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)

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

2019 May


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter May 2019

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. 19
Useful Links p. 20
About the Club p. 21

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

2 May
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
NASA video shorts
(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 19-21 Joint outing to Anza-Borrego Desert to camp out, hike & view the dark skies.  Here’s a report on the outing, & use of our giant binocs that we ended up lending, from Cassie Meyer:
The camping trip went very well! We used the binoculars both Friday and Saturday night to view the moon. No one really knew how to use the parallelogram mount to it’s full potential, but we made it work for our needs. My favorite part was watching the moon rise over the mountain ridges in the distance. On Friday, the moon had a pink glow before it peeked over the ridge. Once the moon rose higher in the sky, it did get pretty bright to look at just like you predicted. I’ve attached a few photos I took with my iphone through one side of the binoculars. One photo turned out blurry before I realized that the binoculars weren’t in focus. I also used the binoculars during the day to scan the mountainsides for big horned sheep – it wasn’t as fruitful as moon viewing.



I can hold the binoculars, tripod, and mount in my office. The outdoors club is also having to store club gear in offices and we talked to AEA about getting some AEA club storage space. It seemed like they supported the idea of some sort of on-campus storage, but progress is slow. It wouldn’t hurt to have another squeeky wheel to ask for oil…😊
Thanks again for lending out the equipment!
-Cassie Meyer


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)

VIDEO:  Mars Methane Mystery Deepens https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190422.html
Video Credit: NASA's GSFC, Scientific Visualization Studio
Explanation: The methane mystery on Mars just got stranger. New results from ESA and Roscosmos' ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, has unexpectedly not detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars. This result follows the 2013 detection of methane byNASA's Curiosity rover, a result seemingly confirmed by ESA's orbiting Mars Express the next day. The issue is so interesting because life is a major producer of methane on Earth, leading to intriguing speculation that some sort of life -- possiblymicrobial life -- is creating methane beneath the surface of Mars. Non-biological sources of methane are also possible. Pictured is a visualization of the first claimed methane plume over Mars as detected from Earth in 2003. The new non-detection of methane by the ExoMars Orbiter could mean that Mars has some unexpected way of destroying methane, or that only some parts of Mars release methane -- and possibly only at certain times. As the mystery has now deepened, humanity's scrutiny of our neighboring planet's atmosphere will deepen as well.
VIDEO: Transit of Phobos -- Martian Moon Phobos Crosses the Sun
   https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190410.html
Video Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Curiosity Rover
Explanation: What's that passing in front of the Sun? It looks like a moon, but it can't be Earth's Moon, because it isn't round. It's the Martian moon Phobos. The featured video was taken from the surface of Mars late last month by the Curiosity rover.Phobos, at 11.5 kilometers across, is 150 times smaller than Luna (our moon) in diameter, but also 50 times closer to its parent planet. In fact, Phobos is so close to Mars that it is expected to break up and crash into Mars within the next 50 million years. In the near term, the low orbit of Phobos results in more rapid solar eclipses than seen from Earth. The featured video has been sped up -- the actual transit took about 35 seconds. A similar video was taken of Mars' smaller and most distant moon Diemostransiting the Sun. The videographer -- the robotic rover Curiosity -- continues to explore Gale crater, most recently an area with stunning vistas and unusual rocks dubbed Glen Torridon.
VIDEO:         All of Mercury https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190428.html
Image Credit: NASA/JHU Applied Physics Lab/Carnegie Inst. Washington
Explanation: Only six years ago, the entire surface of planet Mercury was finally mapped. Detailed observations of the innermost planet's surprising crust began when the robotic have been ongoing since the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft first passed Mercury in 2008 and continued until its controlled crash landing in 2015. Previously, much of the Mercury's surface was unknown as it is too far for Earth-bound telescopes to see clearly, while the Mariner 10 flybys in the 1970s observed only about half. The featured video is a compilation of thousands of images of Mercury rendered in exaggerated colors to better contrast different surface features. Visible on the rotating world are rays emanating from a northern impact that stretch across much of the planet, while about half-way through the video the light colored Caloris Basin rotates into view, a northern ancient impact feature that filled with lava. Recent analysis of MESSENGER data indicates that Mercury has a solid inner core.


The Galaxy, the Jet, and the Black Hole 
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Explanation: Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black hole. Giant of the Virgo galaxy cluster about 55 million light-years away, M87 is the large galaxy rendered in blue hues in this infrared image from the Spitzer Space telescope. Though M87 appears mostly featureless and cloud-like, the Spitzer image does record details of relativistic jets blasting from the galaxy's central region. Shown in the inset at top right, the jets themselves span thousands of light-years. The brighter jet seen on the right is approaching and close to our line of sight. Opposite, the shock created by the otherwise unseen receding jet lights up a fainter arc of material. Inset at bottom right, the historic black hole image is shown in context, at the center of giant galaxy and relativistic jets. Completely unresolved in the Spitzer image, the supermassive black hole surrounded by infalling material is the source of the enormous energy driving the relativistic jets from the center of active galaxy M87.
First Horizon-Scale Image of a Black Hole 
Image Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Explanation: What does a black hole look like? To find out, radio telescopes from around the Earth coordinated observations of black holes with the largest known event horizons on the sky. Alone, black holes are just black, but these monster attractors are known to be surrounded by glowing gas. The first image was released yesterday and resolved the area around the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 on a scale below that expected for its event horizon. Pictured, the dark central region is not the event horizon, but rather the black hole's shadow -- the central region of emitting gas darkened by the central black hole's gravity. The size and shape of the shadow is determined by bright gas near the event horizon, by strong gravitational lensing deflections, and by the black hole's spin. In resolving this black hole's shadow, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) bolstered evidence that Einstein's gravity works even in extreme regions, and gave clear evidence that M87 has a central spinning black hole of about 6 billion solar masses. The EHT is not done -- future observations will be geared toward even higher resolution, better tracking of variability, and exploring the immediate vicinity of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.



Falcon Heavy Launch Close Up 
Image Credit: SpaceX
Explanation: Twenty seven Merlin rocket engines are firing in this close-up of the launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket. Derived from three Falcon 9 first stage rockets with nine Merlin rocket engines each, the Falcon Heavy left NASA's Kennedy Space Center launch pad 39A on April 11. This second launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket carried the Arabsat 6A communications satellite to space. In February of 2018, the first Falcon Heavy launch carried Starman and a Tesla Roadster. Designed to be reusable, both booster stages and the central core returned safely to planet Earth, the boosters to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station landing zones. The core stage landed off shore on autonomous spaceport drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

ISS from Wallasey 
Image Credit & Copyright: Richard Addis
Explanation: After sunset on March 28, the International Space Station climbed above the western horizon, as seen from Wallasey, England at the mouth of the River Mersey. Still glinting in the sunlight some 400 kilometers above planet Earth, the fast moving ISS was followed by hand with a small backyard telescope and high frame rate digital camera. A total of 2500 frames were recorded during the 7 minute long visible ISS passage and 100 of them captured images of the space station. These are the four best frames showing remarkable details of the ISS in low Earth orbit. Near the peak of its track, about 60 degrees above the horizon, the ISS was brighter than the brightest star in the sky and as close as 468 kilometers to the Wallasey backyard.
The Shape of the Southern Crab 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
Explanation: The symmetric, multi-legged appearance of the Southern Crab Nebula is certainly distinctive. About 7,000 light-years distant toward the southern sky constellation Centaurus, its glowing nested hourglass shapes are produced by the remarkable symbiotic binary star system at its center. The nebula's dramatic stellar duo consists of a hot white dwarf star and cool, pulsating red giant star shedding outer layers that fall onto the smaller, much hotter companion. Embedded in a disk of material, outbursts from the white dwarf cause an outflow of gas driven away both above and below the disk resulting in the bipolar hourglass shapes. The bright central shape is about half a light-year across. This new Hubble Space Telescope imagecelebrates the 29th anniversary of Hubble's launch on April 24, 1990 on board the Space Shuttle Discovery.

AZURE Vapor Tracers over Norway 
Image Credit & Copyright: Yang Sutie
Explanation: What's happening in the sky? The atmosphere over northern Norway appeared quite strange for about 30 minutes last Friday when colorful clouds, dots, and plumes suddenly appeared. The colors were actually created by the NASA-fundedAuroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment (AZURE) which dispersed gas tracers to probe winds in Earth's upper atmosphere. AZURE's tracers originated from two short-lived sounding rockets launched from the Andøya Space Center in Norway. The harmless gases, trimethylaluminum and a barium/strontium mixture, were released into the ionosphere at altitudes of 115 and 250 km. The vapor trails were observed dispersing from several ground stations. Mapping how AZURE's vapors dispersed should increase humanity's understanding of how the solar wind transfers energy to the Earth and powers aurora.
Moon Occults Saturn 
Image Credit & Copyright: Cory Schmitz
Explanation: Sometimes Saturn disappears. It doesn't really go away, though, it just disappears from view when our Moon moves in front. Such a Saturnian eclipse was visible along a small swath of Earth -- from Brazil to Sri Lanka -- near the end of last month. The featured color image is a digital fusion of the clearest images captured by successive videos of the event taken in red, green, and blue, and taken separately for Saturn and the comparative bright Moon. The exposures were taken fromSouth Africa just before occultation -- and also just before sunrise. When Saturn re-appeared on the other side of the Moon almost two hours later, the Sun had risen. This year, eclipses of Saturn by the Moon occur almost monthly, but, unfortunately, are visible only to those with the right location and with clear and dark skies.


Astronomy News:

NASA ScienceCasts: Hubble’s Contentious Constant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DDnJmcTRZw

Something Is Not Quite Right In the Universe, Ultraprecise New Measurement Reveals

By Mara Johnson-Groh February 09, 2019 Science & Astronomy 
https://www.space.com/43277-hubble-constant-measured-precisely-with-quasars.html



This Hubble Telescope image shows a doubly-imaged quasar, which can be used to measure the Hubble constant. A new technique of measuring the Hubble Constant from such doubly-imaged quasar systems could help astronomers better understand how the universe's expansion rate has changed over time.
(Image: © NASA Hubble Space Telescope, Tommaso Treu/UCLA, and Birrer et al)

Something isn't quite right in the universe. At least based on everything physicists know so far. Stars, galaxies, black holes and all the other celestial objects are hurtling away from each other ever faster over time. Past measurements in our local neighborhood of the universe find that the universe is exploding outward faster than it was in the beginning. That shouldn't be the case, based on scientists' best descriptor of the universe.
If their measurements of a value known as the Hubble Constant are correct, it means that the current model is missing crucial new physics, such as unaccounted-for fundamental particles, or something strange going on with the mysterious substance known as dark energy.[5 Elusive Particles Beyond the Higgs | Quantum Physics]

Now, in a new study, published Jan. 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists have measured the Hubble Constant in an entirely new way, confirming that, indeed, the universe is expanding faster now than it was in its early days.

"Something interesting going on"

To explain how the universe went from a tiny, hot, dense speck of soupy plasma to the vast expanse we see today, scientists have proposed what's known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model. The model puts constraints on the properties of dark matter, a kind of matter that exerts gravitational pull but emits no light, and dark energy, which seems to oppose gravity. LCDM can successfully reproduce the structure of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background — the universe's first light — as well as the amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe. But it can't explain why the universe is expanding faster now than it did early on. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]
That means that either the LCDM model is wrong or the measurements of expansion rate are.
The new method aims to finally settle the expansion-rate debate,Simon Birrer, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author on the new study, told Live Science.So far, the new, independent measurements confirm the discrepancy, suggesting new physics may be needed.
To nail down Hubble's Constant, scientists had previously used several different methods. Some used supernovas in the local universe (the nearby part of the universe), and others have relied on Cepheids, or types of stars that pulsate and regularly flicker in brightness. Still others have studied the cosmic background radiation.

The new research used a technique that involves light from quasars — extremely bright galaxies powered by massive black holes — in an effort to break the tie.
"No matter how careful an experiment is, there can always be some effect that is built into the kinds of tools that they're using to make that measurement. So when a group comes along like this and uses a completely different set of tools… and gets the same answer, then you can pretty quickly conclude that that answer is not a result of some serious effect in the techniques," said Adam Riess, a Nobel laureate and researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute and at Johns Hopkins University. "I think that our confidence is growing that there's something really interesting going on," Riess, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

Seeing double

Here's how the technique worked: When light from a quasar passes an intervening galaxy, gravity from the galaxy causes that light to "gravitationally bend" before hitting Earth. The galaxy acted like a lens to distort the quasar's light into multiple copies — most commonly two or four depending on the alignment of the quasars in relation to the galaxy. Each of those copies traveled a slightly different path around the galaxy.

Quasars don't usually shine steadily like many stars. On account of material falling into their central black holes, they change in brightness on scales of hours to millions of years. Thus, when a quasar's image is lensed into multiple copies with unequal light paths, any change in the brightness of the quasar will result in a subtle flickering between the copies, as light from certain copies takes a touch longer to reach Earth.

From this discrepancy, scientists could precisely determine how far we are from both the quasar and the intermediary galaxy. To calculate the Hubble Constant, astronomers then compared that distance to the object's redshift, or the shift in wavelengths of light toward the red end of the spectrum (which shows how much the object's light has stretched as the universe expands).

Studying light from systems that create four images, or copies, of a quasar has been done in the past. But, in the new paper, Birrer and his collaborators successfully demonstrated that it is possible to measure the Hubble Constant from systems that create just a double image of the quasar. This dramatically increases the number of systems that can be studied, which ultimately will allow the Hubble Constant to be measured more precisely.
"Images of quasars that appear four times are very rare — there are maybe only 50 to 100 across the whole sky, and not all are bright enough to be measured," Birrer told Live Science. "Doubly- lensed systems, however, are more frequent by about a factor of five."
The new results from a doubly-lensed system, combined with three other previously measured quadruple-lensed systems, put the value for the Hubble Constant at 72.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec; that's in agreement with other local universe measurements, but still around 8 percent higher than measurements from the distant universe (the older, or early, universe). As the new technique is applied to more systems, researchers will be able to home in on the exact difference between distant (or early) universe and local (more recent) universe measurements.
"The key is to go from a point where we're saying, yeah, these things don't agree, to having a very precise measure of the level to which they don't agree, because ultimately that will be the clue that allows theory to say what is going on," Riess told Live Science.
Accurately measuring the Hubble Constant helps scientists understand more than just how fast the universe is flying apart. The value is imperative in determining the age of the universe and the physical size of distant galaxies. It also gives astronomers clues as to the amount of dark matter, and dark energy, out there.

As for explaining what possibly exotic physics might explain their mismatch in expansion-rate measurements, that's way down the line.
Originally published on Live Science.


The universe seems to be expanding faster than all expectations

New evidence deepens a mystery around the Hubble constant, one of the most important numbers in cosmology.

4 MINUTE READ
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/hubble-constant-universe-expanding-faster-than-all-expectations/

BY MICHAEL GRESHKO
PUBLISHED APRIL 25, 2019
FRESH EVIDENCE SUGGESTS that the universe is expanding faster today than it did in its infancy, a difference that has set off a search to understand what cosmic forces could be at play. If confirmed, the changing rate—which is nine percent faster than had been projected—would force us to reconsider a fundamental aspect of the cosmos.
The result, announced in a new report publishing in the Astrophysical Journal, marks the latest in a long-running controversy over the Hubble constant, a key measure of the universe's age and expansion rate.
In recent years, numerous studies have shown that measurements of the Hubble constant from the cosmic microwave background—the faint afterglow of the infant universe—are at odds with estimates from far younger stars, such as those in our Milky Way, even after taking into account other mysterious cosmic forces such as dark energy, which is accelerating the universe's expansion.
“[The universe] is outpacing all our expectations in its expansion, and that is very puzzling,” says lead study author Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who co-won the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for helping discover dark energy.
Some have argued that the discrepancy is a product of incomplete data, or some unseen errors systematically pressing their thumbs on the scales. But based on fresh measurements of our cosmic neighborhood from the Hubble Space Telescope, Riess and his colleagues say that the mismatch is not only real, it's wider than ever.

In the new study, Riess's team measures the Hubble constant to a value of 74.03 kilometers per second per megaparsec, give or take 1.42. That's at odds with the best estimates from Planck, a European Space Agency telescope that made the best measurements to date of the cosmic microwave background. Planck's data pegs the Hubble constant at about 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec, give or take 0.5. In statistical parlance, the difference between these two results stands at about 4.4 sigma, or 1-in-100,000 odds that the discrepancy is merely a fluke.
“To use an analogy, let’s look at a two-year-old and see how tall they are, and then try to figure out how tall they are going to be when they grow up. Then we could actually wait until they grow up and measure them,” Riess says. “If they far exceed that [extrapolation], we’d have a real mystery on our hands. Something isn’t right in our understanding of how this person grew.”

Clocking the universe

Calculating the Hubble constant, and thus the expansion rate of the universe, based on the movements of stars requires two kinds of data: how far away a given star is, and how quickly it's receding from us.

To measure a star's relative velocity, astronomers look for shifts in the star's emitted light. To measure distance, astronomers use a variety of tools, from straightforward geometry to careful observations of stars called Cepheid variables. These stars brighten and dim regularly, and the rate of these pulses is closely related to the star's overall brightness: the brighter the star, the more slowly it pulsates.
In February 1997, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery took this picture of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) after separating from the orbiting telescope.
Astronomers can use this relationship as a ruler. By measuring a Cepheid's pulse rate, astronomers can work out how luminous the star is, and by comparing that absolute brightness with the one we see, we can infer how far away the star is from us. Cepheids also can be combined with observations of certain kinds of stellar explosions to measure distances deeper and deeper into the cosmos.
Astronomers have worked for years to assemble this “cosmic distance ladder,” and they're constantly trying to calibrate it ever more finely. For this study, Riess's team used the Hubble Space Telescope to peer at 70 Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our Milky Way's irregularly shaped satellite galaxies. These new data let them more precisely estimate the distances between us and objects in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which in turn let them infer the Hubble constant with greater precision.

Balancing the books

If the universe really is expanding faster than thought, then some kind of new physics would have to provide the extra oomph. Is dark energy more exotic and turbo-charged than we thought? Is dark matter more complex than we imagined? Is there some other kind of unseen particle in the cosmos, such as a “sterile neutrino” that interacts with other types of matter only via gravity?
And if our cosmic checkbooks are truly off, we might want to call in an outside accountant—and one could be coming soon. In 2017, scientists detected gravitational waves, ripples in space-time itself, and light flung off by a colliding pair of neutron stars. The historic measurement allowed astronomers to derive an independent estimate of the Hubble constant. So far, that value slots right in between the Planck values and those derived from the cosmic distance ladder.
The effectiveness of using such events as “standard sirens” to measure the expansion of the universe, however, hinges on the number of neutron-star events that gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO pick up. So far, astronomers have confirmed only one—but on the morning of April 25, LIGO may have detected another. That said, pinpointing the waves' origins in the sky proved challenging, which is complicating follow-up measurements with telescopes.
Meanwhile Riess and astronomers around the world are working to make their measurements of the Hubble constant even more precise, in the hopes that even a small discrepancy could unlock a massive new clue to how the universe works.
“Even nine percent is a big deal, when you have an uncertainty of one or two percent,” says Riess. “We have some feeling that the universe is still teaching us.”



 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.
2 May
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
NASA video shorts
(A1/1735)






3 May
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic: TBA


May 9 & 10 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2019


CubeSats & SmallSats

Some are the size of a toaster. Others a suitcase. They can ride into space as secondary payloads in a rocket's "trunk," or even be tossed out of an airlock, to start their missions. Small satellites, often collectively called "cubesats," are changing the way we explore space and monitor our home planet.
Host:
Preston Dyches
Speaker:
Anne Marinan (JPL) — Systems Engineer, Near Earth Asteroid Scout & Mars Cube One; Team Xc Lead Engineer
Travis Imken (JPL) — Project Systems Engineer, RainCube

Location:
Thursday, May 9, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA › Directions

Friday, May 10, 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.




May 12, 2019

UCLA Meteorite Gallery Events

DR. ASHWIN VASAVADA

CURIOSITY ROVER, GALE CRATER AND EVIDENCE OF FLOWING WATER ON MARS

Location: Geology 3656
Time: 2:30PM
Our next Gallery Lecture will be presented on 12 May 2019 by Dr. Ashwin Vasavada of JPL, Project Scientist for the Curiosity Mars Rover. His title is “Curiosity Rover, Gale Crater and evidence of flowing water on Mars.” Nearly seven years after its dramatic arrival at Mars, the Curiosity Rover continues to reveal Mars as a once-habitable planet. Streams and lakes persisted there for millions of years and created landforms that Curiosity explores within Gale crater. While the water has long since disappeared, shifting sands and seasonal cycles of methane gas reveal a dynamic planet today. This talk will cover the latest findings from the mission, some striking images, the challenges of exploration, and what lies ahead.

 Photo Credit: NASA

13 May
LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory

18-19 May Jet Propulsion Laboratory Open House See https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7351 for more information.

6 June
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 May:

  

Moon: May 4 new, May 12 1st quarter, May 18 Full, May 26 last quarter               
Planets: Venus visible at dawn all month.  Mars visible at dusk, sets mid-evening.  Mercury visible at dusk after the 29th.  Saturn rises near midnight, visible until dawn. Jupiter rises before midnight, visible until dawn.
Other Events:

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

4 May
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party

5 May Space Day See https://nationaldaycalendar.com/national-space-day-first-friday-in-may/ for more information.

5 May Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Peak The Eta Aquarids are associated with Halley’s Comet. Although not as spectacular as the Leonids or Perseids, it’s still an unusual event. Zenith Hour-Rates are typically around 55 meteors/hour.

1,8,15,22,29 May
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

18 May Full/Blue Moon A blue moon is an additional full moon that appears in a subdivision of a year: either the third of four full moons in a season, or a second full moon in a month of the common calendar.

18 May
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties  for more information.

1 June
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party


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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