Monthly Archives: October 2009

Astronomy outreach, fulldome, informal astronomy education, international year of astronomy, Planetarium-related, science outreach

Stargazing at the White House

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The President Attends a Star Party

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a star party being held at the White House in honor of International Year of Astronomy.  A long-time friend of ours named Martin Ratcliffe was asked to bring a fulldome system to do some astronomy demonstrations to the many attendees at the party.  By all accounts, it was a great success and we were thrilled for Martin’s great opportunity. Well, last week Martin wrote a wonderful account of his experience and posted it to a couple of listservs I read. I recognized it as a wonderful way to show that astronomy can reach everyone — up to the most powerful leaders and their families. So, I asked Martin’s permission to reproduce his comments as a sort of “guest entry” in my blog and he graciously agreed.  Here is the story of the White House star party, in Martin’s own words.

Martin Ratcliffe and the Sky-Skan system at the White House. Image copyright Martin Ratcliffe, used by permission.
Martin Ratcliffe and the Sky-Skan Definiti PD II system at the White House. Image copyright Martin Ratcliffe, used by permission.

Many of you know by now that Sky-Skan was one of the honored attendees at the White House Star Party last week. You might also have heard that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his family, Michelle, and two girls, Sasha and Melia, visited the Sky-Skan dome during the event a week ago, October 7. I’ve been meaning to send more details of what happened, and after some pressing things I find myself a week later still wanting to post to my friends and colleagues on Dome-L. So here goes.

Sky-Skan was invited to be at the White House Star party with our portable Definiti PD II system about two weeks ahead of the event. One dome was already planned, the GeoDome owned by NASA’s GSFC. With over 120 school children at the event, and less than two hours for them to experience all the activities NASA had planned, two domes were needed to get them all through in time. Carter Emmart from AMNH presented in the GeoDome, and I and an AMNH educator, Suzanne, presented in the Sky-Skan dome. I was using DigitalSky 2 and Carter was using Uniview. The overlap between these two applications is, of course, Digital Universe, so that became the focus of the show for both domes, with the individual strengths of each system being used for other interactive parts of the presentations. (CCP NOTE: the Digital Sky Definiti PD system is exactly what we have in our production dome at Loch Ness Productions!)

It was planned to have the inflatable Starlab dome under a NASA tent of there were strong winds. The day turned out to be perfect, except for strong gusts, which caused set up problems for the dome. After an interesting afternoon on the South Lawn of the White House manhandling a wayward Starlab dome, I finally got what I needed, and set up under one of  the NASA tents. You all know the struggle of climbing inside one of these domes, so I had little expectation of the First Family crawling inside.

I began the first show following President Obama’s remarks, with 25 middle school kids gathered around the perimeter of the dome. After a few minutes into the show, I heard activity at the entrance, turned around in my seated position, and there is President Barack Obama entering the tent, meeting me at eye level, and saying “Don’t worry about us”. Now I’ve done a lot of planetarium shows in my time, but I have to say this is the most interesting turn of events ever to happen! “Thanks for coming, Sir”, I said, and Suzanne and I continue with the show. The only space to sit was was right next to the Definiti PD II.

Imagine me seated in a semi-crouched position next to a small laptop and the Definiti PD II projector, with some grassy space next to it. The President and youngest daughter sat 3 feet in front of me next to the projector, Melia sat next to me at the console, and Michelle Obama was just behind me.

So what did the first family experience in the dome?

We had already taken off from Earth and were orbiting, when the President asked a question that had come up during their dinner that evening about the cause of seasons. Suzanne gave a great explanation, and I’m flying DigitalSky 2 in real-time. I added a short demo on DigitalSky where I showed the changing Sun illumination at the north pole of the Earth over a six-month period.

Happy with that, I backed away from the Solar System, showed recent images from the previous week’s flyby of Mercury by the Messenger spacecraft, discussed light travel time from the Earth to the Moon, across the solar system, and in the sky was hanging Orion, which slowly distorted its shape. I told a personal story of teaching my own youngest daughter (a little older than Sasha) about Orion, by using glow stars on her ceiling for a month before taking her outside to see if she recognized anything. Immediately seeing a familiar pattern, she now calls it “my Orion”. Perhaps there will be glow stars on the ceiling of the White House bedroom before long!

After 10 minutes, the family quietly got up to leave, The President thanked me as they quietly departed, and I returned to continue the show for the kids. Normal White House events have the President staying no more than 30 minutes – the Obamas had requested 45 minutes for this event, and ended up staying over an hour, and everyone recognized their real interest in astronomy.

Of course no cameras are allowed in a planetarium ;-), so no pictures were taken inside the dome, but I have a strong visual memory of that scene of two young girls and their parents starring up at a starry sky, the Earth hanging there as a beautiful jewel, and a planetarium projector giving its performance.

I’ve represented the planetarium community at a lot of events, particularly during my tenure with IPS, and never imagined being in that place, at that time, on October 7, on the White House lawn. I can tell you how honored and privileged I feel to have been able to do so. Both Carter and I were also inspired, invigorated, by the experience at the White House. Thanks for reading!

Martin Ratcliffe
Director, Professional Development
Sky-Skan, Inc

astronomy

Tough Little Galaxy Guys

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Barnard’s Galaxy as seen by ESO

Barnards Galaxy glows beneath a sea of foreground stars in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer). This amazing portrait comes to us courtesy of an instrument called the Wide Field Imager (WFI) attached to the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in northern Chile. (Click to embiggen.) Courtesy ESO.
Barnard's Galaxy glows beneath a sea of foreground stars in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) (Click to embiggen.) Courtesy ESO.

What do you get when you point a powerful telescope at a tiny, irregular dwarf galaxy that just so happens to be a neighbor of the Milky Way Galaxy?  The folks at the European Southern Observatory did just that and created an amazing image of a tough little galactic neighbor brimming with star formation regions, interesting bubble-shaped nebulae,and scads of hot, blue stars.

Now, you may look at this image and think to yourself, “It doesn’t look like a galaxy — don’t all galaxies have spiral arms?”

Well, not always. There are many in the universe that look like this — oddly misshapen, dwarf-sized collections of stars. Yet, even though Barnard’s Galaxy doesn’t have that spiral-armed grace and large central bulge that the Milky Way and Andromeda have, it plays an important role in stellar and galaxy evolution. In addition, its reddish nebulae are the same kinds of active star-formation regions that we see in larger galaxies.  These regions glow because their hot young stars are heating the surrounding gas clouds. Also prominent in the upper left of this new image is a striking bubble-shaped nebula.

At its heart (if you zoom in closely), you can make out a collection of massive, superhot stars that are sending waves of matter smashing into the material in nearby regions. The interaction has created what looks like a glowing ring around the central region.  Look closely enough and you’ll see other regions where  hot young stars are heating up their neighborhoods.

This tough, tiny little galaxy comes in at about a tenth of the size of the Milky Way and has about 10 million stars. Yet, as part of the Local Group, it’s in the majority of galaxy types because the Local Group dwarfs outnumber the “normal” spirals. This  kind of begs the questions, “What’s the norm?”  And “How do these galaxies fit in the hierarchy of other galaxies?

Irregular dwarf galaxies are blobby and not very well-defined.  They get these amorphous shapes from close encounters of the galactic kind that go on for millions of years.

How does that work?. Like everything else in the universe, galaxies are in motion, and this means that at some point, a given galaxy will encounter at least one other one during its lifetime. They often make close passes or even go through one another. The density of stars in galaxies is quite low, meaning that few stars physically collide. But, the gravitational effect that each galaxy has on the other will warp and twist their shapes. When this happens, huge collections of stars are pushed or pulled in new directions, or even flung out away from the galaxy where they formerly “lived.”   After the encounters, the resulting galaxies look a lot like Barnard’s Galaxy — irregular, with regions of star formation and star death studded among their other stars.  They have to be tough to survive the close encounters of the galactic kind!