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)

Saturday, April 6, 2019

2019 April


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter April 2019

Contents

AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 1
Astronomy News p. 9
General Calendar p. 11
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 11
    Observing p. 13
Useful Links p. 15
About the Club p. 16

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

4 April
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
“Astrophotography: The Dark Arts,” Marc Leatham & Pizza
(A1/1735)




AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45 am.  For 2018:  Jan. 4 in A1/1029 A/B, Feb. 1 & March 1 in A1/2906 and for the rest of 2018 (April-Dec), the meeting room is A1/1735. 

Club News:  
April 4 Presentation Title: “Astrophotography: The Dark Arts.”

Description: “The majority of Americans live their whole lives without ever seeing the Milky Way and far fewer ever get the chance to explore the stars for themselves. This presentation will show what it takes to see the deep cosmos from your own backyard. With recent technological advancements and blossoming consumer markets, gone are the days where only National Geographic and The Hubble Space Telescope remind you of your place in the Deep Cosmos. Learn how to view it for yourself!”
Bio: "Marc Leatham is a new career Space Systems Engineer working for Booz Allen Hamilton in El Segundo. His work focuses on modeling The Gateway Space Station for NASA, but his true love for science and space stems from the unique hobby of taking pictures of nebulae and galaxies with his backyard telescope. In recent years his work has begun to gain more attention, resulting in it being hung in establishments around the world. When possible, Marc travels the western states presenting the story of finding a love for engineering through discovering the cosmos, and how you can too."

“Between balancing travel and working, I don't think I'll bring the astrophotography setup, but I'll bring something for people to look at. I included a couple of my photos you can use in the email to convince people to hopefully come.”

 April 19-21 Joint outing with the Outdoor Club to Anza-Borrego Desert to camp out, hike & view the dark skies.  RSVP if interested to Cassandra Meyer and Mark Clayson.  We could use someone to bring one of our telescopes & set up & operate.

We need volunteers to help with: 

·         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
(generally from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html, but this month’s (at least first 5) are from 2 local amateurs – club member Jay Landis, and our guest speaker, Marc Leatham.
Touchdown on Asteroid Ryugu https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190312.html
Video Credit: JAXA
Explanation: Last month, humanity bounced a robot off an asteroid. The main reason was to collect a surface sample. Despite concern over finding a safely reboundable touchdown spot, Japan's robotic Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully touched down -- and bounced right back from -- asteroid Ryugu. Before impact, Hayabusa2 fired a small bullet into 162173 Ryugu to scattered surface material and increase the chance that Hayabusa2 would be able to capture some. Next month, Hayabusa2 will fire a much larger bullet into Ryugu in an effort to capture sub-surface material. Near the end of this year, Hayabusa2 is scheduled to depart Ryugu and begin a looping trip back to Earth, hopefully returning small pieces of this near-Earth asteroid in late 2020.Studying Ryugu could tell humanity not only about the minor planet's surface and interior, but about what materials were available in the early Solar System for the development of life.



Horsehead Nebula – Marc Leatham


Andromeda Galaxy (M31) – Marc Leatham



M51 LRGB Final – Jay Landis


Horsehead Nebula – Jay Landis


Here is the Surfboard Galaxy, also known as M108, with the Owl Nebula, M97, in the upper left corner.  Taken from my backyard in El Segundo. – Jay Landis


This is a RGB image of the Cone Nebula and Christmas tree cluster from data taken in December.  I took over seven hours of hydrogen alpha data in February and another 5-6 hours of luminance data with a city light suppression filter in March.  I put all of it together with some basic post processing.  I kind of like it and how it shows the subtle dark clouds and reflection nebulosity. – Jay Landis


The Central Magnetic Field of the Cigar Galaxy 
Image Credit: NASA, SOFIA, E. Lopez-Rodriguez; NASA, Spitzer, J. Moustakas et al.
Explanation: Are galaxies giant magnets? Yes, but the magnetic fields in galaxies are typically much weaker than on Earth's surface, as well as more complex and harder to measure. Recently, though, the HAWC+ instrument onboard the airborne (747)SOFIA observatory has been successful in detailing distant magnetic fields by observing the polarized infrared light emitted by elongated dust grains rotating in alignment with the local magnetic field. HAWC+ observations of M82, the Cigar galaxy, show that the central magnetic field is perpendicular to the disk and parallel to the strong supergalactic wind. This observation bolsters the hypothesis that M82's central magnetic field helps its wind transport the mass of millions of stars out from the central star-burst region. The featured image shows magnetic field lines superposed on top of an optical light (gray) and hydrogen gas (red) image from Kitt Peak National Observatory, further combined with infrared images (yellow) from SOFIA and theSpitzer Space Telescope. The Cigar Galaxy is about 12 million light years distant and visible with binoculars towards the constellation of the Great Bear.


The Orion Bullets 
Image Credit: GeMS/GSAOI Team, Gemini Observatory, AURA, NSF; 
Processing: Rodrigo Carrasco (Gemini Obs.), Travis Rector (Univ. Alaska Anchorage)
Explanation: Why are bullets of gas shooting out of the Orion Nebula? Nobody is yet sure. First discovered in 1983, each bullet is actually about the size of our Solar System, and moving at about 400 km/sec from a central source dubbed IRc2. The age of the bullets, which can be found from their speed and distance from IRc2, is very young -- typically less than 1,000 years. As the bullets expand out the top of the Kleinmann-Low section of the Orion Nebula, a small percentage of iron gas causes the tip of each bullet to glow blue, while each bullet leaves a tubular pillar that glows by the light of heated hydrogen gas. The detailed image was created using the 8.1 meter Gemini South telescope in Chile with an adaptive optics system (GeMS). GeMS uses five laser generated guide stars to help compensate for the blurring effects of planet Earth's atmosphere.


Astronomy News:
(from
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/03/fossils-found-from-day-dinosaurs-died-chicxulub-tanis-cretaceous-extinction/
See link above for photos described in the story below.

Layers of rock in the western U.S. known as the Hell Creek Formation preserve the final millennia of the age of dinosaurs. A nearby site in North Dakota called Tanis may hold sediments laid down within minutes to hours of the asteroid impact that set off this mass extinction 66 million years ago.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DANITA DELIMONT / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
SCIENCE & INNOVATION

These fossils may capture the day the dinosaurs died. Here's what you should know.


Reports about a stunning site in North Dakota are making waves among paleontologists, who are eager to see more.


BY MICHAEL GRESHKO

PUBLISHED MARCH 31, 2019
Mere minutes after a miles-wide asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, a hailstorm of tiny glass beads rained down on a flooding estuary in what's now North Dakota. As seismic waves from the impact thrashed the water, plants and animals were jumbled up and buried in the shifting sediments, which preserved the aftermath for millennia.

 Now, researchers say this site—newly described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—represents an exceedingly rare snapshot of the moment that marked the 

 dinosaurs' demise. Handfuls of fossils have been found before at other places that also capture this moment in the geologic record, known as the K-Pg boundary. But the North Dakota site potentially represents an entire ecosystem affected by the catastrophe.

 Study leader Robert DePalma conducts field research at the Tanis site.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT DEPALMA

“Essentially, what we've got there is the geologic equivalent of high-speed film of the very first moments after the impact,” says lead study author Robert DePalma, a Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas and a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History.
 “To see organisms that would have been impacted by the actual event at the end of the Cretaceous is just stunning,” adds coauthor Philip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester. (See why some scientists think that volcanoes helped doom the dinosaurs.)

 On Friday, The New Yorker published a feature describing the site—sometimes in more detail than the study itself provides. According to DePalma, the new PNAS paper will be just the first of several scientific studies that will fill in the details of this remarkable find.

 So, what does the published data actually reveal so far? And what else might the site hold for paleontologists? We've got you covered.
DINOSAURS 101Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth. Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction.

Rain of glass

The North Dakota site, nicknamed Tanis after the “lost” ancient Egyptian city, lies on private ranch land within a tiny outcrop of the larger Hell Creek Formation, a series of rock layers that record the hundreds of millennia leading up to the dinosaurs' extinction.
Study coauthor Mark Richards (left, background) watches as team leader Robert DePalma examines impact ejecta under a microscope during an expedition at Tanis.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT DEPALMA

DePalma first learned of the site from a fossil-dealer acquaintance, who had prospected there and found little he could sell for high value. Based on the fish, the dealer thought the site was a pond deposit that formed many thousands of years before the K-Pg boundary. But the more that DePalma mapped the site, the more he reconsidered. What if the site was in fact the low-lying portion of a river valley?

 As described in the paper, DePalma found telltale signs of the K-Pg impact in the site's sediments, including bits of quartz shocked under the impact's immense pressure, as well as plenty of impact debris.

 After the asteroid struck, it tore a gaping hole in Earth's crust some 50 miles wide and 18 miles deep, sending hunks of molten earth splashing upward and outward with ferocious speed. High in the atmosphere, the debris coalesced into tiny glass blobs, many of them less than a millimeter wide. These particles, called tektites, started raining down about 15 minutes after impact in a torrent of glass that didn't let up for another three quarters of an hour.

 The Tanis deposits contain a well-preserved mass of intertangled fish that retain their three-dimensional forms.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT DEPALMA

In many K-Pg sites, the tektites formed a discrete layer—but not at Tanis. The site's many layers of sediments are chock-full of tektites, which researchers interpret as a sign of water sloshing back and forth as the tektites fell. Tree resin at the site managed to catch some tektites before becoming fossilized as amber. DePalma's team even claims to have a tektite buried within the two-inch-deep hole it punched into sediment once it landed. After being flung onto land, a mass of fish became entombed all at once, and their exquisitely preserved bodies include gills congested with impact debris.
“It essentially stockpiled the rarest and most poorly represented things in [the rock formation] in one deposit that we can study for decades—and that’s without even including the impact scenario,” DePalma says. (Here's why some experts think the asteroid hit just the right spot to cause the mass extinction.)

 “I certainly was approaching it from a place of skepticism, but to be honest, having read through the paper, I’d be personally hard-pressed to come up with an alternate explanation,” says Victoria Arbour, paleontology curator at the Royal BC Museum who was not involved with the study.

 Ken Lacovara, a paleontologist at Rowan University who was also not on the study team, points out that more than 350 sites around the world preserve the K-Pg boundary, and some of these sites also bear fossils. In 1987, paleontologists described shark teeth and clam shells at a K-Pg site in central Poland. In 2013, researchers in Denmark found isolated shark teeth within the clays laid down by the impact's fallout. But Manning and other researchers who have seen the fossils up close stress that Tanis stands alone.

 “It's just mind-boggling,” says Florida State University paleobiologist Greg Erickson, who is not on the team but saw the fish fossils firsthand when visiting DePalma's lab several weeks ago. “I've never seen anything like that, and there's stacks of these things!”

Seismic sloshing

Though DePalma and his colleagues interpret the site as an estuary in a river valley, there are signs of creatures at Tanis that normally lived out at sea. The study documents some fragmentary marine fossils, including the teeth of ancient sharks, aquatic reptiles called mosasaurs, and an extinct type of mollusk called an ammonite. DePalma and his teams interpret the mix of land and ocean animals as a sign that water from an inland sea suddenly washed upriver, spilling its guts onto the riverbanks at Tanis. (See other evidence for a mass shark extinction in the wake of the asteroid strike.)

 A cross-section of the Tanis deposit shows the layered stratigraphy from two surge pulses and some animal fossils.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT DEPALMA

“The presence of the ammonite there is very weird ... it's like putting a squid in the Upper Potomac,” says Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and an expert on the Hell Creek Formation. Johnson adds that if the mosasaur tooth is confirmed to be the same age as the rest of the site, it could represent the youngest mosasaur material ever found.

 The site's sediments also suggest that a sudden rush of water overtook it. Researchers initially thought the deluge was the impact's tsunami racing up the Western Interior Seaway, a dinosaur-era body of water that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to northwest North America. But the timing was off: It would have taken eight to 16 hours for the tsunami to reach Tanis, but the site's sloshing must have occurred within the first hour after impact.

 Instead, the team thinks that the floods were seiche waves, pulses of flooding caused by magnitude 10 to 11 earthquakes triggered by the impact. Much like the footfalls of T. rex shook every glass of water in the film Jurassic Park, the asteroid impact would have generated such waves that would have sloshed bodies of water around the world.

Extraordinary claims

So far, many geologists and paleontologists have welcomed the study's insights into the asteroid impact.

SCIENCE & INNOVATION
These fossils may capture the day the dinosaurs died. Here's what you should know.

 “The beauty of the study—and it is a beautiful piece of work—is that it is what you expect: Giant rock hits Earth, stuff happens,” says Paul Renne, a geochronologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the detailed timing at the end of the Cretaceous.
However, nearly every paleontologist contacted by National Geographic who is not on the study team raised some concerns about the rollout of the discovery, going back to when DePalma presented previews at conferences in 2013 and 2016. Some researchers were so shocked by his claims at the time, they wondered whether the site was too good to be true.

 Some of DePalma's early work has also raised eyebrows, including one high-profile error. In 2015, DePalma unveiled a new species of dinosaur calledDakotaraptor, but a 2016 study led by Arbour revealed that DePalma had accidentally included fossil turtle bones in Dakotaraptor's reconstructed skeleton. Still, DePalma's colleagues vigorously defend his work on Tanis.

 “There’s not one person out there that hasn’t dropped the ball at some point,” Manning says. “He has produced a remarkable study.”

 Concerns also linger about the lack of visibility. The New Yorker story published days before the underlying scientific study and its 69-page supplement were set to formally appear online. National Geographic obtained both documents and distributed
 them to outside researchers for comment.

 According to the New Yorker, Tanis abounds with fossils, including teeth, bones, and hatchling remains of almost every dinosaur group known from the Hell Creek Formation. The story also reports the presence of foot-long feathers possibly from dinosaurs, pterosaur remains, and an unhatched egg of some kind with a preserved embryo inside.

 None of these details are in the study, however. No dinosaur bones are mentioned in the main study, and the supplement highlights only one hip-bone fragment from a horned dinosaur like Triceratops, found with “associated impressions of tissue.” (The New Yorker claims that a suitcase-size piece of fossilized skin is attached to the bone fragment.)

 “The weird thing is, DePalma has been very hyperbolic and cryptic for the last six years,” says the Smithsonian's Johnson, who was also interviewed for the New Yorker story. “The paper is fine, and we can talk about its significance, [but we] have it paired with the New Yorker article, which has a lot more nuanced detail and a lot more claims. It just makes us all a little bit queasy.”

 Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and a National Geographic grantee, also expresses some consternation: “Right now, I am left with more questions than answers ... It seems odd.”

Study leader Robert DePalma (right) and field assistant Kylie Ruble stabilize a fossil slab with plaster bandages before removing it from the ground.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT DEPALMA

 To verify the study's claims, paleontologists say that DePalma must broaden access to the site and its material.

 “It’s the case where extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; the jury should be out until other people look at this,” says Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

 “If I were in [DePalma's] situation, I would need to put on my science armor and get ready for a lot of criticism—and I think that that’s OK,” adds Arbour. “The nature of science should be for people to come at this with lots of different perspectives and lots of different approaches.”

 DePalma says that the new study is supposed to be a geological introduction to Tanis, not a full description, and that the team is working on follow-up publications. Also, the excavated fossils are entering museum collections, making them available for wider study. The horned-dinosaur bone, for instance, now resides at Florida Atlantic University.

 The researchers add that there are early discussions with the ranch owner on how best to protect Tanis for posterity. In the meantime, the site continues to reveal its secrets.
“Virtually every day they dig there, they see something they haven't seen before,” says study coauthor Mark Richards, a geophysicist formerly at the University of California, Berkeley, now at the University of Washington, who visited the site in 2017. “You can go for days or months at a paleontology dig site and not find anything interesting, and [DePalma] finds things literally by the hour. It's unbelievable.”

 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 2019 Astronomy Lecture Series

Each year the Observatories organizes a series of public lectures on current astronomical topics.  These lectures are given by astronomers from the Carnegie Observatories as well as other research institutions.  The lectures are geared to the general public and are free.
– only 4 per year in the Spring www.obs.carnegiescience.edu.  For more information about the Carnegie Observatories or this lecture series, please contact Reed Haynie.  . Click here for more information.

2019 Season

Monday evenings:  March 18, April 1, April 15 and April 29.

All Lectures are in Rothenberg Auditorium. The simulcast room adjacent to the Auditorium will also accommodate overflow attendance. Directions can be found here.

The lectures are free. Because seating is limited, however, reservations are required for each lecture through Eventbrite (links below). Additionally, the lectures will be streamed live through Livestream and simultaneously on our Facebook CarnegieAstro page. For information, please call 626-304-0250.

Doors open at 6:45 p.m. Each Lecture will be preceded by a brief musical performance by students from The Colburn School starting at 7:00 p.m. Lectures start at 7:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be available.


Monday, April 1, 2019
A New Tool to Map Entire Galaxies
Dr. Rosalie McGurk
Fellow in Instrumentation, Carnegie Observatories
All the popular images of galaxies, while beautiful, do not provide the information that astronomers need to measure the galaxies’ inherent properties, like the dynamics and composition of their stars and gases.  Using the latest technological advances, Dr. McGurk is building a new, custom-designed instrument for Carnegie Observatories' Magellan Telescopes that will peer into the Universe with extreme detail – making it possible to efficiently make 3D maps of galaxies, nebulae, and more.
Date: Monday, April 1, 2019 - 6:45pm
 Tickets will be available starting March 19th at Eventbrite.
Watch the live broadcast of this talk
Monday, April 15, 2019

Nittler_crop.png

Stars Under the Microscope: Ancient Stardust in Meteorites
 Dr. Larry Nittler
Staff Scientist, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
Carnegie Institution for Science
Some meteorites contain rare, tiny grains of dust that formed in the explosions of ancient stars and
became part of the gas and dust cloud that formed our Solar System.  Dr. Nittler will discuss how he
 uses microscopic analyses to understand what these “presolar” stellar fossils tell us about the
evolution and inner workings of stars, and the chemical history of the matter that became the Sun
 and planets.
Tickets will be available starting April 2nd at Eventbrite.
Watch the live broadcast of this talk

Monday, April 29, 2019

Strom_crop.png

The DNA of Galaxies
Dr. Allison L. Strom
Carnegie Fellow, Carnegie Observatories
Like people, each of the billions of galaxies in the Universe has developed its own unique traits
over a complicated lifetime.  Until recently, astronomers have only been able to study galaxies
closest to the Milky Way in any detail, leaving much of the Universe's history a mystery. Dr. Strom
 will show how astronomers are now using the world's largest telescopes to determine the chemical
 DNA of even very distant galaxies, and how this information is answering key questions about
how galaxies like our own formed and evolved.
Tickets will be available starting April 16th at Eventbrite.
4 April
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
“Astrophotography: The Dark Arts,” Marc Leatham & Pizza
(A1/1735)









5 April
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic: “Planetarium Show” Speaker: Shimonee Kadakia

8 April
LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory



April 18 & 19 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2019


The Future is Cloudy: NASA’s Look at Clouds and Climate

Earth is the most-observed planet in our system. There is a fleet of satellites looking down at our skies, giving scientists a deeper understanding of our ever-changing clouds and their relationship to our climate.
Host:
Brian White

Speakers:
Dr. Kate Marvel – Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University
Dr. Graeme Stephens – Co-Director of Center for Climate Sciences, PI for Cloudsat Mission
Dr. Brian Kahn – Atmospheric Infrared Sounder Cloud Algorithm Lead, JPL

Location:
Thursday, April 18, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA › Directions

Friday, April 19, 2019, 7pm
Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium
1200 E California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA › Directions

Webcast:
Thursday’s lecture will be shown live on Ustream and YouTube
* Only the Thursday lectures are streamed live.



April 7, 2019 

UCLA Meteorite Gallery Events

DR. D
IMITRI PAPANASTASSIOU

APOLLO SCIENCE RECOLLECTION

Location: Geology 3656
Time: 2:30PM
Our next Gallery Lecture will be presented on Sunday, 7 Apr 2019 by Dr. Dimitri Papanastassiou, an expert in isotopic geochronology, recently retired from JPL. The Apollo Program was a competitive race to the Moon. Science was inserted quite late. But, once inserted, it resulted in a revolution in planetary science, in the development of a wide range of new analytical techniques and of new ways to think about planetary evolution, including the Earth. Funding for planetary science became plentiful for a few years; it allowed the formation of multidisciplinary teams. "I was finishing my Ph.D. in Physics when the Apollo 11 samples came back and had the excitement to work on them starting in September of 1969. I had developed a mass spectrometer uniquely capable of measuring lunar samples. I attended the 1st Lunar Science Conference, on a very cold day (Jan. 5, 1970) as a newly-minted Ph. D. and continued to work on samples from every Apollo mission. I will share the excitement and serendipity, as well as the importance of the multidisciplinary approach (physics, chemistry, geology)."


2 May
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
TBD
(A1/1735)

Observing:

The following data are from the 2019 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2019 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 4 new, April 12 1st quarter, April 19 Full, April 26 last quarter,            
Planets: Venus visible at dawn all month.  Mars visible at dusk, sets mid-evening.  Mercury lost in solar glare all month.  Saturn rises early morning, visible until dawn. Jupiter rises near midnight, visible until dawn.
Other Events:

6 April
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party

3, 10, 17, 24 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 See https://yurisnight.net/ for more information.

13 April Madrona Marsh Star Party

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

22 April Lyrids Meteor Shower Peak The shower usually peaks on around April 22 and the morning of April 23. Counts typically range from 5 to 20 meteors per hour, averaging around 10. As a result of light pollution, observers in rural areas will see more than observers in a city. Nights without a moon in the sky will reveal the most meteors.

27 April Saturday SBAS In Town Dark Sky Observing Session at Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 NortbBay Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please contact Ken Rossi or Ken Munson to confirm that the gate will be opened.

4 May
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)
Southern California & Beyond Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria
Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting


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, Walt Sturrock, 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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