Dr. William Romanishin, a longtime friend of the Club and retired professor from the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Oklahoma. His presentation is titled, "Seeing the Universe with Your Own Two Eyes." Here is the abstract for Dr. Bill's talk:

Binoculars allow visual observation of the night sky with two eyes, which seems much more natural than the single eye view through most telescopes. However, binoculars (particularly the larger ones with big lenses) can be very difficult to point and hold "free hand". I have been working on a "sit down/ look down" binocular mount with a big mirror that reflects the sky into the fixed binoculars. Using a flat mirror with binoculars in this way is not a new idea, of course. But my setup uses a computer to control the tilt of the mirror, which I have not heard of before.

Before arriving to teach at OU, Dr. Bill worked at NASA, UCLA and Arizona State. Throughout his career, he was on the OU Physics and Astronomy faculty from 1989-2011. Since 2011, he has become a “Gentleman Astronomer”.

Dr. Bill doesn’t remember exactly how he got interested in astronomy until he was reminded of how he first built a telescope in high school. The early space programs played a large role as he remembers.

Dr. Bill’s current research involves the application of optical CCD imaging of astronomical objects using various large and small telescopes, along with associated image processing techniques, to a variety of astronomical topics. Currently, his main topic of interest is the colors and other photometric properties of minor bodies in the outer solar system, including Kuiper Belt Objects and irregular satellites of the Jovian planets. A common theme of these projects is to obtain accurate measurements of the observed brightness and colors of various astronomical objects, frequently in the presence of contaminating background or foreground light sources. The scientific goal of these studies is to trace how and where the diverse population of minor outer solar system bodies we now observe originated and how these objects fit into the story of the formation of our solar system. By measuring colors for a large sample of minor outer solar system objects and finding patterns in their colors and orbital properties, Dr. Bill’s colleagues and him have already found interesting clues to the places of origin of certain classes of these objects.