AEA Astronomy Club
Newsletter
September 2023
Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 12
General Calendar p. 18
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 18
Observing p. 20
Useful
Links p. 21
About the Club p.
22
Club News &
Calendar.
Club Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
--
7 Sept AEA
Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great
Courses video Teams
5 Oct 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.
Congratulations and thanks to our new Vice President, Alexandra Gruson!
2023 AEA Astronomy
Club Dues
• The new Treasurer, Eric Belle,
will be sending out a request for 2023 Dues, it is recognized that this request
is being sent out 3 months late
• We will attempt to set up an
electronic method of dues payment; once the proposed method has been approved
by the officers, an email will be sent out to the membership along with a
request to pay 2023 Dues.
·
To be counted on the club roster for group
membership in the Astronomical League, you need to renew.
2024
Eclipse -- An update from the
2024 solar eclipse committee (Mark Clayson, Marilee Wheaton, Judy Kerner,Mai
Lee, Melissa Jolliff, Nahum Melamed):
The contract with our new hotel
on the north edge of San Antonio has been finalized, and Marilee Wheaton has
the link & phone to make reservations.
It is within an hour drive of Kerrville and Fredericksburg – two options
on centerline for observing. 50 rooms of
various varieties (kings, double queens, studio & 2-bedroom suites, all with
sofabeds). Rates are a bit higher.
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.
We are still
pursuing options for reserving an observing site – leaning now towards
Fredericksburg rather than Kerrville, as the latter has been adopted by NASA
for one of their 3 sites. Looking at
schools, parks, commercial & private properties. There are designated public viewing sites,
but we’d like to find a private one to avoid crowds and parking issues. We do have a new club member working remotely
from San Antonio – Alexandra Olano – who has offered to check out sites for us.
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)
All,
I would
like to share my latest project. This image came from 47 hours 45 minutes
of collected data using emission spectra data from ionized Hydrogen, Oxygen,
and Sulphur. The stars are true color using red, green, and blue.
This image and data was taken from my home in El Segundo.
I took
this image with my 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain optical tube with a cooled
monochrome astronomical camera using filters. This data was taken over 14
nights from July 30 to September 3 2023.
This
nebula is found in the constellation Cygnus, the swan. It is estimated to
be about 6,000 light years from Earth. This nebula is a star-forming
region, rich in HII gas.
Enjoy
the wonder,
Jay
Landis
·
VIDEO: Neptune’s Disappearing Clouds Linked to
the Solar Cycle https://youtu.be/5vL1ZPKFILA
Satellite Hack Reveals New
Secrets From Space
https://joltofjoyful.com/satellite-hack-reveals-new-secrets-from-space/
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/hdTKmuTLcwQ
A Season of Saturn
Image Credit & Copyright: Andy Casely
Explanation: Ringed planet
Saturn will be at its 2023
opposition, opposite the Sun in Earth's skies, on August 27. While that puts
the sixth planet from the Sun at its brightest
and well-placed for viewing,
its beautiful ring system isn't visible to the unaided eye. Still, this
sequence of six telescopic images taken a year apart follows both Saturn and
rings as seen from inner planet Earth. The gas giant's ring plane tilts from most open in 2018 to approaching edge-on in 2023
(top to bottom). That's summer to nearly the autumn equinox for Saturn's northern hemisphere. In the sharp planetary portraits
Saturn's northern hexagon and a large storm system are clearly visible in 2018. In 2023 ice moon Tethys is transiting, casting its shadow across southern
hemisphere cloud bands while Saturn's cold blue south pole is emerging from
almost a decade of winter darkness.
Ringed Ice Giant Neptune
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NIRCam
Explanation: Ringed
ice giant Neptune lies near
the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James
Webb Space Telescope. The dim and
distant world is the farthest planet
from the Sun, about 30 times
farther away than planet Earth. But in the stunning Webb view, the planet's
dark and ghostly appearance is due to atmospheric methane that absorbs infrared
light. High altitude clouds that reach above most of Neptune's absorbing
methane easily stand out in the image though. Coated with frozen nitrogen,
Neptune's largest moon Triton is brighter than Neptune in reflected sunlight,
seen at the upper left sporting the Webb telescope's characteristic diffraction
spikes. Including Triton, seven of
Neptune's 14 known moons can be identified in the field of view. Neptune's faint rings are striking in this space-based planetary
portrait. Details of the complex
ring system are seen here for the first time since Neptune was visited by
the Voyager 2 spacecraft in August
1989.
Northern Pluto
Image Credit: NASA, Johns
Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest
Research Institute
Explanation: Gaze
across the frozen canyons of
northern Pluto in this contrast enhanced color scene. The image data used to
construct it was acquired in July 2015 by the New Horizons spacecraft as it
made the first reconnaissance flight through the remote Pluto system six
billion kilometers from the Sun. Now known as Lowell Regio, the region was named for Percival
Lowell, founder of the Lowell Observatory. Also famous for his speculation that
there were canals on Mars, Lowell started the search that ultimately led
to Pluto's discovery in 1930
by Clyde
Tombaugh. In this frame
Pluto's North
Pole is above and left of
center. The pale bluish floor of the broad canyon on the left is about 70
kilometers (45 miles) wide, running vertically toward the south. Higher
elevations take on a yellowish hue. New
Horizon's measurements were
used to determine that in addition to nitrogen ice, methane ice is abundant
across Lowell Regio. So far, Pluto is the only Solar
System world named by an
11-year-old girl.
A Cosmic Zoo in Cepheus
Image Credit & Copyright: Yann Sainty
Explanation: Sprawling emission nebulae IC 1396 and Sh2-129 mix glowing
interstellar gas and dark dust clouds in this nearly 12
degree wide field of view
toward the northern constellation Cepheus the King. Energized by its central star IC 1396 (left), is hundreds of light-years across and some
3,000 light-years distant. The nebula's intriguing dark shapes include a
winding dark cloud popularly known as the Elephant's Trunk below and right of center. Tens of light-years long,
it holds the raw material for star formation and is known to hide protostars within.
Located a similar distance from planet Earth, the bright knots and swept back
ridges of emission of Sh2-129 on the right suggest its popular name, the Flying Bat Nebula. Within the Flying Bat, the most recently recognized
addition to this royal cosmic zoo is the faint bluish emission from Ou4,
the Giant Squid Nebula. Near the lower right edge of the frame, the suggestive
dark marking on the sky cataloged as Barnard 150 is also known as the dark Seahorse Nebula.
A Triply Glowing Night Sky over Iceland
Credit & Copyright: Wioleta
Gorecka; Text: Natalia Lewandowska (SUNY Oswego)
Explanation: The Sun is not the quiet place it seems. It expels an unsteady stream of energetic electrons and protons known as the solar
wind. These charged particles
deform the Earth's
magnetosphere, change paths, and
collide with atoms in Earth's atmosphere, causing the generation of light in auroras like that visible in green in the image left. Earth itself is also geologically
active and covered with volcanoes. For example, Fagradalsfjall volcano
in Iceland, seen emitting hot gas in orange near the image center.
Iceland is one of the most geologically
active places on Earth. On the
far right is the Svartsengi
geothermal power plant which creates the famous
human-made Blue Lagoon, shown emitting white gas plumes. The featured composition therefore highlights three
different sky phenomena, including
both natural and human-made phenomena.
The Ring Nebula from Webb
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, JWST;
Processing: Zi Yang Kong
Explanation: The Ring Nebula (M57), is more complicated than it appears through a small
telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkable exposure by the James Webb Space
Telescope explores
this popular nebula with a deep exposure in infrared light. Strings of gas, like eyelashes around a cosmic eye, become
evident around the Ring in
this digitally enhanced featured image in assigned colors. These long
filaments may be caused by shadowing of knots of dense gas in the ring from energetic
light emitted within. The Ring Nebula is an elongated planetary
nebula, a type of gas cloud created
when a Sun-like star evolves to throw off its outer atmosphere to become a white dwarf
star. The central oval in the Ring Nebula lies about 2,500 light-years away toward the musical constellation Lyra.
Image Credit & Copyright: Paolo Palma
Explanation: It's fun to scribble on the canvas of the sky. You can use a creative photographic technique to cause
the light of point-like stars to dance across a digital image by tapping
lightly on the telescope while making an exposure. The result will be a
squiggly line traced by the star (or two squiggles traced by binary stars) that
can reveal the star's color. Colorful
lines, dubbed Ghirigori, made
from stars found in the northern sky constellations Bootes, Corona Borealis,
Ophiucus, and Coma Berenices, are captured in this artistic mosaic. The 25
stars creating the varied and colorful squiggles are identified around the
border. Of course, temperature determines the color of a star. While whitish stars tend to be close to the Sun's
temperature, stars with bluer hues are hotter, and yellow and red colors are
cooler than the Sun.
SN 1006: A Supernova Ribbon from Hubble
Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgement: W. Blair et al. (JHU)
Explanation: What created this unusual space ribbon? The answer: one of
the most violent explosions ever witnessed by ancient humans. Back in the year 1006 AD, light
reached Earth from a stellar explosion in the constellation of the Wolf (Lupus), creating a "guest star" in the sky that
appeared brighter than Venus and lasted for over two years. The supernova, now
cataloged at SN 1006, occurred about 7,000 light years away and has left a
large remnant that continues
to expand and fade
today. Pictured
here is a small part of
that expanding supernova remnant dominated by a thin and outwardly moving shock front that heats and ionizes surrounding ambient gas.
The supernova remnant SN 1006 now has a diameter of nearly 60 light years.
The Falcon and the Redstone
Image Credit & Copyright: Matt Haskell
Explanation: In a photo from the early hours of July 29 (UTC), a Redstone
rocket and Mercury capsule are on display at Cape Canaveral Launch
Complex 5. Beyond the Redstone, the
8 minute long exposure has captured the arcing launch streak of a SpaceX Falcon
Heavy rocket. The
Falcon's heavy communications
satellite payload, at a record setting 9 metric tons, is bound for geosynchronous orbit some 22,000 miles above planet Earth. The historic launch of a Redstone rocket carried astronaut Alan
Shepard on a suborbital
spaceflight in May 1961 to an altitude of about 116 miles. Near the top of the
frame, this Falcon rocket's two reusable side boosters separate and execute
brief entry burns. They returned to land side by side at Canaveral's Landing Zone 1
and 2 in the distance.
Astronomy
News:
(from ScienceDaily.com or ScienceNews.org)
The James Webb telescope may have spotted stars
powered by dark
matter
If they exist, dark stars could offer insight into dark
matter and early star formation
Galaxies, some seen as they
were in the universe’s first few hundred million years, fill this montage of images
from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. The white bands mark where no
images have been taken.
NASA, ESA, CSA, JADES COLLABORATION
The James Webb Space
Telescope has spotted objects in the early universe that might be a new kind of
star — one powered by dark matter.
These “dark stars” are
still hypothetical. Their identification in JWST images is far from certain.
But if any of the three candidates — reported in the July 25 Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences — turn out to be
this new type of star, they could offer a glimpse of star formation in the
early universe, hint at the nature of dark matter and possibly explain the
origins of supermassive black holes.
First proposed in 2007 by
cosmologist Katherine Freese and colleagues, dark stars might have been some of the first types of
stars to form in the
universe (SN: 1/1/08).
Though dark stars have yet to be observed, they’re thought to be powered by
heat from dark matter interactions rather than by nuclear fusion reactions like
in the sun.
Dark stars “would be very
weird looking,” says Freese, of the University of Texas at Austin. The
hypothetical stars would have formed from clouds of hydrogen and helium that
drew in locally abundant dark matter as they coalesced. Though the true nature
of dark matter isn’t known — its presence is inferred
largely via its effect on how stars move within galaxies — it’s possible that
dark matter particles can interact with themselves, annihilating each other
when they collide and producing vast amounts of light and heat (SN: 7/7/22). That heat would keep the cloud of hydrogen
and helium from condensing into a dense, hot core like the stars that exist
today.
Because the heat from
dark matter annihilations would keep the gas cloud from condensing, dark stars
could grow to gargantuan size. Theoretically, dark stars could be 10 times as
wide as Earth’s orbit around the sun. They could also be millions of times as
massive as the sun and shine billions of times brighter — bright enough,
potentially, to be spotted by JWST.
To see if any dark stars
are lurking in data from the orbiting observatory, Freese and colleagues pored
over images from a JWST survey of early galaxies. In such images, JWST has so
far discovered over 700 objects that may have originated in the first few hundred million years of the universe — the epoch when dark stars would have
emerged (SN: 12/16/22).
Light from these remote objects is stretched, or redshifted, as the universe
expands. So Freese and colleagues zeroed in on four objects already confirmed
to be highly redshifted, making them some of the oldest objects seen to date.
Those objects are
currently thought to be small galaxies from the universe’s relative infancy.
But because they’re so far away, JWST can’t resolve them well enough to
determine whether they’re actually galaxies or large, ultrabright stars, the
researchers say.
The team ran computer
simulations of how much light a hypothetical dark star might produce at various
wavelengths. They compared those spectra to light from images collected by JWST
at different wavelengths for each of the four objects. JWST data from three of
those objects are consistent with the simulated dark star patterns, Freese and
colleagues report.
Some scientists are
skeptical. Known types of stars could also create the observed light from the
three candidates, says Sandro Tacchella, an astrophysicist at the University of
Cambridge. And identifying any of the objects as a dark star would require that
the simulated patterns fit well to more detailed spectra, says Brant Robertson,
a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
If dark stars were to be
found, though, “that would be revolutionary,” says study coauthor Cosmin Ilie,
an astrophysicist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.
Detecting dark stars
would confirm the existence of a dark matter particle and hint at how it works (SN: 7/7/22). “Just having the information that [dark
matter] is something that could annihilate would be really, really powerful,”
says Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT who was not involved in the
study. That knowledge could help scientists look for dark matter elsewhere in
the universe, she says.
Dark stars could also
help explain the formation of supermassive black holes (SN: 3/16/18). Once the dark matter inside the star has
annihilated itself, the remaining hydrogen and helium — millions of times the
mass of the sun in a relatively compact space — would collapse in on itself and
form a black hole. Those black holes could merge over time into black holes
like the ones at the centers of most galaxies, millions or billions of times as
massive as the sun.
Future experiments, like
looking for brighter or dimmer light at certain wavelengths, could help confirm
whether any of the three objects are dark stars. Freese also expects to find
more dark star candidates in future JWST data, she says. But for now, whether
dark stars truly exist remains a mystery.
A
version of this article appears in the August 26, 2023 issue
of Science News.
CITATIONS
C.
Ilie, J. Paulin, and K. Freese. Supermassive dark star candidates seen by JWST. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. Vol. 120, July 25, 2023, e2305762120. doi:
10.1073/pnas.2305762120.
About Skyler Ware
·
E-mail
Skyler
Ware was the 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow with Science News. She is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at
Caltech, where she studies chemical reactions that use or create electricity.
Spiral galaxies might have been lentil-shaped before becoming
starry whirls
A new look at lenticular galaxies suggests a tweak to
galaxy evolution theory
Lenticular galaxies like Messier 102, also
known as the Spindle Galaxy, could provide new insight into how galaxies morph
into different shapes.
NASA, ESA, HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM/STSCI/AURA, W. KEEL/UNIV. OF
ALABAMA, TUSCALOOSA
The Milky Way might have once looked more like
a legume than a starry whirlpool.
Over their unfathomably long lifetimes, spiral
galaxies like the Milky Way are generally thought to morph into
lentil-shaped “lenticular” galaxies and then into elliptical blobs (SN: 4/23/18). But an analysis of nearby galaxies suggests that our galaxy, and others like it, was once lenticular, astronomer Alister Graham reports in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society. If correct, Graham’s
proposed update to the evolutionary sequence of galaxies would rewrite the
history of the Milky Way.
“Lenticulars have always been sort of the
abandoned stepchild of [galaxy] morphology,” says astronomer Christopher
Conselice of the University of Manchester in England, who wasn’t involved in
the study. But this paper puts them into focus, he says, as being a major
aspect of how galaxies change.
Lenticulars get their name from the way their
entire halo of stars, when viewed edge on, bulges in the middle and thins out
toward the sides, much like a lentil. These galaxies exhibit a confusing mix of
properties that’s made their presumed place in the middle of galaxy evolution
sequences rather suspect.
“We’ve known for a while that that’s almost
certainly not correct,” Conselice says. Particularly puzzling is that
lenticulars, despite their spiral-like disks, don’t have lots of gas, which
hinders them from producing new stars. Spiral galaxies do have lots of
star-forming gas, and scientists aren’t sure why lenticular galaxies don’t.
Graham, of Swinburne University of Technology
in Hawthorn, Australia, found new clues to this mystery of galaxy evolution by
considering black holes.
Most galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole
in their center, and when galaxies merge, so do those black holes. This makes
the mass of a galaxy’s black hole a kind of record of its past collisions. If a
galaxy got big by gobbling up its neighbors rather than by sucking up
surrounding gas, its black hole should be hefty relative to the swarm of stars
that surrounds it.
Using images from the Hubble and Spitzer space
telescopes, Graham compared the black hole and stellar masses of about 100
nearby galaxies. For galaxies of the same shape, he saw that black hole mass
and stellar mass tend to be linked in a predictable way — except for the
lenticular galaxies.
When Graham took a closer look at the
lenticulars, he realized they are actually two distinct groups that had been
lumped together: those that have lots of interstellar dust and those that do
not. This division, which he previously reported in the May Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society, could have been a
superficial aesthetic difference. But the galaxies’ black hole masses suggest
otherwise.
Dust-poor and dust-rich lenticulars have
entirely different relationships between their black hole masses and stellar
masses, suggesting different histories and explaining the apparently scattered
behavior of lenticular galaxies. The dusty galaxies tend to have a heftier
supermassive black hole than the ones found in both spirals and dust-poor
lenticulars. Dust-poor lenticulars are usually on the small side in terms of
both black hole mass and stellar mass.
This led Graham to conclude that spiral
galaxies are actually in between the two types of lenticulars, evolutionarily
speaking. His new analysis suggests that dust-poor lenticulars become spirals
after capturing small “satellite galaxies” and other minor mergers
— bumping up their black hole masses — and scooping up nearby gas.
When spirals collide with other substantial
galaxies, he proposes, they become dust-rich lenticulars — and indeed, he adds,
every dust-rich lenticular in his dataset was previously recognized as the
remnant of a spiral galaxy merger. Collisions between these dust-rich
lenticulars are then enough to finally erode the galaxies’ discs of stars and
destroy their dust, producing blobby elliptical galaxies.
Black holes are a good tracer of galaxy
evolution, Conselice says, but the new sequence could be controversial. One
issue, he says, is that lenticular galaxies in the nearby universe are usually
such lightweights that they would need to merge tens or even hundreds of times
— far more than the expected average of around three over 10 billion years — to
form a large spiral galaxy.
But things might have been different in the
early universe, he adds. Long ago, there could have been more massive
lenticulars. Figuring that out might be possible with the James Webb Space
Telescope, which can see incredibly faint infrared light, so is allowing scientists to peer farther away — and further back in time — than ever before (SN: 12/16/22).
“If you could look in the more distant
universe, you could potentially see some of these galaxies when they’re first
forming, or when they’re evolving,” Conselice says. “We could potentially
really test this idea.”
A version of
this article appears in the September 9, 2023 issue of Science News.
CITATIONS
A.W. Graham. Resequencing the Hubble sequence and the quadratic (black
hole mass)–(spheroid stellar mass) relation for elliptical galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society. Vol. 522, July 2023, p. 3588. doi:
10.1093/mnras/stad1124.
A.W.
Graham. Splitting the lentils: Clues to galaxy/black hole
coevolution from the discovery of offset relations for non-dusty versus dusty
(wet-merger-built) lenticular galaxies in the Mbh–M*,spheroid and
Mbh–M*,galaxy diagrams. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society. Vol. 521, May 2023, p. 1023. doi:
10.1093/mnras/stad529.
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
Zoom Webinar Platform
Night Sky Network Clubs
& Events
https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/clubs-and-events.cfm
7 Sept AEA Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great Courses video Teams
8 Sept Friday Night 7:30 PM SBAS Monthly General
Meeting Topic: TBA, in
the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
? LAAS General Mtg. 8:00pm Griffith Observatory (private)
The von Kármán Lecture
Series:
September 21, 2023 -
Solar Eclipses: Your Guide to the 2023/2024 Celestial Events
September 21
Time: 7 p.m. PDT (10 p.m.
EDT; 0300 UTC)
Two eclipses are
crossing over most of the U.S. in the next few months! The first is an Annular
Eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023, and the second will be a Total Solar Eclipse on April
8, 2024. An eclipse can be an awe-inspiring celestial event that drastically
changes the appearance of the two biggest objects in our sky: the Sun and Moon.
It also gives us the opportunity to study our Sun, Earth, and our space
environment.
Speaker(s):
Dr.
Marin M. Anderson, Research Scientist, NASA/JPL
Jason Craig, Visualization Producer, NASA/JPL
Host:
Nikki Wyrick,
Office of Communications and Education, NASA/JPL
Co-host:
Rachel
Zimmerman Brachman, Solar System Public Engagement Specialist, NASA/JPL
Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on YouTube
No event currently scheduled.
5 Oct 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 September:
Moon Sept 6 last quarter, Sept 15 new, Sept 22 1st quarter, Sept 29
full (blue moon)
Planets:
Venus
is visible at dawn all month. Mars is lost in the Sun’s
glare this month. Jupiter rises in
the evening and is visible until sunrise.
Saturn transits in late
evening and sets at dawn. Mercury is visible at dawn starting on
the 15th.
From NASA:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/skywatching/home/
Other
Events:
LAAS Event Calendar (incl.
various other virtual events):
https://www.laas.org/laas-bulletin/#calendar
1 Sept Neptune 1.4deg
N of Moon
4 Sept Jupiter 3deg S
of Moon
|
Sept 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 Sept |
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/. |
|
15 Sept |
SBAS
out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Ken Munson to coordinate a location.
http://www.sbastro.net/. |
16 Sept Mars 0.7deg S of Moon
19 September Neptune
at Opposition
22 September Mercury
at Greatest Western Elongation
23 Sept equinox
|
? |
LAAS Private dark
sky Star Party |
|
23 Sept |
LAAS Public
Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties for more information. |
28 Sept Neptune
1.4deg N of Moon
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://aerosource2.aero.org/confluence/display/AstroClub/AEA+Astronomy+Club+Home 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
