ASSET NEWSLETTER STARGAZER ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTH EAST TEXAS P O BOX 654 GROVES, TEXAS 77619 President - Will Young Vice-President - Kyle Overturf Secretary - Brenda Tantzen president@asset-astronomer. org [email protected] [email protected] Treasurer - Eddie & Cat Trevino Newsletter Editor - Howard Minor [email protected] [email protected] THE CLUB WEB SITE: SEPTEMBER 2016 ISSUE CHECK OUT THE ARTICLES asset-astronomer.org THIS MONTH, GOT GOOD ONES

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BRENDA’S MINUTES WILL’S WORDS ASSET Minutes August 12, 2016 The whispers of fall are already in STAR PARTY at Martin Dies September 3. the air. The days are getting short- Welcome to new member Tyler Troutman er and the temps seem to be de- from Lumberton. We also had two visitors, Jay and Benja- creasing as well. The longer nights mean more min Willis. Bill suggested checking out the ESO.org chances for observing. The Martin Dies Star Party website. This is the European Southern Observatory, and is coming up on Sept 3rd. We will be doing some he especially likes the virtual tours. Upcoming events at the outreach for the public and that is always a treat. planetarium are: October 8 – International Observe the Hopefully the weather is on our side for this one. Moon Night; and February 18, Galileo’s Birthday. Sharon For more info on that check the website. Another great event coming up is the Okie-Tex star party. always appreciates your help/participation in these events. There's still time to sign up for this one as well as Get more info at the next meeting or check out the newslet- the Eldorado Star Party. Both are extremely fun ter. Will showed us the new 50 mm Lunt H-Alpha solar star parties so if you're looking to get into it, these telescope the club has purchased for outreach. A class will are your chance! Get out and observe and we shall be announced soon instructing members on how to use this see you at the September meeting! WILL scope. Lonnie and Janie recently visited Washington, D. C., and he had pictures from the Air and Space Museums they visited. One is in D. C. and the other is at Dulles Airport. They’ve got lots going on. Texas Parks and Wildlife manages Martin Dies, Jr. State The Eldorado Star Party is October 24-29. Park in Jasper. Ranger Amy Kocurek is a friend of astrono- Attendance: 21 September refreshments: Kyle my. Even when we can’t get there for a star party, she con- Brenda Tantzen ducts one herself. Check out their website. PAGE 1 ASSET Secretary OBSERVERS’ PAGE

ESP October 24 – 29, 2016 Rates $42 if you preregister ONLINE on or before Oct 10, 2016. ($21 for each add’l family member ELDORADO living in the same household who STAR PARTY is fifteen years or older)

ABOUT ESP, THE ELDORADO STAR PARTY THAT’S ON A GREAT TEXAS RANCH Come visit the Eldorado Star Party 2016 for our 14th Year! It’s just for amateur astronomers who want dark skies and a protected environment. It’s located at the 7,100 acre X-Bar Ranch near Eldorado, Texas. Now an established week-long event, come out Monday, Oct. 24 to get maximum exposure to dark skies. This year meal service will begin with dinner on Monday evening, and lunch and dinner served Tuesday through Saturday. There is still a month left to register. We already have a group going from ASSET, so join in. Hot-water showers and toilet facilities are conveniently located near the camping areas. Specially-priced motel rooms are available in nearby Sonora and Ozona. Lunch and dinner can be purchased and will be ca- tered at X-Bar’s nearby Live Oak Lodge. It’s just 200 miles west of San Antonio, and less than one days drive, so you can be observing the same night you get there. Ask questions at the Sept. ASSET meeting.

FROM TYLER TROUTMAN, RECENT NEW MEMBER OF ASSET. Tyler owns Star Graphics in Beaumont, and is going to London in late September. He said, “I will be traveling to London, England and have a chance to see the Science Museum. Here is a brief description of the space related exhibits where I will take pictures and share with the club:” The Science Museum features seven floors of educational and entertaining exhibits, including the Apollo 10 command module and a flight simulator. The Welcome Wing showcases developments in contemporary science, medicine and technology. The Medical History Gallery in the museum's attic contains a substantial collection of medical history treas- ures. Pattern Pod introduces under eights to the importance of patterns in contemporary science, and Launch Pad is a popular hands-on gallery where children can explore basic scientific principles. Exhibits in the Exploring Space galleries include the three-meter-high, 600kg Spacelab 2 X-ray telescope that was flown on British space missions, and full-scale models of the Huygens Titan probe and Beagle 2 Mars Lander. All of us will be waiting for your report on the Science Museum. Tyler, the trip will be a great op- portunity for you! Thanks for the update.

An Astronomy Team To Take Care Of All Your Astronomical Needs COL- ARM- 713-569-7529 RITTER Clayton SAB- Ron 979-702-0258 INE + TRAN-

PAGE 2 HERE IS A GREAT UPDATE FROM GIRISH DOSHI Girish has news of a first telescope, and I know it is very exciting for him. So let’s celebrate with him. “I just got my 1st Telescope, a Celestron Edge 8-inch HD star sense Reflector Telescope.” I have it set up and need to start using it when weather improves. Are you available if I need any help using it? Hope to take it to star party next week.

Io's collapsing atmosphere For the first time, astronomers have been able to observe the effect on Jupiter's moon Io as the planet's eclipse plunges it into cold darkness. The atmosphere of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io peri- odically freezes and thaws as the planet blocks out heat from the Sun, according to new observations. Io is the most volcanically ac- tive object in our Solar System. The moon’s volcanoes are caused by the gravitational forces of Jupiter and other moons generating geological activity. This causes Io's volcanoes to emit sulphur diox- ide (SO2) in plumes extending up to 482km above the surface. As a result, the moon's thin atmosphere consists mostly of sulphur dioxide gas. This eclipse occurs over two hours every day on Io, which is equal to 1.7 days on Earth. The study was made possible using the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES) on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. This instrument was able to measure the atmosphere of Io using heat radiation rather than light, meaning the changes could be observed even when the moon was in shadow.

Juno reaches Jupiter, and here is the latest update The JUNO space craft has been at Jupiter for over a month now and has sent back a bunch of “raw images” and seems to be working perfectly, but now Juno has reached the farthest point from Jupi- ter in its initial orbit of the planet, and is now preparing to fall back towards the gas giant to get its first good close look at the surface. The spacecraft launched from Earth in August 2011 and arrived at Jupiter on 4 July 2016, firing its rockets to place it safely in orbit. Juno reached the farthest distance from Jupiter, known as ‘apogee’, during the first of two major orbits on 31 July, some 8.1 million kilometers from the planet. It is now fol- lowing the orbital path back to make a close approach and get a clear view of Jupiter before beginning its second major orbit. These two major orbits are known as ‘capture orbits’, each taking 53.5 days, and precede the shorter 14-day science orbits that will comprise Ju- no’s main mission. At the beginning of its second capture orbit on 27 August, Juno will fly just 4,200km above Jupiter’s clouds; the closest pass it will make above the planet. Juno will capture up-close images of Jupiter and collect information about its atmosphere such as water content, cloud motions and chemical composition. This will help NASA scientists piece together a history of the planet, and hopefully determine Jupiter’s interior structure and core.

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SOUTH TROPICL ZONE Is there a super-Earth in the Solar System out beyond Neptune? By Ethan Siegel

When the advent of large telescopes brought us the discoveries of Uranus and then Neptune, they also brought the great hope of a Solar System even richer in terms of large, massive worlds. While the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt were each found to possess a large number of substantial icy -and-rocky worlds, none of them approached even Earth in size or mass, much less the true giant worlds. Meanwhile, all-sky infrared surveys, sensitive to red dwarfs, brown dwarfs and Ju- piter-mass gas giants, were unable to detect anything new that was closer than Proxima Centauri. At the same time, Kepler taught us that super-Earths, planets between Earth and Nep- tune in size, were the galaxy's most common, despite our Solar System having none. The discovery of Sedna in 2003 turned out to be even more groundbreaking than astronomers realized. Although many A possible super-Earth/mini-Neptune world Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) were discovered beginning in hundreds of times more distant than Earth is from the 1990s, Sedna had properties all the others didn't. With an the Sun. Image credit: R. Hurt / Caltech (IPAC) extremely eccentric orbit and an aphelion taking it farther from the Sun than any other world known at the time, it represented our first glimpse of the hypothetical Oort cloud: a spherical distribution of bodies ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of A.U. from the Sun. Since the discovery of Sedna, five other long-period, very eccentric TNOs were found prior to 2016 as well. While you'd expect their orbital parameters to be ran- domly distributed if they occurred by chance, their orbital orientations with respect to the Sun are clustered ex- tremely narrowly: with less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of such an effect appearing randomly. Whenever we see a new phenomenon with a surprisingly non-random appearance, our scientific intuition calls out for a physical explanation. Astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown provided a compelling possibil- ity earlier this year: perhaps a massive perturbing body very distant from the Sun provided the gravitational "kick" to hurl these objects towards the Sun. A single addition to the Solar System would explain the orbits of all of these long-period TNOs, a planet about 10 times the mass of Earth approximately 200 A.U. from the Sun, re- ferred to as Planet Nine. More Sedna-like TNOs with similarly aligned orbits are predicted, and since January of 2016, another was found, with its orbit aligning perfectly with these predictions.

This article is provided by NASA Space Place. With articles, activities, crafts, games, and lesson plans, NASA Space Place encourages everyone to get excited about science and technology. Visit spaceplace.nasa.gov to explore space and Earth science!

The ASSET President gets his HERSCHEL 400 CERTIFICATE Did you all see in the REFLECTOR MAGIZINE THAT HE MADE IT. Will is number 560th in achieving this award. Everybody congratulate him! The Herschel 400 is the most lengthy project, but is a requirement for getting your Master’s Certificate. Thanks for be- ing an “asset” to our club, Will. PAGE 4 Howard Astronomers find a galaxy that’s mostly dark matter Dragonfly 44 glows only faintly with starlight — but there's a lot more going on behind the scenes. The hazy oval seen in the picture, isn’t an entire galaxy. Dragonfly 44 weighs about the same as our Milky Way, except it’s 99.99% dark matter and has less than a hun- dredth the number of stars. Dark matter is stuff that can’t interact with the electromagnetic force (how we mostly experience the world) so we can’t see or touch it. Scientists can observe its gravitational effects, though, which keep Dragonfly 44’s paltry collection of visible stars from flying apart. There’s around five times as much dark matter as regular matter in the universe, and even our own Milky Way is around 90% dark matter. Astronomers found Dragonfly 44 with the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini North tele- scope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and are publishing their results in The Astrophysical Journal. The team measured Dragonfly 44’s mass by observing its stars’ velocities as they zoomed around the galaxy. (taken from Astronomy Mag. web site)

Proxima Centauri b has the most promising exoplanet

In a shocking find, astronomers Wednesday announced their discov- ery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Cen- tauri, just 4.2 light-years away. This warm world, cataloged as Proxi- ma b, sits smack in the middle of its habitable zone — the sweetest of sweet spots — where liquid surface water could exist. But Proxima Centauri is not like our sun. It’s a cool, low-mass star known as a red dwarf. So the planet only qualifies as potentially habitable because it circles its sun in an orbit tighter than Mercury’s. Incredibly, the planet’s ghostly signal was hidden in the data for decades. Pale Red Dot noticed a weak signal reoccurring every 11.2 days. They used this potential find to secure support from the European Southern Observatory, and then they set out on an unprecedented confirmation campaign. Read more on this on the Astronomy Mag. web site.

BE AWARE OF THE FALSE DAWN EarthSky Tonight August 30, 2016. The autumn equinox is coming for us in the Northern Hemisphere, making this the best time of year to see the zodiacal light, also known as the false dawn. With the moon out of the morning sky for the next two weeks, this is your chance to catch the zodiacal light before dawn’s first light. This light can be noticeable and easy to see from latitudes relatively close to Earth’s equator, for example, like those in the southern U.S. I’ve seen it many times from the latitude of southern THIS WILL BE A Texas, in the hour or so before true dawn begins to light the sky. In this case, the zodiacal light can resemble the WONDERFUL EVENING, lights of a city or town just over the horizon. COME & JOIN IN PAGE 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

On the 1st, Karl Harding discovers the Asteroid Juno 1 2 3 MARTIN DIES and Pioneer 11 does the 1st fly-by of Saturn in 1979 NEW On the 3rd 1976, Viking 2 lands on Mars STAR PARTY 4 5 6 Moon 7 8 9 10 farthest ASSET CLUB from MEETING 1ST Earth, Apogee 7:00PM

11 12 13 LUNA 2 IS 14 15 16 17 1ST CRAFT FULL TO IMPACT MOON 1959 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Moon Closest to Earth, AUTUMN 3RD Perigee BEGINS 25 26 27 28 29 30 On the 23rd NEW 1846, Neptune discovered

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM? WHERE ARE THE PLANETS?

Mercury starts September as an evening object setting an hour and forty-five minutes after the Sun on the 1st. That evening, three-quarters of an hour after sunset, the planet at magnitude 1.4, will be almost due west and some 10° above the horizon. Finding it will be made easier by the presence of Venus 6.5° to its right and a little higher. Jupiter will also be present below Venus and slightly to its left. Jupiter will also continue to get lower in the evening sky to be at conjunction on the far side of the Sun on the 26th. It will then be 5.45AU, 8.15 million km beyond the Sun. Venus on the other hand will get a little higher in the evening sky, setting just over two and a half hours after the Sun on the 30th. Mars and Saturn will also be in the evening sky forming a fairly close group with Antares at the beginning of the month. During September Mars will move away from Antares while the much slower moving Saturn will remain about 6° from the star. Mars starts September in Scorpius, joins Saturn in Ophiuchus on the 3rd but moves on into Sagittarius on the 22nd. Uranus, at magnitude 5.7, is in Pisces. By the end of September it will rise just over an hour after the Sun sets making it observable late evening. Neptune is at opposition on September 2 when it will be 4330 million km, almost 29 astronomical units, from the Earth. The planet is in Aquarius at magnitude 7.8. Pluto at magnitude 14.4 is also in the evening sky during September setting well after midnight. The planet remains in Sagittarius some 1.5° from the magnitude 2.9 star pi Sgr and less than half a degree from the magnitude 3.7 star omega Sgr.

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