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NEWSTAR is the Astronomy Club serving Northeast Wisconsin.
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The following information was taken from the
www.astrovid.com website.
About Ron Dantowitz:
Ron Dantowitz has been fascinated
with the stars since he was eleven years old,
when he pointed his brother’s toy telescope skyward and “discovered” the
Orion Nebula. Immediately, Ron developed a child-size version of aperture
fever,
and wanted (he would say “needed”) a larger telescope with which to explore
the
heavens. When Ron’s parents gave him an optically perfect Cave 8” f/6
Newtonian
for his 13th birthday, it began his obsession to see and record the sharpest
lunar
and planetary features possible. His quest for sharp images continues to this
day,
twenty-five years after having taken his first astrophoto.
In 1988, after receiving his
Aeronautical Engineering degree and completing a year
of work at NASA, Ron took a position at the Charles Hayden Planetarium, at the
Boston Museum of Science. It was at the Museum’s Gilliland Observatory where
Ron
began developing techniques for high resolution astronomical imaging using
video.
The techniques he uses and the images he has achieved have been published in
scientific journals, magazines, astronomy textbooks, encyclopedias,
newspapers,
and television programs. His special interest is in imaging orbiting
satellites at high
resolution through the telescope, although the video techniques he uses also
work
well on “conventional” solar system targets. Ron's efforts have produced some
of the
sharpest ground-based optical images of the moon and planets to date, with
resolutions
approaching 0.1 second of arc.
Ron’s goal is to encourage both
amateurs and professionals to use video as a serious
imaging tool. To this end, he has tested video cameras on telescopes ranging
from 4” to
100” aperture, and the results have been very promising. In the May 2000
Astronomical
Journal, Ron published a peer-reviewed paper with the world’s first
high-resolution images
of Mercury, showing impacts and maria on the planet’s “unseen” hemisphere. As
you may
have guessed, an inexpensive off-the-shelf video camera was used in this
research.
Ron Dantowitz
is the Director of the Clay
Center Observatory at
Dexter and Southfield Schools in Brookline, Massachusetts.
His primary interests are astronomy education and developing
techniques for ultra-high resolution telescopic imaging.
Ron Dantowitz's link on the Meade.com website entitled,
350 miles above Boston.
Here is a link to a National Public Radio (NPR) story on Ron Dantowitz. It was aired October 5, 2004 just after Ron
video recorded and photographed Spaceship One's winning of the X prize. You can listen to
the interview at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4062789
Rev: 04/26/05