December Holiday Party & Meeting with Dennis di Cicco
Saturday, December 4, 2010, 7:00 pm
Fun with 6 Billion Pixels: Building a Huge Hydrogen-Alpha Mosaic of the Winter Milky Way
We are continuing our Skyscrapers tradition and will be holding our December Meeting on the Saturday (Dec. 4th) at 7:00 rather than our normal Friday. Our meeting will be at the Scituate Community Center, as it will be from December through April. We are planning to have a Pot Luck Dinner, and past years have proven that many of our members are not only astronomically capable but gastronomically proficient as well.We have planned on providing the coffee, hot chocolate, apple cider, and some pastries. The Saturday date was decided upon years ago to allow those planning a homemade dish sufficient time to prepare them, and to provide our members adequate time to arrive. Let me know what food item you plan to bring so that our efforts can be coordinated and we don’t end up with too much of any one item. You can contact me via e-mail at DeepSpaceViewer@aol.com or call me at 401-489-1957.
Last winter the speaker and his colleague Sean Walker tackled their most ambitious joint project yet -- creating an 85-degree-square mosaic of the Milky Way stretching from Canis Major to Perseus made with deep exposures in hydrogen-alpha light. Between October and January the speaker made approximately 130 hours of exposure from his backyard observatory in Sudbury, Massachusetts. In the weeks that followed, Sean spent an equal amount of time assembling the 25-frame mosaic, which, if printed at it's native resolution, would make a print nearly 12 feet square. The image shows many large-scale nebulous structures that are all but unknown to observers. This popular-level talk will explain how the mosaic was made and why it's not the kind of project that sane people should attempt.
