Stockton Astronomical Society

Valley Skies - December 2005 Issue

Editor's Corner...

Congratulations to the Officers for 2006

Members attending the November 10 meeting elected the following officers to lead the club through 2006:

President:	Lloyd Altamirano
VP/Program Director:	Jerry Hyatt
Secretary:	Christie Abbott
Treasurer:	Frank Wheeler
Newsletter Editor:	Trevor Atkinson
Member-at-Large:	Becky Greider
Member-at-Large:	Roger Stark

The only change from this year is the election of Lloyd Altamirano, relieving Jerry from the dual responsibility of acting president and program director.

We are particularly thrilled that Lloyd has agreed to serve. Over the last couple of years, Lloyd has fought through the rigors of radiation and chemotherapy treatments for an unusual form of lung cancer (Lloyd was never a smoker). We are delighted that he's again feeling well enough to take on a new challenge.

Come to the January dinner and welcome Lloyd and all of the returning officers.

...Trevor Atkinson

The Science Directorate at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center sponsors the Science@NASA web sites. The mission of Science@NASA is to help the public understand how exciting NASA research is and to help NASA scientists fulfill their outreach responsibilities.

Space-time Vortex

Patrick L. Barry and Dr. Tony Phillips

NASA's Gravity Probe B spacecraft has gathered all the data physicists need to check a bizarre prediction of Einstein's relativity.

November 16, 2005:   Is Earth in a vortex of space-time?

We'll soon know the answer: A NASA/Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth-and, possibly, the vortex.

An artist's concept of twisted space-time around Earth.

Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The tremendous mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.

If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space to check.

The idea behind the experiment is simple:

Put a spinning gyroscope into orbit around the Earth, with the spin axis pointed toward some distant star as a fixed reference point. Free from external forces, the gyroscope's axis should continue pointing at the star-forever. But if space is twisted, the direction of the gyroscope's axis should drift over time. By noting this change in direction relative to the star, the twists of space-time could be measured.

In practice, the experiment is tremendously difficult.

The four gyroscopes in GP-B are the most perfect spheres ever made by humans. These ping pong-sized balls of fused quartz and silicon are 1.5 inches across and never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. If the gyroscopes weren't so spherical, their spin axes would wobble even without the effects of relativity.

According to calculations, the twisted space-time around Earth should cause the axes of the gyros to drift merely 0.041 arcseconds over a year. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree. To measure this angle reasonably well, GP-B needed a fantastic precision of 0.0005 arcseconds. It's like measuring the thickness of a sheet of paper held edge-on 100 miles away.

GP-B researchers invented whole new technologies to make this possible. They developed a "drag free" satellite that could brush against the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere without disturbing the gyros. They figured out how to keep Earth's penetrating magnetic field out of the spacecraft. And they concocted a device to measure the spin of a gyro-without touching the gyro.

One of the spherical gyroscopes of Gravity Probe B.

Pulling off the experiment was an exceptional challenge. A lot of time and money was on the line, but the GP-B scientists appear to have done it.

"There were not any major surprises" in the experiment's performance, says physics professor Francis Everitt, the Principal Investigator for GP-B at Stanford University. Now that data-taking is complete, he says the mood among the GP-B scientists is "a lot of enthusiasm, and a realization also that a lot of grinding hard work is ahead of us."

A careful, thorough analysis of the data is underway. The scientists will do it in three stages, Everitt explains. First, they will look at the data from each day of the year-long experiment, checking for irregularities. Next they'll break the data into roughly month-long chunks, and finally they'll look at the whole year. By doing it this way, the scientists should be able to find any problems that a more simple analysis might miss.

Eventually scientists around the world will scrutinize the data. Says Everitt, "we want our sternest critics to be us."

The stakes are high. If they detect the vortex, precisely as expected, it simply means that Einstein was right, again. But what if they don't? There might be a flaw in Einstein's theory, a tiny discrepancy that heralds a revolution in physics.

First, though, there are a lot of data to analyze. Stay tuned.

New Madeira Monument Dedication - January 21, 2006

George David Madeira (1836-1922), a miner in Volcano, Amador County, built the first astronomical observatory in California, in 1860. With the Stockton Astronomical Society taking a leading role, a monument was erected in 1968 about four miles outside Volcano, marking the location as "Observatory Hill" - erroneously as it turned out. The location error was acknowledge by the State Historical Resources Board in 1991.

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 21, a new monument located in the town of Volcano will be dedicated. Descendants of George Madeira will participate in the ceremony.

SAS member Marshal Merriam, who has researched the history of George Madeira in great depth, has been largely instrumental in bringing about the creation and placement of the new monument. In fact, Marshal matched donations by the SAS and the SVAS (Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society) to cover the cost of the monument.

Marshal will be the keynote speaker for the Saturday morning program, talking about the life and times of George Madeira. Members of the SAS are invited to attend. In fact, a good representative turnout by the SAS would be most appropriate.

Full details will be in the January issue.

Voices from the Cacophony

By Trudy E. Bell and Dr. Tony Phillips

Around 2015, NASA and the European Space Agency plan to launch one of the biggest and most exacting space experiments ever flown: LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

LISA will consist of three spacecraft flying in a triangular formation behind Earth. Each spacecraft will beam a laser at the other two, continuously measuring their mutual separation. The spacecraft will be a mind-boggling 5 million kilometers apart (12 times the Earth-Moon distance) yet they will monitor their mutual separation to one billionth of a centimeter, smaller than an atom's diameter.

LISA's mission is to detect gravitational waves-ripples in space-time caused by the Universe's most violent events: galaxies colliding with other galaxies, supermassive black holes gobbling each other, and even echoes still ricocheting from the Big Bang that created the Universe. By studying the shape, frequency, and timing of gravitational waves, astronomers believe they can learn what's happening deep inside these acts of celestial violence.

The problem is, no one has ever directly detected gravitational waves: they're still a theoretical prediction. So no one truly knows what they "sound" like.

Furthermore, theorists expect the Universe to be booming with thousands of sources of gravitational waves. Unlike a regular telescope that can point to one part of the sky at a time, LISA receives gravitational waves from many directions at once. It's a cacophony. Astronomers must figure how to distinguish one signal from another. An outburst is detected! Was it caused by two neutron stars colliding over here or a pair of supermassive black holes tearing each other apart in colliding galaxies over there?

"It's a profound data-analysis problem that ground-based astronomers don't encounter," says E. Sterl Phinney, professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Profound, but not hopeless: "We have lots of good ideas and plans that work-in theory," he says. "The goal now is to prove that they actually work under real conditions, and to make sure we haven't forgotten something."

To that end, theorists and instrument-designers have been spending time together brainstorming, testing ideas, scrutinizing plans, figuring out how they'll pluck individual voices from the cacophony. And they're making progress on computer codes to do the job.

Says Bonny Schumaker, a member of the LISA team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "It's a challenge more than a problem, and in fact, when overcome, a gift of information from the universe."

For more info about LISA, see lisa.nasa.gov. Kids can learn about black holes and play the new "Black Hole Rescue!" game on The Space Place Web site at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/blackhole/.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Dr. Custer's Telescope: Opportunity Lost
(correspondence extracts continued from the November issue)

From: Trevor Atkinson to Rick Mielbrecht, October 16.
Rick, Do you know the whereabouts of Clarence Custer's telescope components? Seems to me you had thoughts of using parts of it for your twin twelve??? Are all the pieces still around? Is there any way it could be resurrected for the Smithsonian? I believe the mirror is still in the back room of the planetarium. I don't know what else is still back there, other than boxes of Custer's glass slides and observing notes.

From: Trevor Atkinson to Fred Schumacher, October 16.
Fred, can you refresh my memory of just what was done with Custer's telescope? The Smithsonian wants it! I know the pier was destroyed in the removal process but what was done with the rest of the scope? Let me know what you remember.

From: Fred Schumacher, October 16, 2005
Trevor, You are correct. Unfortunately, the pier did not survive the disassembly process..... more than ten year ago now ... If my memory serves me correctly we were able to disassemble the telescope tube and it was moved to the Planetarium.

The 12" mirror was removed and stored in the telescope loft in the upper back of the Planetarium. We also carefully removed the 'hypering' hardware (regulators, lines, etc) from his lab behind the house. Those items were moved along with the telescope. I believe they were stored in the wooden locker just below the stairs... I do remember what the items looked like so maybe I could stop by the Planetarium and see if anything appears familiar. Fred

From Rudi Lindner, October 16:
Dear Trevor and Rick: The Smithsonian curator is Dr. David DeVorkin. He is a historian of astronomy and has published a number of books on the history of astrophysics and the space program. He organizes the exhibits at the Smithsonian Space Museum, which gets a ton of visits.

I was at a history of astronomy meeting with him and some others, and we got to talking about historical instruments made by amateurs. It turns out that relatively few Springfield mountings were made outside of Springfield, and that the Custer Springfield was the largest and best of the lot. When Walter Baade lectured to the SAS in the 1950s, Custer showed him his photos of M31, and Baade pointed out some of the globular clusters surrounding the galaxy, and commented on the high quality of the guiding and photo.

Remember that Dr. Custer took prime focus images, using an interesting guiding device that I think was developed from a device Nicholas Mayall used on the Crossley reflector at Lick (Mayall was a protege of Hubble, a great observer of galaxies at Lick, and also a native of Stockton - I once had the pleasure of seeing him kick the Crossley tube in frustration). I do not believe that any other American amateur was taking images at the prime focus of a reflector at that time. The S&T article has a retouched photo of the apparatus.

So this means that it would be important, at least for the time being, to keep the glass plates and observing notes. I am attending a meeting in D.C. on the preservation of astronomical archives in three months, and one of the issues is the preservation and documentation of important observations, and Custer's photos are on the list produced by Tom Williams, a Rice University historian of amateur astronomy.

When I told my associates that I knew Custer and that I had heard his telescope might still be intact (if in pieces), they began to salivate.

DeVorkin averred that he had slobbered over the S&T cover that showed Custer navigating the Springfield. Well, that's what the man said. He told me that the Museum would display the Custer Springfield if they could obtain it, period.

Of course when it was dismantled I imagine that it was in pieces - it was originally fabricated from plans by the Carando Metal Works in downtown Stockton (near the Port and the old Police Station), and it had a lot of hunks of metal. But even if in pieces, if it could be reconstituted, it would be important.

I do hope the instrument is more rather than less intact, if not for the Smithsonian, then at least for the time when it can receive the love it deserves. What a pity that Dr. Custer, who was not a, shall we say, man to display humility, did not live to see the Smithsonian people go ape. With best regards from the cloudy skies of Ann Arbor, Rudi

From Rick Mielbrecht:
Trevor, Clarence's scope was disassembled and the usable parts were incorporated into other systems. The mirror, as you know, was not usable so it must be around. The declination axis was scrapped and the polar axis incorporated into the twin-twelve. Focusers, spiders, secondary, tube and pier were all scrapped. Don't think there is much left besides the main mirror and I'm not sure where that is. Sorry. Rick

This may not be the end of the trail...more in the January issue. T.A.

Copyright © 2005 by Stockton Astronomical Society
Last Updated: 12/3/2005
http://astro.sci.uop.edu/~sas/Newsletter/VS0512.html