Astronomy

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Astronomy

Selected photographs are below on this page - Please Scroll Down

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."

– attributed to Henri Poincaré, ca. 1904

“We should be unwise to trust scientific inference very far when it becomes divorced from observational test.”

– Sir Arthur Eddington, The Internal Constitution of the Stars, 1924, p.1.

"...to wring these data from the near-mute starlight."

- Martin Schwarzchild, Structure and Evolution of the Stars, 1958, p.1.

And so we observe! (scroll down the page and click on the links)

About Grand View Observatory

Photometry/Spectroscopy Data Page

Photometry/Spectroscopy Projects - Web Page Views

Photometry/Spectroscopy Projects - PDF File

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Brian's background. My interest in astronomy began in the early 1960's, after observing the Echo satellites, viewing the planets through my 2-inch Gilbert Newtonian reflector, and learning the rudiments of celestial navigation. In eighth grade, and with the encouragement of my parent's and my best friend Christopher, I ground, polished and figured my own 6-inch mirror and built my first Newtonian telescope. The same year I joined the Delaware Astronomical Society (DAS) and received mentoring from Dr. Randy Barton, Al Webber, Mike Simmons, and Tom Hench; I most enjoyed the early morning forays into the countryside to observe occultations and grazes, armed with our small telescopes, WWV radios and tape recorders. My grandfather's lessons in photography helped me build cameras for my early attempts at astrophotography. The 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing and moon walk was a real spectacle, watched by the entire family 'in-real-time', on a black and white television in the family room of the bungalow on Elizabeth Avenue in Dewey Beach. The saga moves now to Elkton, Maryland.

While attending Elkton High School, in the mid-1970's I edited the DAS newsletter, Focus, and made presentations to audiences in Cecil County, Maryland. In those days, Elkton High School had a Spitz planetarium, Criterion 6-inch equatorial-mounted telescopes and a great group of enthusiastic teachers (Mrs. Burnett, Mr. Carrion, Mr. Cross, Mrs. Humphries, Ms. Smart, and Mlle Craven). I became interested in stellar evolution and cosmology when Dr. Richard Herr of the University of Delaware showed me glass plate images capturing the expansion of the crab nebula, taken with the Mount Cuba 24-inch Tinsley Cassegrain telescope. I spent a lot of time up there during high school.

I earned my bachelor of science degree in astronomy from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) in 1980, under the guidance of Dr's. Michael A'Hearn, John Carlson, Drake Deming, Frank Kerr, Patrick Harrington, Mike Zeilik, and Dave Zipoy. In those days we took photographs on glass plates which we scanned under a microdensitometer to obtain graphs that we next analyzed with a planimeter and slide rule. We learned photoelectric photometry with the RCA 1P21 tube, cooled with dry ice (made by flowing CO₂ gas from a large cylinder into a cheesecloth sack), and our data was acquired on a strip chart recorder whose red ink had to be kept from gumming up on cold nights (by any means available). My astronomy lab partners were Ken Shears and Peter Garnavich; I was lucky to have had a desk in the student room - I learned an immense amount from the graduate students and had a study place removed from the dormitory. I am lucky to have worked with Ken, who was an incredible electronics expert and who worked on the Very Large Array in Soccorro, New Mexico; he and I built a radio interferometer on the roof of the Space Sciences building at UMCP. We were also fortunate to have spent time at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Greenbank, West Virginia. I especially recall climbing up and standing on the dish of the original 300-foot telescope, and helping (watching) astronomers take data in the 21 cm radio band of the Milky Way.

At UMCP I was proud indeed to have received a B+ on a project to determine the orbital elements of the asteroid Vesta, without a computer, from three (3) images that I had taken at intervals over a 4 month period. A few years ago I found my tracings from the glass plates and re-analyzed them with astrometric software that I had subsequently wrote, and re-determined the elements with the same data, this time to within 5% of the published values!

Today I am an amateur astronomer and a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (observer code MBE). Together with Julie, we operate Grand View Observatory (GVO) from Maryland and Virginia and make photoelectric (BVRI, Wing ABC, and JH) and spectroscopic measurements of K, M and carbon stars, as well as novae and suspected variable stars. We share an interest in cosmology and have measured extragalactic Doppler shifts (Click here for M82 Results). We also enjoy taking the occasional photograph of extragalactic and solar system objects.

Please look through a selection of our data: GVO Observations (web pages)

Here is a file (large pdf) of selected observations: GVO Observations (pdf).

For recent and easily accessible data, use the Data page button here or at page bottom. We plan to eventually archive data by object.

Below are selected pictures from 2006-2008 (click on preview to open image):

Equipment