The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image (see description on the right, below)

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image
(10,000 galaxies in an area 1% of the apparent size of the moon -- see description on the right, below)

Thursday, April 13, 2017

2017 April

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter April 2017

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 10
General Calendar p. 18
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 18
    Observing p. 22
Useful Links p. 23
About the Club p. 24

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:
6 April
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Pizza & Online Astronomy Video
(A1/1735)
4 May
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Gemini (Exo-)Planet Imager, Sloane Wiktorowicz, Aerospace
(A1/1735)




AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45 am (except Feb. 2 which will start at 12:00).  For all of 2017, the meeting room is A1/1735. 


Club News:  

Eclipse 2017.  A survey has been sent to those on the eclipse roster (let me know if you’d like to be added).  It is primarily for those planning to observe the eclipse in Rexburg, Idaho, although others may be interested in the eclipse glasses, memorabilia and photo pool.

This will help us to choose locations/arrangements for a group meeting the evening before the eclipse, a star party the evening of the eclipse, and possible meal(s).  And some other local eclipse-related activities.

Please complete the survey and return it to me at your earliest convenience.  We will probably have another group meeting sometime after we have compiled the results and made arrangements, to update everyone on preparations & plans.

If you have not made travel arrangements, it is probably a good idea to do so before long.  If anyone has recent experience or insights into making lodging arrangements, feel free to share.  I have heard of homeowners on the eclipse path now renting their homes for thousand(s) of dollars per night (at least near Casper, WY, site of the Astronomical League convention).  I have a cousin in Ogden, UT who’s planning to camp out on his Idaho farm.  I checked, and there are no car rentals available in Pocatello. 



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

VIDEO:  Equinox on a Spinning Earth https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170319.html
 Image Credit: NASA, Meteosat, Robert Simmon
Explanation: When does the line between day and night become vertical? Tomorrow. Tomorrow is an equinox on planet Earth, a time of year when day and night are most nearly equal. At an equinox, the Earth's terminator -- the dividing line between day and night -- becomes vertical and connects the north and south poles. The featured time-lapse video demonstrates this by displaying an entire year on planet Earth in twelve seconds. From geosynchronous orbit, the Meteosat satellite recorded these infrared images of the Earth every day at the same local time. The video started at the September 2010 equinox with the terminator line being vertical. As the Earth revolved around the Sun, the terminator was seen to tilt in a way that provides less daily sunlight to the northern hemisphere, causing winter in the north. As the year progressed, the March 2011 equinox arrived halfway through the video, followed by the terminator tilting the other way, causing winter in the southern hemisphere -- and summer in the north. The captured year ends again with the September equinox, concluding another of billions of trips the Earth has taken -- and will take -- around the Sun.


JWST: Ghosts and Mirrors 
 Image Credit: Chris Gunn, NASA
Explanation: Ghosts aren't actually hovering over the James Webb Space Telescope. But the lights are out as it stands with gold tinted mirror segments and support structures folded in Goddard Space Flight Center's Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility clean room. Following vibration and acoustic testing, bright flashlights and ultraviolet lights are played over the stationary telescope looking for contamination, easier to spot in a darkened room. In the dimness the camera's long exposure creates the ghostly apparitions, blurring the moving lights and engineers. A scientific successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimized for the infrared exploration of the early Universe. Its planned launch is in 2018 from French Guiana on a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket.


King of Wings Hoodoo under the Milky Way 
 Image Credit & Copyright: Wayne Pinkston (LightCrafter Photography)
Explanation: This rock structure is not only surreal -- it's real. The reason it's not more famous is that it is, perhaps, smaller than one might guess: the capstone rock overhangs only a few meters. Even so, the King of Wings outcrop, located in New Mexico, USA, is a fascinating example of an unusual type of rock structure called a hoodoo. Hoodoos may form when a layer of hard rock overlays a layer of eroding softer rock. Figuring out the details of incorporating this hoodoo into a night-sky photoshoot took over a year. Besides waiting for a suitably picturesque night behind a sky with few clouds, the foreground had to be artificially lit just right relative to the natural glow of the background. After much planning and waiting, the final shot, featured here, was taken in May 2016. Mimicking the horizontal bar, the background sky features the band of our Milky Way Galaxystretching overhead.


Dust, Gas, and Stars in the Orion Nebula 
 Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Reprocessing & Copyright: Jesús M.Vargas & Maritxu Poyal
Explanation: The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is probably the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, filaments of dark dust and glowing gas surround hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the featured deep image shown in assigned colors, part of the nebula's center is shown as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye near the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. In addition to housing a bright open cluster of stars known as the Trapezium, the Orion Nebula contains many stellar nurseries. These nurseries contain much hydrogen gas, hot young stars, proplyds, and stellar jets spewing material at high speeds. Also known as M42 and M43, the Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.


The Aurora Tree 
 Image Credit & Copyright: Alyn Wallace Photography
Explanation: Yes, but can your tree do this? Pictured is a visual coincidence between the dark branches of a nearby tree and bright glow of a distant aurora. The beauty of the aurora -- combined with how it seemed to mimic a tree right nearby -- mesmerized the photographer to such a degree that he momentarily forgot to take pictures. When viewed at the right angle, it seemed that this tree had aurora for leaves! Fortunately, before the aurora morphed into a different overall shape, he came to his senses and capture the awe-inspiring momentary coincidence. Typically triggered bysolar explosions, aurora are caused by high energy electrons impacting the Earth's atmosphere around 150 kilometers up. The unusual Earth-sky collaboration was witnessed earlier this month in Iceland.


UGC 12591: The Fastest Rotating Galaxy Known 
 Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble
Explanation: Why does this galaxy spin so fast? To start, even identifying which type of galaxy UGC 12591 is difficult -- it has dark dust lanes like a spiral galaxy but a large diffuse bulge of stars like a lenticular. Surprisingly observations show that UGC 12591 spins at about 480 km/sec, almost twice as fast as our Milky Way, and the fastest rotation rate yet measured. The mass needed to hold together a galaxy spinning this fast is several times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy. Progenitor scenarios for UGC 12591 include slow growth by accreting ambient matter, or rapid growth through a recent galaxy collision or collisions -- future observations may tell. The light we see today from UGC 12591 left about 400 million years ago, when trees were first developing on Earth.


A Dark Winter Sky over Monfragüe National Park in Spain 
 Image Credit & Copyright: José Luis Quiñones (Entre Encinas y Estrellas)
Explanation: You, too, can see a night sky like this. That is because Monfragüe National Park in Spain, where this composite image was created, has recently had its night sky officially protected from potential future light pollution. Icons of the night sky that should continue to stand out during northern winter -- and are visible on the featured image -- include very bright stars like Sirius, Betelgeuse, and Procyon, bright star clusters like the Pleiades, and, photographically, faint nebulas like the California and Rosette Nebulas. Even 100 years ago, many people were more familiar with adarker night sky than people today, primarily because of the modern light pollution. Other parks that have been similarly protected as dark-sky preserves include Death Valley National Park (USA) and Grasslands National Park (Canada). Areas such as the city of Flagstaff, Arizona and much of the Big Island of Hawaii also have their night skies protected.


Colorful Aurora over Iceland 
 Image Credit & Copyright: Sigurdur William Brynjarsson; Annotation Advice: Sævar Helgi Bragason
Explanation: You don't always see a scene this beautiful when you hike to an ancient volcano -- you have to be lucky. When the astrophotographer realized that auroras were visible two-weeks ago, he made a night-time run for the top of the caldera to see if he could capture them also reflected in the central lake. When he arrived, he found that ... the northern lights were even brighter and more impressive than before! And his image of them is the featured 13-frame panoramic mosaic. The crater lake in the center is called Kerid (Icelandic: Kerið) and is about 3,000 years old. The aurora overhead shows impressive colors and banding, with the red colors occurring higher in the Earth's atmosphere than the green. The background sky is filled with icons of the northern night including Polaris, the Pleiades star cluster, and the stars that compose the handle of the Big Dipper.


Astronomy News:

No, Dark Energy Isn't An Illusion

Ethan Siegel, Contributor
NASA / Swift

Supernovae observed in nearby and distant galaxies provide some of the best evidence for dark energy. But alternative theories attempt to explain the same phenomenon without it.
In 1998, two teams of scientists announced a shocking discovery: the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. Distant galaxies weren't just receding from us, but their recession speed was increasing over time. Over the next few years, precision measurements of three independent quantities -- distant galaxies containing type Ia supernovae, the fluctuation pattern in the cosmic microwave background, and large-scale correlations between galaxies at a variety of distances -- all supported and confirmed this picture. The leading explanation? That there's a new form of energy inherent to space itself: dark energy. The case is so strong that no one reasonably doubts the evidence, but many teams have made alternative cases for the explanation, claiming that dark energy itself could be an illusion.
NASA / WMAP science team

The expansion (or contraction) of space is a necessary consequence in a Universe that contains masses. But the rate of expansion and how it behaves over time is quantitatively dependent on what's in your Universe.
To understand whether this could be the case, we need to walk through four straightforward steps:
1.      What a Universe without dark energy would look like,
2.      What our Universe actually looks like,
3.      What alternative explanations have been offered up,
4.      And to evaluate whether any of them could legitimately work?
In science, as in all things, it's pretty easy to offer a "what if..." alternative scenario to the leading idea. But can it stand up to scientific rigor? That's the crucial test.
NASA / WMAP science team

A closed (overdense), open (underdense), and critical (flat) Universe would either recollapse, expand forever, or have the expansion asymptote to zero, respectively, in a Universe without dark energy.
Well before we conceived of dark energy, all the way back in the 1920s and 1930s, scientists derived how the entire Universe could have evolved within General Relativity. If you assumed that space, on the largest scales, was uniform -- with the same density and temperature everywhere -- there were only three viable scenarios to describe a Universe that was expanding today. If you fill a Universe with matter and radiation, like ours appears to be, gravity will fight the expansion, and the Universe can:
·         expand up to a point, reach a maximum size, and then begin contracting, eventually leading to a total recollapse.
·         expand and slow down somewhat, but gravitation is insufficient to ever stop or reverse it, and so it will eternally expand into the great cosmic abyss.
·         expand, with gravitation and the expansion balancing each other perfectly, so the expansion rate and the recession speed of everything asymptotes to zero, but never reverses.
Those were the three classic fates of the Universe: big crunch, big freeze, or a critical Universe, which was right on the border between the two.
NASA & ESA, of possible models of the expanding Universe

Without dark energy, the Universe wouldn't be accelerating.
But then the crucial observations came in, and it turns out the Universe did none of those three things. For the first six billion years or so after the Big Bang, it appeared we lived in a critical Universe, with the initial expansion and the effects of gravitational attraction balancing one another almost perfectly. But when the density of the Universe dropped below a certain amount, a surprise emerged: distant galaxies began speeding up, away from us and one another. This cosmic acceleration was unexpected, but robust, and has continued at the same rate ever since, for the past 7.8 billion years.

Saul Perlmutter of Berkeley

Measuring back in time and distance (to the left of "today") can inform how the Universe will evolve and accelerate/decelerate far into the future. We can learn that acceleration turned on about 7.8 billion years ago.
Why was this happening? The current, known forms of energy in the Universe -- particles, radiation and fields -- can't account for it. So scientists hypothesized a new form of energy, dark energy, that could cause the Universe's expansion to accelerate. There could be a new field that permeates all of space causing it; it could be the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum; it could be Einstein's cosmological constant from General Relativity. Current and planned observatories and experiments are looking for possible signatures that would distinguish or search for departures from any of these potential explanations, but so far all are consistent with being the true nature of dark energy.

Ned Wright, based on the latest data from Betoule et al.

The distance/redshift relation, including the most distant objects of all, seen from their type Ia supernovae. The data strongly favors cosmic acceleration, even though other data pieces now exist.
But alternatives have been proposed as well. Adding a new type of energy to the Universe should be a last resort to explain a new observation, or even a new suite of observations. A lot of people were skeptical of its existence, so scientists began asking the question of what else could be occurring? What could mimic these effects? A number of possibilities immediately emerged:
·         Perhaps the distant supernovae weren't the same as nearby ones, and were inherently fainter?
·         Perhaps there was something about the environments in which the supernovae occurred that changed?
·         Perhaps the distant light, en-route, was undergoing an interaction that caused it to fail to reach our eyes?
·         Perhaps a new type of dust existed, making these distant objects appear systematically fainter?
·         Or could it be that the assumption on which these models are founded -- that the Universe is, on the largest scales, perfectly uniform -- is flawed enough that what appears to be dark energy is simply the "correct" prediction of Einstein's theory?
The light-blocking, light-losing, or systematic light-differences scenarios have all been ruled out by multiple approaches, as even if supernovae were removed from the equation entirely, the evidence for dark energy would still be overwhelming. With precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations, and the large-scale structures that form and fail-to-form in our Universe, the case that the Universe's expansion rate is changing in the fashion we've measured is beyond reproach.
Supernova Cosmology Project, Amanullah, et al., Ap.J. (2010)

Constraints on dark energy from three independent sources: supernovae, the CMB and BAO. Note that even without supernovae, we’d need dark energy.
But what about that last possibility? The Universe, after all, isn't perfectly uniform. It has huge overdense regions: cosmic filaments, giant galaxy clusters, individually bound galaxies, stars, planets, dust clouds, and even black holes, not to mention dark matter. It has underdense regions: cosmic voids that have practically no stars or galaxies inside, stretching for up to tens of millions of light years. And if the Universe is non-uniform -- and in particular, if it went from a more uniform state to a more non-uniform state over time -- perhaps what we're seeing as dark energy is a mere misinterpretation of the energy in these imperfections?

Gábor Rácz et al., 2017

A Universe with dark energy (red), a Universe with large inhomogeneity energy (blue), and a critical, dark-energy-free Universe (green). Note that the blue line behaves differently from dark energy.
That was the idea of a new paper, published just a few weeks ago, by Gábor Rácz and collaborators. Or, more accurately, that's an old idea that comes up every few years, that gets publicized, and that is still ruled out. Why is it ruled out? Because the effects of these inhomogeneities on cosmic expansion has been quantified, and the results have been known for many years. The big conclusions one can draw are:
·         Cosmic imperfections contribute like spatial curvature, which leaves them unable to cause an accelerated-expansion-like effect.
·         They contribute less than 0.01% to the expansion rate at all times, even extrapolating billions of years into the future.
·         And that gravitational potential energy is the largest contributor from these cosmic imperfections, but play no important role on any scales in the Universe: from singularities to beyond the observable Universe.
E.R. Siegel and J.N. Fry, 2005

The contributions of inhomogeneity energy to cosmic expansion (top line), up to today (1 on the x-axis), and the fractional contribution to the expansion rate. Note that even into the far future, the contribution never approaches 1. The straight lines are linear approximations; the curves are the full calculation.
Although I myself wrote one of the important papers that quantified this effect, this result has been known since at least 1995, when Uros Seljak and Lam Hui presented their treatment at a symposium

The Universe is indeed imperfect, but we know exactly how (and by how much) it's imperfect. It was an interesting idea, but the effects of these imperfections is well-understood, and can't explain the observed acceleration. Dark energy is here to stay.
If you're going to resurrect an old idea, you'd better have a new reason why the old objections that ruled it out no longer apply. Until that day comes, you can rest assured that dark energy is no illusion!


 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 HaynieClick here for more information.
Update: All tickets have been reserved, however you can still join our live webcast at the following link:  Huntington Live Webcast.
The 2017 Astronomy Lecture Series is organized by Dr. John Mulchaey, Director of the Observatories. 
Monday, April 3rd 2017
Unraveling the Mysteries of Exploding Stars
Dr. Tony Piro
George Ellery Hale Distinguished Scholar in Theoretical Astrophysics
Carnegie Institution for Science
Supernovae are cosmic explosions where a single star can become as bright as a billion stars combined. Even though supernovae are crucial to the Universe, including producing the elements necessary for life, many mysteries remain. What powers them? Which stars are exploding? How do stars die? Astrophysicists are combining clues from observations with theoretical modeling to finally address these issues. And just like with any good mystery, often the answers lead to even more questions. 
Monday, April 17th 2017

Simulating the Universe, One Galaxy at a Time
Dr. Andrew Wetzel
Caltech-Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow
Carnegie Institution for Science

The formation of galaxies like our Milky Way involves gravity, dark matter, gases, star formation, and stellar explosions. Theoretical astrophysics is now revealing this complex process by using the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate galaxy formation. Dr. Wetzel will describe dramatic new advances in understanding how galaxies form within the cosmic web of the Universe.

Monday, May 1st 2017
Exoplanet Genetics
Dr. Johanna Teske
Carnegie Origins Postdoctoral Fellow
Carnegie Institution for Science
How do we find planets orbiting stars other than our Sun? How do we know what they’re made of, or if they’re Earth-like? Dr. Teske will discuss how exoplanets’ composition is “inherited” from their host star ‘’genes,” and will highlight new exoplanet discoveries and the Carnegie Institution’s pivotal role in understanding exoplanet formation and composition.
You can watch a recording of this talk by following this link.

Monday, May 15th 2017 
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Now I See You as You Are: How We See Inside a Star With Sound
Dr. Jennifer van Saders
Carnegie-Princeton Fellow,
Carnegie Institution for Science
We have sought to understand the internal workings of stars for as long as we have done astronomy, with the Sun as our first and best-studied star. Today, the technique of “asteroseismology” has revolutionized our view: just as seismology here on Earth reveals the interior of our own planet, asteroseismology of the stars allows us to view their central engines and structures.
6 April
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Pizza & Online Astronomy Video
(A1/1735)






3 April
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic:  “The Solar System in a Galactic Context: Upside-down stars and inside-out orbits” Christopher Spalding, Cal Tech

April 6 & 7 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2017

Harnessing the Sun’s Light to Explore Our Planet and the Universe

Earth science is a key to understanding our universe. Planetary science relies on ideas and technologies developed and tested here on Earth. Like a Star Trek "sensor sweep," a technique of remote sensing called spectral mapping is used to learn about celestial bodies. These types of instruments use reflected sunlight to produce imagery of the chemical composition of planetary surfaces. The information captured in these data is useful to many fields of Earth environmental, as well as planetary, research. In this talk, research systems engineer Mark Helmlinger will share photos and videos of spectral mapping field deployments to various regions of California, the United States, and India, both in the air and on the ground. He will discuss the science behind measuring spectra of reflected sunlight, and perform physical demonstrations to illuminate a few of the phenomena that make spectral remote sensing possible.
Speaker:
Mark Helmlinger 

Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream (or archived after the event)
Locations:
Thursday, April 6, 2017, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium
at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, April 7, 2017, 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.




13 Feb
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

23 April 2:30 PM UCLA Meteorite Gallery Lecture “The Osiris Rex sample-return mission to the asteroid Bennu, a probable source of carbonaceous chondrites” Dr. Steve Chesley, JPL The Osiris Rex mission was launched in September 2016. It will rendezvous with Asteroid Bennu in 2018 and spend 1.5 years mapping the surface. It will then sample the surface and return 60-2000 g to the Earth in 2023. It is the first US asteroid sampling mission. UCLA Slichter Hall, Room 3853 595 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles

4 May
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Gemini (Exo-)Planet Imager, Sloane Wiktorowicz, Aerospace
(A1/1735)

Observing:

The following data are from the 2017 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2017 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: April 3 1st quarter, April 11 full, April 19 last quarter, April 26 new              
Planets: Venus at dawn all April ENE.  Mars visible after dusk in the west all April.  Mercury  visible March 16-April 9 dusk WNW.  Saturn early morning in the southeast all April. Jupiter all April all night east to west.
Other Events:


1 April
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm


5,12,19,26 April
LAAS The Garvey Ranch Observatory is open to the public every Wednesday evening from 7:30 PM to 10 PM. Go into the dome to use the 8 Inch Refractor or observe through one of our telescopes on the lawn. Visit our workshop to learn how you can build your own telescope, grind your own mirror, or sign up for our free seasonal astronomy classes.

Call 213-673-7355 for further information.
Time: 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Location: Garvey Ranch Obs. , 781 Orange Ave., Monterey Park, CA 91755

12 April Yuri’s Night World Space Party Celebrate the dawn of human space exploration. See https://yurisnight.net/ for more information.

22 April Lyrids Meteor Shower Peak Counts typically range from 5 to 20 meteors per hour, averaging around 10

22 April
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party

 
22 April
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/

29 April Astronomy Day. Astronomy Day is a world-wide event observed each spring and fall. The next Astronomy Day this year is April 29, 2017; Astronomy Day next fall will be September 30, 2017. Local astronomical societies, planetariums, museums, and observatories will be sponsoring public viewing sessions, presentations, workshops, and other activities to increase public awareness about astronomy and our wonderful universe.

29 April
SBAS out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Greg Benecke to coordinate a location. http://www.sbastro.net/.  



Internet Links:

Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying Guides


General


Regional (Southern California, Washington, D.C. & Colorado)


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 

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