August 2019

August 5, 2019 Meeting

Attendance: 20 people, including 3 guests. One of our guests visited us at the July 13 public star party.

Treasurer's Report (Evan Zorn):

Beginning balance July 1, 2019 $3,561.70

Income: Member dues 100.00

Expenses: Astronomical League dues <240.00>

Reimburse Denise for club supplies <155.96>

Ending balance July 31, 2019 $3,265.74

Club Business:

  • Denise's notes from the July meeting were approved.

  • We also agreed that in the future Denise will just summarize the main presentation rather than write up pages on it, and we will continue to post Powerpoint slides of presentations when possible.

Recap of Recent Club Events:

  • July 13 Public Star Party (Rick Buck and Denise): Thirty people attended the public star party at Tri County Tech, including 16 visitors. This is the first time we've had more visitors than Club members attend, which was great! John Grismore suggested we set up a table and Rick Buck brought a table with two nice red lanterns which was very helpful and welcoming! We made sure that at least one person manned the table during the evening so that visitors could be greeted and directed to Club members with waiting telescopes! Because the Moon was out, and the event was scheduled close to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the focus of the evening was on the Moon, Jupiter and four of its moons, and Saturn, but we did look at some other objects also. The weather was great!

Upcoming Club Events:

  • Social get-together at Braum's (south location) after tonight's meeting.

  • Next meeting: Thursday, September 5, with program by Denise on meteor showers, in Meeting Room C (first floor) at the Bartlesville Public Library.

  • Future Club meetings: Volunteers needed to do presentations. Contact Bob Young if interested in presenting.

  • Girl Scout Star Party in Tulsa on August 23: This will be part of a Girl Scout Outdoor Extravaganza at their Hardesty Leadership Center. Starting at 7:30 pm they will be doing activities to promote outdoor programs and events, including astronomy. At 8:30 pm they will have telescopes outside with a few volunteers trained to use them. Rick Buck is gathering names of BAS volunteers to help with this; if you are interested, contact him. Denise will be preparing a set of Club handouts for Rick to take to the event.

  • St. John's School Star Party in Bartlesville on August 23: Rick is working with the school on a star party for that evening. We will need to bring telescopes. He is working on our staffing for this event; if you can help, contact Rick. Denise is preparing a handout set for this event.

  • Astronomy Day, October 5: Rick Buck and John Blaesi are working on this. We need speakers for the afternoon indoor session at the library and Denise has reserved the back grassy area at Tri County Tech for a star party that night. Signup sheets were passed out for volunteering at this event.

Upcoming Astronomy Events (Rick Buck):

  • Okie-Tex Star Party, September 21-29, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, sponsored by the Oklahoma City Astronomy Club. Some BAS members will be there between Sept. 20th and 29th. Rick Buck and Rick Bryant are working on coordinating a BYA booth and a cookout.

Storage Committee Update (John Grismore):

  • The telescopes that Mike Woods had been storing for the club are now in two storage rooms in the First Christian Church, and these rooms have proven to be very nice for us to use.

  • The committee is still working on cataloging the contents, labeling, and developing a system for finding things.

  • If anyone has any Club property at home, get in touch with John Grismore or John Blaesi or Craig so we can get it into our storage area.

Astronomical League News (Kristi Herrman): No news this month.

Bartian Youth Astronomers Update (Rick Bryant): No update this month.

Other Announcements and Discussion:

  • Library Display: Our month for the library display next year will be April. Abby is working on a theme and she will be working with the BYA to put examples of crafts the group has done into the exhibit, as well as telescopes and astronomical photos.

  • Business Card Design: Rick Bryant has been working on this for us. Craig showed the Club a prototype printed on both sides, with QR codes for the BAS and BYA on the back. It looks cool! We may want to put a line at the bottom of the front of the card as a place for someone to put their name, should they want to do so.

  • Printing Costs: At the recent star party, some of us discussed the costs of printing at Staples. Denise has since been to the UPS Store on Hwy 75 (which does printing) as well as the Bartlesville Print Shop in downtown. The Bartlesville Print Shop considers a "volume order" (to get the price of printing a color page down to 35 cents) to be 40 copies, whereas the UPS Store considers a volume run (to get the price of printing a color page down to 39 cents) to be a hundred copies. Our print jobs don't go to 100 pages, so we will try using the Bartlesville Print Shop as a less expensive alternative to Staples.

  • Tri County Tech Meeting Rooms: Denise toured the Tri County Tech meeting rooms with Darlene, our events contact at Tri County Tech. Their meeting rooms are very nice, but for the most part would be beyond our budget. We could rent their Event Center on a Friday night for $400 if we have the proper non-profit state certification. (On a Saturday or Sunday, there wouldn't be a non-profit discount for that room and it would cost $800 for a four hour minimum.) We could also rent their Osage Room for $95 (non-profit rate) on a Friday night, ending by 9 pm. One reason weekend rentals are higher is because they have to pay for someone on their staff to be on-site. Darlene said they don't rent out their classrooms.

Member Astrophotos:

Abby's Astronomy News Compilation: None this month, because Abby is doing the main program for tonight's meeting.

Tonight's Program: LIGO -- Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, by Abby Bollenbach

  • Abby was invited to tour this facility in Livingston, Louisiana, by the president of the Baton Rouge Astronomical Society (BRAS) when she attended ALCON 2018. She was invited to visit at the same time that BRAS had their annual picnic there.

  • The Science Education Center at LIGO Livingston is a state-of-the-art interactive, exhibit-based science and math learning center which hosts field trips for students, teacher training programs, and tours for the general public. The Center provides a fun, interactive environment for exploring science concepts such as light, gravity, waves, interference and for learning about LIGO's search for gravitational waves. LIGO is the largest, most ambitious project ever funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry C. Barish "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

  • LIGO was designed, constructed, and is operated by a team of scientists, engineers from Caltech and MIT, as well as collaborators from over 80 scientific institutions worldwide that are members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

  • LIGO is a large-scale physics experiment research facility and observatory, designed to sense vibrations of gravitational waves from deep space with the aid of a laser interferometer. Two large observatories were built; one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington. They operate in unison and can detect a change in the 4 km mirror spacing of less than one-ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton. Their multi-km-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure minute ripples in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves from cataclysmic cosmic events like colliding neutron stars or black holes, or from supernovae.

  • LIGO’s original instruments were used from 2002 to 2010. A subsequent redesign installed in 2015 made the interferometers 10 times more sensitive than the originals, and within days, they picked up gravitational waves made by a pair of colliding black holes 1.3 billion light years away! Since then several other black hole mergers have been detected. As of December 2018, LIGO has made 11 detections of gravitational waves, of which 10 are from binary black hole mergers. The other event was the first detection of a collision of neutron stars. Another revamp will go in next year.