Our speaker will be attending in person, please try to attend in person too!
Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements
7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: G. Ralph Kuntz, MD, MS
Title: Electronically Assisted Astronomy
Abstract:
Electronically assisted astronomy (EAA) is a technology that has been around for many years, and yet few amateur astronomers know about it. EAA is a variant of visual astronomy where the eyepiece of the telescope is replaced with a camera. The first use of EAA occurred in 1928 right after the invention of the television, when a live "stream" of Mars was made using a TV camera attached to a telescope. EAA differs from traditional astrophotography in that EAA uses very short exposures of a few seconds to about 1 minute instead of many long (hour-plus) exposures used in astrophotography. While the quality of the images in EAA rarely approaches that of astrophotography, EAA satisfies a need for "instance gratification" and allows viewing many targets in a single evening, while also recording the views for the future.
About the Speaker:
Ralph Kuntz was born in Connecticut, but spent his childhood living in many parts of the Eastern United States because his father, a surgeon, always thought that the grass was greener somewhere else. He even spent three years from 1966 to 1969 living in Germany when his father received a nice invitation from the US Army to report to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for induction. Ralph attended the University of Florida, getting both bachelor's and master's degree in computer science. He also met his wife, Jamie Kistler, while in computer science graduate school. After they graduated, they both were hired by AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. A few years later, Ralph decide to pursue his dream of becoming a physician, so he enrolled at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (Rutgers University) and received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1994, followed by a three-year residency in internal medicine. Shortly after completely his residency, Ralph designed an electronic medical record (EMR) system that he felt catered more to the health-care professional than the ones in use at that time. He co-founded a medical software company to develop and market the EMR and the company was quite successful, being acquired by a large pharmaceutical corporation in 2011. Ralph had already retired from practicing medicine by that point to devote himself full-time to his company. He continued to work in the field of designing and developing medical software until 2016, when he retired. He now avidly pursues his hobbies playing the ukulele, woodworking/knife-making, and, of course, amateur astronomy and EAA.
