Observatory Adventure

STAR PARTY: We had a super interesting evening - our first date with the observatory on the campus at the University of Washington! Today dawned with complete cloud cover, but as the afternoon wore on, the clouds started to part and we got our hopes up. 

Traffic (mercifully!) wasn't bad, so we arrived on campus a little after 6, well in advance of the 7 p.m. lecture time. We were happy to have the time to stroll around the campus a bit.

Just south of the William Gates (law school) building, we found an intriguing sculpture called The Department of Forensic Morphology Annex. Fabricated by Cris Brusch, it was installed in 2004.

We took a tour around the exterior of Denny Hall, the oldest building on campus.

Above, the kids stand at the northwest corner of the building named after Arthur A.  Denny, who donated most of the land for the original UW campus. 

The building has lots of lovely details to ogle, including an ornate belfry.

Per a UW Web page about the history of the campus, the bell inside was purchased for $368 during the Civil War. It traveled from Troy, NY, around the Cape Horn to Seattle. It was first installed in the original UW building in downtown Seattle, in 1862. It was moved to its present location in 1895 and was used to signal classes until 1912. It's only rung once a year now, at Homecoming. 

The front (south-facing side) of Denny Hall looks like a castle!

From there, we wandered down to The Quad, as I wanted to see the trees in bloom. They didn't disappoint.

We headed back toward the north part of campus and checked out the state-of-the-art PACCAR Hall. Completed in 2010, the 135,000 square foot hall is a gold-certified LEED building and one of the homes to the UW Michael G. Foster School of Business. 

Before too long, it was time to headed to the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory, the second-oldest structure on the UW campus. It was built in 1895, using Tenino sandstone blocks left over from the construction of Denny Hall. 

The observatory's namesake was a former UW astronomer. Theodor Jacobsen spent 70 years studying the pulsation of variable stars. He joined the UW faculty in 1928, and was the sole member of the university's astronomy faculty until 1965 (today, there are over 30 faculty members in the department). Jacobsen died in 2003, at age 102! The observatory was named after him in 2004. You'd think they could have done that while he was alive. :/

The Jacobsen observatory has a 120-year old, 6-inch refracting telescope. Members of the Seattle Astronomical Society were on hand to operate the vintage star gazer in the observatory's dome. 

When we arrived, it was still daylight out, but we enjoyed checking out the telescope itself.

The dome of the observatory rotates - in a very old school way. You have to pull on ropes.

When you tug on the ropes, the roof, resting on a few steel balls, rotates.  There's a rumor that the steel balls are actually Civil War era cannon balls, but the UW can't confirm this.

We got a chance to look at the clockworks which makes the telescope rotate at the same rate as the Earth, allowing it to track whatever you're looking at. 

The telescope is so old, it even has cobwebs. :)

The observatory is also home to an old transit telescope.

Used to keep the time standard, find latitude and longitude and map the night sky, it was in service on campus from 1904 until the late 1950s.

At 7 p.m., it was time to head to the 'lecture hall,' which was really just a cozy classroom. (Based on the way the desks were shoehorned together, it's pretty obvious people were a whole lot smaller in 1895!) To get there, we walked through T.S. Jacobsen's former office.

We enjoyed a lecture featuring Dr. Ana Larson covering “Toys in Space.” Larson gave some introductory remarks, and then each child in the audience was given a toy to play with, make observations of, and then write down some predictions about how that toy would behave in space. Larson reminded the audience that while space is a vacuum, it's not ZERO gravity. Rather, there is microgravity.  CJ got a wind up toy that flipped to experiment with; Annabelle had a ball and jacks.

After the lecture, we got to go back up to the dome and use the telescope to spot Jupiter and four of its moons (Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa). Cool! 

Outside, through some telescopes considerably newer than the observatory one, we had additional glimpses of our solar system's largest planet and those four moons.  

All in all, it was a lovely evening. How lucky we are to live so close to such a wonderful educational resource.

AND LAST NIGHT ... : Inspired by Professor Mike Brown's suggestion, last night as the sun slipped below the horizon, we started scanning the Eastern sky for Mars rising. It was easy to spot, and boy did it put on a show. It was practically strobing red and white, with an interesting tinge of blue, even to the naked eye. We broke out the binoculars and the telescope and got a better look.

Once we'd IDed Mars, with our freshly printed out "The Evening Sky Map" from Skymaps.com, we set about identifying other heavenly bodies.  We noticed  a star right above Mars, and determined it to be Spica, the brightest star in the Virgo constellation. The blue giant is 260 light years from Earth.

Overhead, by far the brightest object had to be Jupiter, per the map. Nearby it were significantly fainter Castor and Pollux. Once we also found Orion's belt, it was easy to spot Betelgeuse, in the top 10 of brightest objects in the night sky and distinctive for its reddish orange glow.  Amazing how easy it is the pick the planets and stars out when you have a map in hand!

NASA "CLASS": We rushed home from science class in Shoreline to be in time for a live via-Internet NASA class all about the Kepler mission. 

Right now, the Kepler spacecraft is some 40 million miles from Earth. It has discovered more than 3,500 potential planets orbiting distant stars in the Milky Way galaxy, including some exoplanets near the size of Earth. The webinar was supposed to share the latest NASA Kepler mission data and explore how the Kepler team identifies planet candidates and learn about Transit Tracks, an activity where students can use algebraic equations to analyze NASA data with the hopes of discovering planets in habitable zones of a star.

It was not the best NASA Webinar I've ever been a part of. In fact, it was the worst. The host took 20+ minutes past the start time to figure out how to upload the PowerPoint presentation. It kinda got worse from there. :(   The host had trouble remembering the difference between planets and constellations, confused Jupiter and Venus (despite a huge graphic of Venus on the screen), observed aloud he was "making myself look like an idiot," a statement I had to agree with, and when someone asked him about the naming convention of planets in the Kepler system (which was a big part of what the presentation was about), his crack answer was, "Let's see, I always get that wrong." NICE!

For the first time, I quit a webinar midstream. It was a horrible use of my time. Watching paint dry would have been a slightly better use of my time, in fact. Wrong information is worse than no information. I hate to think that this webinar was some attendees' first experiences with NASA and their educational webinars. 

THE FORCE IS STRONG IN THIS ONE: Well, WELL worth your time. We all actually started clapping and cheering here at home when it ended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2S72eajLzw#t=376