AAC volunteers needed for a Stargazing Outreach @ Hickory Ranch.
Volunteer members with and without telescopes please register here for entry to the event and for updates. I can still put volunteers to work even if you don't have a telescope!
A GO or NO GO will be emailed to registrants the day of the event. You need to be registered for me to send you updates!!
Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park is hosting an outreach for stargazing by the Alachua Astronomy Club, weather permitting, at Hickory Ranch.
Visitors (not AAC volunteers) need to register with Friends of Paynes Prairie at their website www.prairiefriends.org then click events for registration.
Sunset is at 6:03 pm. Event is scheduled to start at 5:30 pm and finish at 8:30 pm. We may go a bit later if weather is accommodating.
Volunteers should arrive no later than 5:00 pm. Pick out several sky objects and note a few details about them to share. The moon will already be up and the "star" of the night at 53.7 % illumination. Limited ac power is available with a long extension cord if needed. Temps fall after dark so dress warmly.
Point of contact for Alachua Astronomy Club is Lisa Eager, Star Party Coordinator @ 352-318-4074.
Our speaker will be attending in person, please try to attend in person too!
Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements 7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: James Albury
Planetarium Director and host of the YouTube Series "The Sky Above Us"
Topic: TBD
Join James Albury, host of the YouTube astronomy program "The Sky Above Us" (TheSkyAboveUs.org), and 2011-2019 co-host of the PBS TV Show "Star Gazers", as he takes you on a personally guided tour of our night sky, using our GOTO Chronos Space Simulator. Florida Skies is our weekly star show that familiarizes you with some of the popular constellations visible from sunset to sunrise, as well as the stories behind them. We'll also show you how and where in the sky you can find the brightest planets.
Speaker: G. Ralph Kuntz, MD, MS
Title: Electronically Assisted Astronomy
Abstract:
Electronically assisted astronomy (EAA) is a technology that has been around for many years, and yet few amateur astronomers know about it. EAA is a variant of visual astronomy where the eyepiece of the telescope is replaced with a camera. The first use of EAA occurred in 1928 right after the invention of the television, when a live "stream" of Mars was made using a TV camera attached to a telescope. EAA differs from traditional astrophotography in that EAA uses very short exposures of a few seconds to about 1 minute instead of many long (hour-plus) exposures used in astrophotography. While the quality of the images in EAA rarely approaches that of astrophotography, EAA satisfies a need for "instance gratification" and allows viewing many targets in a single evening, while also recording the views for the future.
About the Speaker:
Ralph Kuntz was born in Connecticut, but spent his childhood living in many parts of the Eastern United States because his father, a surgeon, always thought that the grass was greener somewhere else. He even spent three years from 1966 to 1969 living in Germany when his father received a nice invitation from the US Army to report to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for induction. Ralph attended the University of Florida, getting both bachelor's and master's degree in computer science. He also met his wife, Jamie Kistler, while in computer science graduate school. After they graduated, they both were hired by AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. A few years later, Ralph decide to pursue his dream of becoming a physician, so he enrolled at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (Rutgers University) and received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1994, followed by a three-year residency in internal medicine. Shortly after completely his residency, Ralph designed an electronic medical record (EMR) system that he felt catered more to the health-care professional than the ones in use at that time. He co-founded a medical software company to develop and market the EMR and the company was quite successful, being acquired by a large pharmaceutical corporation in 2011. Ralph had already retired from practicing medicine by that point to devote himself full-time to his company. He continued to work in the field of designing and developing medical software until 2016, when he retired. He now avidly pursues his hobbies playing the ukulele, woodworking/knife-making, and, of course, amateur astronomy and EAA.
Speaker: Christopher Layser
Independent Researcher/Lecturer
Society for Cultural Astronomy of the American Southwest
International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture
Pre-Columbian Society of the Penn Museum
Title:
Archaeoastronomy: A brief history of the discipline and four cultural examples of “Architectural Orientation Families”
Archaeoastronomy is the multi-disciplinary study of the beliefs and practices concerning the sky held by people of pre-historic cultures. It focuses on how people of the past put their astronomical knowledge to practical and ritual use. Its aim then, is to ask pertinent social questions about the human past. This lecture will briefly explore the history of the field, including its early missteps at Stonehenge, and the intervening years in search of a rigorous methodology. The second half of this discussion will focus on the concept of “orientation families”, groups of ceremonial architecture for a given culture which share a common orientation to a horizon declination marking a specific solar event. Examples presented will include ancient Egyptian and Hawaiian temples, Maya E-Group complexes, and the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest. How and why these particular orientations to astronomical events were important to the people of each culture will be stressed.
Christopher Layser earned his MA in Cultural Astronomy from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David where he was awarded the “Dyfernir Gwobr MA Seryddiaeth ac Astroleg Ddiwylliannol” (Alumni Association Dissertation Award) for outstanding dissertation of 2019 which was titled “Maya Skyscape Iconology: Can an Iconological Analysis of a Classic Period Vase (K1485) Further our Understanding of Ancient Maya Skyscapes?”. He was also one of the few to obtain the Post-Graduate Certificate in Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture from the short-lived program at the University of Oklahoma. Christopher is an assistant editor for the newly revived Journal of Astronomy in Culture, the official journal for the International Society of Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture (ISAAC) and organizes a monthly journal club for the Society for Cultural Astronomy in the American Southwest (SCAAS).
Research Interests
Christopher’s primary research interest and academic focus is the skyscape archaeology of the ancient Maya. He regularly participates in the excavation, digital mapping, and 3D imaging of ancient Maya ruins in northwestern Belize with the Maya Research Program (MRP) at such archaeological sites as Tz’unun, Xnoha, Tulix Mul, and Blue Creek. He will be returning to the field in 2023 to complete the mapping and archaeoastronomical analysis of the E-Group complex at Tz’unun. As a board member of the Penn Museum Pre-Columbian Society he books speakers, organizes workshops, and co-runs a monthly Maya Glyph Group. A secondary focus in the archaeoastronomy in the American Southwest will take him to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in summer of 2023 as part of a small research team sanctioned by the National Parks Services to continue the orientation studies of the Chacoan Great Houses.
Speaker: Jared Cathey
JWST and Gravitationally Lensed Systems
Speaker:
Dr. Rana Ezzeddine
Galactic Archaeology with the Oldest Stars
