APRIL 2019 UPCOMING EVENTS Wednesday, April 3 - Regular PAC meeting @ 6:30 PM at Touchmark Grand Lodge, 3180 Touchmark Blvd., Prescott, across from the Gateway Mall. Club member Fulton Wright will present “How to Find the Moon.” This is Joke Night, so bring your astronomy, science, math, etc. jokes to share with the club. Saturday, April 6 - Starry Nights @ 7:00 PM at the Highlands Center for Natural History. Sign up at April 3 regular meeting. Wednesday, April 10 - METASIG @ 5:00 PM at The Palace restaurant in Prescott. Sign up at April 3 regular meeting. Thursday, April 18 - Third Thursday Presentation @ 6:00 PM in the Founder's Suite, Prescott Public Library. Dr. Will Grundy, Co-Investigator New Horizons Project, Lowell Observatory will provide an update on NASA’s New Horizons probe following its flyby of the Kuiper belt object Ultima-Thule. He will also discuss his work as the leader in the study of exotic ices at the Ice Lab in NAU’s Physics and Astronomy department. The Ice Lab is advancing our knowledge of Pluto and other icy bodies in the outer Solar System. Friday, April 26 - Star party @ 8:00 PM at Camp Wamatochick for kids from Camelback Kiwanis Club in Phoenix. There will be about 80 grade school kids. Sign up at April 3 regular meeting. Saturday, April 27 - Tour of the Apollo Crater Fields in Cottonwood. The tour group will depart at 10:00 AM from the initial meeting location at the Walmart at 2003 E. Rodeo Drive, Cottonwood. The group will car pool to the Crater Field with the tour lasting up to 3 hours. Anyone interested in joining the tour should contact RSVP Cory Shaw, [email protected], by April 23. Friday, May 3 - Star party @ 8:00 PM at Camp Wamatochick for kids from Camelback Kiwanis Club in Phoenix. There will be about 80 grade school kids. Sign up at May 1 regular meeting. 1 ASTRONOMICAL LEAGUE AWARDEES Two Prescott Astronomy Club members, Jerry Shaw and Patrick Birck, were acknowledged for achieving Astronomical League Outreach Awards in the recent Astronomical League magazine, Reflector (see appendix). RAFFLE OF MEADE 12 ½” STARFINDER DOBSONIAN & 25X100 OBERWERK BINOCULARS At the May 1 general meeting, the club will be raffling a Meade 12 ½-inch Starfinder Dobsonian telescope with accessories and Oberwerk 25x100 mm binoculars with carrying case and tripod (donated by Graham Fyffe). 2 Raffle tickets will be on sale at the April 3 and May 1 regular meetings and are $2.00 a piece or 6 tickets for $10.00. The raffle will take place during the May 1 meeting. The raffle winner does not need to be present as long as their name and phone number is written on the ticket stub so they can be contacted. Good Luck! APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING 50TH ANNIVERSARY July 20, 2019 will be the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. National Informal STEM Education Network, NISE, has a dedicated web page with links to special websites for the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary. http://nisenet.org/moon50 HIGHLANDS CENTER EDUCATION ENRICHMENT PROGRAM By Brenda Smith, Education Enrichment Program Volunteer Coordinator, 570-204-0899 I am the Education Enrichment Program Volunteer Coordinator at the Highlands Center for Natural History and your organization was given to me as a resource for possible speakers for our Ed Enrichment Program. For some background, the Ed Enrichment Program is a series of free presentations for all the volunteer naturalists and docents at the Highlands Center. The purpose is to provide information, training, review and/or discussion on various topics of interest to naturalists and docents in order to provide additional knowledge, skills and experience. The program began in 2015 and we have had many of our own docents and naturalists as presenters during this time. Our presentations take place at the Highlands Center in an indoor classroom, the outdoor ramada, on the trails, or even off-site, generally whatever will work for the presenter. We are now scheduling speakers for March, April, May, August, September, October and November of 2019. Presentations are usually between 1-2 hours, with 15-20 participants, and the meeting dates are the second Tuesday of each month. This is an all-voluntary program and there are no paid individuals. The topics are usually focused on natural history, but we’ve had others that include star gazing, constellations, and other subjects of interest to those who look beyond the earth for enrichment. I am happy to answer any questions you may have and hope you can help us find volunteers that would like to join us as presenters. 3 WHAT’S UP? MERCURY By Adam England Mercury – “The Messenger of the Gods” – races around the Sun every 88 days, and was observed by nearly every known ancient culture for being the most mobile object in the sky. It reaches its greatest Western elongation on April 11th, making it most visible and highest above the horizon in the morning sky. It can be spotted low on the Eastern horizon just before sunrise. Mercury was so named after the Roman deity who was the God of messages and communication, and travels, among other things. The very root of the name is thought to stem from the prefix merĝ- meaning border, as he guided souls to the underworld. As viewed from Earth, the planet Mercury never strays far from the horizon, moving along the border of day and night in its quick orbit of the Sun. The closeness to the sun has proven a double-edged sword to the little planet, stripping away its atmosphere and baking the surface, heavily cratered and similar in appearance to the Moon, indicative of little to no tectonic activity for billions of years. The temperatures on the surface range from 800°F in daytime to below -280°F at night. Being so close to the sun has also made it very difficult to study from Earth or with spacecraft. NASA probes Mariner 10 visited in 1974-75 and MESSENGER collected over 100,000 images from 2011-15. The ESA and JAXA lanched BepiColombo in 2018 to continue study of the planet, with planned observations from 2021-28, and including an experiment to verify Einstein’s theory of general relativity with extremely high accuracy like never before. Image of Mercury courtesy of NASA MESSENGER mission. 4 MARS THE WANDERER By David Prosper April’s skies find Mars traveling between star clusters after sunset, and a great gathering of planets just before sunrise. Mars shows stargazers exactly what the term “planet” originally meant with its rapid movement across the evening sky this month. The ancient Greeks used the term planete, meaning wanderer, to label the bright star- like objects that travelled between the constellations of the zodiac year after year. You can watch Mars as it wanders through the sky throughout April, visible in the west for several hours after sunset. Mars travels past two of the most famous star clusters in our night sky: the Pleiades and Hyades. Look for the red planet next to the tiny but bright Pleiades on April 1st. By the second week in April, it has moved eastward in Taurus towards the larger V-shaped Hyades. Red Mars appears to the right of the slightly brighter red-orange star Aldebaran on April 11th. We see only the brightest stars in these clusters with our unaided eyes; how many additional stars can you observe through binoculars? Open clusters are made up of young stars born from the same “star nursery” of gas and dust. These two open clusters are roughly similar in size. The Pleiades appears much smaller as they are 444 light years away, roughly 3 times the distance of the Hyades, at 151 light years distant. Aldebaran is in the same line of sight as the Hyades, but is actually not a member of the cluster; it actually shines just 65 light years away! By comparison, Mars is practically next door to us, this month just a mere 18 light minutes from Earth - that’s about almost 200 million miles. Think of the difference between how long it takes the light to travel from these bodies: 18 minutes vs. 65 years! The rest of the bright planets rise before dawn, in a loose lineup starting from just above the eastern horizon to high above the south: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter. Watch this month as the apparent gap widens considerably between the gas giants and terrestrial planets. Mercury hugs the horizon all month, with Venus racing down morning after morning to join its dimmer inner solar system companion right before sunrise. In contrast, the giants Jupiter and Saturn move away from the horizon and rise earlier all month long, with Jupiter rising before midnight by the end of April. The Lyrids meteor shower peaks on April 22nd, but sadly all but the brightest meteors will be washed out by the light of a bright gibbous Moon. You can catch up on all of NASA’s current and future missions at nasa.gov 5 The path of Mars between the Pleiades and Hyades in April. Image created with assistance from Stellarium. GRAND CANYON STAR PARTY Seeing the Grand Canyon is overwhelming enough. But attending a star party at the south rim of the Grand Canyon is a privilege that's almost too good to be true. Discover how this annual event came to be, where it's going, and the impression it makes on those who attend it, including a Harley-riding biker as he got his first look at Saturn through a telescope..