San Diego Astronomy Association Celebrating Over 40 Years of Astronomical Outreach Office (619) 645-8940 August 2011 Observatory (619) 766-9118 http://www.sdaa.org August Program Meeting A Non-Profit Educational Association P.O. Box 23215, San Diego, CA 92193-3215 Date: August 17th Speaker: Jerry Hilburn SDAA Business Meeting Topic: JUNO - A NASA New Frontiers mission to the Next meeting will be held at: planet Jupiter 3838 Camino del Rio North Scheduled to launch in August 2011 aboard an Atlas V Suite 300 rocket the spacecraft will be placed in a polar orbit around San Diego, CA 92108 Jupiter to study the planet’s composition, gravity field, August 9th at 7pm magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. Jerry Hilburn will discuss the mission details, science objectives, and answer Next Program Meeting questions about the mission. August 17, 2011 at 7pm San Diego Astronomy Association (SDAA) sponsors Mission Trails Regional Park speakers on a wide range of astronomy topics on the third Visitor and Interpretive Center Wednesday of every month at the Mission Trails Regional 1 Father Junipero Serra Trail Park Visitors Center. The Program meeting begins at 7:00 PM. Each attendee receives one free door prize ticket. After announcements and a small amount of business, the au- dience is treated to the featured presentation. At the close of the meeting the door prizes CONTENTS are presented. The event is open to the public. The Mission Trails Regional Park Visitors August 2011, Vol XLIX, Issue 8 Center is at One Fr. Junipero Serra Trail, San Diego CA 92119. Call the park at 619-668- Published Monthly by the 3281 for more information or visit http://www.mtrp.org. San Diego Astronomy Association Please contact Bill Carlson ([email protected]) if you have an questions, com- $2.50 an issue/$30.00 year ments, or ideas for the Program Meetings. Incorporated in California in 1963 August Program Meeting...................1 Rilke & The Horse & Rider.............1 RILKE & THE HORSE & RIDER By John Mood SDAA Membership Dues...................2 July Minutes.................................2 For just a few more weeks now Ursa Major (& its asterism the Big Dipper) will be up Julian Starfest 2011..........4 for viewing before it begins to sink into the sky glow & haze in the west. Which means Summer in the City..................4 that one of the most intriguing naked eye double stars is still available. It is the middle SDAA Contacts.......................8 star in the handle of the Big Dipper. Actually it’s 6 stars, 2 of which are visible naked August Calendar............................9 eye, a third available in telescopes, & spectroscopy reveals that each of these 3 stars is a ASIG Gallery...........................................10 double. The 2 visible ones have for more than 1000 years been known (to the Arabs) as The Back Page...........................................12 Mizar & Alcor, the Horse & the Rider. Last month I introduced you to the German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875- 1926), who has more poetry on the night and the night sky than any other. He always makes sure his information is scientifically accurate. Here’s what he says about these 2 stars as I describe in a book of mine: Rilke twice in his poetry refers to the dim naked eye double star commonly known as Newsletter Deadline the “Horse” and the “Rider.” This double star is the middle one of the three which make The deadline to submit articles up the handle of the Big Dipper. [. .] The “Horse,” the brighter star of the double, is for publication is the more precisely named “Mizar” and its technical astronomical designation is Zeta Ursae 15th of each month. Majoris; the “Rider,” the dimmer star, is named “Alcor” and is technically known as 80 Ursae Majoris. This lovely sight is easy to find if one is far away from city lights, knows exactly where San Diego Astronomy Association to look, and has good young eyes! The “Horse,” as mentioned, is significantly brighter than the other snuggled up quite close to it, the “Rider,” which is much more difficult to spot, requiring good vision and very dark skies. It is obvious that Rilke had often gazed upon both stars, illustrating his ubiquitous emphasis on “inseeing.” Rilke’s critics always interpret his “inseeing” symbolically; it never seems to occur to them that he meant it quite literally to begin with. Go gaze at the star itself! Yes indeed. Go gaze at it yourself! To do so naked eye, you’ll have to get away from the sky-glow of the San Diego metropolitan area, let your eyesight get dark-adapted, & have young eyes! I used to be able to see it easily, but today these dimmed eyes of my dotage require me to use binocs to see the double. In any telescope, one discovers that Mizar is a neat double star itself, one of mag 2.5, the other of 4.0, easily split. Between Mizar & Alcor is another star, not related to the others, so you’ll see 4. As said above, all 3 stars are spectroscopic doubles & are gravitationally related, meaning they are a 6-star system drifting through space. Incidentally, Rilke’s two uses of the “Rider” occur near the end of his great long lyric poem Duinese Elegies and in Part I, poem 11, of his sequence The Sonnets to Orpheus. {From A New Reading of Rilke’s “Elegies”: Affirming the Unity of “life-AND-death” (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), p. 80. Also in Rilke on Death and Other Oddities (Philadelphia: Xlibris Corp., 2007), pp. 80f., with photo.} SDAA Membership Dues Increase by Michael Vander Vorst, President Effective November 1st, the yearly cost of a contributing SDAA membership will increase by $10 and the cost of basic member- ship will increase by $5. The dues for additional family members remains the same, and the annual lease cost of the private pads will also increase by $10. This is the first dues increase in nearly a decade. Now for the good news, membership in SDAA remains an incredible value. As a contributing member you get unlimited use of our dark sky site at Tierra del Sol (TDS) and, once trained, use of the 22-inch Lipp telescope. The primary reason for the increase is to maintain and improve TDS: we are procuring a new storage container at TDS - just for loaner scopes; we will be making additional repairs to the warming room by adding new drywall, insulation and paint, as well as painting the Lipp observatory; yearly maintenance on the roadways and pad areas at TDS requires tons of gravel; we will build a new electronics shed by the roboscope; the roboscope software and hardware will be upgraded so that it can be easily used by club members for remote imaging, not just asteroid searches; and the cost of printing and mailing the newsletter is ever increasing. We on the board of directors did our best to balance the need to make TDS a great dark site and yet keep the dues reasonable. The improvements to TDS are ongoing and we hope you will take advantage of this tremendous resource. SDAA Board of Directors Monthly Business Meeting Minutes 12 July 2011 1. Call to order. The meeting was called to order at 7:06 pm with the following board members in attendance: Michael Vander Vorst, President; Bill Carlson, Vice President; Ed Rumsey, Treasurer; Jeff Herman, Corresponding Secretary; Mike Finch, Director; Kin Searcy, Director; Scott Baker, Director; Bob Austin, Director. Members in attendance were John and Andrea Kuhl, and Paul “Moose” Pountney. 2. Approval of Last Meeting Minutes. Approved 3. Priority / Member Business. None 4. Standard Reports. Treasurer’s Report. Approved. D & O insurance was the only significant expense. Membership Report. Up seven for a new total of 540. Site Maintenance Report. • The next site cleanup will take place the week before the picnic in September. • We’ll remove the damaged drywall and insulation in the warming room after the small observatory is moved into the storage container Observatory Report. No report Page 2 SAN DIEGO ASTRONOMY ASSOCIATION NEWS AND NOTES, AUGUST 2011 San Diego Astronomy Association Private Pad Report. • The newest round of private pad offerings has closed and we sent out the offers. The lease effective date is 7/11/11 pending receipt of the signed leases and payment. There were 11 people on the waiting list, 3 declined to be included in this round for various reasons, and 3 did not respond. Every member got either their first or second choice of pad. The new pad holders are: 1. Scott Atwood (Pad 46) 2. John Hardin (Pad 62) 3. Doug Coe (Pad 69) 4. Miguel Cravo (Pad 12) 5. Tim Swann (Pad 37) • I had prepared the Non-Usage notices for 2010 with invitations to the August BOD meeting per the previously received instructions. Because they are going out so late, I included usage from 1 Jan 2010 through 31 May 2011 in the letter. None of the let- ters going out had any usage in 2011. Note that I dropped one person from the list because they had 4 uses from January through May 2011. These letters are now on hold per your instructions. • The reminders that the required pad usage is 4 times per year have been prepared for the people who only used their pads 3 times last. I am including their usage through May 0f 2011 in their letters so they know where they stand for this year as well. None of them have any usage yet in 2011. These are also on hold per your instructions. • After the offerings, we will have 4 pads available and 6 people on the waiting list.