August Club Event Reviews
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Up for What’s September The Local Group - Astronomy Club of the Santa Clarita Valley – September 2018 Visit our Web Site at www.lgscv.org Volume 36 Issue 2 SEPTEMBER MONTHLY MEETING Thursday, September 13, 2018 Our monthly club meetings provide an excellent opportunity for both members and guests to hear interesting, educational presentations about all aspects of astronomy. It’s also a great time to meet club members and guests who share an interest in the enjoyment of learning and exploring this rewarding experience. Whether you’re just getting started in exploring the night skies, or a seasoned amateur astronomer, our Local Group meetings are great learning, sharing and socializing events. Our September meeting will be held at the Valencia Public Library on Thursday, September 13 starting at 6:30 pm. For this month’s program, we’ll enjoy a presentation about the latest technology and techniques to locate exoplanets, those planets that exist in solar systems other than our own. August Club Event Reviews August Club Meeting Thursday, August 9, 2018 By Don Cogan The August club meeting was well attended and had lots happening! First, this meeting was the deadline for club members to vote on the new Local Group Board members whose term will start in August for the 2018-2019 year. Votes were collected by both mail-in votes and ballots collected at the start of the meeting. Since there were emailed votes yet to be fully counted, Dave Flynn explained that the newly elected Board members would be announced as soon as all the votes were tabulated (See New Board Members on Page 3). We also reviewed upcoming activities in September, the highlight of which is the fall White Mountains campout. For our monthly meeting presentation, we were fortunate to have guest speaker Dr. Tiffany Meshkat, a research scientist from IPAC/Cal Tech, provide a presentation on the hunt for exoplanets using a new approach – the searching for dust trails around stars considered to be candidates for the possible presence of planets. Dr. Meshkat began her talk with an overview of other methods that have been used with varying degrees of success for locating possible exoplanets, such as the measurement of radial velocity, the transmit method and the gravitational lensing method. As of the time of this presentation, 3,775 exoplanets have been discovered primarily using one or more of these techniques. With the availability of extremely powerful instruments such as the Palomar 1640 telescope. attention is now being placed on direct imaging methods for searching out exoplanets The techniques include such advanced approaches as 3D integral field spectrography, which looks at spectrograph data in three dimensions to identify candidates for further exoplanet searching. Formalhaut b is one such star that has undergone such evaluation. Dr. Meshkat explained in detail a new method that looks for “holes” or gaps in the dust trails surrounding stars. Such stars may potentially have orbiting planets located in such gaps, which may bear some similarity to the Kuiper asteroid belt around our sun between Mars and Jupiter. Recently, Dr. Meshkat’s team has been currently exploring the dust rings around the star Vega While this search has yet to reveal exoplanets around this particular star, the search for other candidate stars and the dust trails surrounding them will continue, potentially with advancements and refinements in the methodology. Congratulations to Our New Board of Directors! Here are the results of the July Board Elections. Our new Board of Directors for the Local Group has been their term of office in August, and are off to a solid start in charting a course for our club during the coming year. • Dave Flynn • Johan Vandersande • Danny Freibrun • Christine Schmidt • Lavere Schmidt • Robi Muskerjee • Glenn Basore • Simon Tang • Will WIra Astronomy Quiz Time! Initially it was thought upon my discovery that I was a 'tenth planet' in the solar system, but - alas - I am another dwarf. Snubbed again! Just like the first time, though that disrespect eventually led to the Trojan War. Who am I? Answer on Last Page. August Board and Staff Meeting Tuesday,(Answer August on last 28, page) 2018 Summary by Don Cogan The Board Meeting came to order at 7 pm. Attendees: • Dave Flynn • Glenn Basore • Will Wira • Robi Muskerjee • Johan Vandersande • Van Webster • Christine Schmidt • Danny Freibrun • Guy Horanberg New Officers This was the first Board meeting of the newly elected Board members for the 2018-2019 year. The Board members appointed Officers and Committee Chairs for the new term. The results were: President – Dave Flynn Vice President – Van Webster Treasurer – Johan Vandersande Secretary – Christine Schmidt Co-Secretary – Don Cogan Outreach Coordinator – Van Webster Membership – Will Wira Special Events Coordinators – Don Cogan and Danny Freibrun Webmasters – Simon Tang and Robi Muskerjee Upcoming Events The attendees discussed upcoming activities during the next several months. September Club Meeting For our September monthly club meeting, Dave Flynn has invited Dr, Jesse Christianson, an astrophysicist at IPAC, to expand on the topic of exoplanet searching, sharing plans for the use of instrumentation such as the recently launched TESS, as well as the James Webb Space Telescope Astronomy Day We discussed having an Astronomy Day during the fall at the Valencia Library, the date is currently planned for October 13. As there is new management in place at the Library, both discussion/coordination with their staff and club planning efforts are required to firm up event details College of the Canyons – Fall Star Party This event has been very well attended in the previous years, and has been an effective avenue for building awareness of Local Group activities. We agreed to continue to participate in both their spring and fall star party events. Placerita Canyon Open House/Vasquez Rocks National Area Open House These are daytime programs at which we typically provide an exhibit booth displaying our club event information and educational materials. We have also had solar scopes set up at these events, which combined combined with the exhibit materials and information, have attracted attendees to our booth. This year,at the Vasquez Rocks Open House, we had a significant increase in the number of visitors to our booth from the previous year. Spring and Fall Campouts Our campout/night sky exploration trips, which have been held primarily at White Mountains in the past few years, have been a favorite event for Local Group members. Dark skies, beautiful scenary and a variety of daytime local attractions such as the Bristlecone Pine forest make this locale especially appealing. We agreed to plan continue to plan both spring and fall campouts, and discussed investigating some alternative dark sky locales to provide even more options for club members. Great American Campout Held annually in Central Park, the Great American Campout has been regularly attended by some club members, and while the night sky viewing here in Sant Clarita is not of the quality of that in the remote areas such as Vasquez Rocks and White Mountains, we opted to continue support for those this event as long as we have members interested in attending and providing their telescopes for night time viewing. Treasurer/Membership Report Johan reported about $4,391 in our account. We currently have 65 Local Group club members The meeting was adjourned at 8:15 PM. This article is distributed by NASA Space Place. With articles, activities and games NASA Space Place encourages everyone to get excited about science and technology. Visit spaceplace.nasa.gov to explore space and Earth science! A Trip Through the Milky Way By Jane Houston Jones and Jessica Stoller-Conrad Feeling like you missed out on planning a last vacation of summer? Don’t worry—you can still take a late summertime road trip along the Milky Way! The waning days of summer are upon us, and that means the Sun is setting earlier now. These earlier sunsets reveal a starry sky bisected by the Milky Way. Want to see this view of our home galaxy? Head out to your favorite dark sky getaway or to the darkest city park or urban open space you can find. While you’re out there waiting for a peek at the Milky Way, you’ll also have a great view of the planets in our solar system. Keep an eye out right after sunset and you can catch a look at Venus. If you have binoculars or a telescope, you’ll see Venus’s phase change dramatically during September—from nearly half phase to a larger, thinner crescent. Jupiter, Saturn and reddish Mars are next in the sky, as they continue their brilliant appearances this month. To see them, look southwest after sunset. If you’re in a dark sky and you look above and below Saturn, you can’t miss the summer Milky Way spanning the sky from southwest to northeast. You can also use the summer constellations to help you trace a path across the Milky Way. For example, there’s Sagittarius, where stars and some brighter clumps appear as steam from a teapot. Then there is Aquila, where the Eagle’s bright Star Altair combined with Cygnus’s Deneb and Lyra’s Vega mark what’s called the “summer triangle.” The familiar W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia completes the constellation trail through the summer Milky Way. Binoculars will reveal double stars, clusters and nebulae all along the Milky Way. Between Sept. 12 and 20, watch the Moon pass from near Venus, above Jupiter, to the left of Saturn and finally above Mars! This month, both Neptune and brighter Uranus can also be spotted with some help from a telescope.