All systems go for Bainbridge sundial project

A sundial project that the Battle Point Astronomical Association (BPAA) has had on the drawing board for years will become reality by summer if all goes as planned. A fundraising effort anchored by an Indiegogo campaign has been a success.

“We’re only about $150 short of where we need to be, so on the strength of that we’re moving ahead,” said Frank Petrie, a BPAA member who is heading up the sundial effort. “It’s a done deal.”

BPAA members, with artist Bill Baran-Mickle at the center,
pose with a model of the proposed sundial. BPAA photo.

Interestingly, the Indiegogo campaign fell well short of its goal, raising just $6,610 of the $17,000 needed to meet the project budget of about $30,000. Petrie said, however, that the campaign helped raise the overall visibility of the sundial project.

“A lot of donations came in outside of Indiegogo,” he said. “Even though we fell well short of our Indiegogo goal, all of this other money coming in outside of Indiegogo was able to bring us to the point where we successfully funded the project.”

The North American Sundial Society chipped in with a grant of $1,000 and several other significant private donations also were made.

“It was really gratifying to see how people stepped up and really got enthusiastic about the project and supported it,” Petrie said.

He gave a big nod to University of Washington astronomy professor Woody Sullivan, known in some circles as “Mr. Sundial.” Sullivan appeared in the video supporting the sundial campaign and also connected BPAA with the Sundial Society.

Bainbridge Island sculptor and metalsmith Bill Baran-Mickle is finalizing the design for the equatorial bowstring sundial, which will stand 12 feet tall. Petrie said the next steps are some engineering for the foundation for the sundial, which will be erected in Battle Point Park near BPAA’s Edwin Ritchie Observatory, then building the foundation, fabricating the sundial, and installing it.

“We hope to complete all that process by late spring, so hopefully we can have a dedication in late spring or early summer,” Petrie said.

Petrie added that additional contributions would be welcome. There’s a long-term plan to build a plaza at the sundial site, but that if enough donations are made in the coming months they could speed up the time line on that. Contributions can be made by check or online at the BPAA website. Earmark any contributions for the sundial project.

Petrie admitted that the original goal was pretty ambitious.

“It was a little daunting, but I’ve been really gratified. The Bainbridge Island community is good that way. They get excited about stuff like this,” Petrie said, adding that it wasn’t just islanders. “The response has been pretty overwhelming from all over. That’s been really nice.”

We look forward to attending the dedication of the sundial next summer if all goes as planned.

The End of Night

Paul Bogard laments the loss of the beauty of the stars and the night sky.

“Walking out of your door and seeing the Milky Way for ever was one of the most common human experiences, and now it’s become one of the most rare human experiences,” said Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. “Estimates are now that eight of 10 kids born in the United States will never live where they can see the Milky Way” because of light pollution.

“There’s been a real switch and, I think, with great cost,” Bogard said during a talk this week at Town Hall Seattle.

Author Paul Bogard spoke about The End of
Night at Town Hall Seattle on Oct. 8, 2013.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Bogard, an English professor at James Madison University, first got interested in the stars as a kid. He grew up in Minneapolis and his family had a lake cabin in Northern Minnesota, where he spent summer nights looking up.

“Year after year of seeing that night sky in the summer made a lasting impact on me,” he said.

Even more impressive was a post-college backpacking trip in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, where he described a night sky so dark it was like a dream; the millions of stars looked like a snowstorm.

“I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay and the world was imprinting upon me its breathtaking beauty,” Bogard read from the book. “Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression and my life-long connection was sealed.”

Much of The End of Night relates Bogard’s experiences visiting the brightest and the darkest places we can get to, sometimes within hours of each other, such as the time he drove from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the pitch dark of Great Basin National Park in Eastern Nevada.

During the talk Bogard shared the familiar photo of the Earth at night, and observed that it’s a beautiful image, but that he doesn’t like what it depicts.

“What we’re seeing here is waste,” he said. “Nearly all of the light we see here is shining up in to the sky, it’s wasted, it’s not doing anybody any good.”

While the loss of the splendor of the night sky is terrible, Bogard noted that the other effects of light pollution may be more compelling reasons to do something, from a public policy standpoint. Poor lighting can actually reduce safety and security, and it harms wildlife. He also said there’s growing evidence of light pollution’s health effects on humans. Our sleep is disrupted and our circadian rhythms confused, and bright nights impede our production of melatonin, which could lead to breast and prostate cancer. In fact, Bogard noted that the World Health Organization now considers working the night shift to be a possible carcinogen.

He praised the work of the International Dark-sky Association; the chair of its local chapter, David Ingram, was part of the audience at the talk. Bogard hopes The End of Night inspires a better approach to night lighting.

“What I was trying to do with the book is to raise awareness about the issue,” he said. “Once people become aware of the beauty that we’re talking about, what we’re losing, the threats of light pollution, I think most people will realize that we can do a better job of lighting the night or leaving some of it dark.”

Bainbridge sundial project in home stretch

The shadow is moving on the Battle Point Astronomical Association (BPAA) as it seeks to raise the funds needed to build a large equatorial bowstring sundial near its Edwin Ritchie Observatory in Battle Point Park on Bainbridge Island. With a week left in the association’s Indiegogo campaign, they’ve raised $4,535 toward the goal of $17,000 needed to fully fund the project.

BPAA members, with artist Bill Baran-Mickle at the center,
pose with a model of the proposed sundial. BPAA photo.

BPAA is actually a bit closer to the target than that. Frank Petrie, a BPAA member and part of the sundial committee, says they’ve raised more than $3,000 outside of Indiegogo since they launched the campaign about a month ago. Positive coverage of the effort has no doubt helped; in addition to our Seattle Astronomy article, the sundial project has received notice from the Bainbridge Island Review and Kitsap Sun. A contribution of $1,000 came in from the North American Sundial Society, which features a story about the BPAA effort on its website.

The budget for the sundial is $30,000. With previously received donations and contributions that have come in during the Indiegogo campaign, Petrie says they’re now within $10,000 of making the sundial a reality.

Even if they don’t reach the Indiegogo goal, they’ll receive funds pledged (less Indiegogo’s cut), and Petrie says they’ll bank that and take on other fundraising efforts until they have enough.

Why not resolve that worry and help them out today? Visit the campaign site, watch their video, read about the project and excellent perks for donors, and contribute to this worthy project. The sundial will be a significant piece of public art that will be a conversation starter, and it may well help spark some interest in astronomy.

Bainbridge astronomers seek funding for sundial

The Battle Point Astronomical Association (BPAA) has been working for many years on a plan to build a sundial next to its Edwin Ritchie Observatory in Battle Point Park on Bainbridge Island.

“It has been in the master plan for the organization almost since the get-go,” says Frank Petrie, a BPAA member since 1996 who is part of the sundial committee. The sundial would be built on a berm north of the association’s observatory and would be visible throughout much of the busy park.

BPAA members, with artist Bill Baran-Mickle at the center,
pose with a model of the proposed sundial. BPAA photo.

The project took a major leap toward reality with the launching of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign earlier this month. Petrie says the aim of the campaign is to raise the $17,000 they need to fully fund the sundial.

The budget for the spectacular, 12-foot-tall, bronze-clad steel equatorial bowstring sundial, designed by Bainbridge metalsmith Bill Baran-Mickle, is $30,000. BPAA has collected about $13,000 toward the project over the years from the donation jar at their monthly planetarium shows and community events, a pledge from its board, and recent grants from the Bainbridge Island Metro Park and Recreation District and the Bainbridge Community Foundation. The latter, Petrie says, indicated to BPAA that there was widespread community interest in the sundial.

“There’s interest in this project coming from the arts community as well,” he says, because of the renown of Baran-Mickle and the desire for more public art at Battle Point.

Woody Sullivan, a University of Washington astronomy professor also known as “Mr. Sundial,” makes a pitch for the project in the BPAA’s video on Indiegogo.

“Sundials connect you with the cosmos,” Sullivan says in the video. “They connect you with a more natural kind of time than a digital, flashing watch. They tend to slow you down, also, which is something I think we need in our 21st Century iPhone existence.”

Petrie says the sundial is a first step in BPAA’s ambitious vision for its astronomy programs at Battle Point Park.

“Our hope is to build an astronomy-related complex around our observatory in Battle Point Park,” he explains. “We have a number of features that we’d like to incorporate, and the sundial is one of those features.”

Another is an adjacent building for BPAA’s planetarium. Monthly planetarium shows are presently wedged into the Helix House, which also houses the observatory. But the space is small and cramped, and typically far more interested people show up than can be accommodated, forcing many to wait for a second show, or miss out.

“It’s been very, very popular, and that tells us that our long-term plan to expand is a good one,” Petrie says.

The popularity is well-deserved; BPAA puts on a good show. Seattle Astronomy recommends them highly.

Petrie calls the BPAA and its facilities “a little jewel” and says he loves the organization’s commitment to its mission.

“It’s dedicated to public outreach and getting folks interested in science,” he says. “We like to share the excitement that we have about science in general and astronomy in particular, and hope that we can reach as many folks as possible and get them excited as well.”

You can help share the excitement by contributing to BPAA’s Indiegogo campaign for the sundial.

Earthlings on Mars

If scientists eventually discover strange new life forms on Mars, then Bernie Bates is going to be out about $4 to members of the Tacoma Astronomical Society. Bates, professor of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound, made a friendly wager with those who attended his talk at the club’s meeting earlier this month. He has a shiny new dime that says we will find life on Mars and that it will look awfully familiar.

Bates expects we will have a definitive resolution to the wager by around 2026. NASA recently announced a Mars mission for 2020, and the ESA and Russia are working on a slightly earlier mission, both with an eye toward eventually returning samples of Mars rock and soil for analysis.

Bernie Bates, astronomy instructor at the University of Puget
Sound, spoke about Mars exploration at the August meeting
 of the Tacoma Astronomical Society

“They’re going to get samples back, they’re going to find microbes in it, and they’re going to pull the microbes apart,” Bates says. “The microbes are going to have DNA that we recognize, nucleotides that we recognize.”

“Life will be there on Mars,” Bates bets, “and it will be Earth life.”

The reason: Earth and Mars have been exchanging rocks for billions of years. “Mars is so close to us that there’s been cross-contamination between the two planets.”

Bates is confident he won’t have to pay off on the 10-cent wager about this multi-billion dollar question. But he isn’t offering odds or compound interest!

Recent science has been pretty conclusive about the past habitability of Mars, according to Bates, though Mars hasn’t been very Earth-like for the last two or three billion years.

“All of the geology questions in a sense have been answered,” he says. “We’ve got every potential smoking gun you can ask for for life on Mars.”

He expects we will find it.

“If Mars had life on it then it’s still there, someplace, probably underground,” Bates says, noting that microbial life is tough and adaptable. “The planet itself never did anything so hostile so quickly that it could wipe it out.”

Exploration of Mars was bumped up a notch or two with the arrival there of Curiosity a year ago, Bates says. A big reason is its power source, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that will keep the rover operable for many years.

“They know they have enough time to do the science, they don’t have to rush, they can actually think through what they’re doing,” Bates says.

Time means flexibility. Bates notes that Curiosity spent the better part of its first year on an unplanned detour to explore the geology of an area named Glenelg near its Martian landing site.

“The spacecraft has an almost unlimited lifetime, they trust it, and they can do something like that” without jeopardizing the primary mission, Bates says.

Finding life on another planet, even if it actually originated here on Earth, wouldn’t exactly be ho-hum. Bates believes, though, that the greater discovery will come from a bit further out than Mars.

“If you want to find what the real search is for in the solar system, what they call second genesis, a different type of life, the Jovian people are the people to put your money on,” Bates says.

Money is a key factor. Interplanetary exploration costs a lot, and there’s not much cash to go around. The bulk of it is being invested in Mars these days, but Bates and many astrobiologists are rooting for more funding for those who want to probe the systems of Jupiter or Saturn. Both gas giant planets have moons that have interesting possibilities for life.

“Europa, Enceladus, that’s where the answers are,” Bates says.