Highlights of the April Sky - - - 1st - - - First Quarter Moon 6:21 am EDT A Publication of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society DAWN: Saturn and Mars are 1° apart, with Jupiter about 6° to the upper right. - - - 3rd - - - PM: Venus is in the Pleiades. The brilliant planet will not be closer to the Seven KAS Sisters unl April 2028. - - - 7th - - - Full Moon General Meeting: Friday, April 3 @ 7:00 pm 10:35 pm EDT - - - 14th - - - Observing Session: Saturday, April 11 @ 8:00 pm DAWN: The Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars form an arc that spans 20° above the south-southeastern horizon. Observing Session: Saturday, April 25 @ 8:00 pm Last Quarter Moon 6:56 pm EDT ― ALL CANCELED DUE TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ― - - - 15th - - - DAWN: The Moon is 3° below Saturn, with Jupiter and Mars flanking the pair. - - - 16th - - - Inside the Newsletter. DAWN: The Moon is nearly 4° to lower right of Mars. March Meeng Minutes.................... p. 2 - - - 22nd - - - AM: Lyrid meteor shower Board Meeng Minutes..................... p. 4 peaks (10 - 20 meteors/hr.). KAS Library Update............................ p. 4 New Moon 10:26 pm EDT Observaons...................................... p. 5 - - - 25th - - - Messier Marathon Report..................p. 7 DUSK: A thin waxing crescent Moon is 3.5° right NASA Night Sky Notes........................ p. 8 of Aldebaran. Membership of the KAS..................... p. 9 - - - 26th - - - DUSK: The Moon is 4° to the April Night Sky................................... p. 10 lower right of Zeta Tauri (Taurus’ southern horn), KAS Board & Announcements............ p. 11 Venus is 7° to Moon’s le. Miller Planisphere.............................. p. 12 - - - 30th - - - First Quarter Moon 4:38 pm EDT March Meeting Minutes The general meeting of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society Leonard James Ashby Telescope will [hopefully] be held on was brought to order by President Richard Bell on Friday, Saturday, May 30th at 6pm. All KAS members are strongly March 6, 2020 at 7:09 pm EST. Approximately 63 members encouraged to attend. Please! and guests were in attendance at the Kalamazoo Area Math & Science Center (KAMSC). Richard ended his report with an announcement. He will not be seeking another term on the KAS Board at the end of the In his President’s Report, Richard started with an update on year. Richard said that this is his 26th year as a KAS member Jeff Goldblum and National Geographic shooting footage for and 25 of those have been spent serving on the Board (15 as the Disney+ series The World According to Jeff Goldblum at president). He feels he’s accomplished all he can and it’s Arizona Sky Village (ASV). The crew was due to arrive at time to step aside. Therefore, he made the announcement so 7pm on March 1st, but arrived 3 hours late. They were soon in the year to give other members time to step forward planning to record scenes from inside Rick Beno’s and serve. Richard said he still plans to act as Newsletter observatory, but never made it in there (much to Rick’s Editor and Webmaster as well as serve as Program and dismay). Instead, they asked some ASV residents to stage a Membership Chair. Much of his effort will also go into mock observing session (as it was totally overcast) on Rick’s promoting and encouraging use of Owl Observatory and the cement pad and this is where all the recording took place. Remote Telescope. After a few chaotic hours, the crew packed up their gear and left at 1am. Mike Patton said it wasn't worth all the effort. The evening’s guest speaker, Dr. Elias Aydi, is a Research Hopefully the footage shot will survive editing and be Associate in the Physics & Astronomy Department at released later this year or early 2021. Mike & Kathy did get Michigan State University. He graduated from the University a nice photo with Mr. Goldblum (see below), so that was of Cape Town with a PhD in astronomy and got his Masters something! at Notre Dame University in Beirut. His research interests involve working on eruptive stars and optical transients. The Richard thanked all those members that recently volunteered title of his well-received presentation was Where is their time with community outreach. Dave Garten, Scott Everybody? The Fermi Paradox. Macfarlane, and Don Stilwell passed out KAS literature at the Nature Center’s new "Club Connection" event on Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years distant, is the nearest star February 8th. Arya Jayatilaka and his daughter Akila joined to the Sun. An exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b, was found Don at Family Science Night on February 19th at Hastings orbiting this red dwarf star in 2016. The discovery of a Public Library. Don also setup a table on February 29th second planet was announced in April 2019, but remains when the Battle Creek Symphony performed The Planets. unconfirmed. If intelligent life exists on Proxima Centauri b Richard then covered upcoming outreach, including and they observed the planets of our solar system with a Vicksburg Middle School’s annual Science Night on March large telescope, they would see Earth as it appeared 4 years 11th (volunteers for this event included Dave Garten, Arya, ago. This is due to the time needed for light to travel the Thenuka, and Akila Jayatilaka, Jack Price, Don Stilwell, and distance between the two worlds. This phenomenon is Dave Woolf). known as lookback time. In another example, if an alien civilization about 50.7 light-years away focused a very Greg Sirna (unable to attend due to a non-coronavirus powerful telescope on the Moon, they would witness the first illness) e-mailed Richard some pictures of the new cabinet Moon landing on July 20, 1969. for Owl Observatory. This cabinet will secure eyepieces, filters, cameras, etc. when not in use. The dedication of the The Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter. The Sun is located about two-thirds (or about 28,000 light-years) from the galactic center. It is estimated to contain 200 - 400 billion stars. The nearest big galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda (M31), located about 2.5 million light-years away. Civilizations in M31 with even bigger telescopes pointed at the solar system would see an Earth devoid of humans. Instead they would see Homo habilis, the first human ancestors known to use tools. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field was released in 2012. The Hubble Space Telescope took an equivalent exposure of 23 days over the course of 10 years in an area of the sky measuring only 2.3ʹ × 2.0ʹ. It contains around 5,500 galaxies, the most distant of which is 13.2 billion light-years away. The observable universe is estimated to be 93 billion light- years in diameter. Although, thanks to the universe being 13.8 billion years old, we cannot actually view galaxies more distant than 13.8 billion light-years. Light simply hasn’t had enough time to travel further than that. Prime Focus Page 2 April 2020 Most stars in the Milky Way are now thought to contain at least one planet of its own. Today, we know of over 4,000 exoplanets orbiting stars other than the Sun (most of these stars are relatively nearby). Therefore, our galaxy alone likely contains trillions of planets. The observable universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies. Doing a bit of math, there are 1021 total stars in the universe. So, the total number of planets in the universe is staggeringly large! Dr. Aydi then covered the two most successful techniques to discover exoplanets utilized today, the radial velocity and transit methods. The Kepler Space Telescope and Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) were also discussed. (Richard covered these topics in his talk on exoplanets last year. Please see pages 2 - 4 of the March 2019 issue of Prime Focus to learn more.) Dr. Elias Aydi, a Research Associate in the Physics and The existence of planets around distant stars, along with Astronomy Department at MSU, was the guest speaker at possible inhabitants, has long been speculated. Therefore, in our meeting on March 6th. 1950, the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, asked (over lunch with his colleagues) “Where is everybody?” If climate of their planet? If this were the case, alien races the Milky Way has been inhabited with intelligent wouldn’t last long enough to discover one another. If alien extraterrestrial civilizations for tens of million of years then civilizations do exist, but are infrequent, then they would be they’ve had plenty of time to spread out and explore the scattered throughout the Galaxy. This would make visitation Galaxy, including visits to Earth. Since no visitations have or even communication very impractical. Perhaps most alien occurred, intelligent life beyond Earth must not exist. societies aren’t transmitting signals. And finally, maybe highly advanced alien cultures just don’t find us interesting. In 1961, the American astronomer Frank Drake developed Dr. Aydi used the analogy of driving down the highway. If what became known as the Drake Equation, used to calculate you saw an ant hill would you bother to stop and try to share the number of currently active communicative extraterrestrial your technology? Dr. Aydi then asked “would we want them civilizations. Making various assumptions for the variables, to visit us?” If our history is any indication, a less advanced the number of advance alien societies can range from 20 to culture often suffers when visited by a technologically 50,000,000 in our galaxy alone. However, Dr. Aydi argued superior people. Very alien cultures may frankly be too that non-intelligent life is far more abundant in the universe. different for us to understand.