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The Astronomical Society of Greenbelt
Welcomes you to its web site!
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ASG Home Events Officers & Contacts "The Meteor" Join Resources Holdings Projects History Local Weather Bylaws |
The Astronomical Society of Greenbelt is an organization made up of people in and around Greenbelt, MD who are interested in astronomy. The group's objective is to educate people about the fascinating science and hobby of astronomy. Persons of all knowledge and skill levels, whether members of the Society or not, are welcome to attend activities. Up to the start of the pandemic (late March 2020) regular meetings, normally featuring a presentation by an authority on some astronomical topic, were (usually) held on the last non-holiday Thursday of each month at the Greenbelt Community Center. Star parties were held on selected Saturdays -- and other days for notable events -- at the City of Greenbelt Observatory on Northway (extended) in Greenbelt. Visitors were welcome to set up their own telescopes on the hill there./p>
All of ASG's remaining 2020 scheduled events, including meetings at the Greenbelt Community Center and star parties at the Greenbelt Observatory, were cancelled in late March due to the pandemic. And they remain cancelled. However, we resumed operations in mid-June in an online mode. ASG links: ASG message server (groups.io/g/greenbeltastro) 2020 ASG brochure (All events will be online until further notice) 2020 ASG star party schedule (All scheduled events have been cancelled until further notice) "Star Parties at Greenbelt Observatory" (What to expect, when life returns to normality) "ASG favorite images" (A picture gallery) Old news: The Great Conjunction - 21 Dec 2020: For a report on this impromptu "star party," including an image of Jupiter and Saturn just six arcminutes apart, see our post "The Conjunction, from Observatory Hill" on our message server at: https://groups.io/g/greenbeltastro/topics.News, 17 Mar 2020: Sebastian Rivera-Muñoz, a student at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, has completed his senior year Research Project, the development of an image sharpening algorithm now incorporated in ASG's "QuickStack" live-stacking application currently in use at Greenbelt Observatory to enable the observation of very faint cosmological "deep sky objects." Sebastian developed his algorithm, called "2Delta-PSF" (for two times a delta function minus the point spread function), using Microsoft Visual C++, an application development system he mastered (well enough for his purpose) during the course of the project. The beauty of his algorithm is that it uses the telescope-and-camera's image of a star to automatically determine the proper degree of sharpening required, making the process quick and easy to use at ASG star parties. Sebastian compared his algorithm with a standard astronomical image sharpening algorithm called the "Lucy-Richardson deconvolution algorithm," and we deemed his algorithm superior with regard to the aspects important to us (fewer artifacts and acceptable processing time). His mentor for the project was Conrad Terrill of ASG. | |||
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