Understanding the past habitable conditions on Mars is a primary scientific driver for NASA’s Curiosity rover. During the last eight years, Curiosity has traversed across diverse terrain within Gale crater and drilled the martian surface over two dozen times. Dr. Williams will provide an update on the latest scientific findings and share spectacular snapshots from along the rover’s journey. In addition, she will present an overview of NASA’s next robotic mission to Mars, Perseverance, which will land at Jezero crater in February 2021. 

Rebecca M. E. Williams is a planetary geologist who studies the history of water on Mars through orbiter and rover observations in conjunction with field-based analog studies on Earth. The overarching objective in her research is to understand the role of water in shaping the surface of Mars through comparison with similar landforms on Earth. She has led fieldwork at sites in Utah, California, Australia, Patagonia, and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to investigate river, lake and alluvial fan deposits. She was selected as a Participating Scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover in 2011. She has served in the role of principal investigator in eleven NASA-funded projects and as a team member with the MOC, CTX and THEMIS VIS cameras on spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Dr. Williams received her BA in physics and geology in 1995 from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 2000, she earned her Ph.D. in planetary science from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She was awarded the NASA Carl Sagan Fellowship for Early Career Researchers in 2006, and a 2017 Friend of Education by the Waunakee Teachers Association for her multi-year education and public outreach activities with students at all levels in the school district. Dr. Williams conducts research and rover operations from her home office in Waunakee, WI, where she lives with her husband and two daughters (8th & 12th grade).

The January meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to nonmembers who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, Jan 8 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm that day which will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

MAS’s annual telescope clinic is a chance for people in the Madison area to get their questions answered about telescopes and binoculars. It may also help you with some ideas for the gift-giving season.

Do you have an old telescope that’s gathering dust because you don’t know how to use it?Or are you looking to buy a new one? Whatever the case, join us Friday online and learn something. MAS members will be on hand to answer your questions about your existing telescope or give you ideas for your next purchase.

The December meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event.

This month we are opening the virtual meeting up to non-MAS members who may want to attend the meeting. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday, Dec 11 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm Friday, Dec 11 that will get you into the meeting by 7:30 on Friday evening.

Dr. Brady will talk about the generation of gravitational waves by colliding black holes and neutron stars, and how they are measured here on Earth using the LIGO detectors. He will tell the story of the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2017, through to the exciting observations that are becoming almost routine.

Patrick Brady received his B.Sc. from University College Dublin in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Alberta in 1994 where he studied with Werner Israel. He has held research positions at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Caltech, University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1999, Brady has been at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he holds the rank of Professor and is Director of the Leonard E Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology, and Astrophysics. Brady has been a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a Sloan Research Fellow, and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. Brady is a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and currently serves as Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. His research focuses on the analysis and interpretation of data from the worldwide network of gravitational-wave detectors.

The November meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event.

The September MAS meeting will be a virtual meeting hosted with Zoom.

UW Madison emeritus professor of the history of science Dr. Michael Shank will present on “Copernicus: A Life on the Frontiers.”

Description: An unexpected invitation to write a general-audience biography of Copernicus has forced this historian of medieval science to wrestle anew with the founding figure of the Scientific Revolution. I expected the assignment to be quick and easy. Instead, it has driven me back to the sources and completely changed my picture of the man. Copernicus was far more buffeted by Baltic politics and indebted to his late-medieval background than I had ever expected. In this talk, I emphasize his early life in a changing frontier context: the post-colonial political and economic turmoil of the southeastern Baltic frontier (13-15th c.), the astronomical excellence of the late-medieval University of Cracow, and the unsettled life of a prince-bishopric buffeted between the Prussia of the Teutonic Knights and the Kingdom of Poland during the emergent Reformation.

Michael H. Shank is Professor emeritus in the now-defunct Department of the History of Science at the UW-Madison, specializing in 14-15th-c. natural philosophy and astronomy. Most recently, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University (Beijing; fall 2017, fall 2019) and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Zhejiang University (Hangzhou; fall 2018).

The September meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to Facebook Group members who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday Sept 11 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm Friday Sept 11 that will get you into the meeting at 7:30 on Friday evening.

At the August MAS meeting, our guest speaker will be Shimon Kolkowitz of the UW-Madison physics department (assistant professor). Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this meeting will again be held via Zoom.

Optical atomic clocks are now the most stable and accurate timekeepers in the world, with fractional accuracies equivalent to neither losing nor gaining a second over the entire age of the universe. This unprecedented level of metrological precision offers sensitivity to new physics phenomena, opening the door to exciting and unusual applications. This talk will provide an introduction to how and why time is measured from a historical perspective, with an emphasis on the recent development of optical atomic clocks and their applications. I will discuss recent progress on pushing clocks to even greater levels of precision, as well as prospects for future improvement. Finally, I will give a brief overview of potential future applications of clocks, including gravitational wave detection, tests of general relativity, and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Shimon Kolkowitz is an assistant professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where his research is focused on experimental atomic physics and quantum science. He works on building novel and precise sensors to study fundamental physics and to develop new quantum technologies. Shimon received his B.S. from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University, where his research focused on nanoscale sensing with quantum systems. He did his postdoctoral research on ultra-precise optical atomic clocks at NIST/CU Boulder, where he was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow. He is the author of research articles published in Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters amongst many other journals. Shimon was recently named a 2019 “Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering.”

The August meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to Facebook Group members who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday August 14 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm Friday August 14 that will get you into the meeting at 7:30 on Friday evening.

PHOTO CAPTION: “In the picture above, the glowing blue ball at the center of the round vacuum chamber window is a cloud of roughly 10 million strontium atoms cooled to one-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero and levitated in empty space by a combination of laser light and large magnetic field gradients. These atoms are the heart of the ultra-precise atomic clock being built in the Kolkowitz labs at the UW-Madison physics department.”

The July meeting of the Madison Astronomical Society will again be held online. Our guest speaker is Jordan Marché of the UW Madison. Jordan’s talk is entitled: “Solar System Remnants.”

The ‘golden age’ of planetary exploration continues unabated. Along with all of the major planets and their principal satellites, spacecraft have explored the dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres, the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth (formerly Ultima-Thule), together with a number of large and small asteroids and comets. This talk presents an overview of many of the latest surveys and discoveries concerning these ‘minor’ members of the Solar System, along with implications for how they have redirected the evolution of life here on Earth. This talk will be delivered live by Zoom; questions and answers can be addressed.

About the Speaker

Jordan Marché is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned both his bachelor’s degree in Astronomy (1977) and a master’s degree in Planetarium Education (1978) from Michigan State University. He later earned a Ph.D. in the History of Astronomy (1999) from Indiana University, with a study of the American planetarium community. This work was revised and published (2005) as a book: Theaters of Time and Space: American Planetaria, 1930-1970.

Jordan was in charge of school programs at the Fleischmann Planetarium, University of Nevada-Reno (1980-1983), and directed the planetarium at the North Museum, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania (1983-1990). He was also an assistant professor of astronomy at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (2005-2008). In addition, he served on the editorial board for the first two editions of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomy (Springer, 2007; 2014). As an astronomical hobbyist, he has done photographic astrometry of asteroids and comets, performed optical ray tracings, and designed and built several reflecting telescopes. He has also built (or helped to build) four observatories; three of which had rotating domes.

The July meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with link and instructions to join a day or two before the event. Again this month we are opening the virtual meeting up to Facebook Group members who may want to join in. If you would like to attend the MAS virtual meeting, send an email to madisonastro.info@gmail.com by noon Friday July 10 to let us know of your interest. We will email you the Zoom link at 3pm Friday July 10 that will get you into the meeting at 7:30 on Friday evening.

The Madison Astronomical Society is turning 90 next year. All this spring the History Committee has been delving into the archives, interviewing surviving members, pouring over newspaper microfiche, and turning over rocks. Come see some of the surprises we’ve discovered.

This photo was shot at the Oscar Mayer Observatory (in Fitchburg) sometime in the mid-1970s by one of the Explorer Post Scouts. This observatory used to be the UW “Students’ Observatory” and from 1880 to 1960 sat on Observatory Hill right beside the Washburn Observatory. In 1960, as the university moved its Astronomy department into Sterling hall and its observing activities to facilities on mountaintops in the western US, it donated this observatory to the MAS, who moved it to Fitchburg, where it still stands today. MAS abandoned it in 1985 when it moved to YRS in Green County.

The Scouts’ Explorer Post was MAS’s youth outreach arm, a surprisingly active and energetic group of high-school-age boys and girls who kept the older folks alert for their shenanigans. Before that, in the 50s and 60s, there was a “Junior” MAS, since a membership requirement for the main group was that members be 18 years of age or older.

The June meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with link and instructions to join a day or two before the event.

Geoff Holt was accepted into the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP) this past year which teamed him up with other teachers around the country and an astronomer from CalTech/JPL. This program aims to give teachers experience doing actual astronomy research, and they can get students involved if they wish. Over the past year, Geoff and five James Madison Memorial High School students have been participating in this research team. Their goal has been to mine the Spitzer Space Telescope data archive in search of sources that have an excess of infrared light compared to a black body curve. The infrared excess is most likely due to dust in evolved stars, young stellar objects, debris disks around stars, active galactic nuclei, and luminous infrared galaxies. They travelled to Hawaii in January to present their results at the American Astronomical Society meeting. Come to hear more about their research and how you can mine the Spitzer archive as well.

Note: Due to continuing state guidance in light of COVID-19, this meeting will be conducted virtually via a Zoom-hosted conference. All MAS members will receive an email 24-48 hours before the meeting with instructions on how to join. Due to Zoom meeting size limitations, this meeting is only open to MAS members and a few select guests. We will attempt to record the presentation and make it available via MAS’s facebook page shortly after the event concludes.