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Upcoming Events

Astronomy Talk - Tycho Brahe -- Friday, September 14th.
Herrett Center - 8:15 PM

Full Moon Star Party -- Saturday, September 22nd.
City Of Rocks - TBA. Depends on if we do solar viewing.

Meeting and Star Party -- Saturday, October 13th.
The Great Debate continues... Pluto - Planet or Not?
Herrett Center - 7:00 PM

The Eclipse report is here.

The Pomerelle Star Party report is here.

NOTICE: Our November business meeting will include voting on changes to the By-Laws to help the club move into the digital age, and reflect the changes in the relationship between the club and the Herrett Center. Please plan to attend!

The proposed changes can be seen here.

September Meeting / Star Party

I did not get a count, but we had a good turn out for the last meeting. We also gained a new member, and helped someone with a very nice Bushnell telescope that looked like it might be thirty years old. The meeting started with a report on the scouting trip that David, Rick and Terry took last week. There really isn't a great place to set up, but there are a couple of good ones. Terry would like to find a place further off the road. Rick is worried about how many people we lose because the park is so spread out. We hope to do the Pomerelle follow up visit on the way to this star party.

Jay Sneddon gave a wonderful presentation on the mysteries of Pluto, starting with the anomalies in Uranus' orbit that led to the discovery of Neptune. Then the same thing seemed to happen with Neptune resulting in an intense race to find Planet X, or Planet O depending on which side you were on. The actual discovery was made by Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Then for many years Pluto got smaller every time the measurement technique improved. If it had continued to shrink, it would have already disappeared.

Next came the case of the defective plates. In the process of analyzing some images of Pluto someone noticed a bump that sometimes appeared on one side of Pluto, then about three days later on the other. This turned out to be the discovery of Charon, Pluto's moon that is nearly as large as the planet. The New Horizons mission is on its way to study Pluto close up for the first time. If you missed Jay's talk, you missed one of the most enjoyable events so far this year.

After Jay's talk we watched the KMVT coverage of the eclipse, then headed up to the observatory for a decent night of observing. We had about fifty people for the star party, with an unusual number who knew a little about astronomy. The skies were fairly steady, but hazy. Objects nearly overhead, like M57 the Ring Nebula, and M13 the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules looked good in the 18" JMI, but M31 the Andromeda Galaxy hardly made it out of the glare in the eastern sky.

Look for previous contents of this page here.