06/10/2006 Another Great Huachuca Astronomy Club Meeting

Last night was club meeting night for the Huachuca Astronomy Club. Although it's a bit of a drive for me (about 1.25 hours), it's been well worth the trip every time. This is a very active, amateur-oriented, friendly club with the claim (very likely true!) that they have "more member observatories per capita than any other club in the United States". Since they are in Southeast AZ, many local residents are blessed with dark skies and large parcels of land. If I didn't have the work and family commitments to keep me in Tucson, I would probably want to move down there.
Anyway the main speaker last night was Adam Block, who is perhaps the most well-known CCD imager around. For years he was in charge of the Kitt Peak amateur observer program, and had access to some very high-end amateur equipment on top of Kitt Peak. The combination of excellent gear and ideal conditions, plus a huge amount of image processing skills in Photoshop etc., allowed Adam to create some unbelievably detailed astrophotography. He gave us a few tips and the running theme of his talk seemed to be to work at trying to let your picture tell a story. In order to tell this story it's important to push the quality to the utmost, just like a visual observer uses various techniques to study objects and resolve details. Adam's an excellent presenter - I also attended a CCD workshop that he put on at NOAO early in 2005, which was quite good - and one thing I appreciate is that he puts a lot into the preparation so that he's not fumbling around the whole time.
Of course throughout the lecture we were treated to breathtaking images, both wide-field and high magnification. Adam's images are often published in various places like APOD, Astronomy magazine, and Sky and Telescope magazine. Now that he's on his own he's going to be lecturing around the country and has just published the first in a series of videos about astroimage processing.
We also heard about other various astro-news including a brief presentation by Bob Kepple of the new "Astro Cards" edition of DeepSky Software. This new version has all the usual DeepSky features plus it allows the user to view and print Bob's famous Astro Cards charts, which are very useful. I just purchased the cards plus the illuminator when I was at TSP this year, and they are really a cool and helpful little product.
Larry came along with us, as well as my son Brad. Dean was also there. This picture shows "Mr. Galaxy", Wayne Johnson (who has discovered numerous supernova) introducing Adam, who is sitting at the computer in the front corner.