2017 October

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter October 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. 15

    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 15
    Observing p. 17

Useful Links p. 19
About the Club p. 20

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

5 Oct	AEA Astronomy Club Meeting	Pizza Party & Solar Flare presentation & Online Video	(A1/1735)
2 Nov	AEA Astronomy Club Meeting	TBD	(A1/2906)

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1^st  Thursdays at 11:45 am.  For all of 2017, the meeting room is A1/1735. 

Oct. 10 & 12, 11:30-12:30 in the A3 Cafeteria – look for the club’s table as part of the AEA clubs showcase series.

Oct. 14 – Club observing night on Mt. Pinos.  Jason Fields, our premier observational astronomer, will be leading our observing night on the club’s 16-inch Dobsonian, and his personal 20-inch telescope.

Oct. 18, 11am-1pm in the Paulikus Mall – club booth at the AEA October Fest.

Nov. 28 – the club (including Nahum Melamed presenting) is supporting Smith Elementary School’s (Lawndale) astronomy night, together with the South Bay Astronomical Society that is bringing some telescopes.

Nov./Dec. ? (TBD)  Eclipse show -- a more polished photo, video & Powerpoint presentation for the broader Aerospace & eclipse group audience.

Club News:  

Mt. Wilson.  Based on the clear weather report, our group of 18 observers proceeded to Mt. Wilson for a night on the 100-inch telescope Sept. 23.  They then took the docent tour of the Mt. Wilson facilities.  But as time for observing neared with dusk, fog and humidity came up the south side of the mountain and barely encompassed the 100-inch scope, raising humidity levels higher than tolerable with the newly-cleaned optics, and the observing had to be cancelled, and the dome remained closed.  The  60-inch, not far away but slightly on the other side of the ridge, had lower humidity, and was open for observation by another group.  This was our first cancellation in several years of club nights.  We’ll try again next year, and will get first choice at observing nights.

We need volunteers to help with: 

·         the Oct. 10 & 12 club table in the A3 cafeteria at lunch

·         the Oct. 18 club booth at the AEA Oct. Fest.

·         Preparing a more polished eclipse photo & video show for a broader audience possibly late Nov. or early Dec.

·         Nov. 28 STEM night at Smith Elementary School

·         Populating our club Sharepoint site with material & links to the club’s Aerowiki & Aerolink materials

·         Arranging future club programs

·         Managing club equipment

Astronomy Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month

(from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

A Total Solar Eclipse Close-Up in Real Time 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170912.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Jun Ho Oh (KAIST, HuboLab);
Music: Flowing Air by Mattia Vlad Morleo

Explanation: How would you feel if the Sun disappeared? Many eclipse watchers across the USA surprised themselves with the awe that they felt and the exclamations that they made as the Sun momentarily disappeared behind the Moon. Perhaps expecting just a brief moment of dusk, the spectacle of unusually rapid darkness, breathtakingly bright glowing beads around the Moon's edge, shockingly pink solar prominences, and a strangely detailed corona stretching across the sky caught many a curmudgeon by surprise. Many of these attributes were captured in the featured real-time, three-minute video of last month's total solar eclipse. The video frames were acquired in Warm Springs, Oregon with equipment specifically designed by Jun Ho Oh to track a close-up of the Sun's periphery during eclipse. As the video ends, the Sun is seen being reborn on the other side of the Moon from where it departed.

Cassini Approaches Saturn https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170911.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA, S. Van Vuuren et al.;
Music: Adagio for Strings (NY Philharmonic)

Explanation: What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spaceship? One doesn't have to just imagine -- the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and hundreds of thousands more since entering orbit. Some of Cassini's early images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the featured inspiring video which is part of a larger developing IMAX movie project named In Saturn's Rings. In the concluding sequence, Saturn looms increasingly large on approach as cloudy Titan swoops below. With Saturn whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over Mimas, with large Herschel Crater clearly visible. Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's thin ring plane. Dark shadows of the ring appear on Saturn itself. Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moonEnceladus appears in the distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends. The Cassini spacecraft itself, low on fuel, is scheduled to end on Friday when it will be directed to approach so close to Saturn that it falls in and melts.

Swirling Around the Eye of Hurricane Irma 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170910.html
Video Credit: NASA, GOES-16 Satellite, SPoRT

Explanation: Why does a hurricane have an eye at its center? No one is yet sure. What happens in and around a hurricane's eye is well documented, though. Warm air rises around the eye's edges, cools, swirls, and spreads out over the large storm, sinking primarily at the far edges. Inside thelow-pressure eye, air also sinks and warms -- which causes evaporation, calm, and clearing -- sunlight might even stream through. Just at the eye's edge is a towering eyewall, the area of the highest winds. It is particularly dangerous to go outside when the tranquil eye passes over because you are soon to experience, again, the storm's violent eyewall. Featured is one of the most dramatic videos yet taken of an eye and rotating eyewall. The time-lapse video was taken from space by NASA's GOES-16 satellite last week over one of the most powerful tropical cyclones in recorded history: Hurricane Irma. Hurricanes can be extremely dangerous and their perils are not confined to the storm's center.

100 Steps Forward 
Image Credit & Copyright: Camilo Jaramillo

Explanation: A beautiful conjunction of Venus and Moon, human, sand, and Milky Way is depicted in this night skyscape from planet Earth. The scene is a panorama of 6 photos taken in a moment near the end of a journey. In the foreground, footsteps along the wind-rippled dunes are close to the Huacachina oasis in the southwestern desert of Peru. An engaging perspective on the world at night, the stunning final image was also chosen as a winner in The World at Night's 2017 International Earth and Sky Photo Contest.

The Big Corona 
Image Credit & Copyright: Alson Wong

Explanation: Most photographs don't adequately portray the magnificence of the Sun's corona. Seeing the corona first-hand during a total solar eclipse is unparalleled. The human eye can adapt to see coronal features and extent that average cameras usually cannot. Welcome, however, to thedigital age. The featured picture is a combination of forty exposures from one thousandth of a second to two seconds that, together, were digitally combined and processed to highlight faint features of the total solar eclipse that occurred in August of 2017. Clearly visible are intricate layers and glowing caustics of an ever changing mixture of hot gas and magnetic fields in the Sun's corona. Looping prominences appear bright pink just past the Sun's limb. Faint details on the night side of the New Moon can even be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from the dayside of theFull Earth.

The Flash Spectrum of the Sun 
Image Credit & Copyright: Yujing Qin (University of Arizona)

Explanation: In clear Madras, Oregon skies, this colorful eclipse composite captured the elusive chromospheric or flash spectrum of the Sun. Only three exposures, made on August 21 with telephoto lens and diffraction grating, are aligned in the frame. Directly imaged at the far left, the Sun'sdiamond ring-like appearance at the beginning and end of totality brackets a silhouette of the lunar disk at maximum eclipse. Spread by the diffraction grating into the spectrum of colors toward the right, the Sun's photospheric spectrum traces the two continuous streaks. They correspond to the diamond ring glimpses of the Sun's normally overwhelming disk. But individual eclipse images also appear at each wavelength of light emitted by atoms along the thin, fleeting arcs of the solar chromosphere. The brightest images, or strongest chromospheric emission, are due to Hydrogen atoms. Red hydrogen alpha emission is at the far right with blue and purple hydrogen series emission to the left. In between, the brightest yellow emission is caused by atoms of Helium, an element only first discovered in the flash spectrum of the Sun.

Layers of a Total Solar Eclipse 
Image Credit: Inside: Solar Dynamics Observatory, LMSAL and NASA’s GSFC; 
Middle: Jay Pasachoff, Ron Dantowitz, and the Williams College Solar Eclipse Expedition/NSF/National Geographic; 
Outside: LASCO from NRL on SOHO from ESA 

Explanation: Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night can keep a space-based spacecraft from watching the Sun. In fact, from its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers sunward of planet Earth, NASA's SOlar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can always monitor the Sun's outer atmosphere, orcorona. But only during a total solar eclipse can Earth-based observers also see the lovely coronal streamers and structures - when the Moon briefly blocks the overwhelmingly bright solar surface. Then, it becomes possible to follow detailed coronal activity all the way down to the Sun's surface. In the outside layer of this composite image, SOHO's uninterrupted view of the solar corona during last month's eclipse is shown in orange hues. The middle, donut-shaped region is the corona as recorded by the Williams College Eclipse Expedition to Salem, Oregon. Simultaneously, the inner view is from NASA's Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, which, being outside of totality, was able to image the face of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light, shown in gold.

LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap 
Illustration Credit: LIGO- Virgo Collaboration - Optical Sky Data: A. Mellinger

Explanation: From around planet Earth three gravitational wave detectors have now reported a joint detection of ripples in spacetime, the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole merger in the distant Universe. The event was recorded on 2017 August 14, and so christened GW170814, by the LIGO observatory sites in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, and the more recently operational Virgo Observatory near Pisa, Italy. The signal was emitted in the final moments of the coalescence of two black holes of 31 and 25 solar masses located about 1.8 billion light-years away. But comparing the timing of the gravitational wave detections at all three sites allowed astronomers to vastly improve the location of the signal's origin on the sky. Just above the Magellanic clouds and generally toward the constellation Eridanus, the only sky region consistent with signals in all three detectors is indicated by the yellow contour line in this all-sky map. The all-sky projection includes the arc of our Milky Way Galaxy. An improved three-detector location of the gravitational wave source allowed rapid follow-up observations by other, more conventional, electromagnetic wave observatories that can search for potentially related signals. The addition of the Virgo detector also allowed the gravitational wave polarization to be measured, a property that further confirms predictions of Einstein's general relativity.

The Climber and the Eclipse 
Image Credit & Copyright: Andrew Struder

Explanation: What should you do if your rock climbing picture is photobombed by a total eclipse of the Sun? Rejoice -- because your planning paid off. After months of considering different venues, and a week of scouting different locations in Oregon's Smith Rock State Park, a group ofphotographers and rock climbers led by Andrew Struder, Ted Hesser, Martina Tibell, and Michael Shainblum settled on picturesque 100-meter tall Monkey Face tower as the dramatic foreground for their images of the pending total solar eclipse. Tension mounted as the eclipse time approached, planned juxtapositions were scrutinized, and the placement of rock climber Tommy Smith was adjusted. Right on schedule, though, the Moon moved in front of the Sun, and Smith moved in front of the Moon, just as planned. The solar eclipse image displayed here actually shows a diamond ring, an eclipse phase when a bit of the distant Sun is still visible beyond the Moon's surface.

A First Glimpse of the Great American Eclipse 
Image Credit & Copyright: Babak Tafreshi (TWAN), National Geographic

Explanation: Making landfall in Oregon, the Moon's dark umbral shadow toured the United States on August 21. Those gathered along its coast to coast path were witness to a total eclipse of the Sun, possibly the most widely shared celestial event in history. But first, the Moon's shadow touched the northern Pacific and raced eastward toward land. This dramatic snapshot was taken while crossing the shadow path 250 miles off the Oregon coast, 45,000 feet above the cloudy northern Pacific. Though from a shorter totality, it captures the eclipse before it could be seen from the US mainland. With the eclipsed Sun not far above, beautiful colors appear along the eastern horizon giving way to a clear, pitch-black, stratospheric sky in the shadow of the Moon.

Cassini's Last Ring Portrait at Saturn 
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute, Mindaugas Macijauskas

Explanation: How should Cassini say farewell to Saturn? Three days before plunging into Saturn's sunny side, the robotic Cassini spacecraft swooped far behind Saturn's night side with cameras blazing. Thirty-six of these images have been merged -- by an alert and adept citizen scientist -- into a last full-ring portrait of Cassini's home planet for the past 13 years. The Sun is just above the frame, causing Saturn to cast a dark shadow onto its enormous rings. This shadow position cannot be imaged from Earth and will not be visible again until another Earth-launched spaceship visits the ringed giant. Data and images from Cassini's mission-ending dive into Saturn's atmosphere on September 15 continue to be analyzed.

Astronomy News:

(from https://www.sciencedaily.com )

NASA wrapped its most famous spacecraft in aluminum kitchen foil — a last-minute move that may have saved the mission

Dave Mosher/Sep 26, 2017

https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/-nasa-wrapped-its-most-famous-spacecraft/f-8d74900008%2Fbusinessinsider.com

·         NASA's twin Voyager space probes launched 40 years ago.

·         Two months before launch, the space agency learned Jupiter's radiation and magnetic fields were stronger than expected.

§  To protect the Voyagers, engineers covered their cabling with kitchen-grade aluminum foil.

NASA launched its twin Voyager probes four decades ago, one of the most exalted missions in the space agency's history.

The Voyager mission explored Jupiter and Saturn more deeply than ever before, surveyed Uranus and Neptune for the first time, then left the solar system. The probes are now traveling in the space between stars.

But just months before the plutonium-powered robots were supposed to launch, scientists made a surprising last-minute addition: they covered critical parts of the probes in kitchen-grade aluminum foil.

The ad-hoc protection was added because Jupiter appeared to have more intense magnetic and radiation fields than scientists originally anticipated.

"Two months before shipping to the Cape for launch, the scientists were predicting that the magnetic fields around Jupiter were intense enough that they would accelerate particles," Frank Locatell, a Voyager project engineer, said in a PBS documentary called "The Farthest" that premiered this month.

These high-speed particles, similar to a geomagnetic storm on Earth, could generate electric fields of 40,000 volts.

"That would be the end of our spacecraft," Locatell said, since such high-voltage pulses could travel along exterior cables on the probes, "just feed them right into our systems and kill us."

An illustration of Jupiter's radiation belts. YouTube/NASA

The moment NASA scientists were worried about was set to occur in 1979, about a year and a half into the mission. That's when each probe would pass very close to Jupiter to observe the planet and its moons, and steal some of the Jupiter's gravitational energy to slingshot out to Saturn.

"You're approaching this monster magnetic field, this monster radiation environment, on purpose. Because you need to get close, because you want to see all the little moons and the clouds and the storms and you want to slingshot on to Saturn," Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who chronicled the Voyager mission in his book "The Interstellar Age", said in the documentary. "But you just don't know if you're going to survive. If the thing gets fried, you lose the mission."

NASA could not simply divert the probes or cancel the mission, which cost billions in today's dollars.

Engineers working on one of the Voyager probe's magnetometer booms in Florida on June 17, 1977. NASA/JPL-Caltech; Business Insider

But fixing the issue wasn't insurmountable — the cables just needed to be shielded to divert any rogue currents into a grounded part of the spacecraft. The problem was that launch was around the corner and a delay would mean missing the planetary alignment that made the mission possible. It occurs only once every 175 years.

"We didn't have time to go through the normal design reviews, so in order to get this protection done quickly enough, an ad hoc team was formed and we did some things that were out of the ordinary," Locatell said. "Very out of the ordinary."

He eventually sent a technician to a local supermarket in Florida to buy up all the kitchen-grade aluminum foil available.

"It was one of the only materials that was available to us," he said.

The team unfurled the foil, cut it into continuous strips, cleaned it with alcohol and wipes, and wrapped every exterior cable on the two spacecraft.

The effort appears to have worked.

NASA launched Voyager 2 on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The identical Voyager 1 probe launched on September 5 and soon overtook its twin in space.

On March 9, 1979, Voyager 1 safely swung past Jupiter during its closest approach and went on to Saturn. Both probes sent back unprecedented images of the outer solar system, including the first (and so far only) close-up photos of Uranus, Neptune, and those planets' moons and rings.

Those remarkable discoveries may not have happened if it weren't for the material that Locatell said he uses to wrap his Christmas turkeys.

Astronomers Spun Up By Galaxy-shape Finding

Press Release - Source: University of Sydney

Posted September 11, 2017 10:06 PM

 

Galaxies         ©University of Sydney

For the first time astronomers have measured how a galaxy's spin affects its shape.

It sounds simple, but measuring a galaxy's true 3D shape is a tricky problem that astronomers first tried to solve 90 years ago.

"This is the first time we've been able to reliably measure how a galaxy's shape depends on any of its other properties - in this case, its rotation speed," said research team leader Dr Caroline Foster of the University of Sydney, who completed this research while working at the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

The study is published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx1869

Galaxies can be shaped like a pancake, a sea urchin or a football, or anything in between.

Faster-spinning galaxies are flatter than their slower-spinning siblings, the team found.

"And among spiral galaxies, which have disks of stars, the faster-spinning ones have more circular disks," said team member Professor Scott Croom of the University of Sydney.

The team made its findings with SAMI (the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field unit), an instrument jointly developed by The University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory with funding from CAASTRO, the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics.

SAMI gives detailed information about the movement of gas and stars inside galaxies. It can examine 13 galaxies at a time and so collect data on huge numbers of them.

Dr Foster's team used a sample of 845 galaxies, over three times more than the biggest previous study. This large number was the key to solving the shape problem.

Because a galaxy's shape is the result of past events such as merging with other galaxies, knowing its shape also tells us about the galaxy's history.

SOURCE: University of Sydney Press Release

 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.  . Click here for more information.

5 Oct			AEA Astronomy Club Meeting	Pizza Party & Solar Flare presentation & Online Video	(A1/1735)
	6 Oct	Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance) Topic: “The Future of Mars Exploration” Speaker: Anita Sengupta, NASA JPL
	16 Oct	LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory

October 19 & 20 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2017

Sink or Swim? Using Radar to Protect California’s Water Supply

Among the U.S. states, California is atypical in that it has both highly variable annual precipitation, leading to major droughts and floods; as well as a great disparity between where and when the precipitation falls, where people live, and where crops are grown. To deal with these issues, California has a vast array of infrastructure in place to store, channel and convey water throughout the state, much of which also serves to protect against floods. Monitoring and maintaining the infrastructure that carries our water where we need it is both critical and an enormous undertaking, involving local, state, and federal resources. Even today, most of the monitoring is done through visual inspection from motor vehicles or on foot, a formidable task that affords neither frequent nor comprehensive measurements. Researchers at JPL are working to change that, using techniques developed for Earth science to measure Earth surface deformation using airborne radar. This game-changing technology has been applied to detect subsidence (sinking) of sections of the California Aqueduct during the recent drought and to identify levees that are subsiding in the Sacramento delta. In this lecture, Jones will describe how NASA uses a high-resolution, airborne radar to identify these hazards before they can become disasters.

Speaker:
Dr. Cathleen E. Jones - Signals Analysis Engineer, JPL

Location:
Thursday, Oct 19, 2017, 7pm
 Click here to add the date to your online calendar
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions 

Friday, Oct 20, 2017, 7pm
 Click here to add the date to your online calendar
The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College
1570 East Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream

22 Oct

MARC FRIES HOW TO FIND METEORITES WITH WEATHER-RADAR OBSERVATIONS OF FIREBALLS: OPPORTUNITIES FOR “CITIZEN SCIENCE” IN THE US AND WORLDWIDE Location: UCLA, Geology 3656 Time: 2:30PM The US maintains a nationwide network of Doppler weather radars, and it is possible to find meteorite falls using their freely-available radar imagery. This talk will describe what a meteorite fall is, how frequently they occur (Spoiler: About once per year in the US!), and instructions so that anyone with internet access can find them.

2 Nov

AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

TBD

(A1/2906)

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 October:

  

Moon: Oct 5 full, Oct 12 last quarter, Oct 19 new, Oct 27 1^st quarter         

           

Planets: Venus all month dawn low east.  Mars all month early dawn, low east.  Mercury is out of sight all month.  Saturn visible all month, early evening SW. Jupiter first few days of Oct. bright evening twilight.

Other Events:

5 October Venus Passes 0.2deg from Mars See them pass each other in the pre-dawn sky to the east.

4,11,18,25 Oct

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

9 October Draconids Meteor Shower Peak The Zenith Hourly Rate for this shower is highly variable with some years experiencing rates of several thousand per hour.

14 Oct

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 Oct

LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party

17 October Mercury Passes 1deg from Jupiter Look for these two low in the western sky after sunset.

19 October Uranus at Opposition

21 October Orionids Meteor Shower Peak The Orionid meteor shower, usually shortened to the Orionids, is the most prolific meteor shower associated with Halley’s Comet. The Orionids are so-called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Orion, but they can be seen over a large area of the sky. Orionids are an annual meteor shower which last approximately one week in late October. In some years, meteors may occur at rates of 50–70 per hour

21 Oct

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

21 Oct

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

28 October International Observe the Moon Night

 See http://www.lpi.usra.edu/observe_the_moon_night/ for information on participating.

Internet Links:

Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying Guides

Sky & Telescope Magazine -- Choosing Your Equipment

Orion Telescopes & Binoculars -- Buying Guides

Telescopes.com -- Telescopes 101

General

Getting Started in Astronomy & Observing

The Astronomical League

 e! Science News Astronomy & Space

NASA Gallery

Astronomical Society of the Pacific (educational, amateur & professional)

Amateur Online Tools, Journals, Vendors, Societies, Databases

The Astronomy White Pages (U.S. & International Amateur Clubs & Societies)

American Astronomical Society (professional)

More...

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

Southern California & Beyond Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria

Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting

Los Angeles Astronomical Society (LAAS)

South Bay Astronomical Society (SBAS)

Orange County Astronomers

The Local Group Astronomy Club (Santa Clarita)

Ventura County Astronomical Society

The Astronomical Society of Greenbelt

National Capital Astronomers

Northern Virginia Astronomy Club

Colorado Springs Astronomical Society

Denver Astronomical Society

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