Volume 42 No. 10 October 1, 2005 NEXT MEETING 7:30 p.m., Monday, October 3, 2005 Maturango Museum, 100 East Las Flores Avenue, Ridgecrest PROGRAM FOR THE OCTOBER 3 MEETING As amateur telescopes improve, the satellites of Saturn are getting more visible to amateur astronomers. Let's talk about this interesting group of satellites at our October meeting. Maybe we will have some recent observations to add to our discussion. DATES TO KEEP IN MIND Monday, October 3, 2005: Regular CLAS Meeting at the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, 7:30 p.m. Friday, September 30, 2005: Public Star Party. See below. Wednesday, October 26, 2005: Deadline for next Skywatchers Newsletter Monday, November 7, 2005: Regular CLAS Meeting at the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, 7:30 p.m. STAR PARTY SCHEDULE FOR THE 2005 SEASON: Star Parties will be held on the dates listed below. Star Parties are an activity where members and guests join together to share views of the skies. If you have a telescope, bring it. If not, come and look through someone else's. Star parties are held at a site in the open desert south of Ridgecrest. To reach the star party site from Ridgecrest, go south on China Lake Boulevard 6.5 miles from its intersection with Ridgecrest Boulevard. Continue straight across Highway 395 and you will be on Brown Road (Old Highway 395). Follow Brown Road as it curves to the right and goes west. After 2.3 miles there will be a 30-inch orange cone on the left. Turn left and follow the dirt road marked by 12-inch cones. The CLAS Star party is 0.5 miles along this road. Watch for signs and cones, which will be put out about a half hour before viewing starts. Call Carroll Evans 760-375-5681, or Bruce Churchill 760-375-7247, for more information. Friday, September 30--Signs out at 6:30 p.m., Star viewing at 7:00 p.m. Friday, October 28--Signs out at 6:30 p.m., Star viewing at 7:00 p.m. STAR PARTIES WILL RESUME IN MARCH 2006 THE SKY IN OCTOBER (Roger Brower) 1. Venus starts the month low in the southwest at sunset but begins to rise higher as the month progresses. 2. Jupiter will only visible the first few days of the month very low in the west soon after sunset. 3. Saturn remains in the morning sky rising about 2 AM at the beginning of the month and so is best viewed just before dawn. 4. Uranus is in Aquarius and Neptune is is Capricornus. 5. Mars will be the show piece for October. It will rise around 9PM and remain well placed the rest of the night. CLAS STAR PARTY Friday Sept. 2, 2005 (Alex Shlanta) This monthly star party was held at the usual site in the open desert south of Ridgecrest, CA. Bruce Churchill and Roger Brower were unable to attend, so the duties of setting out the orange cones and reporting on the star party was passed on to me. We had great conditions for deep space viewing at this star party. There were no clouds, the moon was in its waning crescent phase, the relative humidity 10%, wind speed 2 mph, and it was a comfortable 80 o F outside. Cones were out and observers were in place at 7:30 pm, but we had to wait until it got dark at 8:00 pm before we could do any serious viewing. There were 18 guests at the star party. One of those was an astronomy student of mine, Scott Moore. His mother Debbie Moore who had been an astronomy student of Ken Pringle's when she was younger accompanied him. She still has fond memories of attending CLAS star parties back then. There were 8 telescopes out at the site for the star party. They were operated by Neal Barry with his 8" Odyssey dobsonian reflector, Peter Eiserloh with his Meade LXD55 8" Schmidt-Newtonian reflector, Joe Kurley with a Meade ETX-70 AT refractor, Dick Johnson with a Meade ETX-125ED Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, Jerry Ott with his GOTO Starmaster 14 ½" dobsonian reflector, myself with a 10" Orion dobsonian reflector, and John Veazey with the CLAS homemade 12" reflecting dobsonian telescope. Ken Pringle wandered around among the telescopes keeping the guests informed with "star stories" and encouraging them to move around to look through the various telescopes out there. Because of the good seeing conditions we were able to look at quite a few celestial objects at the star party. We took a look at Jupiter and its 4 visible Galilean moons before it set for the evening. Later in the evening we saw Mars as it was rising in the East. There were several spectacular meteors seen during the star party accompanied by the usual ooohs and aaahs. Double stars Mizar and Alcor were viewed along with Albireo and Gamma Andromeda. Many of the standard Messier items were looked at as well such as M4, M6, M7, M13, M15, M22, M31, M51, M57, M81, and M82. M33 and the Double Cluster in Perseus were observed as well. Using UTC and Oxygen III filters we had good views of M8 Lagoon Nebula, M17 Swan (Omega) Nebula, M20 Trifid Nebula, M27 Dumbbell Planetary Nebula, and NGC 6960 & 6992 the Veil Nebula. A special hit for the evening was looking at the Crescent Nebula NGC 6888 in central Cygnus with a UTC filter. This nebula is a shell of material blown away by stellar wind from a rare type of super hot Wolf-Rayet Star. We were also able to see Barnard 86, the Ink spot, on Jerry Ott's telescope. THE SUN AT FAIR TIME - Another form of outreach (Carroll Evans) The Desert Empire Fair just concluded its four day run in Ridgecrest. The run was from Thursday evening to late Sunday evening. On Wednesday before the Thursday opeing CLAS member Kiran Mehra just happened to find me at City Hall, and mentioned that it would be a good idea to set up his solar telescopes so that the public could see the Sun safely. We went to the Fairgrounds, and arranged with Mike Thomas, the Fair's CEO, to set up the telescopes on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We picked a nice mainstream location, and waited for Saturday noon to arrive. Saturday noon arrived, right on time, and so did Kiran. He set up his big Celestron with a full aperture Mylar filter, and a hydrogen-alpha telescope piggybacked on the Celestron. There was a massive, obvious sunspot group to be seen, and several pink looking prominences of the edge of the sun. On Saturday (a rather windy day) we had 200 people look through both telescopes., and 250 more on Sunday., total of 450 people saw something (the Sun) that they had never seen before in such detail. SPECIAL NOTE Astronomy magazine has raised its rate for group subscriptions, An appropriate increase has been made to the charge to CLAS members. SOMETHING FOR YOU TO TRY (An email I received) Good day. Please view my rewritten and redesigned website at: www.savethemilkyway.org Please consider adding a link to it on any website(s) you administer. The Dark Sky Institute is my own personal solution to light pollution. My new website is more navigable than earlier versions. With it I hope to offer my own individual voice to the ever-growing chorus of people wishing to preserve starlight. It is best viewed on Safari or Firefox Browsers. Please send me your comments and / or your images of Good Lights, Bad Lights, and Just Plain Ugly Lights, for the link: Lights (images). Thank you. Sunny Days and Milky Way Nights. Jack Troeger (Milky Way Man, Dark Sky Guy, Dark Sky Knight). Dark Sky Institute 1009-16th Street Ames, Iowa 50010 (future dark sky residents) troegerj@raccoon.com www.savethemilkyway.org VIA EARL TOWSON COMET IMPACT RISK IS LOW: (But odds greater than winning Lotto jackpot.) Although astronomers have discovered plenty of comets, they've always thought it was just a fraction (less than 3%) of the number of comets out there - and one of them might have our names on it. Fortunately, this scenario doesn't seem so likely, according to new research from scientists at the Australian National University; astronomers have probably found more like 20% of comets. That means that small comets, capable of destroying a city, probably only hit the Earth once every 40 million years, and big continent-busting comets probably only hit us once every 150 million years. NOTE: These results apply to comets coming from beyond the orbit of Pluto, which is where most comets live. The Earth is still at risk of being hit by asteroids, and by so-called short-period comets - ones that come past repeatedly, like Halley's comet. "But asteroids and short-period comets come past again and again, so if we're clever enough we can find them all and predict which, if any, will hit the Earth," said Dr Francis. "If we find one on a collision course with the Earth, we would normally have hundreds of years warning in which to do something about it, like deflecting the asteroid. "The comets coming from beyond Pluto, so called long-period comets, are nastier, as they are totally unpredictable, and if we see one on a collision course we'd have at best one or two years warning - not long enough to do anything." Dr Francis' research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. It was based on computer simulations, published data from the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Project at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and on data from amateur astronomers around the world. MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION Basic CLAS dues are $20.00 per year, which includes the Skywatchers Newsletter. As a benefit of membership you may also receive Astronomy Magazine and/or Sky and Telescope Magazine. The fee schedule is as follows: Basic membership $20.00 per year Membership with Astronomy magazine $51.00 per year Membership with Sky and Telescope magazine $53.00 per year Membership with both S & T and Astronomy $84.00 per year Send your check to: Roger Brower, Treasurer, China Lake Astronomical Society, P.O. Box 1783, Ridgecrest, CA 93556. PRESIDENT - Earl Wilson - 760-876-5455 (email zearl.email@gmail.com) VICE-PRESIDENT - Bruce Churchill - 760-375-7247 (email bchurchill@atsecure.net) SECRETARY - Ted Hodgkinson - 661- 824-2738 (email ghodkinson@sbcglobal.net) TREASURER - Roger Brower - 760-375-1181 (email brower@iwvisp.com) NEWSLETTER EDITOR - Carroll Evans Jr. - 760-375-5681 (email clevans@ridgenet.net) WESTERN AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS WEB SITE http://www.waa.av.org/ Meetings of the China Lake Astronomical Society are held at the Maturango Museum at 7:30 p.m. on the first Monday evening of each month, except when the first Monday is a holiday. SKYWATCHERS Newsletter of the CHINA LAKE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY POST OFFICE BOX 1783 RIDGECREST, CA 93556-1783 NEXT MEETING: 7:30 p.m., MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2005: "SATELLITES OF SATURN" AT THE MATURANGO MUSEUM, 100 EAST LAS FLORES AVE. CLAS WEB PAGE http://www1.iwvisp.com/brower/clas.html INDEX OF CLAS NEWSLETTERS http://www.ridgenet.net/~jebush/clas/