Crimson and Gold Connection; David Keuhn

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected to the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. Thanks for joining us for Crimson and Gold Connection. This is Trent Johnson. Today, our guest is interim chair of the physics department at Pittsburgh State University, David Keene. David, thanks so much for joining us today. What is your position at Pittsburgh State University and what does that entail? I'm a physics professor. I've been here since 1990, and I'm interim chair of the physics department. You've been here since 1990, as you said. Over that period of time, what has been the best part about working at Pittsburgh State University? Oh my gosh. Well, it has changed over the years, but initially it was the challenge of learning how to teach at the undergraduate and graduate level. Now I think I'm pretty good at that. So now the new challenge is keeping the physics department going and all of the affairs of the other faculty. When I first worked here, I saw it just as my own classes, but now I see the whole department and the classes and the students and everything all together being interim chair.

So it's been quite a wild ride for the last three years or so. But research wise, I've had a lot of opportunities here at Pittsburgh State. We put in the observatory out at Greenbush, and we've been using that over the years for student research and classes for upper division, physics students, graduate students, and so on. And then, of course, this planetarium thing that's happened recently, we've been able to refurbish the Kelst planetarium, so that's been taking up some time here in the last six months. For anybody who's not familiar with the planetarium here on campus, could you just tell us a little bit about the planetarium? Sure, the L Russell Kelst planetarium was built as part of the building Yates Hall when that was built in 62. So there was kind of an empty silo there on the north side of the building, and then they were looking for some way to put a planetarium projector in there with the dome and Gladys Kelst, who had given money for the business school. Decided to donate the money for the projector, so very generous. It was put in a 64.

Dr. Bruce Daniel, who was the founding chair of the physics department, ran the planetarium for many, many years, decades, and did thousands of programs. He retired in the 2004 or so, and so he had spent about 40 years giving programs, even gave programs after that point. But the projector that was installed, of course, 60s technology, was entirely mechanical, opto-mechanical. So it did a really good job projecting the stars, showing the positions of planets and so on. It did a good job doing that. But over the years, maintenance began to be too much, so a lot of the features of the projector started to fail, and the manufacturer didn't really support the projector anymore. So we took it upon ourselves to figure out how to replace it, and over this last six months, we've replaced the projector with a new digital one that's computer controlled, and it's quite fancy. The planetarium, as you're hitting on a little bit, has underwent some renovations. There were a few more upgrades as well, along with the projector.

What upgrades were made, and what do these upgrades add to the experience of presentations in the planetarium? Well, there were some new paint on the dome, and paint on the walls, and that has the colors of remain the same. They're kind of boring, black on the walls, and white on the dome. But we have the seats re-apholstered and new carpet laid, so it looks a lot better, more comfy. I worry that it's so comfortable that when people arrive, they just go to sleep. But hopefully they'll remain awake during the programs. The programs we've been doing over October start off with about 15 minutes, 20 minutes of what's in the night sky right now, both in the evening and in the morning, because that's when people often look up. As the sun goes down, there's a couple of good planets and so on, and then in the morning, lots more planets in the mornings. And then we go to a program that was put out a few years ago by the Google XPRIZE people called Back to the Moon for Good, and it's really exciting to see that projected onto a planetarium dome in 360 degrees. It gives you an immersion feel, and sound systems really good, so I think we do a really good job.

What is the planetarium used for when classes are in session? We have a lot of general ed students who take physical science and descriptive astronomy. Those students were trying to get across the way the night sky looks, what the constellations look like, and then the motions of the planets, the sun, the moon, seasonal variations, for example, where the sun sets, how that point changes throughout the year, where the sun rises, and so on. And then phases of the moon, of course, eclipses, they happen a little more rarely. This new projector does a great job doing both lunar and solar eclipses. The old projector couldn't do that. And the phasing of the moon is really done well. Since it's computerized, you can click on an object and zoom in on it to see what it looks like through a telescope, for example, or even through a spacecraft that might be close by. It's very exciting to see a digital projector the way it works. Why do you think that the planetarium is important as this teaching tool for students?

Well, a lot of students, even back when I was a kid, it's hard to detect some of the motion that takes place in the sky because it takes place over weeks or months. And in the planetarium, you can speed that up and show the motion more rapidly, and it becomes easier to learn about what a planet does in the sky relative to an Earth-based observer. Further, with this new projector, you can go to different points. You don't have to stand on the Earth. You can go out into space and watch the relationship between Earth and the planet. You can go to that planet and look back and see where the Earth is in the sun. So it's exciting because it allows you to move around. The old projector, of course, was completely Earth-centric. So it didn't have that capability. Computers, of course, bring that to the proposition that you can change your viewpoint. It's almost like being in a simulated spacecraft. You can rapidly go forward in time. You can even, although it's not possible, you can go backward in time. We can go back and look at the sky the way it looked thousands and thousands of years ago.

So further, you can see constellations with different cultures. We learn the constellations in Western culture, whether they're 88 constellations, but other cultures like Native Americans, Chinese, South Americans, you can go to different cultures and see how they viewed the sky. There's remarkable similarities and there's stark differences between cultures and how they see. So I often kid participants, especially in public viewings, I kid people and say, well, if kids were just given a blank slate on what the sky looked like now, we might have constellations that were like Apple iPod or iPad or a Corvette constellation or something like that. The culture feeds into the nature of what we see in the sky, the patterns that we see. What do you think the planetarium adds to the university? It's a public focus because we can get out news about astronomy happenings, we can educate the public. Also, we educate our students, so it's a focal point for that.

And I think it's a front door type kind of an award on the front of the university. This is a place that not every university has a planetarium, not every university has an observatory, so PSU's got both. It's kind of remarkable that a comprehensive division 2 school has both of these, the observatory out at Greenbush and the planetarium here on campus. They really are cutting edge type institutions, installations, so I really enjoy being here at PSU because we have both those things and allows a public education standpoint and also a research area that we can use to with our students. What programs can we look forward to come next month? Through November, we'll have some dates posted and it'll be a new program called Dark, and it's about dark matter in the universe. Many people have heard about it. The matter that we see in the universe are stars and nebulae and things that are glowing, but it turns out that's only about 10% of the universe's mass. The other 80 or 90% is dark matter, and so this program called dark, which we will be featuring, is about that dark matter and the research that leads to its discovery, hopefully.

So we'll be talking about that in November. All right, David, thanks so much for joining us today and have a fun rest of your semester in the planetarium. Okay, thanks a lot. Today, our guest on Crimson and Gold Connection was David Keene, the interim chair of the physics department at Pittsburgh State University. For KRPS and Crimson and Gold Connection, this is Trent Johnson. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection, Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.