Hi Mark - nice photos - particularly M8 and M20.  These were with the Digital Rebel and 80ED?

Thanks for checking into the materials at the library.  Here at home I have a DVD with a series of about a dozen short videos produced by Space.com - the Starry Night folks.  Topics range from the Moon, asteroids, the planets, comets, star birth and more.  I also have a DVD called Eyes on Mars from Space.com.  It has 7 videos discussing Mars missions with an emphasis on the most recent rover missions.  Then I have two DVDs from the Standard Deviants - basically part 1 and part 2 of an introductory course in Astronomy.  Part one is many of the basic concepts of Astronomy including a good bit of history.  Part 2 concentrates on the planets, asteroids, comets and the Sun.

I know that we also have several newcomers and I would be very happy to see presentation on topics anyone has questions about.  For example, how do we know the distances to other stars and galaxies?  How have scientists determined the age of the universe, the Sun and the Earth?  Prior to technology like GPS, how did one determine their location on the Earth and why did it take clear until the last half of the 18th century before any level of accuracy was available for ships at sea?  How do we know the composition of the gases in various nebula or the trace elements in stars?

Undoubtedly there are other questions out there :-)

Best regards,

Mike

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From: RACAstronomy@yahoogroups.com [mailto:RACAstronomy@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of M Goochey
Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2006 3:05 AM
To: RACAstronomy@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [RACAstronomy] Club meeting last night

Mike,

I think the Thanksgiving and Christmas weekend meeting times will be fine since the Holiday's themselves aren't on Saturday. The AFN announcements are a great idea, and hopefully attendance will pick up with new people arriving this summer. I'm kind of at a loss for presentation ideas at the moment. I'll take a trip over to the Foster Library and see what they have available for videos and DVD's and such.

 I added a few more photos to the group that were took on the 29th. I had the ISO cranked up to 1600 so they came out a bit noisy though. Hopefully I'll get a chance to try again later.

Hope everyone has been enjoying the nice weather lately...enjoy it while it lasts!!

Cheers

Mark

Michael Swanson <swanson.michael@...> wrote:

Hi gang,

We really had a grand meeting last night.  We started off with a great presentation from Mark introducing everyone to astrophotography.  A load of experience compacted into a concise, fact filled presentation.  Next we discussed a bit about the future of the club and we seem to have an agreement that we need to do the following:

·         Get AFN to run regular announcements about our meetings in order to pull in both newcomers to the hobby as well as established amateur astronomers that are new to the island.

·         Hold monthly meetings with presentations, discussions, videos or other items of general interest to insure the club survives through those months where the weather doesn't cooperate.

·         Use this discussion group to stay in communication and coordinate ideas for meetings.

About 8PM we headed out to Torii Station to enjoy some relatively dark and quite clear skies.  The transparency and seeing (http://www.nexstarsite.com/_RAC/articles/SeeingConditions.htm) were a bit above average and we had three scopes on the field.  We logged several globular clusters, galaxies, planetary nebulae, open clusters, double stars and diffuse nebulae.  Quite a lot of memorable beauty.  We also caught Saturn before it sank into the ocean and spent a good deal of time on Jupiter.  

In fact, Jupiter was unusual last night.  The south EQ band was double its normal width and with quite a bit of texture across the entire width.  It was so wide in fact that it extended all the way up past the equator.  There was still a distinct separation from the north EQ band.  To make it more remarkable, two hours later we went back to Jupiter and the SEB was back to its usual appearance.  Those who witnessed this last night may want to make a note in your observation log - this is not the type of thing you see often.

A few of you are not yet on the Yahoo Group - this is the last message you will get directly.  You can join here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RACAstronomy/

I have just updated the web site - http://www.NexStarSite.com/rac.htm - the meeting schedule for the year is posted and I added a map to the Torii site to the meeting page.  Note that the November and December meetings fall on the weekends associated with Thanksgiving and Christmas.  What does everyone think - should we leave them or reschedule them?  The disadvantage of rescheduling is that a recurring AFN announcement for the 4th Saturday of each month would then be incorrect for those months.

Best regards,

Mike

 

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