2015 May

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter  May  2015

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 6
General Calendar p.10
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 10
    Observing p. 12
Useful Links p. 14
About the Club p. 15

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:


7 May AEA Astronomy Club Meeting "A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster than Light Travel." Greg Meholic A1/1735
2 July AEA Astronomy Club Meeting Pizza Party, Planetary Society Speaker Mat Kaplan A1/1735

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of 2015, the meeting room is A1/1735.

Club News:  

 On Thursday, May 7, Greg Meholic will give a presentation titled, “A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster than Light Travel,” in A1-1735 at 11:45 a.m. during the Aerospace Employees Association (AEA) Astronomy Club meeting.

Meholic works at Aerospace in the Launch and Range section of Development Planning and Projects where he examines future concepts and emerging technology for spacelift systems of interest to the U.S. government. He also evaluates novel propulsion systems and engine cycles geared towards hypersonics and access to space. He is an expert in liquid rocket engine design and has supported more than 48 launches as well as a number of advanced propulsion programs.

Meholic holds both bachelors and masters degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. His 22 years of aerospace industry experience has given him extensive practical knowledge in aerodynamics, aircraft design, gas turbine and rocket engines and alternative propulsion systems. He is a Distinguished Lecturer and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and serves on the Nuclear and Future Flight Propulsion Technical Committee. Among his numerous patents and published work in the aerospace field, he has also authored several papers on his own ideas about faster-than-light travel, the construct of space-time, and the grand unified theory. Greg is also an adjunct professor at Loyola-Marymount University instructing courses on Propulsion System Design and is an avid, instrument-rated, private pilot.

For our July 2 mtg., in addition to the regular quarterly pizza, we’ll have a guest speaker – Mat Kaplan is the Planetary Society Radio Producer and Host.  He will talk about the work of the Society, and his experiences as a science and space reporter for several decades.

The latest ideas for spending our budget for 2015 include a Canon DSLR that is rated highly for astrophotography, and image-stabilizer binoculars.  And a spectrographic grating.  Other last suggestions before we spend it?

A reminder that for most of us, our club membership expired Dec. 31 (except those who joined in the last few months and likely paid also for 2015).  If you haven’t yet, we invite you to renew for 2015 at your earliest convenience & in time for the pizza lunch Jan. 8 (the first of our quarterly pizza parties of the year) -- we must have your $12 dues payment (& pizza order -- see the menu above) by Thursday, Jan. 8 to get member credit.  See the club website for the many other benefits of membership.  Please submit the renewal form (available on Aerolink at https://aerolink.aero.org/cs/llisapi.dll?func=ll&objId=13659520&objAction=browse&viewType=1, or attached) with your payment ($12 check made out to AEA Astronomy Club) to Alan Olson at M1-107.


Astronomy Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month
(from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)

VIDEO:  Through the Shadow of the Moon http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150414.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Stephan Heinsius (Eclipseland)
Explanation: What would it look like to fly through a total eclipse of the Sun? On a typical place on Earth in the path of the dark shadow of the Moon during a total eclipse, an observer would see the Moon cross the face of the Sun, completely blocking it for a few minutes. A particularly clear view of the darkness created on Earth during last month's total solar eclipse was captured by an aircraft flying through the Moon's umbral shadow. One second of time in the featured time-lapse video corresponds to about one minute of real time. The Moon's shadow comes in from the right and leaves on the left, all while locations on Earth outside the umbral shadow -- over 100 kilometers away -- remain partly sunlit. During the next solar eclipse in mid-September, the Moon will, at most, block only part of the Sun.

Mapping Tool: Vesta Trek: A Digital Model of Asteroid Vesta http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150421.html
Image Credit: NASA, JPL, LMMP, SSERVI, USGS, DLR
Explanation: You can explore asteroid Vesta. Recently, NASA's robotic spaceship Dawn visited Vesta, the second largest object in our Solar System's main asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. During a year-long stopover, Dawn's cameras photographed Vesta's entire surface, documenting all of the minor planet's major mountains and craters. These images have now been combined into a digital model that allows anyone with a full-featured browser to fly all around Vesta, virtually, and even zoom in on interesting surface features, by just dragging and clicking. If desired, the initially flat 2D map can be wrapped into a nearly spherical object by clicking on the 3D icon at the bottom. Dawn departed Vesta in 2012 and is now just beginning to photograph and explore the mysteries of the largest object in the asteroid belt: dwarf-planet Ceres.

Ring Galaxy AM 0644-741 from Hubble
Image Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA / STScI), J. Higdon (Cornell) ESA, NASA
Explanation: How could a galaxy become shaped like a ring? The rim of the blue galaxy pictured on the right is an immense ring-like structure 150,000 light years in diameter composed of newly formed, extremely bright, massive stars. That galaxy, AM 0644-741, is known as a ring galaxy and was caused by an immense galaxy collision. When galaxies collide, they pass through each other -- their individual stars rarely come into contact. The ring-like shape is the result of the gravitational disruption caused by an entire small intruder galaxy passing through a large one. When this happens, interstellar gas and dust become condensed, causing a wave of star formation to move out from the impact point like a ripple across the surface of a pond. The intruder galaxy is just outside of the frame taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This featured image was taken to commemorate the anniversary of Hubble's launch in 1990. Ring galaxy AM 0644-741 lies about 300 million light years away.

Total Solar Eclipse over Svalbard
Image Credit & Copyright: Thanakrit Santikunaporn
Explanation: Going, going, gone. That was the feeling in Svalbard, Norway last month during a total eclipse of the Sun by the Moon. In the featured image, the eclipse was captured every three minutes and then digitally merged with a foreground frame taken from the same location. Visible in the foreground are numerous gawking eclipse seekers, some deploying pretty sophisticated cameras. As the Moon and Sun moved together across the sky -- nearly horizontally from this far north -- an increasing fraction of the Sun appears covered by the Moon. In the central frame, the Moon's complete blockage of the disk of the Sun makes the immediate surroundings appear like night during the day. The exception is the Moon itself, which now appears surrounded by the expansive corona of the Sun. Of course, about 2.5 minutes later, the surface of the Sun began to reappear. The next total eclipse of the Sun will occur in 2016 March and be visible from Southeast Asia.

Meteor in the Milky Way
Image Credit & Copyright: Marko Korosec
Explanation: Earth's April showers include the Lyrid Meteor Shower, observed for more than 2,000 years when the planet makes its annual passage through the dust stream of long-period Comet Thatcher. A grain of that comet's dust, moving 48 kilometers per second at an altitude of 100 kilometers or so, is swept up in this night sky view from the early hours of April 21. Flashing toward the southeastern horizon, the meteor's brilliant streak crosses the central region of the rising Milky Way. Its trail points back toward the shower's radiant in the constellation Lyra, high in the northern springtime sky and off the top of the frame. The yellowish hue of giant star Antares shines to the right of the Milky Way's bulge. Higher still is bright planet Saturn, near the right edge. Seen from Istra, Croatia, the Lyrid meteor's greenish glow reflects in the waters of the Adriatic Sea.

Cluster and Starforming Region Westerlund 2
Image Credit & Copyright: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team
(STScI / AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
Explanation: Located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, the young cluster and starforming region Westerlund 2 fills this cosmic scene. Captured with Hubble's cameras in near-infrared and visible light, the stunning image is a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990. The cluster's dense concentration of luminous, massive stars is about 10 light-years across. Strong winds and radiation from those massive young stars have sculpted and shaped the region's gas and dust, into starforming pillars that point back to the central cluster. Red dots surrounding the bright stars are the cluster's faint newborn stars, still within their natal gas and dust cocoons. But brighter blue stars scattered around are likely not in the Westerlund 2 cluster and instead lie in the foreground of the Hubble anniversary field of view.

Comet Churyumov Gerasimenko in Crescent
Image Credit: ESA, Rosetta, NAVCAM; processing by Giuseppe Conzo
Explanation: What's happening to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko? As the 3-km wide comet moves closer to the Sun, heat causes the nucleus to expel gas and dust. The Rosetta spacecraft arrived at the comet's craggily double nucleus last July and now is co-orbiting the Sun with the giant dark iceberg. Recent analysis of data beamed back to Earth from the robotic Rosetta spacecraft has shown that water being expelled by 67P has a significant difference with water on Earth, indicating that Earth's water could not have originated from ancient collisions with comets like 67P. Additionally, neither Rosetta nor its Philae lander detected a magnetic field around the comet nucleus, indicating that magnetism might have been unimportant in the evolution of the early Solar System. Comet 67P, shown in a crescent phase in false color, should increase its evaporation rate as it nears its closest approach to the Sun in 2015 August, when it reaches a Sun distance just a bit further out than the Earth.

Astronomy News:

Astronomers probe inner region of young star and its planets
Published: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - 05:21 in Astronomy & Space
Related images

A.-L. Maire / LBTO

LBTO - Enrico Sacchetti


Astronomers have probed deeper than before into a planetary system 130 light-years from Earth. The observations mark the first results of a new exoplanet survey called LEECH (LBT Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt), and are published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The planetary system of HR8799, a young star only 30 million years old, was the first to be directly imaged, with three planets found in in 2008 and a fourth one in 2010.

"This star was therefore a target of choice for the LEECH survey, offering the opportunity to acquire new images and better define the dynamical properties of the exoplanets orbiting," said Christian Veillet, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBTO).

The LEECH survey began at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in southeastern Arizona in February 2013 to search for and characterize young and adolescent exoplanets in the near-infrared spectrum (specifically, at a wavelength of 3.8 micrometers that astronomers call the L' band). LEECH exploits the superb performance of the LBT adaptive optics system to image exoplanets with the L/M-band infrared camera (LMIRCam) installed in the LBT Interferometer (LBTI).

"The LBT enables us to look at those planets at a wavelength that nobody else is really using," Veillet explained. "Because they are gas giants and still very young, they glow nicely at the L' band, and because they appear so bright there, they stand out, allowing us to observe closer to the star. This has allowed us to nail down the orbits of this system, which is pretty far away."

"Normally the problem with this approach would be that at 4 microns, telescope optics glow themselves," said Andy Skemer, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory and the lead of the survey. "However, with LBT, everything about the telescope, its adaptive optics system and science camera have been optimized to minimize this glow. As a result, LEECH is more sensitive than previous exoplanet imaging surveys, and this new image of HR 8799 is proof."

The study was dedicated to studying the planet architecture of the HR 8799 system, according to the leading author, Anne-Lise Maire, a postdoctoral fellow at INAF-Padova Observatory in Padova, Italy. The team sought to constrain the orbital parameters of the four known giant planets and the physical properties of a putative fifth planet inside the known planets.

"To address the first point, we investigated in particular the types of resonances between the planet orbits," Maire explained. "From the resonances, we learn not only about the overall architecture of the planetary system, but also about the mass range of the planets."

"They cannot be too massive, or else the system would be dynamically unstable, as previous studies have suggested. Moreover, the presence of resonances between the planets indicates that they gravitationally interact with each other, which gives us a lower limit on their masses."

The results of this study favor an architecture for the system based on multiple double resonances, in other words, each of the three outer planets takes about twice as long to complete an orbit around the star as its neighbor closer to the star.

"LEECH's unique sensitivity enabled us to probe the inner region of this planetary system," added Wolfgang Brandner, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "A fifth massive giant planet in an inner resonant orbit was excluded. This could mean that the HR 8799 planetary system has an architecture similar to the solar system, with four massive planets at larger distances, and potentially lower mass planets -- which haven't been detected, yet -- in the inner planetary system."
"Our observations give us good idea that this system is pretty stable," Veillet added, "in other words, there is no indication those planets are going to collide with each other in a few million years."
In its current configuration, the inner planet LEECH can see approaches the star to about 15 Astronomical Units (AU), Veillet explained, or fifteen times the average distance between the earth and our sun.

"If there were planets of similar brightness closer to the star, we should see it as close as 10 AU," he said, "which corresponds to the orbit of Saturn."

According to Veillet, the LEECH survey is an exemplary project in two ways.
"It takes full advantage of the adaptive optics performance offered by our adaptive secondary mirrors, and it combines resources from most of the LBTO partners -- four U.S. universities, two institutes in Germany, and the Italian community -- to build a large program of more than 100 observing nights. This would not be possible for a single partner on a reasonable time scale."

Source: University of Arizona

Dark Energy Survey creates detailed guide to spotting dark matter
Published: Monday, April 13, 2015 - 18:03 in Astronomy & Space
Related images

Dark Energy Survey

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world's most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail and will improve our understanding of dark matter's role in the formation of galaxies. Analysis of the clumpiness of the dark matter in the maps will also allow scientists to probe the nature of the mysterious dark energy, believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. The new maps were released today at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, Maryland. They were created using data captured by the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel imaging device that is the primary instrument for the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up roughly a quarter of the universe, is invisible to even the most sensitive astronomical instruments because it does not emit or block light. But its effects can be seen by studying a phenomenon called gravitational lensing -- the distortion that occurs when the gravitational pull of dark matter bends light around distant galaxies. Understanding the role of dark matter is part of the research program to quantify the role of dark energy, which is the ultimate goal of the survey.

This analysis was led by Vinu Vikram of Argonne National Laboratory (then at the University of Pennsylvania) and Chihway Chang of ETH Zurich. Vikram, Chang and their collaborators at Penn, ETH Zurich, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Manchester and other DES institutions worked for more than a year to carefully validate the lensing maps.
"We measured the barely perceptible distortions in the shapes of about 2 million galaxies to construct these new maps," Vikram said. "They are a testament not only to the sensitivity of the Dark Energy Camera, but also to the rigorous work by our lensing team to understand its sensitivity so well that we can get exacting results from it."

The camera was constructed and tested at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and is now mounted on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The data were processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

The dark matter map released today makes use of early DES observations and covers only about three percent of the area of sky DES will document over its five-year mission. The survey has just completed its second year. As scientists expand their search, they will be able to better test current cosmological theories by comparing the amounts of dark and visible matter.

Those theories suggest that, since there is much more dark matter in the universe than visible matter, galaxies will form where large concentrations of dark matter (and hence stronger gravity) are present. So far, the DES analysis backs this up: The maps show large filaments of matter along which visible galaxies and galaxy clusters lie and cosmic voids where very few galaxies reside. Follow-up studies of some of the enormous filaments and voids, and the enormous volume of data, collected throughout the survey will reveal more about this interplay of mass and light.

"Our analysis so far is in line with what the current picture of the universe predicts," Chang said. "Zooming into the maps, we have measured how dark matter envelops galaxies of different types and how together they evolve over cosmic time. We are eager to use the new data coming in to make much stricter tests of theoretical models."

Source: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)

A blueprint for clearing the skies of space debris
Published: Friday, April 17, 2015 - 12:34 in Astronomy & Space
An international team of scientists have put forward a blueprint for a purely space-based system to solve the growing problem of space debris. The proposal, published in Acta Astronautica, combines a super-wide field-of-view telescope, developed by RIKEN's EUSO team, which will be used to detect objects, and a recently developed high-efficiency laser system, the CAN laser that was presented in Nature Photonics in 2013, that will be used to track space debris and remove it from orbit. Space debris, which is continuously accumulating as a result of human space activities, consists of artificial objects orbiting Earth. The number of objects nearly doubled from 2000 to 2014 and they have become a major obstacle to space development. The total mass of space debris is calculated to be about 3,000 tons. It consists of derelict satellites, rocket bodies and parts, and small fragments produced by collisions between debris.

Because the debris exists in different orbits, it is difficult to capture. The objects can collide with space infrastructure such as the International Space Station (ISS) and active satellites. As a result, developing remediation technology has become a major challenge.

The EUSO telescope, which will be used to find debris, was originally planned to detect ultraviolet light emitted from air showers produced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays entering the atmosphere at night. "We realized," says Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, who led the effort, "that we could put it to another use. During twilight, thanks to EUSO's wide field of view and powerful optics, we could adapt it to the new mission of detecting high-velocity debris in orbit near the ISS."

The second part of the experiment, the CAN laser, was originally developed to power particle accelerators. It consists of bundles of optical fibers that act in concert to efficiently produce powerful laser pulses. It achieves both high power and a high repetition rate.

The new method combining these two instruments will be capable of tracking down and deorbiting the most dangerous space debris, around the size of one centimeter. The intense laser beam focused on the debris will produce high-velocity plasma ablation, and the reaction force will reduce its orbital velocity, leading to its reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

The group plans to deploy a small proof-of-concept experiment on the ISS, with a small, 20-centimeter version of the EUSO telescope and a laser with 100 fibers. "If that goes well," says Ebisuzaki, "we plan to install a full-scale version on the ISS, incorporating a three-meter telescope and a laser with 10,000 fibers, giving it the ability to deorbit debris with a range of approximately 100 kilometers. Looking further to the future, we could create a free-flyer mission and put it into a polar orbit at an altitude near 800 kilometers, where the greatest concentration of debris is found."
According to Ebisuzaki, "Our proposal is radically different from the more conventional approach that is ground based, and we believe it is a more manageable approach that will be accurate, fast, and cheap. We may finally have a way to stop the headache of rapidly growing space debris that endangers space activities. We believe that this dedicated system could remove most of the centimeter-sized debris within five years of operation."

The research was done by Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, Satoshi Wada, Lech Wiktor Piotrowski, Yoshiyuki Takizawa, and Marco Casolino of RIKEN, Toshiki Tajima of the University of California at Irvine, Mark N. Quinn, Remi Soulard and Gerard Mourou of IZEST EcolePolytechnique, Philippe Gorodetzky and Etienne Parizot of The AstroParticle and Cosmology laboratory/University of Paris 7, and Mario Bertaina of the University of Torino.

Source: RIKEN


General Calendar:

Colloquia, Lectures, Seminars, Meetings, Open Houses & Tours:

Colloquia:  Carnegie (Tues. 4pm), UCLA, Caltech (Wed. 4pm), IPAC (Wed. 12:15pm) & other Pasadena (daily 12-4pm):  http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/seminars/
Carnegie astronomy lectures – only 4 per year in the Spring www.obs.carnegiescience.edu.  Visit www.huntington.org for directions.  For more information about the Carnegie Observatories or this lecture series, please contact Reed Haynie.  This year's Astronomy Lecture Series will take place at A Noise Within on March 30, April 13, April 27, and May 11. Click here for more information.
All four lectures this year will be held at A Noise Within, the theater located at 3352 East Foothill Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91107 (just North of the 210 Freeway, take the Madre street exit). Free parking is available in the Metro Gold Line parking structure just South of the theatre. Enter the structure East off Sierra Madre Villa Ave. (if you are traveling North on Sierra Madre Villa) or West off Halstead Street. Click here for a map which depicts the site with the theatre, parking structure, and surrounding streets. Visit www.anoisewithin.org for directions and more information.  All lectures are free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Please arrive early. Doors open at 6:45 PM and all lectures start at 7:30 PM. Light refreshments will be served in advance of the lectures.


Monday, May 11th 2015
The Accelerating Universe
Dr. Robert P. Kirshner
Clowes Professor of Science,
Harvard University

The expanding universe was discovered at Mount Wilson almost 100 years ago. But there is something new! In the past 20 years, astronomers have found that cosmic expansion is speeding up, driven by a mysterious “dark energy” whose nature we do not understand. Dr. Kirshner, one of today”s preeminent astrophysicists, is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (sponsored by Google, among others), as well as the 2014 James Craig Watson Medal of the National Acad- emy of Sciences for “service to astronomy.”

1 May Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Friday Night 7:30PM Monthly General Meeting
Topic: Juno and the New Renaissance
Speaker: Theo Clarke, NASA/JPL
7 May AEA Astronomy Club Meeting "A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster than Light Travel." Greg Meholic A1/1735

18 May LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

May 21 & 22 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2015

The Search for Planets, Habitability, and Life in our Galaxy
What will the first evidence of life outside our own solar system look like? And what future technologies are required to discover that evidence? Exoplanet-hunting space-borne telescopes must suppress the bright glare from stars up to ten billion times in order to directly image the faint reflected light from a planet and look for tell-tale signatures of life. To tackle this challenge, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing two novel starlight suppression approaches: 1) coronagraphs (an internal occulter) and 2) starshades (an external occulter). We will discuss where these technologies are today, and how they must evolve in order to support possible exoplanet missions in the next decade and beyond.

Speaker:
Dr. Nick Siegler – Technology Manager, NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program, JPL

Locations:
Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, May 22, 2015, 7pm
The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College
1570 East Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Webcast: We offer two options to view the live streaming of our webcast on Thursday:
› 1) Ustream with real-time web chat to take public questions.
› 2) Flash Player with open captioning
If you don't have Flash Player, you can download for free here.


Observing:
The following data are from the 2015 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2015 Skygazer’s Almanac & monthly Sky at a Glance.

Current sun & moon rise/set/phase data for L.A.:  http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/usa/los-angeles

Sun, Moon & Planets for April:

Moon: May 4 full, May 11 last quarter May 18 new, May 25 1st quarter
Planets: Mercury & Venus  are visible in the W for 1-3 hours after sunset (Venus the longest).  Jupiter is up until just after midnight.  Saturn rises about shortly after sunset.  Mars is hidden in the Sun’s glare all month.

Other Events:

5 May Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Peak The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is the first of two showers that occur each year as a result of Earth passing through dust released by Halley's Comet, with the second being the Orionids. Every year, the earliest Eta Aquarids can be seen around April 21 and they persist until about May 12; however, the number of meteors you are likely to see will be low until around the time of the peak on May 5/6. At this time, observers in the Northern Hemisphere are likely to see about 10 meteors every hour, while Southern Hemisphere observers will see about 30 per hour.

7 May Mercury at its Greatest Eastern Elongation


11 May SBAS Saturday Night In Town Dark Sky Observing Session at Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 North Bay Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please contact Greg Benecke to confirm that the gate will be opened! http://www.sbastro.net/


14 May Astronomy Day

16 May LAAS Dark Sky Night : Lockwood Valley (Steve Kufeld Astronomical Site; LAAS members and their guests only)

18 May SBAS out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Greg Benecke http://www.sbastro.net/.  

21 -25 May RTMC It will be held at YMCA Camp Oakes, five miles southeast of Big Bear City, California on State Route 38 at Lake Williams Road between mileposts 44 and 45. This location is about 50 miles northeast of Riverside in the San Bernardino mountains

23 May Saturn at opposition

30 May Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm



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About the Club

Club Websites:  Internal (Aerospace): https://aeropedia.aero.org/aeropedia/index.php/Astronomy_Club  It is updated to reflect this newsletter, in addition to a listing of past club mtg. presentations, astronomy news, photos & events from prior newsletters, club equipment, membership & constitution.  We have linked some presentation materials from past mtgs.  Our club newsletters are also being posted to an external blog, “An Astronomical View” http://astronomicalview.blogspot.com/.

Membership.  For information, current dues & application, contact Alan Olson, or see the club website (or Aerolink folder) where a form is also available (go to the membership link/folder & look at the bottom).  Benefits will include use of club telescope(s) & library/software, membership in The Astronomical League, discounts on Sky & Telescope magazine and Observer’s Handbook, field trips, great programs, having a say in club activities, acquisitions & elections, etc.

Committee Suggestions & Volunteers.  Feel free to contact:  Mark Clayson, President & Program Committee Chairman (& acting club VP), TBD Activities Committee Chairman (& club Secretary), or Alan Olson, Resource Committee Chairman (over equipment & library, and club Treasurer).

Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club President