National Optical Astronomy Observatory

White House Star Party

Two NOAO astronomers, Dr. Dara Norman and Dr. Stephen Pompea, at the White House Star Party on Wednesday, Oct 7. The event, attended by local middle school students, was designed to promote science literacy. Telescopes on the White House lawn were focused on Jupiter, the Moon and select stars; interactive dome presentations; and hands-on activities. Dara and Steve had the honor of meeting President Obama and his family, and showing them objects through their telescopes. Dara also shared SPECTRUM, the newsletter of the Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy.

Steve demonstrated the Galileoscope, created for the International Year of Astronomy. This new, high-quality telescope kit for students enables kids to learn how to do science, making the same observations that Galileo made 400 years ago.

IC 5067, Pelican Nebula

IC 5067, a star forming region in Cygnus, is also sometimes called the Pelican Nebula. This image was taken May 24, 2009 by Gregor Rothfuss, a first time visitor to the Kitt Peak Advanced Observing Program, with the help of Kitt Peak Visitor Center operator Flynn Haase. They used the VC 20-inch RC telescope with an SBIG STL-6303E camera and AstroDon LRGB filters. Exposures were 120:40:40:40 respectively. This was Mr. Rothfuss’s first experience doing CCD imaging. The Kitt Peak Visitor Center program, which receives no financial support from the observatory, offers paying guests the opportunity to do their own observing and imaging.

G. Rothfuss, S. Byers, F. Haase and NOAO/AURA/NSF

NSF Commits New Funds for ReSTAR

New funds allocated for ReSTAR by the NSF will provide immediate access to the Palomar 200-inch telescope, fund a copy of the OSMOS optical spectrograph for the Mayall 4-m and more. Read about this and more in the latest edition of NOAO Currents.

Kitt Peak Then and Now

Composite image showing a view of Kitt Peak looking north from near the location of the 0.9-m dome. Left: a re-discovered image from Dr. Aden Meinel taken during his first visit to the summit while scouting potential sites for the National Observatory. Right: image by Dr. John Glaspey from April 2009, shows the changes that have taken place in the last 50 years.

NOAO/NSO Newsletter
June 2009

This issue includes an article by Andrei Tokovinin about speckle interferometry at the SOAR telescope. Short-exposure images of a 1.08" binary star were co-added with re-centering on the global centroid (left), or on the brightest pixel, selecting the sharpest 10 percent of images (right). This latter technique, dubbed “lucky imaging”, is gaining popularity .