WAA Meeting & Lecture
Friday, January  12 at 7:30 pm

Live at David Pecker Conference Room, Willcox Hall, Pace University or via Zoom
(link on WAA home page)

Astronomy Education’s Changing Perspective

Marc Taylor
Senior Manager, Planetarium and Science Programs. Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY,

In the past, astronomy education was largely about mathematics, observing techniques, and perhaps theological interpretations of those observations. Over the past 75 years, astronomy education has democratized and become more widely available to all ages, backgrounds, and interests, and can now take us to other worlds and other times. But there has been another change, very recent, permeating the sciences and science education as well — and this newest turn is not really about astronomy at all…

A native of Upstate New York, Marc grew up exploring the woods and streams of the Hudson Valley, and investigating the wider world through popular accounts of science, his father’s math textbooks, and whatever science television programs could reach the family rooftop antenna through the hills of the Hudson Highlands. He attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating in 1993 with a degree in art and a focus on geology, having also studied art history, biology, physics, and chemistry. A summer job at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, led to the field of science education. Over the past ten years, as awareness and alarm about ecological issues has grown, Marc has been bringing in more elements of local ecology into programs at the Hudson River Museum; leading nature walks and creating ecology-focused activities and workshops for the public. He is currently pursuing an Urban Naturalist certificate from the New York Botanical Garden and planning for the 2024 Solar Eclipse.

Free and open to the public.

Friday, September 10th
Live at David Pecker Conference Room, Willcox Hall, Pace University and via Zoom

Members’ Night

One of the most popular meetings of the year is our annual “Member’s Night.” Club members present talks on a vast range of subjects of astronomical interest, including their astronomy trips, observations, new equipment, imaging techniques, and other topics.

Members interested in presenting should email WAA’s Vice President for  Programs, Pat Mahon, at waa-programs@westchesterastronomers.org.

In-person attendance is always encouraged. Meet and greet fellow amateur astronomers.

Roman Tytla at WAA Members’ Night

Friday June 9 at 7:30 p.m.

Live at Willcox Hall and via Zoom (link on WAA home page)

Searching for New Physics in the Universe’s Oldest Light

J. Colin Hill, Ph.D.
Columbia University Department of Physics

Dr. Hill will begin with a general review of the state of physical cosmology — what do we know about our universe, and how do we know it? He will then discuss recent and ongoing work focused on attempts to resolve a potential discrepancy amongst some measurements of the current cosmic expansion rate (the “Hubble  tension”). He will then describe how this discrepancy could potentially be resolved via the introduction of new physics into our cosmological model around the time of “recombination”, the moment when photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) last scattered in the primordial plasma, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

He will discuss constraints on these new-physics models derived using the latest CMB data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), as well as new data from Supernova Refsdal just published in May, and will conclude with a look ahead to forthcoming CMB measurements from ACT and the Simons Observatory, which will definitively detect or exclude these scenarios.

Free & open to the public!

Friday, March 10 at 7:30 p.m.
Live or on Zoom (link on Home page)

Artificial Intelligence and its use in Astronomy
Marwan Gibran, PhD
Chairman of Physics, St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana

Artificial Intelligence applications have been used extensively in astronomy over the last decade. This is mainly due to the large amount of data that are recovered from space and ground-based observatories. In the era of big data, the use of automated tools is essential. Dr. Gebran will introduce the most used techniques in Machine and Deep Learning that astronomers are using and show some of their applications. He will present some of his on the use of neural networks for classifying stellar spectra.

Dr. Gibran received a PhD in Astrophysics in 2007 from Montpellier University, France in 2007. He was a post-doctoral fellow in Barcelona working on calibration of the Gaia space telescope. He received a Fulbright grant to work at Columbia University in 2018, and then Joined the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Saint Mary’s College in fall 2021.

Friday, February 10 at 7:30 pm

Live at Pace University or via Zoom

How Are Orbits Determined?

Dan Platt, PhD

IBM Watson Research Labs & Westchester Amateur Astronomers

When I was young, my family had a book on the history of astronomy. Its discussion of how Gauss determined the orbit of Ceres from the sparse measurements Piazzi had obtained fascinated me. Later, my interests in math and physics led me to celestial mechanics and methods for computing orbits, so I added to my bucket list the goal of doing an orbit calculation from scratch. Now, after many years, I decided to take the question seriously and complete these calculations. The first thing I realized is that there is a lot to it. I needed to understand coordinate systems. I will present a short history of those systems and of the precision required for these orbit methods to work. The second goal was to find how much measurement precision we need today to determine orbital elements. I wanted to see whether commercial telescopes have the precision required to permit us compute orbits. My approach was first to check my code output for known orbits from Stellarium, then to add noise to the “observed” angular measurements, and then see whether I could still compute a reasonable orbit. That will give a standard check if our commercially available scopes can deliver the required precision. As an aside, I’ll tell you just what Tycho Brahe’s fight was about that made his nose famous (and other history).

Friday, January 13 at 7:30 p.m.

Live at Willcox Hall, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY or via ZOOM (link on WAA home page)

Cosmic eras in the infant universe: what was happening during the first billion years?

Paul O’Connor
Instrumentation Scientist, Brookhaven National Laboratory

The more scientists discover about the ingredients that make up our Universe and the ways in which they evolved from a featureless gas to the systems of stars and galaxies that we see today, the more we recognize the need for new observations — ones which can extend our reach across time and space to resolve questions at the foundations of fundamental physics. This has led to an effort within the High Energy Physics community, formerly concerned with particle accelerators to study the subatomic world, to build large facilities and instruments designed to tackle the big open questions of cosmology. This lecture will review progress on Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (Vera Rubin Observatory) construction, and will present several new instrument concepts for studying the physics of the early universe using the highly-redshifted radiation from atomic hydrogen which we observe in the radio frequency wavelength range.

Free and open to the public!

Friday, December 9 at 7:30 p.m.
David Pecker Conference Room, Willcox Hall, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY
or via Zoom (link on the WAA home page)

DART and the Dinosaurs

Dany Waller
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

The bold, ingenious and successful DART mission may make it possible to prevent devastating asteroid impacts that could wipe out much of life on Earth. Dany Waller is a member of the DART team at JHU-APL. She’ll discuss the risks of asteroid impacts and review the planning, execution and results of the DART mission.

The December meeting is also the official Annual Meeting of WAA, at which the officers will be elected.

Friday, November 11 at 7:30 pm

David Pecker Conference Room
Willcox Hall, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY
or on-line via Zoom

The McCarthy Observatory: A Refuge for Science

Bill Cloutier
Founding member, McCarthy Observatory

The McCarthy Observatory is the centerpiece of a community science center in New Milford, Connecticut. It was conceived, designed and constructed by volunteers from the local communities with a common goal  to establish a teaching tool to promote science literacy.

The observatory is different from many other astronomical facilities in that its focus is on accessibility and educational outreach. While capable of real science, the mission of the non-profit organization that operates the facility is to encourage critical thinking and promote STEM-related learning. Over the past 22 years, the all-volunteer staff has continued to add to the observatory’s educational offerings and look for new and innovative means to engage with the public.

The talk will focus on the history of the McCarthy Observatory, as well as the challenge of managing a small, all-volunteer organization with lofty goals.

Bill Cloutier is an amateur astronomer and founding member of the McCarthy Observatory. He is also on the Board of Directors that oversees the all-volunteer, non-profit organization that operates and maintains the Observatory, which opened to the public in December 2000. Bill is the author of the observatory’s monthly newsletter, covering topics related to astronomy and space exploration, a regular presenter at public events, an adult education classroom instructor for a night sky appreciation course, NEO observer, and the caretaker/public outreach coordinator for the observatory’s antique refractor telescope. Before retiring, Bill worked in the nuclear industry for 42 years. He has had a life-long interest in astronomy, lunar photography, the history of lunar exploration, and sharing those pursuits with the public. He is also a NASA Solar System Ambassador, a volunteer outreach initiative conveying the latest happenings in space exploration to the general public to generate interest in the STEM disciplines.