GARSEF 2025: The Greater Austin Regional Science and Engineering Fair

This was my 14^th year, and again on Thursday, I judged senior and junior high school competitors in Behavioral and Social Sciences and then on Saturday, I reviewed the upper and lower elementary entries. In other years I have served for middle school physics or engineering. (My degrees are in criminology and social science and I have some experience as a technical writer in the other areas.) Behavioral always has about 30 to 40 entrants served by three to five teams of six or seven judges. This year, the young scientists were better prepared and they presented themselves better than in the wake of Covid-19 which shut down the schools. Say what you like about the problems with socialized education, generally speaking, teachers are better educators than are parents and school is a better learning environment. That said, they still have not come up to the pre-Covid metrics for performance. 

 

In particular, none of them in this category presented project diaries (typically in bound composition books) or methods and results (in 3-ring binders). One did actually have about 1000 data items on their tablet computer but I had to repeat the question: “You say that you reviewed a hundred entries each from ten different people but where are they?”

 

AI was big this year. Based on our instructions, for most categories, the challenge was to sort out the results provided by an AI from the work of the student. In Behavioral, two of the competitors had no human subjects but instead trained AIs to respond like people (or so they claimed). As far as I could tell, the young researchers all think that AI is new and none of them had heard of ELIZA. 

 

Overall, in the senior division I was unwilling to advance any entrant to second-round judging, so two more judges were sent down to the hall to find some, which they did. My perception is that the middle schoolers did better than the high schoolers and the elementary entrants were the most promising of all. Parents tend to be more involved with the little kids, for better or worse. I did award a second place and tell the child to give the award to their mother but the youngster did know their stuff and did do the work, so, that counts. I also gave out to kiddos a couple of post-it notes with suggestions for future research. I am looking forward to seeing them (and their notebooks) next year.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Science Fair: A National Geographic Film 

An Abundance of Talent: the 2015 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 

2017 Austin Energy Regional Science Fair 

Science Fairs and Science Frauds 

Astronomy: Two Minor Books for the Backyard

There’s a lot of books out there for backyard stargazers. Amateur astronomers with some experience tend to recommend a few favorites with longevity. 

• Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis (Cambridge University Press; five editions 1989 to 2019); 
• Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe by Terence Dickson (Firefly Books; four editions 1989 to 2019); 
• and The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer (Firefly Books; four editions 1991 to 2021). 

These two books are not at that level but there’s nothing wrong with them. You would have to search well to find them for more than $10 online and your local used bookstore probably has them for that much or less (and no shipping). And as always, check the city library.

Starwatch by Ben Mayer (New York: Perigee Books, 1984).

 In a layout favored by book designers in the 1970s Starwatch by Ben Mayer offers two unique teaching aids for learning the night sky. The author shows how to construct “starframes” from clear kitchen wrap stretched on coat hangers bent into rectangles. Scaled with the illustrations in the book you can hold the frame up to the sky to find constellations and the deep sky objects within them. 

Mayer also shows how to build a projection system that he calls a “problicom” for revealing new objects that have appeared on successive nights. His system requires two slide projectors. Mayer also insists that you can take pictures of the night sky with a standard 35mm camera and a 50mm lens. That being as it may, it is true that with a different machine on the same principle, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Modern technology offers other solutions but the method is sound. 

Those two projects open and close the book. Most of the book is a tour of 25 constellations in the northern night sky. The rest of the book is about celestial coordinates, comets, meteors, adapting to the dark, and other standard topics. For the constellations, every layout includes a classical artistic drawing, a guide to estimate the location, the geometric arrangement of the stars, and a list of interesting targets for your telescope.

 

The Stars : The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos by Robert Dinwiddie, et al., delivers a solution to an esoteric problem with all books: we project a spherical sky onto a flat page. This criticism came up on the Cloudy Nights discussion board as a reason not to give a planisphere to a child. I reject the criticism but I understand the point. The illustrations in this book are spherical projections. Those prints are also pieces of a puzzle that could be reproduced, cut and pasted onto a sphere. Also included are call-outs to favored targets: the Messier objects (of course), binary stars, and so on. 

 

The Stars: The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos
by Robert Dinwiddie; David W Hughes;
Geraint H Jones; Ian Ridpath; Carole Stott;
Giles Sparrow (New York, New York : DK Publishing
and  London : Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2016)

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies 

De Magnete by William Gilbert 

Galileo’s Two Sciences 

Vectures: Monetizing Urban Transportation 

 

Baader-Planetarium Micro-Guide Reticle

This eyepiece can serve any amateur astronomer who wants to make their own measurements of separations and positions of binary stars or the extents of features on the Moon. Given some facility with this little tool, you could probably measure anything you can see. 

It is called a “Log Pot Illuminator” because the brightness control is logarithmic: you have to turn the knob much to make it a little brighter or a bit dimmer. In other words, it delivers very fine control. (“Pot” is short for “potentiometer” an older word from the early days of electricity for a volume control, gain, or variable resistance.) You sharpen the image of the scales by turning the top screw mount of the ocular. It is very simple and intuitive. You focus the eyepiece as you would any other, by focusing your telescope.

 

The instructions are direct and easy to understand. From my point of view as an American technical writer I found some gaps in the narrative. (I have worked for German companies before, including Zeiss.) They tell you exactly what you need to know and not one word more. But everything was grammatically and syntactically correct. 

The Metrical View Plate

My three nights of use did not go well. 

 

First of all, things move pretty fast. The first two nights, my telescope was a Meade 10-inch “Advanced” Ritchey-Crétien (focal length 2500 mm) fork mount with manual controls. The challenge of targeting was like trying to snatch a housefly out of the air. My first projects were to measure the diameter of Mars, the width of the Trapezium in M42, and the separations of the brightest stars in the Pleiades. My eyes could not move fast enough to measure the objects against the tics. You might be more agile. But this really required a motorized drive to hold the telescope on target or a camera to record the view or both. 

 

Another of the procedures is to align the reticle with the celestial equator. The way to do that is to find a star and position the reticle so that the star tracks along the horizontal metric bar. I chose Rigel. Manipulating the reticle and the two axis controls was a juggling act. It likely would have gone better with the electric drive control paddle. Turning two knobs and twisting the reticle was hard work for a creature without a third manipulator. 

The next night, I tried a smaller telescope, an Explore Scientific 102 mm refractor f=660 mm with First Light mount (simple tilt-pan XY). I ran into a problem that I experienced earlier with this instrument: the focal draw cannot be short enough. In the earlier failure, I was viewing Venus; and to cut the glare, even a moon filter was not enough. I added another filter and hit a hard stop. The draw would not go in far enough to focus. (That morning, I was able to use two filters with my 70 mm National Geographic refractor.) The same thing happened here. With the diagonal in place, focus was impossible. Without the diagonal my posture was difficult to obtain and impossible to hold. So, I gave up.

$279 or €229 from Baader or a Selected Retailer

 

I have one more telescope that can work. (The National G 70 mm above is five years old and is held together with rubber bands. Nice as it can be as an f/10, it is too wobbly for consistent small moves.) 

Added 05 February 2021

(As reported to The Sky Searchers discussion board "Eyepieces" forum.)

I viewed the Trapezium in M42 and measured it as 1 division. It was pretty easy to align the Baader and let the stars drift across the scale. I did that several times. I calculated the size of Trapezium as 29 arc-seconds by 29 arc-seconds. Burnham's gives 12x13, but I am pretty happy with the first try. 

I also viewed Eta Cassiopeiae. They are close together, so I let them drift across the scale and measured them against the center between the two rows of divisions, which Baader says is 35 micrometers wide. From that, I calculated a separation of 10.3 arc seconds. I found online from a report at the Havering Astro club UK 13.4 arc-seconds. Again, I was satisified with the first attempt will try again another night.

The last instrument in my inventory is a Celestron EQ 130 f/5 Newtonian reflector. As an equatorial mount, manual tracking is with one hand once it is aligned. In fact, one of the calibrations that the reticle allows is to test and adjust polar alignment. But the telescope is resting in its cartons in the garage. If I decide to follow through on this, I will report it here.

 

I have one other unresolved problem. I still do not know how to change the battery. They have helps on their website, but no answers to the questions. They tell you which cell designation to use. They do not tell you where it goes. When I unscrewed the two pieces of the reticle itself—not the illuminator—I found a wire (which I accidentally tore out and had to re-solder.) So, at this point, I do not want to struggle with it any more. 

The instrument came to me on loan from a friend I met online, username JohnDonne on The SkySearchers. Of course, I bought him a new replacement. This one is is packed away. If I buy a telescope with a motor drive or if I buy a camera for astrophotography, I may take this up again, but I will most probably sell it at a discount to someone else in my local astronomy club and get my measurements from standard stellar survey catalogs.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Assign a Number to It, Said Lord Kelvin

Neutron-Irradiated Dimes

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Slow Down and Think

The Unit Circle

Driving to the Moon

 My 2005 Honda Civic turned 238,900 miles, the median distance to the Moon.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

ONE LIGHT SECOND 

TECHNICAL WRITER JOB DESCRIPTION

THE FUTURE OF MONEY

ARMADILLO CON 41 DAY 3

Problems with Pop Sci from Sky & Telescope (Part 2)

Similar to my critique of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the source of the many problems may be that the editors at Sky & Telescope are trying to condense complicated truths into a few lines of common English.

February 22: “Small meteorites aren’t hot when they hit the ground. Earth’s atmosphere heats and removes a very thing surface layer, but the rest of the meteorite is still ice-cold from its time in space.”

and

August 13: “Occasionally, meteor-watchers hear a hiss or crackle accompany particularly bright fireballs. Astronomers still debate the source of the sound.”

Those two resulted in an interesting search: “are meteorites hot or cold when they hit earth?” Apparently the answer may be “yes.” The consensus is that they are cold. They quickly lose their outer layers by ablation, the same phenomenon used to protect spacecraft: the outer layers burn away carrying the heat. That said, accounts of meteorites being at least warm are not totally discounted. At the same time, also accepted are reports of newly-fallen objects being covered with frost. That meteorites are hot when they fall was commonly accepted until recently even by educated people. An article in Popular Astronomy for February 1934 took the Smithsonian to task for perpetuating the error. (See Astrophysics Data Site archive of Harvard online here.) 

December 27: “In 50 million years or so, Phobos will spiral into Mars, crashing on its surface or breaking up in pieces. In the meantime, though, the little moon has quite a view: Mars fills much of its sky because of the close orbit.”  The spiral is not a possible orbit. That was a teaching point from a Heinlein juvenile novel. Living in a spacefaring culture, our young hero takes an aptitude test to be trained as a pilot. “What would you do if you suddenly found that you were spiraling in to a planet?” It is a trick question because the spiral is not a possible orbit. Considering the problem again, the easiest general statement is that successive elliptical orbits decay by atmospheric drag. 

Logarithmic Spiral

Wolfram Mathworld

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LogarithmicSpiral.html

Archimedean spiral

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_spiral

Seashell Spirals 

Mathematical Association of America

https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/images/upload_library/23/picado/seashells/espiraleng.html

Re-entry of Orbital Debris

NASA JSC

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/reentry/

Video Tutorials on Mechanics and Orbital Motion

Physics Department at the University of New South Wales

Brief Discussion

https://forums.phys.unsw.edu.au/viewtopic.php?t=2876

Animations

http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/mechanics/chapter11_gravity.html#11.8

As for what will happen to Phobos, the Wikipedia article rests in part on a NASA Web Archive. As stated above: it could break up or hit the surface. We will just have to wait and see.

October 31: “As it sails beyond the solar system, Voyager I hears the lonely radio whistles of plasma waves passing through interstellar space. Listen here: https://is.gd/voyagerwhistles. This was interesting, but it is a transduction. Note that the video (YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAZWb9_si4) also presents color blobs representing those waves. We can make them sounds in any octave, lines or shapes in any color, depending on our choices of coordinates.  And, as we all know, you really cannot hear radio waves traveling through interstellar space.

December 5: “You can cry in space, but your tears won’t fall—due to water tension (and a lack of gravity) they form a floating, liquid sphere.” “There is no gravity in space” is one of those many easy sayings spoken by people who watch television shows about science, but who never take a formal class in astronomy or physics. If you lived in a spacefaring culture you might be told that if you were trapped in a gravity well, your tears would be pulled away from your face as the tremendous inertial acceleration overpowers the molecular adhesion that holds them to your face. If you were “in space” as a passenger of an accelerating vehicle, you would experience an inertial force indistinguishable from “gravity.”  

Einstein's Imaginary Elevator
From The Boy Scientist by John Llewellen, Simon and Schuster, 1955.

(Some tests could reveal the larger context of your condition. You might be on a rocket accelerating; you might be in a spinning torus like the classic space station; you might be on a large body such as a moon or planet in space. But within the reach of a human—a fathom—it would be difficult to find any differences. The differences were explained to me by a friend of mine from high school who went to MIT. I am not smart: I learn well.)

March 28: “Thanks to its solar wind, the Sun is losing roughly an Earth’s worth of mass every 150 million years.”

And

March 29: “Because the Sun is (slowly) losing mass, Earth’s orbit gets about an inch bigger every other year.”

And

April 15: “The Moon is drifting away from Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches per year.”

And

July 7: The expansion of space means that the solar system is expanding, too, but only at an infinitesimal amount: one part in septillion over its lifespan. 

1.     A so-called “solar wind” is an essential characteristic of every star. The phrase is just a way that we conveniently think of the energy of the star. The loss of mass is integral to the nature of the star and we know how stars age. 

2.    What is interesting is that Earth is losing mass, also. That must mean that all of the planets and, in fact, all other material bodies do so as well. Net loss to Earth is 50,000 tonnes per year (BBC News Magazine online here). That is the difference between the meteoric dust which falls in and the hydrogen and helium gasses which escape into space. Other effects come from the core’s heat being lost, volcanoes and other relatively minor events. (See this homework problem from Weber State University.)

3.    Finally, as for the expansion of “space” (or space-time, or the stuff “in” it or “in” which space-time exists), while not quite lying with statistics, casually tossing out large numbers obfuscates the question. If the universe is 13.8 billion years old and expanding one part in a septillion over 10 billion years, the numbers just do not explain the facts we believe from observation and measurement – unless the expansion rate is highly variable, greatly slowing down or expected to greatly increase. Deceleration seems to be the accepted theory of the day. But it is more complicated than can be explained in five lines of a calendar page.

·              Universe's Expansion Rate Is Different Depending on Where You Look By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor July 13, 2018 04:03 pm ET

https://www.space.com/41163-universe-expansion-rate-changes-near-far.html

·              The Expanding Universe: From Slowdown to Speed Up; Distant supernovae are revealing the crucial time when the expansion of the universe changed from decelerating to accelerating By Adam G. Riess, Michael S. Turner on September 23, 2008

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/expanding-universe-slows-then-speeds/

4.    Just to note about the actual age of our planet and its sisters: “The inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone is moving outwards at a rate of about 1 metre per year. The latest model predicts a total habitable zone lifetime for Earth of 6.3 billion–7.8 billion years, suggesting that life on the planet is already about 70% of the way through its run. Other planets — especially those that form near the outer boundary of a star’s habitable zone or orbit long-lived, low-mass stars — may have habitable-zone lifetimes of 42 billion years or longer.” (Daily news blurb from Nature online here.) 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Philosophical Breakfast Club

The Scientific Method 

Is Philosophy a Science? 

Is Physics a Science?

The Science of Liberty 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy 

Problems with Pop Sci from Sky & Telescope

Last year, I bought myself the Page-a-Day Incredible Cosmos desk calendar from Shop at Sky dot com, the retail arm of the leading magazine for amateur and hobby astronomers. Most days offered interesting snips of knowledge to consider and even wonder about. About 40 pages made questionable assertions. A few were laughable, the bad science being a consequence of poor philosophy.

First of all, it is important to note that astronomy is one of the few remaining studies—numismatics being another—where professionals work with and learn from amateurs. All of the world’s institutional observatories combined are not enough to watch and record all of the sky all of the time. Competing research schedules force narrow windows on professional staffs. On the other hand, amateurs can devote all the time they want to their own passions. Amateurs routinely discover comets and asteroids. NASA’s public webpages on meteorites cites the International Meteor Collectors Association. Cornell University’s page on the subject points to the American Meteor Society. Put “discovery by amateur astronomer” in your search engine. Some projects, such as the search for planets orbiting stars outside our solar system (“exo-planets”), involve amateurs being enrolled to access and review thousands of images from space-borne telescopes such as NASA’s Kepler. In most cases, amateurs work entirely on their own. So, we amateurs and hobbyists expect good science from Sky & Telescope. 

August 19: “Cosmic rays aren't rays--most of them are protons shooting through space at a significant fraction of the speed of light.”  So, what is a “ray”? A so-called “gamma ray” or “x-ray” is quantum packet, right? Isn't everything? Alpha rays are helium nuclei. Beta rays are electrons. I had a freshman physics homework problem to calculate the wavelength of a Major League Baseball pitch using Planck's equation. 

 

HyperPhysics from Georgia State University here 

July 3: “The whole universe (including the parts we can't see) might be infinite.”  That begs a lot of questions. If it is infinite, then you could take away the parts we cannot see and it would still be infinite, right? If the “whole universe” is infinite, then is it comprised of a finite number of infinite subsets, or it is comprised of an infinite number of finite subsets? What do they mean by “see”? Does that include what we “see” with radio telescopes? Does this include Dark Matter, which we can calculate but cannot detect, i.e.,“see”? Which meaning of “infinite” applies here? Can the Universe be finite in space but eternal in time? If so, what can “space-time” refer to? Objectivists assert that the Universe does not exist “in” time, but that time exists in the Universe.

July 9: “The temperature of the Sun is almost 10,000°F (5,778 K)—hotter than burning rocket fuel.”  In fact, the temperature of the Sun varies from the core to the corona; and actually the surface (photosphere) is cooler than either of those. 

• The center of the Sun: about 15 million degrees Kelvin (often stated as “Kelvins”).
• Radiative Zone: Temperature falls from about 7 million to about 2 million K across this zone.
• Convection Zone: drops from 2 million K to 5800K in this zone.
• Photosphere: about 5800K, although sunspots are about 3800K – that’s why they are dark.
• Chromosphere: 4300 to 8300 K from inside edge to outside edge
• Corona: about 1 million degrees 

(From the Cornell astronomy department public pages here and see also Scientific American online here .)

August 5: “A third of all planets discovered by the space-based Kepler mission have a super-Earth or mini-Neptune. (Most of these planets are not at all habitable, though.)”  Well, now they are not. Neither were the Arctic and Sahara habitable until someone figured out how. If on principle the Moon is not considered uninhabitable why would Neptune be?

February 7: “When you look up tonight, you see stars because the universe is transparent. Between 380,000 and a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, that wasn’t the case.”

and

August 15: “A fog of neutral hydrogen kept the universe dark in the so-called ‘dark ages’ during its adolescence between 380,000 years and a few hundred million years.”

and

August 16: “The first galaxies began forming a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.”  In the first place, the universe is not transparent. If it were, we could never detect anything, not galaxies, and not our keyboards. It is the problem of Superman’s X-Ray Vision: if he sees through everything, then he sees nothing. A better statement is that interstellar space is mostly not opaque. (See, also, Olber's Paradox.) The cosmology implied by these three claims is that the hydrogen “fog” began to coalesce as (diatomic) hydrogen molecules were attracted to each other. But it is also true that we believe that most of the “stuff” of the universe is as-yet-undetectable “Dark Matter.” So, we may still be in the Dark Ages …

February 4: “When two galaxies merge, the space between the stars is so vast that they almost never collide. Instead, the stars are swept into different orbits around the new galactic center.”  Galactic mergers are complex events. One resource is the GalMer Project of the Paris Observatory (http://galmer.obspm.fr) where you can try your hand at any of the 1000+ simulated interactions between 15 Hubble Types of galaxies. Easiest here is that it seems typical of elliptical galaxies that the stars do not orbit the galactic center, but move along seemingly random paths of Brownian motion on a galactic scale. However, that stage is supposed to be the last in a complicated interaction. While galaxies are merging, whatever were their centers are arbitrarily the new foci, two “centers” that add (by vectors) to a new barycenter. The same phenomenon applies to our own solar system: the planets do not revolve around the center point of the Sun; their orbits are ellipses with the Sun’s (shifting) barycenter as one focus.

February 5: “Intracluster light is the name for the ghostly glow in the space between galaxies, emanating from the lost stars tossed out of their hosts during gravitational interactions.”  Given the complexities (see above), it remains more likely that the stars were pulled out their host galaxies, not tossed out by them. 

Previously on Necessary Facts

The Perfect Machine 

Meteorites 

The Andromeda Galaxy 

One Light Second 

Questions about “A Brief History of Time”