www.havastro.co.uk

This Month

We welcome back our own Nik Szymanek who will be Benhurst Junior School - Hornchurch showing us some more of the wonderful images he has achieved with his telescopes. There will also be a We have received a request from the Benhurst Junior School raffle. in Hornchurch to give a presentation to their 6 and 7--old pupils on a date convenient to us in the near future. However, Last Month this will have to be during the day during the school week and we appreciate that some members would not be available to We enjoyed a very interesting talk Dr Paul Whiting assist on this occasion. However, we would be grateful for at about the “Cassini Mission to Saturn”. least one telescope that can be demonstrated and also any books, posters and flyers that can be provided to help with Members News the presentation. If you are able to assist pleas speak to Barbara or Frances.

Terry showed us some wonderful photos of auroras Brentwood Scouts that he had taken on his recent trip to Alaska. He also showed us some photos of a family of bears that he We have also received a request from the Brentwood Scouts and Christine encountered in the wild. for a return visit following on from our visit last year. They would like us to visit on an evening in the New Year between January and February but on this occasion they have access to a Scout hut situated at a dark site just outside of Brentwood.

Again, if you are able assist please let either Barbara or Frances know.

Next Meeting ~ December 12th

Our next meeting will see our annual Christmas Quiz which, this year will be set by Peter Morris. We are very grateful for the many that John Sweeney has been our Quiz Master. We would appreciate it if members could bring some festive snacks and treats and, hopefully, we may see another splendid cake from Liz. There will also be a raffle and we ask for items for prizes.

NIGHT SKY

The “Coathanger” : Looking upwards after dark high in the south-west you should spot the three stars making up the 'Summer Triangle'. The lowest is Altair in Aquilla, up to its right is Vega in Lyra and over to its left is Deneb in Cygnus. With binoculars sweep upwards about one third of the way from Altair towards Vega. You should spot a nice asterism, formally 'Brocchi's Cluster' but usually called the Coathanger. It is formed of a straight line of six stars below which is a 'hook' of four stars. A pretty object!

Venus: can best be seen on 30th November at 06:00 BST in Virgo low in the Southeast. By the end of November, Venus’s phase will have increased to 25% and its disc will appear 41 arcseconds across. At this time Venus will shine at an impressive mag.-4.5 and rise just short four hours before the . Saturn: can best be seen on 1st December at 17:00 in Sagittarius low in the Southwest. Saturn is almost at the end of its apparition but it might just be spotted low on the Southwest horizon at the start of December but soon to be lost in the post-sunset glare.

Uranus: can best be seen also on 1st December at 23:20 BST in Aries in the South. Although Uranus is in Aries at this date and time, by 3rd December it will have slipped over the border into . The mag.+5.8 planet continues moving West until at the end of December its 1.2°North of mag.+4.3 Omicron Piscium. Uranus passes its highest point in the sky, due South, in darkness all month.

Thank you to everyone who Spaceflight News helps with NASA says goodbye to Kepler planet-hunter refreshments. Ground controllers have beamed the final commands to NASA’s Kepler Observing at South Weald telescope, turning off the spacecraft’s transmitters and disabling the craft’s automatic recovery software after the planet-hunting observatory The possible observing dates for ran out of fuel last month. Engineers commanded Kepler to turn off its December are: radio transmitters, a standard procedure during deactivation of a space mission to ensure errant signals do not interfere with communications Fri 2nd-Sun 4th, using the same or similar frequencies. The commands also prevented Kepler’s on-board computer from trying to switch the transmitters back th th Fri 9 – Sun 11 , on and contact Earth. NASA announced that Kepler had run out of fuel and no longer had the pointing stability to search for planets around other th th Fri 16 – Sun 18 stars. Launched in 2009, Kepler is circling the sun around 94 million miles from Earth. On its current path, Kepler is flying a bit farther from the sun To be determined nearer the time. than Earth, and traveling around the sun a bit slower than Earth. Kepler collected its last science observations in September, ending a run that observed more than 530,000 stars and returned 678 gigabytes of data. Kepler’s discoveries also helped astronomers write nearly 3,000 scientific Young Astronomers papers, a number that will continue to climb. Astronomers using data collected by Kepler confirmed the existence of 2,681 planets orbiting other stars, with another 2,899 planet candidates in the pipeline that We will next be meeting at the home could be confirmed with follow-up observations. “We found small of Terry and Christine, 1 Ashleigh potentially rocky planets around some of these bright stars, and those are Gardens, Upminster on Thursday now prime targets of current and future telescopes so we can move on to th see what these planets are made of, how they are formed, and what their December 6 . atmospheres be like,” said Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at Ames. “While we have ceased spacecraft operations, the science results from the Kepler data will continue for years to come,” she said.