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.