AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter
April 2022
Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 11
General Calendar p. 16
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 16
Observing p. 18
Useful
Links p. 20
About the Club p.
21
Club News &
Calendar.
Club Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
--
7 Apr AEA Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great Courses video Teams
5 May AEA
Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great
Courses video Teams
AEA
Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st Thursdays at 11:30 am. Virtual meetings on Teams until further
notice. When live meetings resume, our
preferred room has been A1/1735, when we can reserve it.
Club
News:
Mt.
Wilson – Tentative reservation requests have been made for the 60-inch
Oct. 21 (Friday), and 100-inch Oct. 22 (Sat.).
This year would normally be our every-other-year for the 60-inch, but we
put in the 100-inch request as backup in case we don’t get the 60-inch.
2024
Eclipse -- An update from the
2024 solar eclipse committee (Mark Clayson, Mai Lee, Melissa Jolliff, Nahum
Melamed, Judy Kerner, Marilee Wheaton):
73 responses to our survey had been received as of
this week, of which 32% were club members.
24 would commit to group lodging, but 60% were undecided. 88% prefer lodging near centerline. 50% would stay 2 nights (April 7, 8), 38% 3
nights (April 6-8). 41% would fly, 26%
drive, and the rest are undecided.
We will for now continue looking to nail down lodging
for 50 rooms (31 would be needed for those 24 responses to the survey). Focus is on Kerrville and Marble Falls/Burnet
– near San Antonio & Austin, respectively.
Most hotels say they won’t be taking bookings until between Sept. &
next April, but we have found a Marriott in Boerne (halfway between San Antonio
and Kerrville) willing to do a contract now for half our group, and they say a
sister hotel nearer San Antonio could accommodate the rest of us. We will continue to check for managers of hotels
nearer centerline willing to negotiate a
contract.
We do have an observation site reserved in Kerrville,
and have identified candidates in the Marble Falls area.
Doug Enright shared the following:
“I actually just got back from a vacation to the Texas Hill
Country, visiting Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. I also spent a whole
day driving through the Hill Country between Houston and San Antonio, through
Shiner and Gonzales, where the Texas Revolution of 1836 got
started.
“I also
visited Space Center Houston and took tours of NASA/Johnson Space Center while
staying in Houston. Seeing a full-scale Saturn V they have on display was
quite special along with touring the original Manned Spacecraft control room
where the first images of man landing on the Moon (Apollo 11) were displayed on
Earth. I was wondering if Eclipse trip attendees might be
interested in visiting NASA/JSC. We might be able to get a special tour
for our group beyond the standard public tours through Space Center
Houston. Space Center Houston | Science and Space Exploration
Learning Center
Contact Jason Fields if interested in joining him for an observing
night with his 20” Dobs.
We need volunteers to help with:
·
Installing
our new software on our tablet & laptop
·
Populating
our club Sharepoint site with material & links to the club’s Aerowiki
& Aerolink materials – Kaly Rangarajan has volunteered to help with this
·
Arranging
future club programs
·
Managing
club equipment & library (Kelly Gov volunteered to help with the
library, Sam has a fair chunk of the 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:
Animation: Odd Radio Circles https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220330.html
Credits: Illustration: Sam Moorfield; Data: CSIRO, HST (HUDF), ESA, NASA;
Image: J. English (U. Manitoba), EMU, MeerKAT, DES (CTIO); Text: Jayanne English
Explanation: What do you call a cosmic puzzle that no one expected to
see? In this case, Odd Radio Circles, aka ORCs. ORC-1 typifies the enigmatic five objects,
only visible at radio frequencies, that were serendipitously
discovered in 2019 using the
new Australian SKA
Pathfinder radio array. The
final image in the featured video uses 2021 data from the South African MeerKAT array to reveal more detail. The radio data, assigned
turquoise colors, are combined with a Dark Energy
Survey optical/IR map. The animated artist’s illustration explores just
one idea about the ORCs’ origins. If two supermassive black holes merge in the center of a galaxy, the associated shockwaves could generate rings of radio radiation. These grow to fill the video frame. The video zooms out so the expansion the ORC can be tracked until it is about a million light-years across. Fortunately, the up-coming Square Kilometer
Array can help test this and
other promising scenarios.
The Observable Universe
Illustration Credit & Licence: Wikipedia, Pablo Carlos
Budassi
Explanation: How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything
you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of
radiations around you -- is the observable universe. In light, the farthest we can see comes from the cosmic microwave
background, a time 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was opaque like thick fog.
Some neutrinos and gravitational waves that surround us come from even farther out, but
humanity does not yet have the technology to detect them. The featured
image illustrates the
observable universe on an increasingly compact
scale, with the Earth and Sun at the center surrounded by our
Solar System, nearby stars, nearby galaxies, distant galaxies, filaments of early matter, and the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists typically assume that our observable universe is just the nearby part of a greater entity known as
"the universe" where the same physics applies. However, there are
several lines of popular but speculative reasoning that assert that even our universe is part of a greater multiverse where either different physical constants
occur, different physical laws apply, higher
dimensions operate, or
slightly different-by-chance versions of our standard universe exist.
2MASS J17554042+6551277
Image Credit : NASA, STScI, JWST
Explanation: 2MASS
J17554042+6551277 doesn't
exactly roll off the tongue but that's the name, a coordinate-based catalog
designation, of the star centered in this sharp field of view. Fans
of the distant universe should
get used to its spiky appearance though. The diffraction pattern is created by
the 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the James
Webb Space Telescope. After
unfolding, the segments have now been adjusted to achieve
a diffraction limited alignment at
infrared wavelengths while operating in concert as a single 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror. The
resulting image taken by Webb's NIRcam demonstrates their precise alignment is
the best physics will allow. 2MASS J17554042+6551277 is about 2,000 light-years away
and well within our own galaxy. But the galaxies scattered across the
background of the Webb telescope alignment evaluation image are likely billions
of light-years distant, far beyond the Milky Way.
Gems of a Maldivean Night
Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horálek (ESO Photo
Ambassador, Inst.
of Physics in Opava)
Explanation: The southernmost part of the Milky Way contains not only the stars of the Southern Cross, but the closest star system to our Sun -- Alpha Centauri. The Southern Cross itself is topped by the bright, yellowish star Gamma Crucis. A line from Gamma Crucis through the blue star at the bottom of the cross, Acrux, points toward the south celestial pole, located just above the small island in the featured picture -- taken in early March. That island is Madivaru of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Against faint Milky Way starlight, the dark Coal Sack Nebula lies just left of the cross, while farther left along the Milky Way are the bright stars Alpha Centauri (left) and Beta Centauri (Hadar). Alpha Centauri A, a Sun-like star anchoring a three-star system with exoplanets, is a mere 4.3 light-years distant. Seen from Alpha Centauri, our own Sun would be a bright yellowish star in the otherwise recognizable constellation Cassiopeia.
Titan Seas Reflect Sunlight
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, U. Arizona, U. Idaho
Explanation: Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding
flash? The reason: a sunglint from
liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that, when the angle is right, reflect sunlight as if
they were mirrors. Pictured here in false-color, the robotic
Cassini spacecraft that
orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 imaged the cloud-covered Titan in 2014 in different bands of cloud-piercing infrared light. This specular
reflection was so bright it
saturated one of Cassini's infrared cameras. Although the sunglint was annoying -- it was also useful. The reflecting regions confirm that northern Titan houses a wide and complex array of seas with a
geometry that indicates periods of significant evaporation. During its
numerous passes of our
Solar System's most mysterious
moon, Cassini has revealed Titan to be a world with active
weather -- including times
when it rains a liquefied version of natural gas.
The Bubble Nebula from Hubble
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Mehmet Hakan Özsaraç
Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows
perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known simply
as The
Bubble Nebula. Although it looks
delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above
and left of the
Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some
45-times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out
the structure
of glowing gas against denser
material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere
7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This
sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously
acquired Hubble Space Telescope
image data.
The Sky in 2021
Image Credit & Copyright: Cees Bassa (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy)
Explanation: What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for
an entire year? That, very nearly, is what is pictured here. Every 15 minutes
during 2021, an all-sky camera took an image of the sky over the Netherlands. Central columns from these images were then aligned and combined to
create the featured keogram,
with January at the top, December at the bottom, and the middle of the night
running vertically just left of center. What do
we see? Most obviously, the
daytime sky is mostly blue, while the nighttime sky is mostly black. The twelve light bands crossing the night sky are caused by the glow
of the Moon. The thinnest part of
the black hourglass shape occurs during the summer solstice when days are the longest, while the thickest part
occurs at the winter solstice. Yesterday was an equinox -- when night and day were equal -- and the
northern-spring equinox from one year ago can actually be located in the
keogram -- about three-quarters of the way up.
A Flower-Shaped Rock on Mars
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS
Explanation: It is one of the more unusual rocks yet found on Mars.
Smaller than a penny, the rock has several appendages that make it look, to
some, like a flower. Although it would be a major discovery if the rock was
truly a fossilized ancient Martian
flower, there are less
spectacular -- and currently
preferred -- explanations for
its unusual structure. One theory that has emerged is that the rock is a type
of concretion created by minerals deposited by water in cracks or
divisions in existing rock. These concretions can be compacted together, can be
harder and denser than surrounding rock, and can remain even after the
surrounding rock erodes away. The flower structure may also be caused
by crystal clusters. The small
rock, named Blackthorn Salt, has
similarities to previously imaged Martian pebbles. The featured
image was taken by the Curiosity
rover on Mars in late February. Scientists will continue to study
data and images taken of this -- and similar -- surprising Martian rocks.
A Lion in Orion
Image Credit & Copyright: Maroun Mahfoud
Explanation: Yes, but can you see the lion? A deep exposure shows the
famous dark indentation that looks like a horse's head, visible
just left and below center, and known unsurprisingly as the Horsehead Nebula.
The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) is part of a vast complex of dark absorbing dust and bright glowing gas. To bring out details of the Horsehead's pasture, an astrophotographer artistically combined
light accumulated for over 20 hours in hydrogen (orange), oxygen (blue), and sulfur (green). The resulting spectacular picture captured
from Raachine, Lebanon, details an intricate tapestry of gaseous wisps and dust-laden filaments that were created and sculpted over eons by stellar
winds and ancient supernovas. The featured composition brings
up another pareidolic animal
icon -- that of a lion's head -- in the expansive orange colored gas above the
horse's head. The Flame Nebula is visible just to the left of the Horsehead.
The Horsehead
Nebula lies 1,500 light years distant towards the constellation of Orion.
Astronomy
News:
From
ScienceNews.org
Here’s the
best timeline yet for the Milky Way’s big events
Our galaxy formed
its original disk 2 billion years before its stellar halo
The Milky Way arches over the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber
Spectroscopic Telescope in China, one of the observatories whose data has
revealed that our galaxy began forming a disk of stars surprisingly fast after
the Big Bang.
YINGWEI CHEN
By Ken Croswell
MARCH 23, 2022 AT
12:00 PM
A new analysis of nearly a quarter million stars puts firm ages
on the most momentous pages from our galaxy’s life story.
Far grander than most of its neighbors, the Milky Way arose long
ago, as lesser galaxies smashed together. Its thick disk — a pancake-shaped
population of old stars — originated remarkably soon after the Big Bang and well before
most of the stellar halo that envelops the galaxy’s disk, astronomers report
March 23 in Nature.
“We are now able to provide a very clear timeline of what
happened in the earliest time of our Milky Way,” says astronomer Maosheng
Xiang.
He and Hans-Walter Rix, both at the Max Planck Institute for
Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, studied almost 250,000 subgiants — stars that
are growing larger and cooler after using up the hydrogen fuel at their
centers. The temperatures and luminosities of these stars reveal their ages,
letting the researchers track how different epochs in galactic history spawned
stars with different chemical compositions and orbits around the Milky Way’s
center.
“There’s just an incredible amount of information here,” says
Rosemary Wyse, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not
involved with the study. “We really want to understand how our galaxy came to
be the way it is,” she says. “When were the chemical elements of which we are
made created?”
Xiang and Rix discovered that the Milky Way’s thick disk got its
start about 13 billion years ago. That’s just 800 million years after the
universe’s birth. The thick disk, which measures 6,000 light-years from top to
bottom in the sun’s vicinity, kept forming stars for a long time, until about 8
billion years ago.
During this period, the thick disk’s iron content shot up
30-fold as exploding stars enriched its star-forming gas, the team found. At
the dawn of the thick disk era, a newborn star had only a tenth as much iron,
relative to hydrogen, as the sun; by the end, 5 billion years later, a thick
disk star was three times richer in iron than the sun.
Xiang and Rix also found a tight relation between a thick disk
star’s age and iron content. This means gas was thoroughly mixed throughout the
thick disk: As time went on, newborn stars inherited steadily higher amounts of
iron, no matter whether the stars formed close to or far from the galactic
center.
But that’s not all that was happening. As other researchers
reported in 2018, another galaxy once hit our own, giving the Milky Way
most of the stars in its halo, which engulfs the disk (SN: 11/1/18). Halo stars have
little iron.
The new work revises the date of this great galactic encounter:
“We found that the merger happened 11 billion years ago,” Xiang says, a billion
years earlier than thought. As the intruder’s gas crashed into the Milky Way’s
gas, it triggered the creation of so many new stars that our galaxy’s star
formation rate reached a record high 11 billion years ago.
The merger also splashed some thick disk stars up into the halo,
which Xiang and Rix identified from the stars’ higher iron abundances. These
“splash” stars, the researchers found, are at least 11 billion years old,
confirming the date of the merger.
The thick disk ran out of gas 8 billion years ago and stopped
making stars. Fresh gas around the Milky Way then settled into a thinner disk,
which has given birth to stars ever since — including the 4.6-billion-year-old
sun and most of its stellar neighbors. The thin disk is about 2,000 light-years
thick in our part of the galaxy.
“The Milky Way has been quite quiet for the last 8 billion
years,” Xiang says, experiencing no further encounters with big galaxies. That
makes it different from most of its peers.
If the thick disk
really existed 13 billion years ago, Xiang says, then the new James Webb Space Telescope (SN: 1/24/22) may discern similar
disks in galaxies 13 billion light-years from Earth — portraits of the Milky
Way as a young galaxy.
Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org
CITATIONS
M. Xiang and H.-W. Rix. A time-resolved picture of our Milky Way’s early
formation history. Nature. Published online March 23,
2022. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04496-5.
About Ken Croswell
Ken Croswell
has a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University and is the author of eight
books, including The Alchemy of the Heavens: Searching for
Meaning in the Milky Way and The Lives of Stars.
The universe’s background starlight is twice as bright
as
expected
It took a
spacecraft at the solar system’s edge to make precise enough observations of
dark sky
From a vantage point far from the sun and
light-scattering interplanetary dust (illustrated, center), the New Horizons
spacecraft is well-positioned to measure the visible background glow of the
universe.
NASA, JOSEPH OLMSTED/STSCI
Even when you remove the bright stars,
the glowing dust and other nearby points of light from the inky, dark sky, a
background glow remains. That glow comes from the cosmic sea of distant
galaxies, the first stars that burned, faraway coalescing gas — and, it seems,
something else in the mix that’s evading researchers.
Astronomers estimated the amount of
visible light pervading the cosmos by training the New Horizons spacecraft,
which flew past Pluto in 2015, on a spot on the sky
mostly devoid of nearby stars and galaxies (SN: 12/15/15). That estimate should match measurements of the total amount
of light coming from galaxies across the history of the universe. But it doesn’t, researchers report
in the March 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“It turns out that the galaxies that we
know about can account for about half of the level we see,” says Tod Lauer, an
astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Ariz.
For decades, astronomers have measured
the extragalactic background light in different
wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays (SN: 8/23/13; SN: 11/29/18). This provides a
census of the universe and gives researchers hints into the processes that emit
those types of light.
But the background visible light — dubbed
the cosmic optical background, or COB — is challenging to measure from the
inner solar system. Here, lots of interplanetary dust scatters sunlight,
washing out the much fainter COB. The Pluto-visiting New Horizons spacecraft,
however, is far enough from the sun that scattered sunlight doesn’t flood the
spacecraft’s images.
So in September 2021, Lauer and
colleagues pointed the spacecraft’s LORRI camera toward a patch of sky and took
a bunch of pictures. They digitally removed all known sources of light —
individual stars, nearby galaxies, even heat from the spacecraft’s nuclear power source (SN: 2/18/16) — and measured what
was left to estimate the COB.
Then they used large archives of galaxy
observations, like those from the Hubble Space Telescope, to calculate the
light emitted by all the galaxies in the universe. The measured COB is roughly
twice as bright as that calculation.
While Lauer’s group previously noted a discrepancy, this new measurement
reveals a wider difference, and with smaller uncertainty. “There’s clearly an
anomaly. Now we need to try to understand it and explain it,” says coauthor
Marc Postman, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, Md.
There are several astronomical reasons
that could explain the discrepancy. Perhaps, says Postman, rogue stars stripped
from galaxies linger in intergalactic space. Or maybe, he says, there is “a
very faint population of very compact galaxies that are just below the
detection limits of Hubble.” If it’s the latter case, astronomers should know
in the next couple years because NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope will see these
even-fainter galaxies (SN: 10/6/21).
Another possibility is the researchers
missed something in their analysis. “I’m glad it got done; it’s absolutely a
necessary measurement,” says astrophysicist Michael Zemcov of the Rochester
Institute of Technology in New York who was not involved in this study. Perhaps
they’re missing some additional glow from the New Horizons spacecraft and its
LORRI instrument, or they didn’t factor in some additional foreground light. “I
think there’s a conversation there about details.”
The light that reflects off the Milky
Way’s dust, for example, is “a very subtle beast,” Zemcov says, “and our
uncertainties likely get dominated by it at some point, just because it’s not
very well understood.” Several projects in the next few years, such as
the CIBER-2
experiment and the space mission
SPHEREx, could help astronomers understand this pesky dust-scattered
light, Zemcov says.
In addition, he and his research group
member, astrophysicist Teresa Symons, are poring through hundreds of old LORRI
images of dark sky and running their own analyses. Meanwhile, Lauer and his
colleagues will take more pictures of other patches of sky with LORRI to
strengthen their confidence in the measurement of the background light and to
better understand intrusions from the spacecraft itself.
“There
is something going on that we weren’t expecting,” Zemcov says, “which is where
the fun part of science kicks in.”
CITATIONS
T.R. Lauer et al. Anomalous flux in the cosmic optical background detected
with New Horizons observations. Astrophysical
Journal Letters. Vol. 927, March 1, 2022, L8. doi:
10.3847/2041-8213/ac573d.
T.R.
Lauer et al. New Horizons observations of the cosmic optical
background. Astrophysical Journal. Vol.
906, January 11, 2021, p. 906. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abc881.
General Calendar:
Colloquia,
Lectures, Seminars, Meetings, Open Houses & Tours:
Colloquia: Carnegie (Tues.
11am), UCLA, Caltech (Wed. 4pm), IPAC (Wed. 12:15pm) & other Pasadena
(daily
12-4pm): http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/seminars/
https://carnegiescience.edu/events/carnegie-digital-series
Carnegie Zoom Digital Series
Zoom Webinar Platform
January Night Sky
Network Clubs & Events https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/clubs-and-events.cfm
7 April AEA Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great Courses video Teams
Cancelled for now -- Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw
Bl. In Torrance)
April
14 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2022
April 2022 - A Look at NASA’s Earth System Observatory
A Delta Oasis in Southeastern Kazakhstan
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using
Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey
A Look at
NASA’s Earth System Observatory
April 14
Time: 7
p.m. PDT (10 p.m. EDT; 0300 UTC)
NASA is
working on a new set of Earth-focused missions to provide key information to
guide efforts related to climate change, natural hazard mitigation, fighting
forest fires, and improving real-time agricultural processes. Each uniquely
designed satellite in the Earth System Observatory will complement the others,
working in tandem to create a 3D, holistic view of Earth, from bedrock to
atmosphere.
Speaker(s):
Erika Podest, Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Scientist, NASA/JPL
Host:
Nikki Wyrick, Public Services Office, NASA/JPL
Co-Host:
Lindsay McLaurin, Public Outreach Specialist, NASA/JPL
Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on YouTube
NO EVENT IN APRIL 2022UCLA Meteorite Gallery Lectures
5 May AEA Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great Courses video Teams
Observing:
The
following data are from the 2022 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s
2022 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 1 new, April 9
1st quarter, April 16 Full, April 23 last quarter, April 30 new
Planets:
Venus
is visible at dawn all month. Mars visible at dawn all
month. Jupiter visible at dawn low
in the east-southeast all month. Saturn is visible at dawn all month. Mercury
emerges from the Sun’s glare on the 11th and is visible at dusk.
Other
Events:
LAAS Event Calendar (incl.
various other virtual events):
https://www.laas.org/laas-bulletin/#calendar
|
2 April |
SBAS
out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Ken Munson to coordinate a location.
http://www.sbastro.net/. |
April 3 Uranus 0.6deg
N of Moon
April 4 Mars 0.3deg S of Saturn
|
None? |
LAAS Private dark
sky Star Party |
|
April 6, 13, 20, 27 |
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. Time: 7:30
PM - 10:00 PM Location: Garvey
Ranch Obs. , 781 Orange Ave., Monterey Park, CA 91755 |
9 April Global Star
Party – Global Astronomy Month https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/event-view.cfm?Event_ID=123504
12 April Jupiter
0.1deg N of Neptune
|
26 March |
SBAS In-town
observing session – In Town Dark Sky Observing Session at
Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 NortbBay Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please
contact Ken Munson to confirm that the gate will be opened. http://www.sbastro.net/. Only if we get
permission to use the school grounds again and CDC guidelines are reduced |
|
Cancelled |
LAAS Public
Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties for more information. |
22 April Lyrid meteors peak
23 April SBAS In
Town Dark Sky Observing Session at Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 NortbBay
Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please contact Ken Munson to confirm that the gate
will be opened. Only if we get permission to use the school grounds again and
CDC guidelines are reduced
27 April Venuis 0.01deg S of Neptune
29 April Mercury greatest elongation E (21deg)
30 April Venus 0.2deg S of Jupiter
|
30 April |
SBAS
out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Ken Munson to coordinate a location.
http://www.sbastro.net/. |
|
None? |
LAAS Private dark
sky Star Party |
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
e! Science News Astronomy & Space
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)
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)
The Local Group Astronomy Club
(Santa Clarita)
Ventura County Astronomical
Society
The
Astronomical Society of Greenbelt
Northern
Virginia Astronomy Club
Colorado
Springs 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 Kaly Rengarajan, 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: Jason Fields, President & Program Committee Chairman, Sam
Andrews, VP, Kelly Gov club Secretary (& librarian), or Kaly Rangarajan,
(Treasurer).
Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter Editor
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