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)

Friday, March 24, 2023

2023 March

 

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter                        

March  2023

 

Contents


AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 7
General Calendar p. 15

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

Useful Links p. 18
About the Club p. 19

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

 

Club Meeting Schedule: --

 

 

2 March   AEA Astronomy Club Meeting     TBD – Great Courses video        Teams

 

6 April      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:  

 

The club’s Meade LX-200 10” telescope & accessories need a new home – contact Alex Ellis.

 

Nominations for club V.P. are being taken.

 

2024 Eclipse --   An update from the 2024 solar eclipse committee (Mark Clayson, Mai Lee, Melissa Jolliff, Nahum Melamed, Judy Kerner, Marilee Wheaton):

 

Great news from the eclipse committee – we have secured lodging (April 7 & 8) & an observing site for the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse!  We have contracted for a block of 50 rooms in the Boerne, TX area (30 minutes from San Antonio & our observing site on centerline in Kerrville -- halfway between them, and 90 minutes from Austin).  4 types of rooms, all under $100/night before taxes.

 

If you would like more information about the hotel & available rooms, the link and phone to reserve a room as well as preliminary travel & car rental research and observing plans, contact Marilee Wheaton at Marilee.wheaton@aero.org ,  310-874-5480.

 

It is expected that all people making reservations be members of the club in 2024.  And, as with Mt. Wilson observing trips, we ask that all family members/friends accompanying them also join the club for 2024, as they will also be receiving benefits of the club (arrangements, equipment, photos, expertise, and possibly eclipse glasses and T-shirt).  Violations are subject to cancellation of room reservations, if membership is not finalized by Dec. 31, 2023.

 

Also, please let Marilee know of your anticipated travel plan – driving or flying.  We need to know who’s driving and may be able to take some of our club equipment for observing and photographing the eclipse. 


Contact Jason Fields if interested in joining him for an observing night with his 20” Dobs – per recent emails.

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)

NGC 1850: Not Found in the Milky Way
Image Credit: NASAESA and P. Goudfrooij (STScI); Processing: M. H. Özsaraç (Türkiye Astronomi Derneği)

Explanation: There is nothing like this ball of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. This is surprising because, at first glance, this featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that star cluster NGC 1850's size and shape are reminiscent of the many ancient globular star clusters which roam our own Milky Way Galaxy's halo. But NGC 1850's stars are all too young, making it a type of star cluster with no known counterpart in the Milky Way. Moreover, NGC 1850 is also a double star cluster, with a second, compact cluster of stars visible here just to the right of the large cluster's center. Stars in the large cluster are estimated to be 50 million years young, while stars in the compact cluster are younger still, with an age of about 4 million years. A mere 168,000 light-years distant, NGC 1850 is located near the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. The glowing gas filaments across the image left, like supernova remnants in our own galaxy, testify to violent stellar explosions and indicate that short-lived massive stars have recently been present in the region.

Seven Dusty Sisters in Infrared
Image Credit: NASAWISEIRSAProcessing & Copyright Francesco Antonucci

Explanation: Is this really the famous Pleiades star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleiades is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, G=12, B=4.6 microns). The base images were taken by NASA's orbiting Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Cataloged as M45 and nicknamed the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades star cluster is by chance situated in a passing dust cloud. The light and winds from the massive Pleiades stars preferentially repel smaller dust particles, causing the dust to become stratified into filaments, as seen. The featured image spans about 20 light years at the distance of the Pleiades, which lies about 450 light years distant toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus).

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1365 from Webb
Image Credit: NASAESACSA, Janice Lee (NOIRLab) - Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Explanation: A mere 56 million light-years distant toward the southern constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is an enormous barred spiral galaxy about 200,000 light-years in diameter. That's twice the size of our own barred spiral Milky Way. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals stunning details of this magnificent spiral in infrared light. Webb's field of view stretches about 60,000 light-years across NGC 1365, exploring the galaxy's core and bright newborn star clusters. The intricate network of dusty filaments and bubbles is created by young stars along spiral arms winding from the galaxy's central bar. Astronomers suspect the gravity field of NGC 1365's bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, funneling gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the active galaxy's central, supermassive black hole.




Magellanic Clouds over Chile
Image Credit & Copyright: Felipe Mac Auliffe López

Explanation: The two prominent clouds in this Chilean Atacama Desert skyscape captured on January 21 actually lie beyond our Milky Way galaxy. Known as the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds they are so named for the 16th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, leader of the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. Famous jewels of southern hemisphere skies, they are the brightest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. The larger cloud is some 160,000 light-years, and the smaller 210,000 light-years distant. While both are irregular dwarf galaxies in their own right, they exhibit central barred structures in the deep wide-angle view. Wide and deep exposures also reveal faint dusty galactic cirrus nebulae and the imprints of gravitational tidal interactions between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

The Seventh World of Trappist-1
Illustration Credit & Copyright: Michael Carroll

Explanation: Seven worlds orbit the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. A mere 40 light-years away, many of the exoplanets were discovered in 2016 using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) located at La Silla Observatory in Chile and later confirmed with telescope including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely all rocky and similar in size to Earth, and so compose one of the largest treasure troves of terrestrial planets ever detected around a single star. Because they orbit very close to their faint, tiny star they could also have regions where surface temperatures allow for the presence of ice or even liquid water, a key ingredient for lifeTheir tantalizing proximity to Earth makes them prime candidates for future telescopic explorations of the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets. All seven exoplanets appear in the featured illustration, which imagines a view from the most distant known world of this system, TRAPPIST-1h, as having a rocky landscape covered in ice. Meanwhile, in the imagined background, one of the system's inner planets crosses in front of the dim, orange, nearly Jupiter-sized parent star.

 

 

Astronomy News:

 

From Science Daily

 

 

Six candidate massive galaxies are seen 500-800 years after the Big Bang. One of the sources, bottom left, could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way. NASA FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Massive galaxies seen near the cosmic dawn

BY MARCIA DUNN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. >>Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast-track that produced these “monsters.”

 

While the new James Webb Space Telescope has spotted even older galaxies, dating to within a mere 300 million years of the beginning of the universe, it’s the size and maturity of these six apparent mega-galaxies that stun scientists. They reported their findings Wednesday. Six candidate massive galaxies are seen 500-800 years after the Big Bang. One of the sources, bottom left, could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way. NASA FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Lead researcher Ivo Labbe ofAustralia’s Swinburne University of Technology and his team expected to find little baby galaxies this close to the dawn of the universe — not these whoppers. “While most galaxies in this era are still small and only gradually growing larger over time,” he said in an email, “there are a few monsters that fast-track to maturity. Why this is the case or how this would work is unknown.”

 

Each of the six objects looks to weigh billions of times more than our sun. In one of them, the total weight of all its stars may be as much as 100 billion times greater than our sun, according to the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature. Yet these galaxies are believed to be extremely compact, squeezing in as many stars as our own Milky Way, but in a relatively tiny slice of space, according to Labbe.

 

Labbe said he and his team didn’t think the results were real at first — that there couldn’t be galaxies as mature as the Milky Way so early in time — and they still need to be confirmed. The objects appeared so big and bright that some members of the team thought they had made a mistake.

 

“We were mind-blown, kind of incredulous,” Labbe said.

 

The Pennsylvania State University’s Joel Leja, who took part in the study, calls them “universe breakers.” “The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” Leja said in a statement. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”These galaxy observations were among the first data set that came from the $10 billion Webb telescope, launched just over a year ago. NASA and the European SpaceAgency’s Webb is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

[from National Geographic, Feb. 2023]

How did Saturn get its rings?

Scientists don’t agree on when the planet’s iconic rings formed—or even how they came to be. But the theories have one thing in common: violence.

 

 

When the Cassini spacecraft took a 2013 image from above Saturn’s pole, its rings didn’t intersect the planet. In the same Cassini image, but with Saturn’s rings edited out, the planet loses some of its luster.

ORIGINAL CASSINI IMAGE BY NASA/JPL/CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE/CORNELL; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION (RINGS REMOVED)

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 15, 2023

10 MIN READ

Without its rings, Saturn looks really boring. Super blah. Erase those bangles—as blogger Jason Kottke did (above) from a NASA photo—and the planet is the blandest sphere in our solar system. Sure, a hexagonal vortex and some cool cyclones appear at the planet’s poles—but its vanilla face lacks the pizzazz of Jupiter’s watercolored bands, the spicy blue of Neptune, the suffocating murk of Venus.

Even rusty Mars looks more interesting.

Thankfully, at some point in the past 4.5 billion years, the cosmos gave Earth’s neighborhood an upgrade: It put a big, bright, icy ring system around Saturn. But scientists don’t agree on when Saturn’s rings formed—or how the bangles even came to be. And that’s been true for decades. In a twist, it turns out that the genesis of one of the solar system’s iconic features is still an unsolved mystery.

For the most part, scientists have a good grip on the provenance of our solar system’s most spectacular sights. But Saturn’s rings

“The planet was formed at a certain point during the formation of the solar system, and we don’t know if the rings formed at the same time or if they were formed much later,” says Cornell University astrophysicist Maryame El Moutamid. “And the reason why it’s so interesting is not only to know that but to understand the Saturn system—we have a planet, a ring system, and a moon system, and we think there is a connection between the rings and the moons.”

That enigma is uniquely fascinating. For the most part, scientists have a good grip on the provenance of our solar system’s most spectacular sights: a chasm carved into Mars that would dwarf the Grand Canyon, Jupiter’s churning Great Red Spot, the moon’s enormous southern basin. But Saturn’s rings …

“Saturn’s rings are unique,” says Jeff Cuzzi of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “They’re the only big, massive rings, and they’re very, very bright, which is unusual. So this has been a puzzle.”

 

  

Left: Depictions of Saturn have come a long way since the earliest drawings: what Galileo saw in 1610 (left), and then in 1616 with a better telescope.

PHOTOGRAPH BY WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Right: A rendering by astronomer Giovanni Cassini, published in 1676.

ARCHIVIO GBB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Scientists who think about this question tend to cluster into two camps. The first group suggests that Saturn’s rings are primordial—that they formed along with the planet more than four billion years ago—and that Saturn has never been a boring, blah world.

The other group suspects the rings are much younger, formed within the past several hundred million years. Under that theory, the rings are so young that if the dinosaurs had had a space program, they’d have seen a ringless Saturn through their telescopes (and maybe avoided obliteration by a wayward asteroid).

ACROSS A HUMAN LIFETIME, THE NIGHT SKY MAY NOT SEEM TO CHANGE MUCH.

Planets move in predictable orbits, constellations rise and fall on schedule, time’s passage can be marked by the shifting lunar face. This is comforting because it means that, adrift on a verdant island in an infinite cosmic sea, small creatures like us have achieved some degree of celestial knowing. We have deciphered the harmonies of planetary motion; we can calculate, with precision, the appearance of something as magical as a blackened midday sun; and we know, to some degree, how everything came to be (except ourselves). In a bottomless universe, we cling to what we know.
“Your mind just wants things to be stable and permanent,” says NASA’s Jeff Cuzzi. “Celestial things are supposed to not be changing in front of our eyes. But that’s one thing [the Cassini probe] showed us when we were there at Saturn
We know stuffs popping out there on all timescales. It’s a perspective shift that would be good for us.” —ND

“Both scenarios have great arguments, but they also have weaknesses,” El Moutamid says.

Though separated in time by billions of years, both origin stories have one thing in common: violence. Making the rings required the cataclysmic destruction of an icy object—a comet, perhaps, or a moon. Somehow that object wandered too close to Saturn, and the planet’s gravity tore it into countless icy shards. A small fraction of those shards are bigger than houses; others are infinitesimally small. Most are made of bright, pristine water ice, but one band in the rings is a bit darker. Over time, those busted-up remnants organized themselves into the ring system we see today, which stretches some 170,000 miles across but is only about 30 feet thick.



Disk of Rings

The varied rings were assigned a letter in the order of their discovery, while gaps and divisions between them are named for astronomers. Tiny “shepherd” moons like Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, and Pandora orbiting within the bright rings maintain the breaks.

Matthew W. Chwastyk, NGM Staff

Sources: NASA; JPL/CalTECH; SSI

The “old-rings” crew says that the cataclysm occurred in Saturn’s early days. (It is scientifically likelier for a wayward object to enter a planet’s gravitational maw during the solar system’s youth.) One version of that story proposes that the giant planets were not born where we see them today; rather, they migrated to their current locations and triggered a cascade of instability among smaller objects that ended up being flung all over the place like celestial Ping-Pong balls.

During the chaos of the solar system’s infancy, it wouldn’t be tough for an icy body to end up putting a ring around Saturn. The old-rings theory also predicts that some of Saturn’s moons formed from busted-up ring stuff that spread far enough from the planet to form clumps on its own. And therefore, some of the moons that today hover near the rings’ margins are made of the same material.

“Honestly, and without trying to be too neutral, I think the old age makes more sense to me than the young age,” El Moutamid says. “That’s my belief up to now, but I am happy to be convinced otherwise.”

The trouble is, the icy rings are too pearly white to be billions of years old—or at least that’s an argument the “young-rings” camp focuses on. Called the pollution argument, the problem hinges on the rate at which dark dust in the outer solar system collides with and dims rings’ resplendence. Put simply, some four billion years of drab cosmic rain should leave Saturn’s rings looking as dingy and unimpressive as Jupiter’s—unless the rings are massive, or they’re young. In 2017, using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists measured the mass of Saturn’s rings and found there’s not enough material to absorb a solar system’s age of dust and still look so pristine. Cassini also gathered data about how much dust ends up in the Saturn system, and that result also supports the idea that the rings are young.

Yet it’s highly unlikely that an object large enough to shatter into rings could have come within reach of Saturn—except in the chaos of the early solar system.

The first photograph of Saturn was taken by Voyager I in 1980. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY REGENTS, UC SANTA CRUZ

What if, instead of shredding an interloping object, Saturn destroyed one of its own moons? Two recent theories suggest that—just as Spanish painter Francisco de Goya depicted in a bloody masterpiece—Saturn, in fact, devoured one of its children.

Theory number one, proposed in 2016, suggests that roughly a hundred million years ago, the Saturn system slid into a position where the sun’s gravity jostled its inner moons onto colliding orbits that eventually fastened a ring of debris around the planet. That idea also explains the seemingly young surfaces of several Saturnian moons, since the ring-forming event would have destroyed some and caused them to re-form.

Theory number two, from late 2022, largely blames the rings on Saturn’s megamoon Titan, which is slowly tiptoeing away from its home world. A couple hundred million years ago, Titan’s slow-motion exodus put it in resonance with—that is, exerted a gravitational influence on—a hypothetical moon that scientists call Chrysalis. As a result, Chrysalis got chucked toward Saturn and ripped into a ring. (This theory would also explain the curious angle at which Saturn is tilted, as a gravitational interaction with the orbit of Neptune.)

Needless to say, some don’t buy either of those scenarios. But in Cuzzi’s view, “Debate is good for science. It’s not a bad thing that not everyone is convinced.”

Young Saturnian rings challenge our comfortable notions of cosmic permanence, even as stars explode and meteors streak through our sky. That one of the solar system’s most familiar sights—magnificent ringed Saturn—may not have always looked this way is startling, just as when the star Betelgeuse dramatically dimmed and changed the celestial outline of the constellation Orion. As Cuzzi says, objects we know and love in our nighttime sky aren’t supposed to do that.

Yet to me, young Saturnian rings also suggest that life on Earth got lucky. Serendipitously, evolution produced us—a species capable of crafting telescopes—in an age that intersects with Saturn’s magnificent cosmic spectacle.

Footprints of galactic immigration uncovered in Andromeda galaxy

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument reveals compelling evidence of a mass migration of stars into a galaxy other than the Milky Way

 

Date: February 8, 2023

Source: Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) & Science Daily

Summary: Astronomers have uncovered striking new evidence for a mass migration of stars into the Andromeda Galaxy. Intricate patterns in the motions of stars reveal an immigration history very similar to that of the Milky Way.

    

FULL STORY


Over the course of billions of years, galaxies grow and evolve by forging new stars and merging with other galaxies through aptly named "galactic immigration" events. Astronomers try to uncover the histories of these immigration events by studying the motions of individual stars throughout a galaxy and its extended halo of stars and dark matter. Such cosmic archaeology, however, has only been possible in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, until now.


An international team of researchers has uncovered striking new evidence of a large galactic immigration event in the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way's nearest large galactic neighbor. The new results were made with the DOE's Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab.

By measuring the motions of nearly 7500 stars in the inner halo of the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), the team discovered telltale patterns in the positions and motions of stars that revealed how these stars began their lives as part of another galaxy that merged with M31 about 2 billion years ago. While such patterns have long been predicted by theory, they have never been seen with such clarity in any galaxy.

"Our new observations of the Milky Way's nearest large galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, reveal evidence of a galactic immigration event in exquisite detail," explained Arjun Dey, astronomer at NSF's NOIRLab and the lead author of the paper presenting this research. "Although the night sky may seem unchanging, the Universe is a dynamic place. Galaxies like M31 and our Milky Way are constructed from the building blocks of many smaller galaxies over cosmic history. "

"We have never before seen this so clearly in the motions of stars, nor had we seen some of the structures that result from this merger," said Sergey Koposov, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh and coauthor of the paper. "Our emerging picture is that the history of the Andromeda Galaxy is similar to that of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. The inner halos of both galaxies are dominated by a single immigration event."

This research sheds light on not only the history of our galactic neighbors but also the history of our own galaxy. Most of the stars in the Milky Way's halo were formed in another galaxy and later migrated into our own in a galactic merger 8-10 billion years ago. Studying the relics of a similar, but more recent, galaxy merger in M31 gives astronomers a window onto one of the major events in the Milky Way's past.

To trace the history of migration in M31, the team turned to DESI. DESI was constructed to map tens of millions of galaxies and quasars in the nearby Universe in order to measure the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the Universe. It is the most powerful multi-object survey spectrograph in the world, and is capable of measuring the spectra of more than 100,000 galaxies a night. DESI's world-class capabilities can also be put to use closer to home, however, and the instrument was crucial to the team's survey of M31.

"This science could not have been done at any other facility in the world. DESI's amazing efficiency, throughput, and field of view make it the best system in the world to carry out a survey of the stars in the Andromeda Galaxy," said Dey. "In only a few hours of observing time, DESI was able to surpass more than a decade of spectroscopy with much larger telescopes."

Even though the Mayall Telescope was completed 50 years ago (it achieved first light in 1973), it remains a world-class astronomical facility thanks to continued upgrades and state-of-the-art instrumentation. "Fifty years sounds like a long time, and naïvely one might think that's the natural lifetime of a facility," said co-author Joan R. Najita, also at NOIRLab. "But with renewal and reuse, a venerable telescope like the Mayall can continue to make amazing discoveries despite being relatively small by today's standards."

The research was carried out in collaboration with two Harvard University undergraduates, Gabriel Maxemin and Joshua Josephy-Zack, who connected with the project through the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Najita was a Radcliffe Fellow from 2021 to 2022.

The team now plans to use the unparalleled capabilities of DESI and the Mayall Telescope to explore more of M31's outlying stars, with the aim of revealing its structure and immigration history in unprecedented detail.

"It's amazing that we can look out at the sky and read billions of years of another galaxy's history as written in the motions of its stars -- each star tells part of the story," concluded Najita. "Our initial observations exceeded our wildest expectations and we are now hoping to conduct a survey of the entire M31 halo with DESI. Who knows what new discoveries await!"


Story Source:

Materials provided by Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA)Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1.       Arjun Dey, Joan R. Najita, S. E. Koposov, J. Josephy-Zack, Gabriel Maxemin, Eric F. Bell, C. Poppett, E. Patel, L. Beraldo e Silva, A. Raichoor, D. Schlegel, D. Lang, A. Meisner, Adam D. Myers, J. Aguilar, S. Ahlen, C. Allende Prieto, D. Brooks, A.P. Cooper, K. S. Dawson, A. de la Macorra, P. Doel, A. Font-Ribera, Juan Garcia-Bellido, S. Gontcho A Gontcho, J. Guy, K. Honscheid, R. Kehoe, T. Kisner, A. Kremin, M. Landriau, L. Le Guillou, Michael E. Levi, T. S. Li, Paul Martini, R. Miquel, J. Moustakas, Jundan Nie, N. Palanque-Delabrouille, F. Prada, E. F. Schlafly, Ray M. Sharples, Gregory Tarle, Yuan-Sen Ting, L. Tyas, M. Valluri, Risa H. Wechsler, H. Zou. DESI Observations of the Andromeda Galaxy: Revealing the Immigration History of our Nearest NeighborThe Astrophysical Journal (submitted), 2023 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2208.11683

 

 

 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):  

 

https://obs.carnegiescience.edu/observatories-events  (in-person, online & hybrid events typically Tuesdays & Fridays)

 

Carnegie Zoom Digital Series

Register to Join Us!

 

Zoom Webinar Platform

 

Night Sky Network Clubs & Events   https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/clubs-and-events.cfm  

 

2 March      AEA Astronomy Club Meeting     TBD – Great Courses video        Teams

 

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

 13 March  LAAS General Mtg. 8:00pm Griffith Observatory (private)

 

The von Kármán Lecture Series:

March 2023 - To Boldly Go Where No Robots Have Gone Before: Solar System Exploration with Autonomous Robots at JPL

 

Mar. 9

Time: 7 p.m. PST (10 p.m. EST; 0300 UTC)

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has the most advanced autonomous driving capability ever flown to Mars. Having such an advanced capability contributes to the rover in its challenging mission to discover signs of life that may have existed on Mars in a distant past. This talk provides an overview on the current research and development efforts on robotics autonomy at JPL, with an emphasis on enhancing the safety, efficiency, and performance of robotic mobility through the applications of risk-aware decision making and machine learning.

Speaker(s):
Masahiro (Hiro) Ono, Group Lead, Robotic Mobility Group, NASA/JPL

Host:
Brian White, Office of Communications and Education, NASA/JPL

Co-Host:
Rachel Etheredge, Lead Producer – The Studio, NASA/JPL

Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on YouTube

 

 

 MARCH   UCLA Meteorite Gallery Lectures

               No event currently scheduled.

 

6 April   AEA Astronomy Club Meeting     TBD – Great Courses video        Teams

 

 

Observing:

 

The following data are from the 2023 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2023 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 March:

 

     

 

Moon    March 7  Full, March 15 last quarter, March 21  new, March 29 1st quarter

Planets: Venus is visible at dusk all month.  Mars transits the meridian at sunset and sets in the predawn. Jupiter visible low in the west at dusk until the 30th.  Saturn is visible at dawn starting on the 23rd.   Mercury is visible at dusk starting on the 26th.

Other Events:

 

LAAS Event Calendar (incl. various other virtual events):  

https://www.laas.org/laas-bulletin/#calendar

 

1 March  -- Jupiter and Venus conjunction.

 

March 1

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

 

 

11 Mar

SBAS In-town observing session –at Christmas Tree Cove Located at the west end of Palos Verdes Peninsula at the intersection of Via Neve and Paseo Del Mar. Reached from PV West, turn on Via Anacapa then turn left on Via Sola and left again on Via Neve., Weather Permitting. http://www.sbastro.net/.  

 

12 March – Daylight Savings Time begins

 

18 Mar

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

 

20 March – Vernal Equinox

 

22 March – Jupiter 0.5deg N of Moon

 

24 March -- Venus 0.1 deg N of Moon

 

25 March – Uranus 1.5 deg S of Moon

 

28 March – Mars 2deg S of Moon

 

?

LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party   

 

 

25 March

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

 

 

Internet Links:

 

Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying Guides

Sky & Telescope Magazine -- Choosing Your Equipment

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Getting Started in Astronomy & Observing

The Astronomical League

 e! Science News Astronomy & Space

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

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

Southern California & Beyond Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria

Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting

Los Angeles Astronomical Society (LAAS)

South Bay Astronomical Society (SBAS)

Orange County Astronomers

The Local Group Astronomy Club (Santa Clarita)

Ventura County Astronomical Society

The Astronomical Society of Greenbelt

National Capital Astronomers

Northern Virginia Astronomy Club

Colorado Springs Astronomical Society

Denver Astronomical Society

 

 

About the Club

Club Websites:  Internal (Aerospace): https://aeropedia.aero.org/aeropedia/index.php/Astronomy_Club  It is updated to reflect this newsletter, in addition to a listing of past club mtg. presentations, astronomy news, photos & events from prior newsletters, club equipment, membership & constitution.  We have linked some presentation materials from past mtgs.  Our club newsletters are also being posted to an external blog, “An Astronomical View” http://astronomicalview.blogspot.com/. 

 
Membership.  For information, current dues & application, contact 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 Eric Belle, (Treasurer).

Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter Editor

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