordinates at which NASA said the Apollo 11 first stage rocket crashed. The hunt was on.

“That was going to prove to be the only easy thing about this project,” Bezos laughed. It was an incredibly complicated endeavor. Bezos Expeditions put together a team of more than 60 people who are experts in ocean recovery. They searched some 300 square miles of ocean with side-scanning sonar to find the engines and then pulled them out from under 14,000 feet of seawater, where they’d been at rest for more than 40 years.

The parts were restored at the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. Much of the damage to the engines was caused not by their high-speed crash into the sea, but by silt and corrosion from four decades in salt water, though the large and highly recognizable bell-shaped nozzle extensions were badly mangled.

Great museum pieces

Geoff Nunn, the adjunct curator for space history at the museum, said the engines that drove Apollo were marvels of engineering.

Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space history at the Museum of
Flight, talked about what makes the F-1 engines a special artifact.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“The Rocketdyne F-1 was the largest single-chambered liquid-fueled rocket ever flown,” Nunn said. “Each engine produced over a million and a half pounds of thrust and stood 18 and a half feet tall.”

That’s quite a kick. King said all of the planes in the museum’s entire collection collectively have only half that much thrust. Five F-1s launched each Saturn V.

The first piece unwrapped at the news conference this morning, still in its shrink wrap from Cosmosphere, was an injector plate from one of the Apollo 12 engines.

“The injector plate is really what is key to making the F-1 engine an engine and not just a million and a half pounds of bomb,” Nunn explained. “It’s covered in these minute holes that release fuel and oxidizer in an incredibly precise mixture in order to ensure that the combustion that occurs is smooth and controlled.”

Bezos talks about the workings of the F-1 engine injector plate.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Some of the F-1 engine components will go on public display at the museum starting Saturday and will be out until early January. The full collection will be part of a new, permanent exhibit that will open late next year or in early 2017.

For Bezos, finding and restoring artifacts like the F-1 engines is not about looking to the past.

“It’s about today and it’s about the future,” he said. “It’s about building a 21st-century version of the F-1 engine. It’s about building reusable rockets.

“Civilization for many centuries has been getting better and better, and the point of recovering an object like this is to remind us of who we are and what we can do as we move forward as a civilization.”

The video below from Bezos Expeditions tells the tale of the recovery of the F-1 engines from the briny Atlantic.

The end of the beginning of the universe

Miguel Morales has been spending a lot of time pondering what he calls “the end of the beginning of the universe”—the cosmic microwave background. Morales, professor of physics at the University of Washington, heads up the university’s Dark Universe Science Center, a group working to figure out gravity, dark matter, dark energy, galaxy formation and evolution, and other cosmological mysteries. Morales gave a talk earlier this month titled “The End of the Beginning.” It was the second of a four-part lecture series, The Big Bang and Beyond, sponsored by the UW alumni association in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Astronomy.

The now-famous rendering of the cosmic microwave background “looks
like Pollock. It’s kind of a mess!” jokes Prof. Miguel Morales. Yet it may
hold clues to how the universe formed and how we all got here.
Image: ESA and the Planck Collaboration.

Morales gave a “Cliff’s Notes” history of the formation of the universe, noting that the end of the beginning came about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the hydrogen and helium plasma formed by that event cooled sufficiently to change phase and release light.

“It froze from an opaque helium hydrogen plasma to a clear, neutral gas,” Morales explained.

The “glowing wall of gas” left behind is the cosmic microwave background. Recent measurements have confirmed temperature fluctuations in the CMB.

“These are real, hot and cold spots that we see on the sky,” Morales said. “This is the writing of creation on the wall.”

Ghostly evidence

Morales noted that this writing is extremely faint. He pointed out that the differences between the red an blue sections of the now-famous Planck map of the cosmic microwave background are just one part in 100,000.

Miguel Morales explains how oscillations in plasma created sound
waves that can be spotted within the cosmic microwave background.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“This is really a testament to precision measurement,” he said. He noted that, given this level of accuracy, we can learn a lot about what was going on in the early universe from the evidence left behind.
For example, scientists have teased out sound waves from the cosmic microwave background. The waves were created when the plasma oscillated in what was essentially a tug-o-war between gravity trying to collapse the mass and photons resisting that force. How those sound waves propagate could hold clues to what was going on in the early universe.

Changing tactics

The early observations measured temperature, but Morales said the state of the art is to look at the polarization of the light, which could lead to a needle in the cosmic haystack.

“You might be able to see, in the polarization, the ghost of gravity waves from inflation,” he said. They actually thought they had something in observations from the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole, but what they saw actually turned out to be spinning dust.

“The polarization that BICEP saw is contaminated by the galaxy,” Morales said. “We’re seeing stuff on the windshield here; it’s not all primordial.”

One of the greatest challenges in making these observations is fine-tuning the instruments to ignore the noise and not be faked out by the data.

“BICEP is a technical tour de force, the measurement is awesome. It’s just a little contaminated, and, to be honest, Planck is not sensitive enough to say how bad the contamination is,” Morales explained.

That, he said, is science.

“We’ll keep looking, scratching our heads, building yet more sensitive instruments as we learn to read the words about the universe written faintly on the sky.”

Spooky action explained

according to author and journalist George Musser, “We’re starting to see the hazy outlines of an answer,” to questions about the how particles in different locations appear to act on each other. He is quick to add that there are still scientists who don’t really believe that non-locality is a real thing.

Author George Musser explains separate particles magically acting
on each other during his talk Nov. 3 at Town Hall Seattle.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Musser is the author of Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). He spoke about the book and the science earlier this month at Town Hall Seattle.

Musser noted that Einstein was clearly bothered by some aspects of quantum mechanics, particularly the notion that randomness governs the universe. This led to his famous observation that God does not place dice.

“It was arguably Einstein’s number one concern,” Musser noted. “His deeper worry, actually the worry that led him to the worry about randomness, was the worry about non-locality. What is non-locality? How can this magic sorcery kind of thing be happening in the real world?”

That’s the quality that got Musser interested in writing about the subject.

“It’s the closest thing that we have in contemporary science to real, honest-to-god, Harry Potter magic,” he said. He noted that it turns up in many different sciences, and isn’t just a “freak show” over in quantum mechanics.

Space is constructed

Muster detailed the experimental evidence that has established that entanglement is a real phenomenon. String theory, loop quantum gravity, and other attempts to explain what’s happening have, at their cores, a similar idea, according to Musser. That idea is that space isn’t just empty and out there; it’s made of something.

“Anyone working on quantum gravity thinks that at some level space is constructed,” Musser explained. “That gives you the opening to deal with non-locality. No longer is that an insoluble puzzle that has been hanging in the air since Einstein’s days.”

Muster suggested thinking about water to illustrate the idea. A single molecule of H2O does not have the properties of water. It’s only when you get a whole bunch of that molecules together that water can flow or have surface tension.

“Likewise, if space consists of atoms, each individual atom is not spacial. Each individual atom lacks the properties we associate with spacial things,” Musser said. “Those spacial properties are derived collectively from the interactions among atoms.”

Given that idea, it’s possible that space can also change its state, just like water can boil and evaporate or freeze, and perhaps that’s part of what is driving our perception of different locations and entanglement.

“It seems that these things are in a predetermined location, but maybe that quality of being in a predetermined location is actively being generated all the time, below our level of consciousness, below the level even of our theories,” Musser said. “There’s some deeper machinery in the natural world.”

It’s a complicated concept to work into a 500-word blog post or a 45-minute lecture. You can listen to an audio recording of Musser’s talk on the Town Hall Seattle website. He is an engaging speaker, and Spooky Action at a Distance promises to be a good read.

Dark matter may have killed the dinosaurs

Harvard particle physicist and author Lisa Randall has a new hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs, and it’s a surprisingly simple one. The possible culprit: dark matter.

Physicist Lisa Randall spoke at Town Hall Seattle about her
hypothesis that dark matter may have triggered the events that
killed the dinosaurs. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Randall visited Town Hall Seattle last week to talk about her ideas, explained in her new book Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (Ecco, 2015).

Randall noted that ordinary matter forms into disks like our galaxy and solar system because it interacts with light, radiates photons, cools, and collapses. Dark matter, on the other hand, doesn’t interact with light and so stays diffuse. It is believed that the Milky Way Galaxy sits inside an essentially spherical halo of dark matter.

Here’s where Randall throws in a what-if. The model for dark matter presumes it consists of only one type of particle. But that’s not necessarily so.

“Maybe there’s a new type of dark matter in addition to the dark matter that people talk about,” Randall said.

“Suppose you had dark matter which could radiate,” she speculated. “Maybe dark matter interacts with its own light, which I’m going to call dark light.”

If that’s the case, this particle also could form structure, Randall said.

“Most of the dark matter is going to stay intact in a spherical halo, but this small fraction, maybe five percent of dark matter that interacts with dark light, can also collapse into a disk,” she said. This thin disk of dark matter would be embedded in the plane of the galaxy.

Here’s how that could have been the death blow for the dinosaurs, and a big chunk of the rest of the life on Earth, about 66 million years ago. Randall noted that, as our solar system rotates around the galaxy, it doesn’t follow a simple, flat course.

“As it goes around it actually bobs up and down through the plane of the Milky Way,” every 30 million years or so, she said.

“When it goes through that mid-plane, if there is a dark-matter disk there will be an enhanced gravitational force,” Randall explained. “So our hypothesis is that every time it goes through the mid-plane it can trigger comets getting dislodged from the Oort Cloud, and one of those could have been the comet that actually did in the dinosaurs.”

Randall stresses that this is all highly speculative, but she’s looking for evidence in her current research. She’s hoping to get data to further test the notion from the Gaia satellite, which will make precise measurements of the motions of about one billion stars. That will help us get a better handle on dark matter and where it is.

In the meantime Randall marvels at the interconnectedness of the universe. Galaxies could not have formed without dark matter, yet it may also have set into motion events that wiped out much of the life on our planet, also paving the way for large mammals, like us, to flourish.

Weighing the universe

Astronomers are about to take their best shot at weighing the universe. You might well ask how and why; University of Washington astronomy professor Andy Connolly recently tackled those questions in a lecture titled “Unraveling Our Own Cosmic History.” The talk was the first in a series dubbed The Big Bang and Beyond being sponsored by the UW Alumni Association as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the university’s Department of Astronomy.

Professor Andy Connolly spoke Oct. 21
 to kick off the Big Bang and Beyond lecture
series celebrating the 25th anniversary of the
Department of Astronomy at the University
 of Washington. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The why is easy: to try to figure out dark matter and dark energy. The how, according to Connolly, is actually pretty simple, too: they’re going to weigh the universe by looking at it, and not in a carnival weight-guesser sort of way.
To explain the idea, Connolly used an example of a swimming pool with tiles on its bottom. Water refracts light, and as the surface of the water in the pool ripples the reflections of light on the bottom of the pool move. Similarly, if you watch the grid of tiles on the bottom of the pool, the view will change. Connolly noted that by taking precise measurements of the distortion, we could determine the size of the waves and the mass of the water in the pool. Blow that model up to astronomical scale, about six billion light years, and you can weigh the universe.

Connolly looked, and found no grid in the sky, but notes that there are galaxies everywhere which can serve the same purpose.

“If I can measure the shapes of galaxies, and measure how they’re distorted through gravitational lensing, in the same way that I could measure the mass of the waves on the surface of a pool, I can now measure the mass of the universe,” Connolly said. “More importantly, I can measure that structure as a function of the age of the universe.”

The challenge is that while the structures are huge, they’re also spread out and the distortion will be miniscule. Spotting it will take a better telescope, and that’s one of the research reasons that the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is under construction in Chile. The UW is a founding partner of the LSST, which will have an 8.4-meter mirror and a 3.2 billion pixel camera. Its images will cover 3.5 degrees of sky; the Hubble Space Telescope would have to shoot about 3,000 images to achieve the same results.

“This means that (the LSST) can survey half the sky every three nights,” Connolly said. By comparison, it took the wildly successful Sloan Digital Sky Survey ten years to image a fifth of the sky. In other words, we’re in for a big download of data. Connolly said that the LSST will produce a thousand times more data than did Sloan, which revolutionized astronomy by making so much data publicly available.

The possible discoveries from so much new data are staggering. Connolly noted that data on a mere handful supernovae led to the discovery of dark energy.

“It’s amazing that measuring the distances and the brightness of 42 supernovae could reveal a component of our universe that drives the expansion, a component of our universe that makes up 73 percent of the energy budget in the universe today,” Connolly said.

“With the LSST, in ten years we’ll have 1.2 million supernovae,” he added. “A few tens of thousands of galaxies led to the discovery of dark matter through gravitational lensing. With the LSST we get four billion galaxies.”

If it all works, Connolly said it would help us solve what it perhaps the greatest scientific riddle of our time.

“If we can understand dark energy, if we can understand dark matter, if we can understand how the universe formed in the earliest fractions of a second, then we may be able to unify two of the biggest discoveries in the last hundred years: the discovery of general relativity, which explains gravity and how structure forms; and quantum mechanics, how our universe might have come into being.”

The history of the universe in ten minutes

As communicators of science our job is often to take huge amounts of complicated information and condense it into something understandable. Scientist, composer, and author Glenna Burmer recently took on a monumental task: explain the 13.8 billion year history of the universe in a ten-minute movie.

Glenna Burmer talked during a presentation at the Museum of
Flight about her process for creating her movie “The Big Bang.”
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“There are some challenges being an amateur filmmaker and trying to condense this much information into a movie,” Burmer understated. She did it, though, and you will be able to see her work as part of the Origins: Life and the Universe multimedia concert that will be held Nov. 7 at Benaroya Hall. Burmer is one of eight composers whose work will be featured at the event. She and UW professor Matt McQuinn spoke at the Museum of Flight last Saturday to explain the Big Bang and preview Burmer’s film.

Burmer is a scientist; a molecular pathologist and expert in immunohistochemistry.

“As a passion, I have always loved astronomy,” she said in explaining her involvement in the project. Though a scientist, Burmer comes from a family of artists and musicians.

“Consequently, I’ve always wanted to try to synthesize science, art, and music, and this concert gives me the first-time opportunity to really do that,” she explained.

Among the challenges in doing a film about the Big Bang is that there’s no existing footage of the event, so creating visuals relied in part on particle animation technology. Burmer admits to being thrown off a bit by tensor calculus, membrane theory, and string theory, but she got enough understanding to help animators create a sequence demonstrating a Big Bang based on ekpyrotic theory. The animation shows two 3-D universes.

“They approach each other, they leak gravity, and they bud off our universe,” Burmer explained.

UW astronomy professor Matt McQuinn explained the evidence
for the Big Bang during a talk Oct. 17 at the Museum of Flight.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Her film also uses pieces of many of the computer simulations McQuinn, a theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist, used in explaining the Big Bang. He started out with an account of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the signature of the Big Bang.

McQuinn noted that the best evidence for a hot Big Bang is that there is way more helium in the universe than could have been created by fusion in stars. The explanation is that, soon after the Big Bang, hydrogen fused much more easily in the hot, dense new universe. Astronomers have built models based on the measurements of the radiation in the cosmic microwave background and how much helium such conditions would produce.

“The predictions from the hot Big Bang model just fall perfectly on the measurements,” of what is actually out there, McQuinn said. “This, coupled with the fact that we have seen the cosmic microwave background, makes it almost indisputable that there was a hot Big Bang. No respected scientist questions this picture any more.”

McQuinn explained that galaxies eventually formed because of fluctuations in the density of mass and energy. An as-yet undetected particle called the inflaton may be the cause.

“This particle seeded these density fluctuations,” McQuinn said. “The predictions of this model are in striking agreement with what we see, so people think that this is the answer for the source of energy fluctuation.”

“From studying the cosmic microwave background radiation, we’ve come to these profound conclusions,” McQuinn concluded. “We’re able to explain the universe down to planetary scales.”

The “Origins” concert is part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Astronomy at the UW. The concert will feature the work of eight composers and accompanying celestial photography. It is a benefit for the scholarship program at the University of Washington Astrobiology Program in the Department of Astronomy. Tickets are $32, $22 for students, and are available online or by calling the Benaroya Hall ticket office at 206-215-4747.

Seattle's Spaceflight Industries flying high

It’s been a whale of a month for Seattle-based space-services company Spaceflight. Since late September the company has purchased a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, announced it will use it to launch a private Israeli mission to the Moon as part of the Lunar XPrize competition, and, most recently, brought a third ground station online to facilitate better communication with the bevy of small satellites it has helped put into space.

Jason Andrews is president and CEO
of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries.

“We’ve got a little bit going on,” said Spaceflight president and CEO Jason Andrews in something of an understatement. “It’s fun; what we do is really exciting. Anytime you buy a rocket and send it towards the Moon, how can you not love it?”

Andrews said the industry is really taking off.

“There is this sudden, rapid advancement of commercial space—some people call it new space—and it’s really been brought about in the last three or four years due to improvements in technology and access to space,” he said. “You can finally build spacecraft that are the size of a shoebox that actually do something. With what we’ve been able to advance with our Spaceflight launch business, you can actually get those satellites into space.”

Andrews said Spaceflight is aiming to be a comprehensive, full-service company in that effort.

“We’re really trying to address all parts of the value chain by building the satellite components, building the satellites, helping everyone get to space, and now helping them get their data back from space,” he said.

Retrieving the data more quickly and efficiently is why Spaceflight is building a network of ground stations. The new one in Invercargill, New Zealand is the company’s third to go operational, following stations in Tukwila, Wash. and Fairbanks, Alaska. Andrews noted that our mobile telephones work most anywhere we go because the gear is standard and speaks the same technical language. It’s not so for spacecraft, which often use custom equipment. Spaceflight wants to change that.

“What we’re doing is building a series of ground stations over the next three years that uses a standard interface protocol,” Andrews explained. The satellites will use standard radios that can connect to the ground stations easily. “Just like a cell phone data plan, we’ll have a satellite data plan.”

While the ultimate number of stations Spaceflight will build is a bit up in the air, Andrews said they plan to have at least a dozen of them in operation around the globe by 2017.

“They’re strategically located geographically to minimize latency—the time between satellites flying over—and that way we can get customer data back quickly,” he explained. As in most businesses, time is money.

Andrews noted that Spaceflight has launched 80 small satellites to date, and has another 86 penciled in to go up next year. He expects customer demand will continue to increase.

“It’s clearly a revolution, and I think just the beginning of the revolution,” he said.

Science and art meet in planetary nebulae

The next time someone tells you that science and art don’t mix, point them to the work of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble images are the inspiration for a multimedia concert, “Origins: Life and the Universe,” coming up at 2 p.m. November 7 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Astronomer Bruce Balick and composer Nan Avant explained during a talk last week at the Museum of Flight how one segment of the concert was created.

Prof. Bruce Balick, in front of a slide depicting Galileo,
talks about science and art at the Museum of Flight.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Balick, professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington, noted that science is, to a great extent, the result of our unique human ability to recognize patterns.

“Science is observing the world around us and describing the pattern, typically with mathematical formulas,” Balick said. “After that we puzzle over what these patterns might mean. We use the patterns as a means to gain insight into the way in which the natural world works.”

While Balick has spent his career studying planetary nebulae, he also loves the incredible images of those celestial objects that Hubble has returned to Earth.

“I want you to appreciate what I hope Nan has found in these pictures, namely glorious natural patterns that inspire music,” he said. “These objects are simply beautiful.”


Avant, a composer from Ballard, said the photos spoke to her.

Composer Nan Avant gestures while talking about
her creative process on “Bijoux.” Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“I was so inspired by what I’d seen with these brilliant colorful images,” she said. In addition, she was influenced by conversations with Balick about the Orion Nebula and the Carina Nebula, the two objects that are featured in her multimedia composition, “Bijoux.”

“There’s so much going on in the nebula I wanted to continue this into my concept of the music, so I created many themes or melodies to represent the nebula,” Avant explained.

Avant said her last year, working on the project, has been “astounding.”

“As a composer, I’ve learned about the nebula, the universe. I had conversations with a distinguished scientist of the nebula. I collaborated with a filmmaker,” she said. “And finally, I composed an orchestral work about the universe. I grew so much as an artist, a composer, and an orchestrator.”

The title of the piece, “Bijoux,” is French for “jewels.”

“When I was looking through these breathtaking, stunning images and the music was unfolding into rich melodies and textures, I wanted to find a word, just one word, that expressed the music and images all in one idea,” Avant said of the choice.

“Scientists, musicians, artists, all of them have so much in common,” Balick marveled. “We love pattern. We appreciate pattern. Pattern says something to us. It may be visceral, it may be scientific. It comes in the form of music, it comes in the form of art.”

The “Origins” concert is part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Astronomy at the UW. The concert will feature the work of eight composers and accompanying celestial photography. It is a benefit for the scholarship program at the University of Washington Astrobiology Program in the Department of Astronomy. Tickets are $32, $22 for students, and are available online or by calling the Benaroya Hall ticket office at 206-215-4747.

Another chance to preview one of the pieces in the concert is coming up at 2 p.m. next Saturday, Oct. 17, at the Museum of Flight. Professor Matt McQuinn of the UW Department of Astronomy will take a close look at how our universe was formed and how small fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background grow into galaxies with stars and planets. Glenna Burmer, who composed a piece entitled “The Big Bang,” will discuss her musical and visual interpretation of the 13.8-billion-year history of our universe, exploring the process that composers and filmmakers use to bridge science and art. The talk, titled “Origin of the Universe and Everything in It,” is free with museum admission.

Simonyi shares space experiences at UW

Your Seattle Astronomy correspondent has at least one thing in common with software executive and billionaire philanthropist Charles Simonyi: neither of us expects to be able to receive spousal clearance for a flight in space. Simonyi has a couple of legs up, having already taken Soyuz flights to and from the International Space Station in 2007 and 2009.

Simonyi spoke about his experiences during a talk titled “Practicalities of Orbital Space Tourism” last week at the University of Washington. It was the first of a series of lectures scheduled this fall celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the university’s Department of Astronomy.

Space tourist Charles Simonyi spoke about his experiences
during a lecture Sept. 29, 2015 at the University of Washington.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Simonyi acknowledged that the cost of going into Earth orbit is prohibitive for almost every individual. Speculation is that he shelled out $25 million to go on his 2007 flight and another $35 million to return to the ISS two years later. On top of the financial cost, he spent eight months training for the first flight, learning the spacecraft, studying Russian, and going through a dizzying and often invasive series of medical tests and examinations. His second flight took just three months of training because he already knew a lot.

Would he go again?

“Now I have a family to think about,” Simonyi said, smiling at his wife seated in the second row of the lecture room at Kane Hall.

“I would have to do eight months training again,” he said, because the Russians are using a different spacecraft. “I think I’m getting too old for that. It’s not easy and that would be a big obstacle.”

Still, the draw is great.

“Let’s assume the price didn’t go up, they didn’t require training, my wife lets me go,” he said to laughter. “I would do it!”

Simonyi said a big reason he wanted to fly in space was to support space exploration. Space tourists pumped more than $100 million into the Russian space program at a time that it was strapped for cash. He also did it to popularize science, he said, though interestingly he’s a bit skeptical about sending humans to space to do science because of the enormous cost. The believes simple wanderlust is a great reason to go into orbit.

“A tourist is a very honest broker. The tourist says, ‘Send me to space and I will pay you,'” Simonyi noted. “I think space tourism will be a major factor in promoting space travel because of this self-justifying property that it has.”

This Soyuz capsule TMA-14, which took Charles Simonyi to
the International Space Station in 2009, is on display at the
Museum of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Some astronauts get a big thrill at the moment of launch into space, but Simonyi found it to be fairly routine to be sitting in the capsule at blastoff.

“It’s not as dramatic as you think from the inside,” he said. “From the outside it’s incredible; I’ve seen it. From the inside it’s like being in an elevator and somebody pushed the button.”

It’s hard to say when space tourism will fall into the price range of those of us whose net worths are less than Simonyi’s $1.4 billion. He noted that these days it costs about $10,000 to send a kilogram of mass into orbit. If the price could be driven down to about $100 per kilogram, then a space tourist might get to orbit for $100,000, which Simonyi called a “reasonable ticket.”

“That’s what the suborbital people are basically pricing their services at,” he noted. “It’s a lot of money, but if it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience I think people would consider it seriously.”

“Those numbers are not here, and they’re not going to be here for quite a while,” Simonyi said. “That is the bad news.”

Predicting some big astronomical kabooms

X-ray binaries are out in the universe making gravitational waves, and Breanna Binder says we may well be on the verge of being able to detect such waves generated in distant star systems. Binder, a recent University of Washington astronomy Ph.D. who did her dissertation about the evolution of X-ray binary systems, gave a talk on the subject at the August meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.

Dr. Breanna Binder gave a talk about
X-ray binary systems at the August
meeting of the Seattle Astronomical
Society. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Binder noted that it’s a bit of a longshot for an X-ray binary system to form. They start out as a pair of stars ten times or more massive than our own Sun.

“Almost all massive stars are born in binary systems,” she said. “Not only that, massive stars are more likely to be born with massive companions.”

However, these massive stars live relatively short lives and ultimately explode in supernovae. The more massive the star, the more rapidly it evolves, and so the larger of two massive stars in a binary system will be the first to expand into a blue giant. The more it expands, the weaker its gravitational pull on its outer atmosphere will be, enabling the smaller companion to steal some of its mass.

Eventually the larger of the pair goes supernova and leaves behind a compact object: either a neutron star or a black hole. This is often the end of the binary system, as only about one in 10,000 pairs remain gravitationally bound after the supernova. If they do stick together, that’s when the fireworks really get going. The sibling star, having siphoned off some of its companion’s mass, also begins to grow into a blue giant.

“As this happens, material flows from the giant star onto the compact object,” Binder explained, “and when this happens the system starts to heat up. All that material funneling onto the compact object gets incredibly hot and begins to glow in X-rays.”

These are easy for us to spot from Earth.

“These objects will emit X-rays at levels that are tens of thousands to millions of times above what a normal star like our Sun does,” Binder noted.

This high-mass X-ray binary phase doesn’t last long in astronomical terms, perhaps just 10,000 years or so. Eventually the second star goes supernova.

“If the system survives the second supernova explosion, which is a big if, you end up with two compact objects in orbit around each other,” Binder explained. While two neutron stars is the most likely formation, it can also be two black holes or one of each, she said.

With two neutron stars in a system they spiral rapidly around each other, creating powerful gravitational waves. Eventually the two objects merge, creating a big explosion that we can see as a gamma-ray burst. This is the aftermath of the merger of two neutron stars, and it’s also where the new science comes in.

“In the very near future, we’re hoping to be able to detect neutron stars in the process of spiraling into each other before the gamma-ray burst occurs,” Binder said. We will do that by actually detecting gravitational waves using LIGO—the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

The challenge with LIGO is that there’s a lot of noise out there. Anything that moves through space generates gravitational waves. In its first runs LIGO in Richland was able to detect motion from ocean waves breaking on the Washington coast. So scientists have been busy modeling and tweaking, and expect to make the first science runs of a new version of LIGO some time this fall.

“If we’re going to detect gravitational waves, it’s going to happen as soon as we bring advanced LIGO on,” Binder said. “It could easily be within the next year that we are able for the first time to directly detect gravitational waves from the source.” That will give us some early warning about where to look to spot future gamma-ray bursts.

Ultimately the study of these systems will help us better understand stellar formation and evolution.

UW's Foucault pendulum out of action

We were sad to see on a recent visit to the Physics/Astronomy Building on the University of Washington campus in Seattle that the university’s Foucault pendulum is out of commission. According to the sign on the railing around the pendulum:

I have been damaged possibly due to vandalism. My mounting support bracket and cable are both damaged and need to be replaced. I don’t know when this can happen yet. I’m sorry I can’t swing gently for you at this time and I know people miss me. 

Given the nature of the damage, we wonder if some dimwits tried swinging from the pendulum.

We hope the pendulum is repaired soon. If blog hits are any indication, people are interested in Foucault pendulums. A post we wrote 2011 about the world’s largest Foucault pendulum, in the convention center in Portland, Oregon, is consistently among the top ten viewed on Seattle Astronomy.

Astronomy store Cloud Break Optics opens in Ballard

For the first time that anyone can remember there is a retail shop run by and for amateur astronomers selling telescopes and astronomy gear in the City of Seattle. Cloud Break Optics opened quietly in Ballard a couple of weeks ago and is gearing up for a grand opening celebration later this month.

Matt Dahl and Stephanie Anderson with
one of their light buckets in front of their
telescope shop, Cloud Break Optics, in
Ballard. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Cloud Break Optics is owned and operated by Stephanie Anderson and Matt Dahl, longtime friends and Colorado transplants who got their start in the business working at a telescope store in the Denver area. They ended up in Seattle because of astronomy, education, and love.

Both have some impressive credentials. Anderson, who got interested in space after reading an Isaac Asimov book as a kid, majored in math and physics and taught at Metropolitan State University and the University of Colorado Denver. She was working as a guide on a solar eclipse tour in 2009 when she met her future husband, a Seattle resident.

“Our first date was three weeks in China and Tibet,” Anderson said. They started up a long-distance relationship between Denver and Seattle but, one December when Anderson’s adjunct contract at Metropolitan ran out, she didn’t renew and moved to Seattle.

Dahl received his first telescope for Christmas when he was 17, and was hooked after one look at the Moon. Later Anderson sold him his first larger telescope. He started college as a music major, but eventually switched to physics.

“Basically it’s been all downhill from there,” he joked. Dahl did research on extrasolar planets and, after college, got a job at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder and worked on the Kepler mission. In 2012 his wife was admitted to a master’s program at Bastyr University in Kenmore, and they moved to Seattle. It was a bit easier having a friend, Anderson, already in town.

An astronomy hiatus

Dahl and Anderson gave up on astronomy for a while after moving to Seattle; after all, we have our reputation as a cloudy and rainy place. But a trip to the Rocky Mountain Star Stare last summer reignited their interest. They went to the Table Mountain Star Party as well last year, and some old ideas resurfaced.

“Throughout our friendship we’d always kicked around this idea of owning a telescope store,” Dahl said. Late last summer, they decided to do it. Anderson explained there were two main factors that led to their leap.

“One was the realization that you really don’t actually have to go that far in the wintertime in order to have a nice, clear sky,” she said. They figured out local weather patterns and learned that things were better in Eastern Washington. “We realized we really weren’t traveling further than we were in Colorado to get a good, dark sky.”

The second was a practical matter that sprung from their renewed interest in observing.

“We really didn’t have a place we could go locally,” Anderson said, to make a quick pick-up of a key piece of gear they needed for an observing session. “We thought there would be a niche to fill.”

Experience counts

A big part of that niche is their personal knowledge and experience, according to Dahl.

“We each have hauled many a telescope from one location to another, and observed with different types of telescopes, imaged with different types of telescopes,” Dahl said. “We have a slew of knowledge in our back pockets. A lot of astronomy is getting that jump start from somebody who had done it before.”

“If your first observing experience is a pleasant one because you know how to operate your telescope and you have an instrument that will show you what you think it will show you, you are far more likely to stay in the hobby,” he added.

Anderson noted that sometimes the personal touch is the only way to go.

“A German equatorial mount is very confusing to someone who has never seen one before,” she said. “It’s almost impossible to learn on your own. You need someone to show you and explain what the theory is behind it.”

The author shot this photo of the Sun using an
iPhone attachment to a solar scope set up in the
Cloud Break Optics parking lot.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The hands-on approach is important. As we talked about their plans for the shop we discussed astrophotography and the challenges I’ve had getting good photos with my smartphone. We soon had a solar telescope set up in the Cloud Break Optics parking lot and I was taking pics with the help of a nifty phone attachment. You get a better sense for the various telescopes and gear when you can actually see them, touch them, and use them. You just can’t get that experience online.

The challenges of a brick-and-mortar store

Anderson and Dahl recognize that a huge chunk of the sales of astronomy gear these days happens online, and so they are doing Internet sales and shipping globally.

“We have to compete in that market,” Dahl explained. “At the same time we wanted to provide a customer service experience” for people local to the Seattle area.

“We want them to come into the shop, talk to us, give them the advice and the expertise and the knowledge that we have,” he said. “At the same time we can provide as much of that as possible on our website.”

You can follow Cloud Break Optics on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Drop by the shop at 2821 NW Market Street in Ballard, and watch for news of their upcoming grand opening celebration. They’ll be at Table Mountain again next week, this time with their vendor hats on. We expect they’ll work in a little observing as well.