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Category Archives: science

Fixing a dull ‘Personal Solar Telescope’

12 Friday Aug 2022

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, astrophysics, monochromatic, optical flat, Optics, science, teaching, Telescope Making

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ATM, Coronado, filter, Hydorgen-Alpha, Meade, Optics, PST, solar filter, Solar telescope, Telescope

A decade or so ago, I bought a brand-new Personal Solar Telescope from Hands On Optics. It was great! Not only could you see sunspots safely, but you could also make out prominences around the circumference of the sun, and if sky conditions were OK, you could make out plages, striations, and all sorts of other features on the Sun’s surface. If you were patient, you could tune the filters so that with the Doppler effect and the fact that many of the filaments and prominences are moving very quickly, you could make them appear and disappear as you changed the H-alpha frequency ever so slightly to one end of the spectrum to the other.

However, as the years went on, the Sun’s image got harder and harder to see. Finally I couldn’t see anything at all. And the Sun got quiet, so my PST just sat in its case, unused, for over a year. I was hoping it wasn’t my eyes!

I later found some information at Starry Nights on fixing the problem: one of the several filters (a ‘blocking’ or ‘ITF’ filter) not far in front of the eyepiece tends to get oxidized, and hence, opaque. I ordered a replacement from Meier at about $80, but was frankly rather apprehensive about figuring out how to do the actual deed. (Unfortunately they are now out of stock: https://maierphotonics.com/656bandpassfilter-1.aspx )

I finally found some threads on Starry Nights that explained more clearly what one was supposed to do ( https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/530890-newbie-trouble-with-coronado-pst/page-4 ) and with a pair of taped-up channel lock pliers and an old 3/4″ chisel that I ground down so that it would turn the threads on the retaining ring, I was able to remove the old filter and put in the new one. Here is a photo of the old filter (to the right, yellowish – blue) and the new one, which is so reflective you can see my red-and-blue cell phone with a fuzzy shiny Apple logo in the middle.

This afternoon, since for a change it wasn’t raining, I got to take it out and use it.

Verdict?

It works great again!

Oscilloscope Testing of OnStep System

30 Saturday Apr 2022

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, science, Telescope Making, Uncategorized

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Arduino, axes, declination, direction, enable, ground, Hopewell, MaxESP, OnStep, oscilloscope, pin, right ascension, step

We are still at work trying to debug our OnStep re-build of the venerable Ealing telescope drive system at Hopewell Observatory.

Without having a whole lot of experience with oscilloscopes, we used a brand-new OWON 200-series hand-held unit to measure the output of our various MaxESP3.03 boards towards the stepper motors. We don’t really understand what these waveforms actually mean, and a brief search of the OnStep wiki page does not immediately point me to screenshots of what the signals should look like under various conditions.

In any case, some of the waveforms we see look like simple square wave signals. Some look like weird semi-random combinations of square waves, and some look like just plain noise.

In this first video, we have an unmodified MaxESP3.03 board with TMC5160 drivers, not connected to any stepper motors. I attached the ground pin of the probe to one of the grounding grommets at a corner of the MaxESP board, and systematically probed the pins that come out towards the various windings on the stepper motor. We also pressed N, S, E, and W buttons to see what happened. Here goes:

Those of you who are experts on this: do these waveforms appear to be OK to you in this situation?

This next setup is different. It’s a MaxESP3.03 board that Ken Hunter has modified by adding or moving about ten jumpers on the underside of the board; it has no slip-stick drivers for RA or DEC mounted on the MaxESP board itself. Instead, each axis has three (not four) wires coming out of the same place that four wires generally come out to connect to your stepper motor; these three wires connect to four of the inputs on an external, and separately-powered TB6600 stepper driver, which then feeds four wires to the two coils on the stepper.

The arrangement we have now does seem to work, at least on our workbench at the ATM workshop in Chevy Chase Community Center in NW DC, as you can see and hear in this video, but, once again, neither Alan nor I have any idea if the waveforms are correct. Here is the video:

Again: experts — do you think those waveforms are correct?

We were surprised at how complex, and apparently noisy, are the signals on the Step and Dir lines from this modified MaxESP board to the green-and-black external TB6600 drivers. They don’t show up at all in these two previous videos, but they will show up in the next one, which I’m having a bit of trouble uploading at the moment.

In that video, I test both RA and DEC output.

In RA, pin #1 is Enable and is apparently not connected to anything. It produces a wave that looks like a crosscut saw seen from above that has teeth very widely spaced apart. That ENA signal doesn’t change no matter what buttons we push; we think the graph is merely showing interference from something or other.

Still in RA, pin #2 is the STEP pin, and it produces a nice square wave that changes dramatically in frequency when you press the E or W buttons on the SHC. We don’t really see the difference between the E or W graphs.

Still in RA, and in contrast, the graphs for both the Dir and GND pins seem to just look like noise. When one presses ‘E’ the noise graph from the Dir pin definitely changes voltage (it drops off the screen), but not when we press ‘W’. Nothing happens to the noise graph on the fourth pin (GND), no matter what we do.

On the DEC side, all pins seem to put out flat but noisy signals. The noise signal on Pin 2 (Step) moves dramatically but identically lower when you press either the North or South button on the SHC. The noise signal on Pin 3 (Dir) does not change when you press buttons, and neither does the noise signal on pin 4 (GND).

So can we conclude that this board is fried?

Birds and City Lighting: a Toxic Mix

21 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, education, History, nature, Safety, science, Uncategorized

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birds, dark, environment, insects, light, light pollution, migration, navigation, night sky

An alarming article about studies of bird deaths due to bright city lighting. A couple of quotes:

Every 11 September at dusk, in memory of the 2001 attacks, New York City mounts the Tribute in Light, an art installation in lower Manhattan. And every year, as twin towers of light bloom skyward, they attract thousands of migrating birds, sucking in warblers, seabirds, and thrushes—along with predators such as peregrine falcons eager to take advantage of the confusion. On each anniversary, bird conservationists wait below, counting and listening to disoriented chirps. If the observers report too many birds circling aimlessly in the beams, organizers flip off the lights.

In recent years, on-site observers have also used a complementary tool to quantify the orbiting birds: weather radar, which bounces off birds as well as raindrops. In 2017, a group led by Cornell University ornithologist Andrew Farnsworth found that during seven previous anniversaries, the once-a-year installation had attracted a total of about 1.1 million birds. Within 20 minutes of lighting up, up to 16,000 birds crammed themselves into a half-kilometer radius. But when the lights flicked off, the dense clouds of birds on the radar screen dissipated just as fast, a finding later confirmed by on-site thermal cameras.’

Later, discussing a single building, the author found that a

‘key factor was how many of the convention center’s windows had been illuminated. Each individual bright window left more dead birds for volunteers to find the next day. The correlation suggests halving the number of lit window bays would halve the number of bird strikes, the team estimated, saving thousands of birds at this one three-story building. “It really does seem that each window makes a difference,” van Doren says.’

First Time Installation of OnStep Board with NEMA23 Stepper Motors in Ealing Mount at Hopewell

03 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, science, Telescope Making

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ATM, Bob Bolster, dobsonian, Hopewell Observatory, Howard Dutton, OnStep, OnStep Conversion, Telescope

A 3-minute video of the results of our first-time installation of something called an OnStep conversion. We are replacing the telescope drive of a venerable but beautifully machined telescope mount, located at a small group-owned observatory called Hopewell, atop a ridge called Bull Run Mountain*.

It’s alive!

Sorry, it’s not the greatest or clearest video. Also, I mistakenly state at about 0:25 in the video that the right ascension axis was turning at 12 RPM, but it’s not: I should have said 5 RPM, or one revolution in 12 seconds.

You can hear some stuttering of one of the motors. You are right, that is not a good sound. We were able to get it to stop and start making that noise and motion by adjusting the precise positioning of some of the gears. It will take some time and experimentation to get that perfect.

Later on (not captured in this video), when I was trying to slew in the declination axis at the highest speed possible, the stepper motor once again screamed and halted. I’m hopeful that all of those problems can be fixed by doing one or more of these things:

  • 1) adjusting the fit of all those gears;
  • (2) changing certain parameters of microstepping and current to the stepper motors in software; and/or
  • (3) increasing the voltage to the board from 18 VDC to 24 VDC.

I’ll need to test things out on my desk at home, using the same OnStep board, but without the gears and timing belt. (That stuff was a royal PITA to remove screw back into place, and none of us have any desire to take them back out again!) I have some identical extra stepper motors that I can test out, with gloved hands, to see if it is possible to stop the motors from turning. Right now, I still don’t think they are putting out the amount of torque needed.

================================

*Yes, that famous Bull Run of Civil War fame is not far away. However, our observatory is named after a different geological feature, namely the Hopewell Gap that cuts through the hard rock of Bull Run Mountain right about where where the creek called Little Bull Run begins.

If you are reading this, you probably know that serious amateur, and all professional, astronomical telescopes (except for Dobs) are generally driven by ‘clock drives’ so that the object one is viewing or photographing stays properly centered as the earth rotates imperceptibly beneath us. The original Ealing motor drive at Hopewell, while turning excellent Ed Byers gears, had been an intermittent problem ever since it was delivered to the University of Maryland about 50 years ago. It was in fact not operational when they sold it to us for a pittance about 30 years ago. (If you go to the University of Maryland Observatory site I linked to, the scope we have now is the one in the center of the 1970s – era photo labeled ‘Figure 4’.)

Bob Bolster, one of the founding members of Hopewell observatory, disassembled the drive, modified it considerably, and got it working again, several years before I joined the group. The scope worked, off and on, with a very complex clutch system for ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ movement of the scope, for most of the rest of the last 25 or so years, except for occasional motor burnouts and clutch replacements. Also unfortunately, the optics on the original 12″ Ritchey-Chretien telescope, were not very good, so we removed them, had them in an attic for many years, re-tested them, and finally sold the glass and the holders, for a pittance, to someone in Italy who wanted to try to re-figure them.

This was originally a ‘push-to’ telescope, meaning that one loosened up two Byers clutches (one for each axis), located the desired target in the sky, tightened the two clutches, did some fine tuning with an electric hand paddle to center the target more precisely, and then allowed the telescope drive to then keep the object in the center of the eyepiece or camera field of view as long as one wanted. It originally came with metal setting circles (basically, finely-made protractors that showed where the scope is pointing vis-a-vis the polar and declination axes), which made finding targets possible, though not trivial!

About 15 years ago, Bolster (with some help from me) installed Digital Setting Circles, which used a rotary encoder on each axis, along with a small hand-held computer and screen display, to allow one to select a given target; the DSC hand paddle’s display then would indicate how far one should rotate the scope along those axes to find the desired celestial object; when it was in the field of your widest eyepiece, one used the hand paddle to center it more precisely.

Converting this scope to an OnStep drive will, I hope, make this a Go-To scope in which one can command the telescope to aim at whatever target one desires.

Unfortunately, right now, the fastest it seems to rotate in Declination, with no load whatsoever (all scopes have been removed, so no balance or inertia problems) is about one degree per second. So doing a 180-degree turn in a North-South direction would take a full three minutes. A 30-degree turn would take 30 seconds. Can we make this a bit faster? I hope so.

I wasn’t able to really slew in right ascension (East-West) because the counterweight box, even though empty, seems to require too much torque to rotate right now.

Bolster passed away a few years ago, and this summer, the moment I had been dreading finally arrived: the drive on the Ealing died again, and his amazing skills and tenacity in fixing such problems was gone with him. What’s more, in his final years, his incurable, chronic idiopathic neuropathy made it literally impossible for him to speak, and even typing email responses to the rest of us took a very long time. So most of his wealth of knowledge and experience died with him.

As indicated in my earlier posts (here, here, here, and here), with help from others, I was able to take the two motor setups for the two axes out from the mount and get them working again on my workbench in their original format. I was even able to order and install material for the clutches. However, I discovered that one needed to adjust the clutches very, very precisely, or else they wouldn’t work at all.

I couldn’t figure out how to do that.

And nobody else who belongs to our observatory volunteered to help out, except for removing the scopes and drives from their former positions inside the mount.

So I decided to convert to a totally different type of telescope drive, one inspired by the Arduino boards and 3-D printers. A group of really smart and resourceful hobbyists (engineers?) designed a system around the Arduino environment that uses inexpensive off-the-shelf printed circuits and complex sub-boards and components, used originally mostly in the 3-D printers that have become so popular, to drive at telescope just the way astronomers want them to be driven.

Apparently, there have been many, many OnStep successes, but what we are doing may be the largest and most massive mount to date that has done such a conversion.

I was warned that the entire process would take some months. Those warnings were correct. But that’s OK. I’m retired, I have time, and I have access to tools and people who are interested in helping. What’s more, I have learned a whole lot about modern electronics, and my soldering skills are much better than they ever were.

I’d again like to thank Alan Tarica (who’s physically helped a **tremendous** amount), Prasad Agrahar (who first showed me the OnStep conversions he had done on a much smaller equatorial mount), Howard Dutton (who first conceived and implemented OnStep), Ken Hunter (who made and **donated** to us a complete, functional OnStep board together with all sorts of accessories and walked me by phone and video through many of my fumbling first steps), Khalid Bahayeldin, George Cushing, and many others.

A Navigation / Geometry Problem

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, History, Math, science, teaching

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Benjamin Banneker, District of Columbia, Pierre l"Enfant, Washington

I had the pleasure of helping lead a field trip for 9th grade Geometry students at School Without Walls SHS that we call ‘Math on the Mall’ assisting with two colleagues from the SWW math faculty.

One of our goals is for the students to see how beautifully and geometrically this city was laid out by Pierre l’Enfant, Andrew Ellicott, and Benjamin Banneker about 230 years ago.

While there are lots of myths written and repeated about Banneker’s actual contribution, the fact is that he was the astronomer, who was responsible for determining due north, exactly, and the exact latitude and longitude of the southern tip of the original 10-mile-square piece of land. With no Internet or SatNav or even a telegraph or steam engine, but with a very nice refractor and highly accurate clock that he was entrusted with, but with no landmarks to measure from, he was able to do so, in 1790.

I was sad to see that exactly none of the students know which way was north – in a city where the numbered streets near the Mall and the rest of DC’s historic downtown were almost all laid out perfectly north-south, and the streets whose names begin with letters or words like ‘Newark’, and the streets along the Mall, are all laid out perfectly east-west. Very few of them had ever seen the Milky Way, though most had heard of Polaris or the North star.

Hopefully they will remember that in the future as they do more navigation on their own in this great city.

I challenged them to try to figure out why the angle of elevation of the North Star is the same as their latitude. Here is a diagram illustrating the problem:

The Earth, Polaris, and You.

This diagram is intended to help you understand why the North Star’s elevation above your horizon always gives you your  latitude (if you live north of the Equator.

The big circle represents the Earth. The center of the earth is at E. The equator is AD.

YOU, the observer, are standing outside on a clear night. You see Polaris in the direction of ray BG. Line HCE is the Earth’s axis, and it also points at Polaris – which is so far away, and seems so tiny, but yet is also so large, that yes, parallel rays BG and CH do, for all practical purposes, point at the same point in the sky. Ray ED starts at the center of the Earth, passes through you at B, and goes on to the zenith (the part of the sky that is directly overhead). The horizon (BF) and the zenith (ray EB) are perpendicular. Also, line HCE (the earth’s axis) is perpendicular to its equator (segment AED).

Using some sort of angle measuring device, if you are out on the National Mall at night, you can very carefully measure the angle of elevation of the North Star above the local horizon, and you should ideally find that angle, FBG, is about 38.9 degrees, but we could also call it X degrees.

Prove (i.e. explain) why your latitude (which is angle AEB) measures the same as angle FBG.

What are the givens?

=========================================================

Full disclosure: My daughter graduated from SWW two decades ago, and I taught there as well for a year and for 10 years at a school that is now associated with it: Francis (then JHS now a middle school).

The kids were nice back then, and they still are. I thought the teachers did a great job.

This is a DC public high school that you have to apply to.

Benjamin Banneker was an amazing person. There are a lot of myths that have been attached to his work and accomplishments, which I am guessing might be because those people didn’t actually understand the math and astronomy that he did accomplish. The best book on him is by Silvio Bedini.

‘Math on the Mall’ was originated by Florence Fasanelli, Richard Thorington, and V. Frederick Rickey around 1990. I participated as a math teacher in a couple of those tours led by FF. Later, I wanted to take my students on a similar tour that would include a trip to see a number of the works of the geometer and artist Maurice C. Escher, and couldn’t find my copy of their work, so I made up my own, and added to it using the work of FF, RT, and VFR and suggestions from teachers and students. Later on, the Mathematical Association of America made something similar, which you can find here.

My version was on the website of the Carnegie Institution for Science for a number of years. See page 56 on this link. I need to find someone to cut out some of my excess verbiage and then trot it out to a publisher.

Disturbing Racist Clauses Found in Early NCA Constitutions & Bylaws

29 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, History, science, Telescope Making

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Albert Einstein, amateur, astronomy, Black people, by-laws, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Caucasian, CIW, constitution, DC, ERO, Eugenics, Eugenics Records Office, Fairfax, George Carruthers, High Schools, History, Hitler, Montgomery County, National Capital Astronomer, Nazis, NCA, Prince George's County, Racism, science, Segregation, Star Dust, Washington

By Guy Brandenburg

Recently, while preparing to give a talk at this year’s Stellafane telescope-makers’ convention, I was disappointed to discover that the National Capital Astronomers (NCA), which I’ve belonged to for about 30 years, specifically excluded Black members for nearly 3 decades: from about 1940 all the way up to1969.

But NCA didn’t start out being overtly racist. Our original 1937 founding document has no such language. It reads, in part,

“The particular business and objects of [the NCA] shall be the education and mutual improvement of its members in the science of Astronomy and the encouragement of an interest in this science among others. (…) The activities of this Association are designed for the enjoyment and cultural profit of all interested in astronomy, whether the member be a beginner, an advanced student, or one whose pursuit of the science is necessarily desultory.”

And today’s NCA home page reads, “All are welcome to join. Everyone who looks up to the sky with wonder is an astronomer and welcomed by NCA. You do not have to own a telescope, but if you do own one that is fine, too. You do not have to be deeply knowledgeable in astronomy, but if you are knowledgeable in astronomy that is fine, too. You do not have to have a degree, but if you do that is fine, too. WE ARE THE MOST DIVERSE local ASTRONOMY CLUB anywhere. Come to our meetings and you will find this out. WE REALLY MEAN THIS!”

But in the 1940’s, the original open-minded and scientific NCA membership policy changed. The January 1946 Star Dust listed a number of changes to be voted on by the membership in the club’s founding documents. (See https://capitalastronomers.org/SD_year/1946/StarDust_1946_01.pdf ) The organization voted to change article III of its constitution as follows:

From:

“only Caucasians over 16 years old are eligible for membership.”

To this:

“to include all ages (see by-laws), exclude only the Black race.”

While it may be shocking that a scientific organization like NCA had such a policy, people often forget how racist a nation the USA used to be, and for how long. If you look up actual pages of DC area newspapers from the 1950s, you will note that the classified advertisements were largely segregated both by race and by gender – want ads would very often specify male or female, single or married, White-only or Colored-only jobs, apartments, and so on.

Schools in DC, MD, and Virginia were mostly segregated, either by law or in practice, up until the late 1960s or early 1970s. The 1954 Brown v Board decision had very little real impact in most areas until much, much later. Queens (NYC), PG County (MD) and Boston (MA) had violent movements against integrating schools in the 1970s. I know because I attended demonstrations against those racists and have some scars to prove it.

While the Federal and DC governments offices were integrated immediately after the Civil War, that changed for the worse when Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912.

Many scientists in the USA and in Europe believed the pseudo-scientific ideas of racial superiority and eugenics that arose around 1900 and were still widespread 50 years ago – and even today, as recent events have sadly shown.

In The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black explains how august scientific institutions like the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), the American Natural History Museum in New York, and a number of eminent statisticians and biologists for many decades supported the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor. So did the fabulously wealthy Rockefeller and Harriman Foundations.

The ERO pushed the concept of the genetic superiority of the ‘Nordic’ race and helped to pass State laws sterilizing the ‘weak’ and forbidding interracial marriage. They were also successful in passing the 1924 Federal immigration law that severely cut back immigration from parts of the world where supposedly ‘inferior’ people lived – e.g. Eastern and Southern Europe. As a result, many Jews who would have loved to escape Hitler’s ovens by crossing the Atlantic never made it.  

Hitler and his acolytes always acknowledged their ideological and procedural debt to American eugenical laws, literature, and propaganda. As we all know, Germany’s Nazis put those ideas to work murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others.

It took more than three decades for the CIW to withdraw their support of the ERO. A CIW committee concluded in 1935 “that the Eugenics Record Office was a worthless endeavor from top to bottom, yielding no real data, and that eugenics itself was not a science but rather a social propaganda campaign with no discernable value to the science of either genetics or human heredity.” (Black, p. 390) The members pointedly compared the work of the ERO to the excesses of Nazi Germany. However, it took four more years for CIW to cut all their ties – shortly after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, starting World War Two.

I don’t know exactly when the ‘Caucasian’-only policy became part of the NCA rules, but it seems to have been between the club founding in 1937, and October 1943 when volume 1, number 1 of Star Dust was printed. At one point, perhaps around 1940, NCA decided that only ‘Caucasians’ over 16 could join. But as indicated above, in 1946, the racial exclusion policy was narrowed to only exclude Black people. Apparently Jews, Italians, young people, Latin Americans, and Asians were eligible to join NCA from 1946 to 1969. But not African-Americans.

While researching my talk, I found that the NCA held amateur telescope-making classes at a number of all-white DC, MD, and VA high schools, from the 1940s through about 1970, both during the days of de jure segregation and the merely de-facto type: McKinley, Roosevelt, Central, Bladensburg, Falls Church, and McLean high schools are listed. While Star Dust mentions a telescope-making course at (the largely-Black) Howard University in 1946, there is no mention of any assistance for that course from NCA.

I also found no evidence in any issue of Star Dust from that era that anybody at the time raised any vocal objections to racial exclusion. Not in 1946, nor 23 years later when the rule prohibiting Black members was quietly dropped (in 1969) when a new constitution was adopted.

A few current or past NCA members confirmed to me that at some point, they noticed that racist language and privately wondered about it. One person told me that they definitely recalled some now-deceased NCA members who were openly racist and not shy about expressing those views. Others told me that they had never heard any discussion of the subject at all.

 (As one who grew up in DC and Montgomery County, and attended essentially-segregated public schools there, I am sorry that neither I nor my family actively spoke up at the time, even though a farm adjacent to ours in Clarksburg was owned by a Black family [with no school-age children at the time]. Amazing how blind one can be! The racists of those days were not shy about committing violence to achieve their ends. Fear might be one reason for silence.)

One possibility is that some of the early NCA meetings might have been held at private residences; perhaps some of the racist members insisted in preventing non-‘Caucasian’ or ‘Black’ people from attending. It is too bad the other NCA members didn’t take the other route and stay true to the original ideas of the club, and tell the racist members to get lost.

Very ironic: the late George Carruthers, a celebrated Naval Research Labs and NASA scientist, and an instrument-maker for numerous astronomical probes and satellites, gave a talk to the NCA in September of 1970 – not too long after the NCA apparently dropped its racist membership rules (April, 1969). So, a mere year and a half before he gave his talk, he could not have legally joined the organization. Nor could he have done so when he was making his own telescopes from scratch as a teenager in the 1940s. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Robert_Carruthers on the life and work of this great African-American scientist and inventor.

To NCA’s credit, we have done better in the past few decades at encouraging participation in telescope viewing parties, telescope making, and lectures by members of all races and ethnic groups. However, I often find that not very many NCA members bring telescopes to viewing events, or show up to judge science fairs, in mostly-minority neighborhoods. Often, it’s just me. That needs to change. We need to encourage an interest in science, astronomy, and the universe in children and the public no matter their skin color or national origin, and we need to combat the racist twaddle that passes for eugenics.

I anticipate that NCA will have a formal vote repudiating the club’s former unscientific and racist policies and behavior. I hope we will redouble our efforts to promote the study of astronomy to members of all ethnic groups, especially those historically under-represented in science.

We could do well to note the words that Albert Einstein wrote in 1946, after he had been living in the US for a decade, and the same year that NCA confirmed that Black people could not join:

“a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the “Whites” toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes.

The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

Many a sincere person will answer: “Our attitude towards Negroes is the result of unfavorable experiences which we have had by living side by side with Negroes in this country. They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability.”

I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences. And yet Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, declared slaves inferior beings who were justly subdued and deprived of their liberty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a traditional prejudice from which, despite his extraordinary intellect, he could not free himself.

What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.

I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.”

Source: http://www.kganu.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/alberteinsteinonthenegroquestion-1946.pdf

I am indebted to Morgan Aronson, Nancy Byrd, Richard Byrd, Geoff Chester, Jeff Guerber, Jay Miller, Jeffrey Norman, Rachel Poe, Todd Supple, Wayne Warren, Elizabeth Warner, and Harold Williams for documents, memories, and/or technical support.

Some WW2 or Cold-War-Era Aerial Surveillance Cameras

02 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, History, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, science, Telescope Making, Uncategorized

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Aerial reconnaissance camera assemblies

(Think U2 spyplanes.. )

Hopewell Observatory has three WW2 or Cold-War aerial spy camera optical tube assemblies, including a relatively famous Fairchild K-38. No film holders, though. And no spy planes. The lenses are in good condition, and the shutters seem to work fine.

We would like to give them away to someone who wants and appreciates them, and can put them to good use. Does anybody know someone who would be interested?

They’ve been sitting unused in our clubhouse for over 20 years. Take one, take two, take all of them, we want them gone.

We are located in the DC / Northern Virginia area. Nearby pickup is best. Anybody who wants them shipped elsewhere would obviously need to pay for packaging and shipping.

Here are some photos.

This one is labeled K-38, has a special, delicate, fluorite lens in front, and is stamped with the label 10-10-57 – perhaps a date. The shoe is for scale.

IMG_2009
IMG_2010
IMG_2012
IMG_2014
IMG_2017
IMG_2018
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The next two have tape measures and shoes for scale.

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hopewell jan 2013 036

 

Let me know (a comment will work) if you are interested.

More about spray-coating astronomical mirrors with silver!

30 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Optics, Safety, science, Telescope Making, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Here is a batch of articles and links concerning the spray-on process for making astronomical mirrors reflective using protected silver solutions.

Long ago, I translated Foucault’s monograph on making paraboloidal, silvered astronomical mirrors. Part of his article described the process that he and Steinheil developed for silvering, which involved using silver nitrate solutions and various other reagents. It looked quite tricky, and also required further polishing! Plus, our telescope making workshop here in Washington DC had a Navy surplus vacuum chamber that was (and still is) quite effective at putting on good-quality, inexpensive aluminum coatings for any mirror up to 12.5″ diameter.

However, I and a couple of other ATMers (Bill R and Oscar O) are working on mirrors in the 16 to 18 inch range, and they simply won’t fit. So I was quite intrigued to watch how Peter Pekurar and some other folks coated a couple of rather large mirrors right in front of a small crowd of onlookers in a tent at this summer’s Stellafane.

I have a few videos on my webpage (here).

There is also an article on the process in the January 2020 Sky and Telescope, and a webpage (here) on the topic run by Pekurar and Howard Banich and others.

Not to mention a bunch of posts on Cloudy Nights (here) and a nice PDF explaining it all, (here).

What is really, really amazing is that the webpage by Pekurar and Banich also has interferograms showing that the overcoating has absolutely no effect on the sub-microscopic, geometrical figure of the mirror! Unfortunately, it’s only effective against chemical attack, not against dirty fingers or scratches. They also did some careful experiments on reflectivity at various wavelengths with various treatments of the surface.

A couple of local ATMers and at least one professional at Goddard Space Flight Center have told me about their experiments with the process; they found that it is easy to mess up if you aren’t stringently clean and also easy to waste materials.

Problems Solved with the Old 6″ Refractor?

23 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, science, Telescope Making

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

crown, figuring, flint, Kiess, lens cell, lenses, refractor, symmetry, testing

I found a few things that may have been causing problems:

(1) Whoever put the lens cell together last didn’t pay any attention at all to the little registration marks that the maker had carefully placed on the edges of the lenses, to show how they were supposed to be aligned with each other. I fixed that, as you see in the photo below. The reason this is probably important is that the lenses are probably not completely symmetrical around their central axes, and the maker ‘figured’ (polished away small amounts of glass) them so that if you lined them up the way he planned it, the images would be good; otherwise, they would probably not work well at all and could very well be causing the poor star test images we saw.

IMG_5310

2. The previous assembler also put eleven little tape spacers around the edges, between the two pieces of glass. More is apparently not better; experts say you should have three spacers, each 120 degrees apart from the other two. Done.

3. The bottom (or ‘flint’) element is slightly smaller than the other one (the ‘crown’), so it probably shifted sideways. That alone would be enough to mess up the star tests in the way that we saw. So I wrapped two thicknesses of blue painter’s tape around the outside of the flint, and put some three cardboard shims between the edges of the ‘crown’ and the aluminum cell.

4. There were no shims at all between the flint and the aluminum ring that holds it in place underneath. This caused some small scratches on the glass, and might have been warping the glass. I put in three small shims of the same type of blue painter’s tape, lined up with the other spacers.

We will see if these improvements help. I really don’t want to haul this all the way out to Hopewell Observatory and struggle with putting it back on the mount for a star test. That was just way too much work, much more than I expected! The next test will be with an optical flat placed in front of the lenses, and a Ronchi grating.

I would like to thank Bart Fried, Dave Groski, and several other people on the Antique Telescope Society website for their advice.

————————————-

By the way, these photos show how we held the refractor on the mounting plate for the Ealing mount at Hopewell Observatory.

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A Weekend at Almost Heaven

06 Friday Sep 2019

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Optics, science, Telescope Making, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Almost Heaven Star Party, binocular mount, dobsonian, NOVAC, Spruce Knob, star party

I spent Labor Day weekend at the Almost Heaven Star Party very close to Spruce Knob, the highest ridge in West Virginia. When the skies cleared at night, the stars and Milky Way were magnificent, but that only happened about 1 night out of three. My 12.5″ home-made Dobsonian telescope performed very well; in fact, because its primary and secondary mirror are almost fully enclosed by the light shrouds and upper cage, I was able to keep observing long after all the other refractors and Schmidt-Cassegrains were closed down by the heavy dew. (To keep the dew off of my finder scope and Telrad, I used large rubber bands to wrap chemical hand warmer packs around them, and that crude and cheap arrangement worked very well!)

Here are three photos taken by me:

Exploring the geology of Spruce Knob Mountain Center: Lyle Mars in blue shirt and white hat is in front of the entrance to a cave carved in limestone
Exploring the geology of Spruce Knob Mountain Center: Lyle Mars in blue shirt and white hat is in front of the entrance to a cave carved in limestone
Selfie with me in front of three others on the geology hike
Selfie with me in front of three others on the geology hike
This lovely sunset did not portend clear skies
This lovely sunset did not portend clear skies

All but the photo with the sextant were taken by Oscar.

Alan Goldberg teaching someone how to use a sextant
Alan Goldberg teaching someone how to use a sextant
Me studying my charts, in front of parallelogram binocular mount
Me studying my charts, in front of parallelogram binocular mount
Oscar Olmedo and me at our campsite
Oscar Olmedo and me at our campsite
Mike Laugherty and me
Mike Laugherty and me
Mike Laugherty and me
Mike Laugherty and me
Me fiddling with my 12.5" home-made dob in the daytime
Me fiddling with my 12.5″ home-made dob in the daytime
Me fiddling with the parallelogram binocular mount in the daytime
Me fiddling with the parallelogram binocular mount in the daytime
Mike Laugherty and me fiddling with binocular mount
Mike Laugherty and me fiddling with binocular mount
Left to right: Mike Laugherty, Oscar Olmedo, me
Left to right: Mike Laugherty, Oscar Olmedo, me
The lottery drawing for a whole bunch of neat prizes. None of us 3 won anything.
The lottery drawing for a whole bunch of neat prizes. None of us 3 won anything.

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