January 2012 Free to members, subscriptions $12 for 12 issues Volume 39, Number 1 IN MEMORIAM: JOHN SANFORD 1939-2011 OCA mourns the passing of amateur astronomy pioneer and three-time past president John Sanford, who passed away after a long illness on December 11. In addition to being one of the founding members of the club, John helped spearhead the development of our Anza site and ran a nationally- recognized photography program at Orange Coast College for many years. He will be missed, and the club extends its condolences--and heartfelt thanks for his services--to his family. OCA CLUB MEETING STAR PARTIES COMING UP The free and open club The Black Star Canyon site will be open on There will be no Beginners Class meeting will be held January January 28th. The Anza site will be open on for the month of January. Please 13th at 7:30 PM in the Irvine January 21st. Members are encouraged to check the website for information Lecture Hall of the Hashinger check the website calendar for the latest regarding February’s class. Science Center at Chapman updates on star parties and other events. University in Orange. This GOTO SIG: Feb. 6th month our speaker is Dr Please check the website calendar for the Astro-Imagers SIG: TBA Christian Ott of Caltech, who outreach events this month! Volunteers are Remote Telescopes: TBA will discuss ‘Stellar Collapse, always welcome! Astrophysics SIG: TBA Core Collapse Supernovae, You are also reminded to check the web Dark Sky Group: TBA and the Formation of Stellar- site frequently for updates to the Mass Black Holes.’ calendar of events and other club news. NEXT MEETINGS: Feb. 10th John Robert Sanford -- In Memoriam by Sheila Cassidy Southern California has lost a great influence on amateur astronomy. From Springville, where he retired, to his earlier years in Orange County, he made himself available to astronomers and onlookers alike in events such as star parties, conferences, club meetings and outreach events. John was bit by the astronomy bug early in his life, in Orange County, New York. At the tender age of 8 years old he saw his first solar eclipse. That was all it took. He was off and running. His father was a machinist and helped him assemble a two-inch refractor lens kit into a telescope. According to John, this was a kit from Edmunds. John remembered seeing Jupiter, with its four moons through the hand-held telescope. A 3.5-inch Skyscope refractor telescope followed, on his 12th birthday. His parents would drop him off at Chestnut Street School so he could observe, and then pick him up around 11pm. He continued to acquire telescopes and soon had a better 3 inch refractor and a six inch Newtonian. In his freshman year in high school, he and a few friends founded the Newburgh Astronomy club. The club papers were still in existence 21 years later, when John visited Newburgh. John’s photography proceeded apace, and he won awards at the New York state science congress at Cornell, and in the National Scholastic-Ansco photo contest. He became hooked for good on photography after being allowed to hang around an Italian commercial photographer’s darkroom and saw a print coming up in the developer. He also developed a secondary interest in archeology and exotic locales as a result of reading the Geographics and the Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia set that his parents bought. This was before the age of television. The call of astronomy was still there when John took the College Boards. He was awarded a regents scholarship and settled on Cornell. But he ran into a barrier when he had trouble with physics because of a lack of mathematical background (calculus). The realization that he would never be a professional astronomer took some time to adjust to. About a year and a half later he transferred to the Rochester Institute of Technology and majored in photography after winning one of two national scholarships given by the Photography Society of America. But that only lasted for a semester, as Rochester pulled the photography classes. So back to Cornell went John, this time with a Sociology/Anthropology major. He joined the photo staff of the Cornellian, the yearbook as a junior. By his senior year, he was the photo editor of the 1961 Cornellian. John beat the draft by enlisting in the Army for the photojournalism school after color blindness kept him out of OCS in the Air Force and Navy. His reward for being second in the class was to be put on a photo team for Vietnam. The lower half of the class of 20 got sent to NATO in Paris. This was in April of 1962, when the US advisors were about 5,000 Green Berets. He made his way around Vietnam mostly in Otter or Caribou Army aircraft flying mail or supply runs. He returned to Vietnam in 1965 for 6 months as a tech representative for Pax Electronics, a company that made transportable photo labs like the ones he had worked at in the Army. This was the time of the big buildup during the Vietnam War. During this time he was also able to take advantage of his location to finally see the ancient ruins at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom that he had read about as a child. He bought a car through the PX in Vietnam, a Volvo Station Wagon that was imported directly from the factory in Sweden to a port in New Jersey. His wife, Ellen and his father picked it up. It was the car that they later made the trip across country when they moved to Mountain View, California. After a few months he found an Industrial photography job with Lockheed Aerospace. A year later he quit to enter a masters program at San Francisco State College in Creative Arts Interdisciplinary Studies, with a concentration in photography. He added a junior college teaching credential and was ready to go. It was at a job fair in Oakland that he learned about an opening for a photo instructor at a community college in Costa Mesa. After looking the place over, he accepted a photo instructor’s position at Orange Coast College and never left. It was from Orange Coast College that he retired after 29 ½ years of helping to build the photography department into a national known and acclaimed student destination. It was around February of 1971 that John heard about the Orange County Amateur Astronomers Association, the predecessor to the OCA. At the time, the club had 35 members and was meeting at the Santa Ana Library and the Lincoln Savings community rooms. The club president was Bob Goff, an employee of Perkin-Elmer, who, in John’s words, “knew everything about optics and a good deal about astronomy.” Bob Goff was John’s guru until Goff died in 2001. John was quick to form friendships with Bill Schafer, a builder of telescope mounts, Art LeBrun, and Brian Holcroft. It was at Brian’s house in the 70’s that John and Brian and the crew turned out the Sirius Astronomer on an old mimeograph machine. (continued on page 9) 2 Dawn Takes a Closer Look By Dr. Marc Rayman Dawn is the first space mission with an itinerary that includes orbiting two separate solar system destinations. It is also the only spacecraft ever to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft accomplishes this feat using ion propulsion, a technology first proven in space on the highly successful Deep Space 1 mission, part of NASA’s New Millennium program. Launched in September 2007, Dawn arrived at protoplanet Vesta in July 2011. It will orbit and study Vesta until July 2012, when it will leave orbit for dwarf planet Ceres, also in the asteroid belt. Dawn can maneuver to the orbit best suited for conducting each of its scientific observations. After months mapping this alien world from higher altitudes, Dawn spiraled closer to Vesta to attain a low altitude orbit, the better to study Vesta’s composition and map its complicated gravity field. Changing and refining Dawn’s orbit of this This full view of the giant asteroid Vesta was taken by NASA’s Dawn massive, irregular, heterogeneous body is one spacecraft, as part of a rotation characterization sequence on July 24, of the most complicated parts of the mission. 2011, at a distance of 5,200 kilometers (3,200 miles). Credit: NASA/ In addition, to meet all the scientific objectives, JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA the orientation of this orbit needs to change. These differing orientations are a crucial element of the strategy for gathering the most scientifically valuable data on Vesta. It generally requires a great deal of maneuvering to change the plane of a spacecraft’s orbit. The ion propulsion system allows the probe to fly from one orbit to another without the penalty of carrying a massive supply of propellant. Indeed, one of the reasons that traveling from Earth to Vesta (and later Ceres) requires ion propulsion is the challenge of tilting the orbit around the sun. Although the ion propulsion system accomplishes the majority of the orbit change, Dawn’s navigators are enlisting Vesta itself. Some of the ion thrusting was designed in part to put the spacecraft in certain locations from which Vesta would twist its orbit toward the target angle for the low-altitude orbit. As Dawn rotates and the world underneath it revolves, the spacecraft feels a changing pull. There is always a tug downward, but because of Vesta’s heterogeneous interior structure, sometimes there is also a slight force to one side or another.