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.

Touchdown confirmed! Curiosity lands safely on Mars!

In what is arguably the nation’s greatest engineering achievement in space, NASA‘s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed safely on Mars a little after 10:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time Sunday. Because of the distance from Earth to Mars and the time it takes communication to travel between the two, we didn’t know until 14 minutes after it happened that a complicated landing plan worked.

Alice Enevoldsen of Alice’s Astro Info, a NASA Solar System Ambassador, hosted a gathering at the Kenney in West Seattle to watch NASA TV coverage of the landing. “This has already happened,” Enevoldsen said of the time delay. “It’s just like the NBC Olympics!” she quipped.

More than 50 people attended the event, and the tension was palpable in the viewing room. Here’s Seattle Astronomy video from the landing:



“Shake hands with the person next to you,” Enevoldsen said after the landing was confirmed. “That crazy landing maneuver worked!”

The Curiosity landing has at least one big Washington state connection. Rob Manning, flight system chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, attended high school in Burlington and is a 1980 graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla. Coincidentally, Enevoldsen also is a Whitman alum.

Mars fans gather after the successful landing
of "Curiosity" to check out model rovers and
Mars maps to learn more about the science
mission. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It’s interesting and encouraging that the landing drew such a crowd late on a warm summer Sunday evening. While a number of those who attended are residents of the Kenney, a retirement community in West Seattle, local media such as the West Seattle Blog and Seattle Astronomy spread the word, and many visitors attended as well. After the excitement of the landing many of the attendees gathered around a table set up with model rovers—including some made from Lego blocks—and looked at maps of Mars with the various spacecraft landing sites marked. Enevoldsen fielded questions from many of those in attendance.

We understand there was a good crowd at the Mars Fest at the Museum of Flight as well.

It’s encouraging to see the interest in the mission and the excitement about the successful landing. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden was clearly both relieved and elated with the successful landing. The mission is a pricey one, at $2.5 billion, and a crash landing would have been demoralizing to say the least. Afterwards Bolden, speaking to the NASA TV audience, called it “a huge day for the American people.” National pride aside, it has to be good for NASA to pull off a big success in these days of shrinking budgets. Energizing the public and impressing the folks with the purse strings can only help.

Getting to Mars was the hard part; now Curiosity and its arsenal of scientific instruments can go about the business of poking around Mars for evidence that our neighbor planet has supported or could support life.

We’re curious to see what it finds.

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.

Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day two

A trip through the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a play about creation’s birthday, and a sailing trip on Lake Michigan were the highlights of the second day of the national conference of the Astronomical League July 5.

Wilson Hall, the administrative building
 at Fermilab, has a spectacular 16-story atrium.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Given the recent news about the Higgs boson, things were relatively quiet at Fermilab, where something of an “I knew that” air seemed about the place. There wasn’t much talk of the Higgs at all, though Fermilab has a FAQ document about the boson among its many handouts for visitors. The document describes the Higgs field as like “a giant vat of molasses spread throughout the universe” and the boson as “a particle that helps transmit the mass-giving Higgs force field, similar to the way a particle of light, the photon, transmits the electromagnetic field.” The universe seems really sticky.

Dr. Jason Steffen, who gave league members a talk about his work on the Kepler project, did give a shoutout to the particle, noting that without it he wouldn’t have a job, as there would be no extrasolar planets to detect and study. Not to worry; Steffen and his colleagues will be busy, as he said the current thinking is that up to 30 percent of stars have planetary systems. “Planets are all over the place,” he said.

The tour of Fermilab was interesting; many of the workers there are in something of a fishbowl, as their offices are glass-walled and visiting gawkers can peer right in. Among the offices at which we gawked was Fermilab’s remote operation center for the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is bigger and packs more electrical oomph than does Fermilab’s Tevatron, which has been shut down now as physicists dream up new experiments for the infrastructure.

ALCon continued to mix art and science. While at Fermilab we watched the play Creation’s Birthday written and directed by Dr. Hasan Padamsee, who spoke on day one of the conference. The play is at its heart about the work of Edwin Hubble and Father George Lemaitre to convince Einstein that the universe is expanding. There was plenty of math and physics in there—Padamsee is a physicist at Cornell—but he’s weaved in themes of religion, philosophy, art, sports, international politics, office politics, war, and a love story to make for a fascinating narrative. We especially enjoyed Julia Weed’s performance in the role of Einstein.

After the show we headed for the sailing ship “Windy” for an evening cruise on Lake Michigan in view of the Chicago night-time skyline. The cruise featured a presentation on navigating by the stars, some constellation lore, and singing of sea shanties. The best part of the show, though, was unplanned. A cool thunderstorm was lurking near us on the lake, flashing occasional lightning from cloud to cloud. Amid all of this the Moon rose, shining through the clouds and fog as a bright red-orange. This led one astronomy wag (me) to declare that, dang, it’s true–Mars really DOES look as big as the Moon!

It was a long but entertaining day of astronomy fun. Friday: a trip to the historic Yerkes Observatory.