Astronomy Magazine Blues Band on YouTube

Can you name the galaxy featured on the AMBB's drum kit?

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

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

I share the videos below for your viewing pleasure.

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day 4

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

An iPhone shot taken in a dark room doesn't do much justice to the
righteous Astronomy Magazine Blues Band, which played a couple
of boffo sets bracketing the banquet and awards ceremony at the
annual conference of the Astronomical League July 7 in
Lincolnshire, Illinois.

Morning sessions focused on a variety of observing techniques, and the afternoon was devoted to an excellent, if lengthy, discussion of various aspects of light pollution. This was the general theme of the conference—the theme was “Celebrate Starlight”—and talks were given by International Dark-Sky Association co-founder David Crawford, Sue Bennett from Dark-Sky park Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Audrey Fischer, the conference co-chair and founder of One Star at a Time, and several experts who talked about the latest research on the proven or suspected health effects of excessive night-time lighting.

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

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

The drum kit for the out-of-this-world Astronomy 

Magazine Blues Band. Can you name that galaxy?

Ironically, after that tune the band was gone, as hotel brass came around and said it was time for some quiet time. I’m sad to report that, as excellent as the band was, it was not universally well-received. Though it was a visibly advertised part of the conference, some attendees seemed distressed by the live music. Seattle Astronomy enjoyed it a lot.

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

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

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day three

Attendees of the Astronomical League conference were fortunate
enough to visit the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin
July 6. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

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

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

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

The 40-inch Alvan Clark refractor, 60-feet long, is the biggest
refractor ever used successfully in astronomy. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It was super cool to visit Yerkes and soak in its history, and also to learn about some of the work being done there to improve the astronomy experience for the visually and hearing impaired.

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

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

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

Astronomy, theatre, baseball, and the blues

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

The Astronomy Magazine Blues Band will play a couple of
sets on the final day of this year's Astronomical League Convention
in Chicago. The band, L-R, is Mike Soliday, Jeff Felbab, Keith
Bauer, and Astronomy editor Dave Eicher.
Photo: Astronomy Magazine Blues Band.

I have to admit that AlCon 2012 wasn’t even on my radar until this item turned up in my newsreader this morning. The notion that Astronomy magazine staffers have a blues band covering the likes of Hendrix, Cream, The Band, Koko Taylor, Muddy Waters, and more was just so mind-bogglingly cool that I immediately started investigating the event. It turns out that there is a lot of fun stuff to do in connection with the convention. I love a good astronomy lecture more than most guys, but the real fun is in the extracurricular activities.

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

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

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

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

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

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