Light pollution measure expected to win governor's approval

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is expected to sign a supplemental state transportation budget tomorrow that includes what may well be the first ever mention of light pollution to make it into state code. The transportation budget may seem an odd place for such policy matters to be considered, but state Rep. Jessyn Farrell (D-Seattle) found an opportunity there.

Rep. Jessyn Farrell

“The Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over a lot of facilities with a lot of light across the state, has some federal dollars to do a study on the impacts of light to night driving and vision,” Farrell told Seattle Astronomy. “I thought as long as they’re looking at the impacts of light on vision, why don’t we also look at the impacts on light pollution?”

Farrell had that directive inserted into the budget as a proviso—see our story from Tuesday for the exact language—and the governor has told her he will sign it.

(UPDATE: Gov. Inslee did, in fact, sign the bill, including the light-pollution language, on March 25, 2016.)

“A huge thank-you to Gov. Inslee,” Farrell said. “He is, as we all know, a great environmentalist. He cares a lot about the night sky and said that specifically when we spoke about this proviso. I’m very pleased that he’s going to sign the supplemental budget with this proviso in it.”

“I care about a visible night sky, so this is important,” she said.

As a proviso in the supplemental budget, it will only be in effect for about a year. Farrell said she plans to work next year on getting the department to make an on-going commitment to considering light pollution in its planning and operations. She said it might not even take legislation, but that the department could be convinced to make such considerations of its own accord.

Gov. Jay Inslee

“It seems like a straight-forward thing, and I’m surprised they don’t already have policies around light pollution,” she said, “but my hope is that ultimately this will allow them to start making different decisions around how they light their road facilities across the state.”

Farrell sponsored a bill this year to have the state Department of Ecology do a comprehensive study of the effects of light pollution and to make policy recommendations for reducing it. While the bill received a hearing, it did not win approval from the House Environment Committee. Farrell said cost was the main hangup. The legislature has been ruled in contempt of court over education funding, and is still in special session trying to wrap up the operating budget, which is under a great deal of strain.

“There was a great concern in doing anything that was perceived as extra in the general operating budget this session,” she said. She saw the DOT funding as a way to make some progress without making it a budget issue.

Farrell said she has long been interested in the night sky, and remembers not having to go very far to see things like the Perseid meteor shower.

“It is really a lot harder to see even really visible events like that, and I think that what’s interesting about light pollution is that its really something that we can address,” she said. She credited the amateur astronomy community for stepping up, noting that it was a constituent, David Dorais, who raised the issue at a community forum and spurred her to action.

“A lot of people care about this issue, so to be present at community forums and raise it and help educate the public that there are things that can be done, I think that’s really important,” Farrell said. “As we work through the various political processes at the different levels of government, having you present really matters.”

“This is only a first step,” she said. “There’s so much work that we can continue to do and I look forward to working with you.”

Sending SHAMU to look for alien life

Researchers want to send SHAMU into space to search for alien life. SHAMU in this case is not an orca, but a Submersible Holographic Astrobiology Microscope with Ultraresolution. Caltech and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab are leading the development of the device, with collaboration from the University of Washington on microbiology and oceanography aspects of the project. Max Showalter, a UW graduate student in oceanography and astrobiology, gave an interesting talk about SHAMU Monday at Town Hall Seattle. The talk was titled, “Finding Life When the Trail Goes Cold.”

Max Showalter

The target for the hunt for alien life is Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has a global ocean.

“That’s really significant when we’re looking for life in our solar system and outer space in general, because everywhere that we’ve found water on Earth we’ve found life, usually in the microbial form,” Showalter explained. The big challenge is that Europa is, on average, about 390 million miles away.

“Since it’s so far from the Sun, it’s really cold on Europa, and it has this crust of frozen ocean on top of it, kind of like our own Arctic Ocean, for example, except it’s eight kilometers thick,” Showalter said. “The question is, when we get to Europa, how do we get through that ice, or can we find a sample of life in that ice?”

You may think that ice is inhospitable, but Showalter said that a lot of things live in arctic ice. Algae have been found in deep cores of ice; enough sunlight can get through to drive photosynthesis. Algae and bacteria can live in brine veins, pockets of salt water within the ice.

This is where SHAMU comes in. The microscope creates a hologram to look for bacteria swimming in an icy water sample. It uses a laser beam split into two parts. One part serves as the control or reference part, the other is able to track changes within the sample.

SHAMU at work in Greenland.
Photo: Caltech.

“You bring those together in the computer and you reconstruct the image and get this 3-D image of what’s going on in this microscope,” Showalter said. “You can think of it as this tiny little cube of liquid that we can now see bacteria swimming around in.”

Showalter pointed out that we can be fooled by fossils, so being able to track something in motion is a key to detecting life.

“That’s an unambiguous biosignature,” he said, but added that multiple converging lines of evidence are needed in order to declare the detection of life. It’s good to see motion, but chemical experiments revealing organics would really be helpful, too.

They’ve tested SHAMU in the lab and found that they could track bacteria swimming around in water as cold as eight degrees fahrenheit; colder than that and the activity pretty much shuts down. Last spring Showalter was part of a team that did a field test of SHAMU in Nuuk, Greenland and they were successful there, too. Ultimately they’d like to take the microscope off planet, and Showalter said Europa would be a great target.

“What’s especially unique about Europa is that in addition to this icy crust it has geysers on the surface, and these geysers are coming from local hot spots inside the ocean and thinner spots in this icy crust,” he said. This is a big advantage for designing a mission.

“Now we don’t have to worry about drilling through the ice; water is coming to us,” Showalter said. “If we can fly through that and take a sample of that plume, that’s ocean water right there in our hands.”

Europa is not the only place where SHAMU could come in handy. Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is similar to Europa in that it, too, has an ice-crusted ocean with water geysers. Mars has been found to have some liquid water.

“There are lots of opportunities for us to use this microscope in outer space in addition to places on Earth,” Showalter said. “Hopefully the smallest organisms alive will help us be able to find the answer to one of the biggest questions of humankind: are we alone in the solar system?”

Progress on light pollution in Washington

The state of Washington may be about to take its first small steps toward addressing light pollution. While a bill creating a comprehensive study of light pollution failed to make it out of committee during this year’s session, proviso language in the supplemental transportation budget directs the Washington State Department of Transportation to begin taking light pollution into account in its planning.

The proviso, found in ESHB 2524, reads as follows:

Within existing resources, the department must evaluate how light pollution from state highways and facilities can be minimized while still meeting appropriate safety standards. Additionally, the department must evaluate how budget savings can be achieved through different types of lighting. To the extent practicable, the department must conduct this work in conjunction with other ongoing study and corridor planning efforts.

This falls somewhat short of HB 2057, which received a hearing (our coverage) before the House Environment Committee in January but never came up for a vote. That measure would have directed the state Department of Ecology to assess the environmental, economic, and public health effects of light pollution, and to submit the study and policy recommendations for reducing light pollution to the Legislature by next January. Yet it would a significant step forward: the transportation budget proviso language will probably be the first reference to light pollution ever to make it into state statute.

Rep. Jessyn Farrell

The Legislature approved the supplemental transportation budget on March 9 and the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate signed and delivered it to Gov. Jay Inslee the next day. By our reckoning, that gives the governor until April 2 to sign it. The Legislature is in the midst of a special session in an effort to finalize a supplemental operating budget for the state.

State Rep. Jessyn Farrell, who sponsored the study legislation and worked to get the proviso language into the supplemental transportation budget, tells us that the governor has said he will preserve that language in the final version of the transportation budget that he eventually signs.
A note of thanks to the governor for his support would likely be helpful, as would a note to Rep. Farrell for her continued work on this important issue.

Oregon SolarFest making big plans for 2017 total eclipse

Madras, Oregon has won the weather jackpot for the total solar eclipse that will sweep across the United States in August 2017. As Mr. Eclipse, Fred Espenak, pointed out in a talk in Seattle in January, the town of 6,500 people in Central Oregon has, statistically, the best chances for clear skies on eclipse day of any place along the eclipse path.

“I just don’t know that you could find a more picturesque place to view it,” said Kelly Simmelink, the organizer of the Oregon SolarFest, noting that Madras is in the high desert and is surrounded by nine volcanoes. “Our weather here from basically the middle of June on is picture perfect.”

Simmelink came up with the idea of SolarFest to make sure more people are able to catch the eclipse.

“People that are really, really true eclipse chasers started booking this stuff two years ago,” Simmelink said. “Our little city here has approximately 328 hotel rooms. Those have been off the books for quite some time.”

Local resorts are pretty well spoken for as well. Oregon SolarFest is offering the chance for RV hookups and dry camping spots on the Jefferson County Fairgrounds.


“Those are going to be the only full hookups available within 100 miles of here,” he said. They’ll be offering rental RVs for people who don’t have their own, and “easy camping” with loaner tents, sleeping bags, coolers and the like for people who don’t have or don’t want to lug their own camping gear.

“Those are just some of the little things that we’re trying to do to ensure that everybody that does choose Madras has somewhere to go,” Simmelink said.

Many people are booking rooms in nearby towns such as Bend, which is a little south of Madras, but Simmelink says that approach carries some risk. Two-lane highways 26 and 97 intersect in downtown Madras, and with 50,000 or more visitors expected in town traffic on eclipse day is likely to be extreme.

“That 45-minute trip could very well turn into six, seven, eight, nine, ten hours on the road,” Simmelink said. It might be tough to come in from elsewhere.

“If you think you’re going to be able to just drive in day of, you’re taking your own chance,” he said. “You’ll end up on Mt. Hood and not (see) a totality.”

To make it worth the stay, Oregon SolarFest plans a true festival in Madras. In addition to camping spots, they’ll be putting on a family fun event with music and entertainment, food booths, educational outreach led by NASA, and a beer garden. Simmelink says he’s lining up scores of porta-potties and other sanitation services, too.

“We’re going out of our way to make sure that we have almost double of everything that we possibly could need to ensure that everybody that comes to this town has a fantastic time and is happy with the way things were,” he said.

When he’s not chasing down all of those details or trying to get the festival’s website fully functional, Simmelink says he gets excited thinking about the eclipse. His office and the fairgrounds are just a quarter of a mile from the center of the eclipse path.

“It’s kind of awe-inspiring,” he said. “From our location where the festival is going to be, you couldn’t be any more ground zero.”

We’ll keep you posted about Oregon SolarFest as events develop.

More info:

• Oregon SolarFest website
• Oregon SolarFest Facebook
• Oregon SolarFest Twitter

Seattle's place in the future of space

Some of the top thinkers about the future of space visited Seattle this week as part of the U.S.-Japan Space Forum. The forum, supported by the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation and the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, is a standing committee of policy experts who meet regularly to sort out the challenges and opportunities for the two countries and more. The group had two days of private meetings in town, followed by a public symposium Wednesday at the Museum of Flight. Saadia Pekkanen, a professor at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and a co-chair of the forum, said there was good reason to bring the discussion to Seattle.

Saadia Pekkanen is a UW professor
and co-chair of the U.S.-Japan
Space Forum. She moderated a panel
discussion Wednesday at the Museum
of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“Seattle is in many ways the new hub for space policy, bringing together a combination of billionaire interest, technical workforce talents, and also shared passion on the part of educational institutions like the Museum of Flight to take and advance our understanding of space,” Pekkanen said. She added that space is no longer dominated just by governments, and that the list of important partners includes longtime contractors such as Boeing and all of the newcomers in commercial space as well.

“We are also dealing with a world that is no longer just dominated by Western players,” Pekkanen said. “The most ambitious space players, I would say, are actually found in Asia—not only ambitious but also very competent.”

With so many countries and companies getting into the space business we have to examine our old assumptions.

“We can no longer take the rules of the game—the normative, the legal, the policy, and the regulatory frameworks that have really shaped global space affairs—for granted,” Pekkanen said. Shaping that discussion, she said, is a big part of what the U.S.-Japan Forum is all about.

Security challenges

Hiroshi Yamakawa, professor from
Kyoto University. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Roy Kamphausen, the vice president of the National Bureau of Asian Research, spelled out six challenges for space and security in the Asia-Pacific region. These include China’s space expansion, conflict with North Korea, the evolving and complex relationship between China and Russia, Southeast Asia’s reluctance to act on military and security questions, and changing priorities and resources for the United States and Japan.

Hiroshi Yamakawa, a professor from Kyoto University, noted that space debris and possible threats to assets in space also present challenges. Yamakawa presented a history of collaboration in space between the U.S. and Japan, which he said goes back more than 50 years.

“It’s a very long and sustainable cooperation since the beginning of the space age,” Yamakawa said, noting Japan had recently extended its commitment to work with the International Space Station until at least 2024. “I hope that this cooperation will last at least until 3016.”

Collaboration in space

Ron Lopez of Boeing
Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Collaboration in space comes down to pretty practical matters. For one, few countries have the funds to go it alone in space any more.

“This backdrop of real threats, favorable policy environment, and budgetary constraints creates an environment that necessitates greater collaboration in space and defense,” said Ron Lopez, director of Asia-Pacific business development for Boeing. “We’re talking about the bringing together of superior technologies with skills and know-how to develop value-added, cost-effective solutions.”

“The purpose of collaboration is really to do more with less,” Lopez added.

Collaboration is not a new idea. Shoichiro Asada of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries pointed out that U.S. and Japanese companies have already worked together on missile defense systems, jet fighters and engines, and other systems.

Shoichiro Asada 

Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“Until now, industries in the U.S. and Japan have had a good relationship in space and defense,” Asada said. He had five suggestions about how that could be made even more productive. These include promotion of collaboration between governments and of an open-door policy for government procurement, harmonizing of procurement rules and of requirements and specifications for projects, and standardizing parts, which he admits can be a challenge when few of certain items are produced.

John Mittleman, expert on maritime domain awareness with the U.S. Naval Research Lab, gave an interesting presentation about the huge quantities of data available, especially from small satellites. We can pinpoint practically every ship at sea as we work on security considerations. Information about what is happening on the oceans can also inform us about other challenges, such as resource issues, energy, and climate change. There’s so much data that Mittleman says machines are going to have to do a lot of the heavy thinking.

John Mittleman
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“Machine learning embedded in big-data analytics will rival human all-source analysis, with one important distinction: the volume of information they can handle will far surpass the speed and capacity of the world’s entire corps of intelligence analysts,” Mittleman said. “Very useful information can be pulled from massive troves of data, whether the data comes form satellites, drones, every car on the highway, every smart phone in your pocket, or anywhere else.”

Can computers really think and understand? Mittleman said the premise of the 2015 film Ex Machina is not all that far-fetched.

“Machine learning can and does discover very complex relationships, hidden relationships, that look an awful lot like human intuition,” he said. “We’re beginning to see real, live, effective understanding coming from the conjunction of persistent, multi-source data with high-speed, high-volume data analytics.”

There’s a fascinating and important future ahead in space, and Seattle people and companies will have a big part to play.

Happy birthday to Astronomy on Tap Seattle

Astronomy on Tap Seattle has spent the last year confirming that astronomy and beer together make a great combination. We will celebrate AoT’s first year in operation with a gala event at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 23 at Bad Jimmy’s Brewing Company in Ballard. The free astronomy talks have drawn good crowds from the beginning, and the most recent events have seen attendees packed shoulder-to-shoulder into Bad Jimmy’s.

“It’s been a wild ride growing from our initially small size to something that we almost can’t handle,” said Brett Morris, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington who is the emcee and one of the co-founders of Astronomy on Tap Seattle. “We’re going to try our best to keep up with it as it grows through our second year.”

Morris said they had a hunch before they started that the audience was out there. Astronomy on Tap started in New York and has spread to a total of eight cities, and events elsewhere have drawn big crowds. Austin, Texas, for example, regularly attracts 400 people to its events in an outdoor beer garden.

“We knew that there was a big drive for this kind of event, especially in nerdy cities like Seattle, so we knew that the availability of participants was good,” Morris said, “but we didn’t really know if we’d be able to scale up the way we wanted or to reach the number of people that we needed to.”

They set out in hopes of being able to attract 50 people who would attend regularly to hear astronomy talks and enjoy a brew. They’ve accomplished that without any sort of paid advertising.

Brett Morris
Photo: Greg Scheiderer

“It seems that word of mouth among nerds is really effective. The social networks have been all that we needed to get the word out,” Morris said. “The enthusiasm that we’ve had from the audience has been unbelievable and unrelenting, and the beer is quite delicious.”

There will be a special treat at the March 23 event. Astronomy on Tap Seattle participants named one of Bad Jimmy’s beers, a Scotch ale that popular vote dubbed “The Big Sipper.” Several months ago the brewers stowed some of that ale in old rum casks.

“We’re going to tap those barrels for the one-year anniversary and serve this barrel-aged imperial Scotch ale in special commemorative glasses, that you can also purchase, that have astronomy on Tap logos on them,” Morris said.

There will be a series of short talks at the anniversary with updates on astronomy discoveries made in the last year, including the latest photos from Pluto and the possibility of the existence of Planet 9. Morris said that one of the great things about being an astronomer is that when an idea such as Planet 9 comes out, there probably is an expert close by who can lead the discussion about how plausible it is. Astronomy on Tap is essentially an effort to take that discussion public.

“As an astronomer you get to meet a lot of people, daily, who think that astronomy is great and would love to talk to you about space, and would love to talk to you about life in the universe,” Morris said, “but it’s rare that you really encounter people who spend their free time trying to learn more about astronomy and physics, and that really is the core audience of Astronomy on Tap.”

“I am consistently surprised by how many people are passionately interested in learning astronomy and physics at a level deeper than you might find in an astronomy magazine,” he added.

It has been a boon for people who write about astronomy for fun. It’s great to have a monthly topic, and the discussions and trivia contests that are a part of Astronomy on Tap are fun and informative.
The March 23 event begins at 7 p.m. at Bad Jimmy’s in Ballard. You might want to arrive earlier than that to get a good seat! It’s free, but bring beer money.

Finding exoplanets by detecting magnetospheres

Scientists are developing new and more refined ways to find and characterize exoplanets, and it involves a familiar local phenomenon. Magnetospheres of distant planets may help us spot them, and could tell us a lot about their potential for habitability.

Matt Tilley, a University of Washington graduate student working on a doctoral degree in computational space plasma physics and astrobiology, gave a talk last week titled, “The Magnetospheres of Solar System Planets and Beyond.” The lecture was part of the Pacific Science Center’s PubSci series at the Hilliard’s Beer Taproom in Ballard.

Matt Tilley
Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Tilley explained that any planet that has a strong magnetic field will have a magnetosphere generated by the stellar wind from the star it orbits. Earth qualifies.

“The solar wind is actually an electrically charged gas that carries with it a magnetic field,” he said. “It’s an electrically charged magnetic wind blowing off of the Sun at a million miles an hour.”
The magnetosphere is essentially a bubble where the stellar wind is deflected around the planet.

“It literally is the force field for Earth, and it shields the Earth from being blasted by this electrically charged magnetic wind.”
Some recent research suggests that we may be able to spot the magnetospheres of exoplanets. To date we have found some 1,800 confirmed exoplanets, most of them by the Kepler mission which watched for slight dimming of stars which would occur as a distant planet transits the stellar disk. Usually the change in the light curve is pretty uniform, but in some cases it is not. Tilley noted that material from the stellar wind can accumulate in a bow shock at the magnetosphere, and this could be enough to show up in the Kepler data.

“If you have varying amounts of density of this electrically charged magnetic gas, this stellar wind, piled up against the bow shock, it will enter and start blocking some of the light before the planet ever enters the frame of the shot,” Tilley said.

There’s still debate about whether this is actually what is happening, but Tilley said it would be quite a useful discovery.

“It would be our first observation of a remote magnetic field,” he noted. “That tells us something about the composition, it tells us something about the mass, the rotation rate—we can infer multiple planetary characteristics from just the magnetic field, just from this distance, this one measurement of light.”

That data, plus the existence of the magnetic field, could tell us a lot about a planet’s potential habitability.

There’s another possible way to discover exoplanets because of magnetospheres. Tilley noted that the transit method only works for edge-on systems in which the transit of planets can be detected from our vantage point. It’s extremely difficult to spot exoplanets visually because they’re so dim in contrast to their host stars. However, Tilley said that the magnetosphere generates strong signals called auroral radio emissions that shoot out from the planet’s poles. Planets generate much stronger radio waves than do stars, and so for face-on systems looking for these radio waves may well be a way to detect exoplanets.

Tilley said it’s an exciting time to be working in the field.

“Astrobiology is really the study of the conditions on a planet, the stellar conditions and the planetary conditions that make the situation right for life to form and right for it to survive long enough to evolve into something interesting,” he said.

BOSS and Pleiades figure out the universe

Astronomy these days is something of a tag-team event involving both observers and theorists. We got a look at how it works at the most recent Astronomy on Tap Seattle event at Bad Jimmy’s Brewing Company in Ballard.

Case in point: for a couple of decades cosmologists had been using the cold dark matter theory to explain how the universe evolved from a hot, dense, uniform place right after the Big Bang to the web of galaxies that we see today. The theory worked pretty well, but there were a couple of catches: it predicted that dwarf galaxies would have large central bulges of stars and increasingly dense dark matter at their cores. Neither prediction matched with the observations.

Figuring it out

Look! Up in the sky! Prof. Fabio
Governato makes a point during his
Astronomy on Tap talk Feb. 17 at
Bad Jimmy’s. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Dr. Fabio Governato, a research professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington, said he and a few colleagues, after downing several beers each during an escape from a boring conference, decided to figure out this anomaly. Governato‘s talk at Astronomy on Tap Seattle was titled, “Dark Matter, Black Holes, and other reasons to work with NASA’s fastest supercomputer: Pleiades.”

Eventually, they hit upon the idea that supernova explosions in the dwarf galaxies might push away gas and thus retard star formation, and may also blow dark matter away as well.

“This is very simple physics,” Governato said, “but the problem was to find a numerical experiment that you could run with computers that shows clearly” how it works. They used millions of hours on supercomputers, like NASA’s Pleiades, adding the supernovae into the mix and tweaking the idea until the computer simulation of the cold dark matter theory turned out dwarf galaxies that matched what we actually observe. Their paper about the work was published in the journal Nature, and Governato has some humorous tales about the twists and turns between the work, the publication, and ultimate acceptance of the findings.

His talk also used interesting and sometimes humorous animations to make points. Governato’s movie of a dwarf galaxy formation based on the work is posted below.

Observation

Dr. John Parejko, holding a sample of the
metal plates used in the BOSS survey,
answers questions after his talk. Even
pooches love Astronomy on Tap!
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Dr. John Parejko works on the observation side of the equation. Parejko recently was with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey out of New Mexico. His talk was titled, “Detect the Ancient Universe Like a BOSS.”

“BOSS is measuring distances to millions of galaxies to find wiggles from the early universe, but that doesn’t make a very good acronym,” Parejko quipped. BOSS actually stands for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey.

The wiggles or oscillations are evidence of interactions that happened right after the Big Bang.

“Patterns in that hot, dense plasma persist to today in the distribution of galaxies in the universe,” Parejko said.

“These are not gravitational waves,” he noted, as the discoveries from LIGO were fresh in the news. “These are actually the interaction between the dark matter and the baryons very early in the universe.”

The process was simple enough, as they took spectra of galaxies and computed their redshifts to precisely determine distances. The challenge was that they had to look at a lot of galaxies, and over the years BOSS examined about a third of the sky and took images of about two million galaxies, measuring the redshifts of about half of those. Using the redshift to pin down distances to and between galaxies, and examining the patterns that emerge, helps astronomers figure out galaxy formation and learn how dark energy is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.

Part of the tool that BOSS uses is made at the University of Washington, where telescope plates are created for the project. Each metal plate, about three feet wide, has a thousand holes drilled into it, each one corresponding to a specific object in the sky. Humans plug a fiberoptic cable into each hole by hand, and the cable collects the light from targeted galaxies.

Birthday party!

Astronomy on Tap Seattle is organized by astronomy graduate students at the University of Washington. The next event, scheduled for March 23, will celebrate the first birthday of the program. Speakers will update the subjects of their talks from the first year. Attendees will be able to purchase a commemorative AoT beer glass and sample Bad Jimmy’s barrel-aged Big Sipper, a Scotch ale named as a salute to Astronomy on Tap.