Next General Meeting:
Meeting Preview—Launch your mission to the stars from your keyboard or keypad
Date: January 2, 7 p.m.
Location: The Lecture Room at New Milford High School
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For our January General Meeting, DACS will boldly go where we've never gone before—to New Milford's John J. McCarthy Observatory for a presentation on computer applications for amateur astronomy. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, January 2, in a lecture hall at New Milford High School, and include a walk-through of the observatory on the school campus. The presenter will be JJMO associate, Marc Polansky, who will focus on the growing number of astronomy tools for the PC and Mac, as well as the expanding universe of mobile apps for stargazers.
At the beginning of the program, JJMO volunteer director, Bob Lambert will give a short address about the genesis of the observatory, its mission, and highlights of its history.

Although some space research is conducted with super computers and massively distributed computing, many of the greatest achievements and innovations have been made by amateurs with simple tools. Galileo never finished college, and his telescope was the equivalent of a pair of 30x opera glasses; Apollo 13 squeaked around the Moon  and limped back to Earth on human ingenuity, lots of luck, and the processing power of a modern cell phone.

In this tradition, Marc Polansky was too busy learning on his own to take time out for a college degree. With a fascination for computers and electronics from age 2, he built his high school's entire computer lab from small parts, ran and terminated the cat5 network wire, and installed all the operating systems/software and configured the server for students to log in.  He was hired by ACR Computer in Waterbury as a service technician right out of high school, and worked there for 10 years before taking a job as a corporate Project Manager and Director of IT, doing  everything from computer/IT maintenance to installing phone, high end audio and video, fiber and copper infrastructure, automation system design and programming (Crestron, Extron, Elan, etc), CCTV systems (Milestone VMS certified).  In his spare time, he is also a mentor for Team Beta, Nonnewaug High School's robotics and electrathon (electric car race) team/host of Tech Fest (of which DACS has been an exhibitor in the past), as well as a volunteer for FIRST (the national organization responsible for the robotics competitions) as the Head Referee for the Boston Regional Competition). 

Marc has spent most of his life tinkering with electronics and computers, learning as much as he can about them from building robots and designing small electronics here and there.  He's been interested in space exploration his whole life, but has only been involved with JJMO for the last year and a half.  He learned the foundation of astro-imaging from JJMO associates, Stephen Riley and Josh Reynolds, and has been experimenting, based on trial and error, to develop techniques and procedures to share with anyone interested in imaging. Marc's creative output is featured on recent covers of the observatory's newsletter and in an image gallery on the JJMO website, http://www.mccarthyobservatory.org/.

After a brief introduction, Marc will outline how the computers and network structure help JJMO manage and operate an extensive array of equipment.  From control of the telescope to image capture and processing, he'll explain how computers play a big role in powering the observatory, via both hardware and software.  Current and commonly used astronomy programs for many platforms, including iPad and Android will be covered.  He will also demonstrate the process of turning raw astro-images into a fine piece of artwork, as well as explain the importance of photometric and astrometric data reduction in finding/tracking exoplanets, asteroids and comets.

The presentation will conclude with Q&A and a short trip to the Observatory led by volunteer director, Bob Lambert.

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DACS meetings are usually held at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. (Click here for directions and parking information.)

Activities begin at 6:30 p.m. with registration and casual networking. The meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. with a question and answer period (Ask DACS), followed by announcements and a short break. The featured evening presentation begins at 8:00. The meeting is scheduled to adjourn at 9:30 p.m.

DACS General Meetings are free and open to the public. Members and prior attendees are encouraged to extend invitations to anyone interested in this topic.

Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS) is a registered nonprofit and has been serving the region since 1990.