It’s been a long day, not difficult, just one that seemed long because I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. So I was walking around like a zombie much of the day.
Fortunately work was slow today and it was nice and sunny this afternoon. It reminded me of a pop up that arrived on my iphone yesterday about a big “solar event” that was happening. I have a free iphone app from NASA called 3d Sun that anyone can get for the iphone. It has a push notification setting, that will signal you that a big solar event is happening.
This application has a real time update and view of the sun a map of almost the entire sun from two satillites that NASA has out there aimed at the sun. These orbit one in front and one behind the path of the earth and aim at the sun to beam back a “stereo” view of the sun. They show 89% of the surface of it. A nice animated globe representation is on my iphone when this application is first running that shows me what is going on with the sun.
It shows sunspots, and there are even youtube updates and links that can show you filmed recordings of events like a comet that recently flew so close to the sun it disintegrated.
There was a huge flare yesterday and I was talking with someone on the phone when this beep and message popped up on my phone. I opened up the 3D app as soon as I was off the phone and the details were right there in the message area from 3d Sun.
There’s a huge event happening which is huge ejections of material from the sun. Nasa says something collided with the far side of the sun yesterday and that’s has triggered a big event. There are also three big sunspots that are on the sun right now. I can see the representation/photo render or whatever we should call it on my iphone, but of course I’d rather run out to the observatory on a sunny day and take a peek.
But work stuff was going to tie me down at work. I was in a holding pattern at work today. Also I didn’t want to go out there during the day, without calling Leo McMaster (school teacher at the middle school.) Leo was probably in class teaching. And who knows maybe Leo was lucky enough to take them out there and show them some solar flares or something. So I just waited around and did my daily tasks. I thought about leaving early and heading out there and made half an effort. I had a few errands to run as well so there was no way I’d likely get there in time.
The day would be over. But the sunspots would remain for another day.
Maybe I could do the next best thing since the temperatures were warm and 45 degrees F this afternoon and still nearly 40 as the sun was setting.
I thought I could go during the daylight and look for a hole in the dome. Maybe a small hole which I suspected was letting water in, would be visible with a bright sky outside and I could shut myself in the dome and see the light and find the leak.
I called Greg Ozimek to let him know I was about to go in there. I think I called Leo as well and left a message. It might not have even been about my short visit, because i didn’t plan on using the solar scope. I figured I’d take a peek and see how much the sun was going into the dome. It seemed too low. I decided to open up the shutter and record a short movie on my iphone and record the noise of the shutter opening. I wanted a little more light in with the shutter open, because I didn’t want to use a flash to take a photo of it's current state. A quick photo of the floor would show how much things were cleaned up. I could send it to Greg Ozimek of post it here to show him the current state of clutter inside.
I arrived when the sun was about an hour from setting. The snow was still around the observatory and my tracks from a last week were still there. The snow of course was slushy. Rather than bring a shovel or walk the long path I just took the direct path and walked out through the mushy mess. That's what boots are for.
Once there I opened up the observatory and heard the alarm system start to make noises. It’s now functioning for those who want to know. I entered in quickly and disarmed the alarm. Happy to note it's functioning.
Well the good news is there are no holes that are visible in the dome. This means the water is coming in some way, but it’s not easy to detect. I thought there was a hole the other week, when looking at the condensation inside the dome, over the area where ice existed, but I guess that doesn’t prove a small hole exists.
The other thing perhaps I ignored before or never noticed was the inside of the dome has a bunch of little dents and dings in it. These number in the hundreds and it looks like somebody over the years has been shooting pellet or bb guns as the dome or perhaps throwing small rocks at it. I suppose we could do some kind of forensic dig for bbs or pellets or something. Probably the crew that repainted the dome and fixed it up were aware of this, I just never noticed it before.
I’d like to claim they were meteorite impacts, but to have that many we’d have to be on the moon.
I also took a photo of the old tube we still have stored in the observatory. Greg Ozimek mentioned in one of our weekend conversations that he thought there was little room in the Lincoln Park museum and wonders how much of a challenge it will be to actually put such a large telescope on display there. He said the museum is filled up with a lot of stuff already. This of course causes my half asleep mind to wander. Every member of the club or person involved with the observatory probably has their own set of dreams or ideas that are totally different if they think about how the observatory would be used or how the students would proceed. I’ve been through several variations of dreams and ideas myself, but all these of course are just my own and more for a diary entry than serious projects to pursue.
I’ll try to start listing a few of these perhaps over the next few blog posts. For now I'll start with a few of my own wacky thoughts and ideas. This is just meant to be a list and example of some wild dreams people can come up with in thinking how far a project could go. And I know that none of these are really a great fix for a known problem or issue and there’s really no demand for these.
THE MEETING CONTROL ROOM
- Build a small building next to the observatory as a type of planetarium training room. This would have a roll off room observatory on the second floor or a platform for outdoor telescopes. That outside platform would also function as a video camera platform for an end zone video location for football games. So it would be a small multipurpose building. How would you build it? It would be a project and could even in my dream scenario be a natural building. That is one build to be off grid as far as heating and cooling and would have a storage room inside it that would act as an area where other telescopes by the club or school could be stored. This of course would have a small room for a planetarium or some kind of AV presentation room and you could perhaps feed it with live video images from the observatory if you linked the two. you could perhaps image and send live feeds to this warmer building that would have seats and allow people to sit in a warm presentation room while the telescope in the observatory was controlled or run by one operator, or via remote control. This would allow a kind of one room schoolhouse concept as a teaching room and also it could be built by the students if you created it with natural building materials it would even be a green low embedded energy building.
This of course is just one idea I had early on as a blue sky idea as soon as I heard about the observatory. The nice thing about new projects is many get onboard and excited about them, but once they are complete it’s hard to keep sustained enthusiasm. I think as humans we tend to look for the new and ignore those who just maintain the old. You can get a lot more excited about an architecture presentation than talking about janitorial services.
Knowing how things turn out, even if something as wild as what I've just described happened, chances are it would end up being a permanent hot dog stand or something instead and the original thought or purpose of the building would change.
Of course there are a million and much smaller footprint variations to this. For example before I even knew about this project Tim Dey and others were talking and dreaming about a wifi link and broadcasting over the net to the school. With that technology you don’t need to worry about some buried cable and link to a media or presentation room next store, you can just use a wifi beam to send the images right into the classroom. We have the WIFI link already. So that is a possible feature and it takes a lot less building, sweat and money to do.
When I talk and chat to others I find everyone of course has their own ideal scenario on how to advance or move astronomy forward and teach kids. Usually old timers who have been out of astronomy and were in the old astronomy club, think about the old days and want to repeat it.
I was talking to one of the Jr High members and he was saying you could just buy a bunch of telescopes and have them hauled out of the observatory and lets kids find objects the old fashioned way. You don’t need goto and computers, was his comment during a part of our phone call. He thought all the expensive technology was overkill. There’s probably a bit of truth, in keeping things simple to teach the basics. But it's a lot nicer to have the high tech options. You can always haul out some old technology and star charts and teach the older ways.
I’m looking at this old acid etched 12.5 inch mirror sitting on the floor a reflection of the past looking at the present. And wondering. A dream of the day.
A FOLDED DOB?
I could send it out to get it resurfaced, and not even work on the mirror, get it aluminized and perhaps create a design that uses a folded newtonian design. We could use perhaps a 4 inch secondary flat and fold the optics and have a folded dobsonian telescope as a telescope project. It could be mostly done without much optical work at all. We’d let the shop class build the dobsonian portion of the project and assemble it. Then again we could even have club members work on the mirror, but it’s a 12.5 inch and who in the club wants to rip their back working on polishing a mirror like that.
So I’m looking at that mirror and thinking hmm. . . maybe we don’t need to put it in the museum yet, maybe we can just give the museum the tube the tube and build a folded dob. But then where do we store it. Hmm. . . back to the straw bale natural building. Then again, there's a 20 inch super fast mirror I saw out there on Astromart. That would make a killer dob. But of course it's a bigger expense and perhaps an example of overkill and telescope fever.
CONCLUSION
This is why really in the end, it’s a question of who will use the facilities and what kids in the school will ultimately do and choose to do. There may be some guidance from sponsors or teachers of the school, but it all comes down to vision and if they really want to do something and what their vision would be. For example we had a club in the old days, and that was a vision and we were into building things back then by hand to save money. Maybe times back then were focused more on manufacturing and that part of Michigan history. My friend had a machine shop in Wyandotte. We built more stuff in the USA, it was more natural for kids to think it's cool to build stuff with your hands, and maybe you'll work in a small factory or inventive shop like Edison worked in back then. Today it's more about electronics, the internet and perhaps texting. We just buy what we want and charge it. Maybe our environment today is to must past the build it yourself mentality and more into integration. Maybe I'm just tired and trying to sound like an old timer and say things are different. Today it’s a lot easier to just go fund raise and buy a telescope build by a company. So the old timers who want to grind and build dobs are at a disadvantage.
In the old days, but I’m not trying to say we need to bring them back, the club kind of decided what it wanted to do. Probably due to direction of the Jr. High club officers. We were of course encouraged and perhaps guided by the sponsors, with what resources were available. It was more of a kid directed thing. Currently the observatory really doesn’t have kid enthusiasm as far as I can tell with any input in what will happen, or what should happen next. Maybe Leo could tell me more about this and maybe there is some enthusiam, but perhaps it's more from FAAC than from the kids at school.
It’s something for the school system to eventually work through. As far as I can tell FAAC helps to run it and we are still setting it up and getting the bugs out. It will be interesting to see what happens. Of course these are just my own thoughts at this time and I'm writing a long post, so don't take this as any kind of official FAAC statement, it's just my musings of the day.
As I post this I can’t help but feel I’m writing to much obvious stuff and perhaps 40 % more wording than I should in this blog. My next blog entry will be a little more brief and stay on one subject.
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