October Monthly Meeting: Astro-photography, some Astro-physics, Astro-art, and Accidental Discoveries

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

David Elmore is an Astronomer Emeritus for the National Solar Observatory.  His professional career centered around conceptualization, design, and construction of solar research instruments attached to solar telescopes.  His particular expertise is in measurement of magnetic fields on the sun utilizing the polarization properties of light.  His instruments have been deployed at observatories around the world, the stratosphere, and on spacecraft.  After decades at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmosphere, Mr. Elmore served as Instrumentation Scientist for the newly completed and world’s largest solar telescope, the National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.

Astrophotography has been a hobby for David from film to digital.  Currently he remotely operates wide-field telescopes located in a rented observatory at a dark site in southern New Mexico.  This talk features images from that observatory tracing the cycle of life in the Milky Way from clouds of galactic cirrus to new stars to planetary nebulae and super novae back to clouds in the in the galaxy.  As a sidelight David will describe the accidental discovery of three never before identified planetary nebulae.