October 2016
27 people in attendance, including one new student member. I recognized one person who came tonight who was at the storytelling event last week!
Financials:
No new activity. Beginning balance Sept. 1 and ending balance Sept. 30 $1696.27.
Dues for most members due next month. Individual adult memberships 20.00 each, family memberships 30.00 each.
Astronomical calendars:
It’s that time of year again…Karen Cruce is getting ready to order them. Cost will be about 6.50 each; if you would like one, sign up now.
Star party Friday night weather permitting at Tri County Tech—forecast looks good! For members only. Sunset about 7 pm.
Club officer elections next month—
Jerry Koenig has offered to be President
Karen, Vicki and Denise have offered to continue to be VP, Treasurer and Secretary respectively
Abigail’s astronomy news:
Dragonfly 44 galaxy has stars set to be ripped apart…the galaxy’s mass is similar to the Milky Way galaxy but consists of 99% dark matter.
Black holes may co-exist better than we thought!
She showed picture of Pandora’s Cluster. Its gravity is strong enough to have gravitational lensing
Starship Enterprise’s maiden voyage was Sept. 8, 1966!
NASA probe Stereo B launched Oct 1, 2014, and which had been “lost” has re-established contact with the deep space network
Mercury is geologically active! Now!
The Proxima Centauri star has an exoplanet, 1.3 X Earth’s mass.
Europa has subsurface oceans and the Hubble telescope has captured what are being termed “cryovolcanoes” of internal pressure forcing liquid water to the surface
The Raptor rocket engine that will eventually go to Mars fired up successfully on Sept. 25
The largest radio telescope began functioning in SW China on Sept. 25; construction began in 2011
Singer Grace Potter has made a space-themed music video about women who work at the Johnson Space Center
Daryl’s astronomy pictures:
M31 galaxy plus 2 smaller galaxies, taken using deep sky stacker and processed. M31 is about twice the size of the Milky Way.
Double cluser in Perseus. Deep sky stacker counted 25000+ stars!
Main program—Daryl and the 2017 solar total eclipse
In the U.S., It will be August 21, with totality along a line from Oregon SW to S. Carolina. In Missouri (closest to us) totality will be 2 min 41 sec at about 12:30 pm.
Drive about 200 miles north from here to see it. Some of the towns like Boonville, which are in the path of totality, figured in Daryl’s childhood years. He has a room booked at the Super 8 in Boonville and will set up to watch in their parking lot. There is also a casino nearby. Some hotels are already sold out for the eclipse day and the day before—book now!
Study the weather map and leave yourself room to drive a distance away E-W in case it is cloudy right where you are.
Eclipsewise.com is put out by NASA and has all kinds of information about the upcoming eclipse.
Through history, eclipses have been seen to portend bad events
Fifteen movies have featured total solar eclipses
The first movie to feature one was a French movie, The Eclipse—the Courtship of the Sun and Moon
The 1937 version of King Solomon’s Mines also had a total solar eclipse, but not the 1954 version or a later version.
The 1949 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court also had one!
Barrabas in 1962 even used real eclipse footage!
When the Navajo witness eclipses, they have a party in their lodge—they don’t go out to look at it because they don’t want to offend the Great Spirit
Considering that there is a 5.8 degree tilt to the moon’s orbit relative to the earth’s, and that the moon’s orbit is elliptical, not all eclipses can be total!
An annular eclipse is where the moon appears fully in the center of the sun, but does not totally block it. A partial eclipse looks like the moon is taking a curved bite out of the sun, but does not totally block it.
Annular eclipses are more common than total ones. In 1994 Bartlesville witnessed an annular eclipse on May 10.
A total eclipse takes about 3 hours to happen, start to finish, with several minutes of totality.
Daryl went to the February 1979 total eclipse in Manitoba with the late Ken Willcox of the BAS. That eclipse featured 4 min. of totality. Headquarters for the expedition was the Natural History Museum in Winnipeg. The weather was iffy, and very cold (minus 16 C, which is minus 2 F) with blowing snow, but just in time it cleared up enough to see it; they drove to a spot between Winnipeg and Gladstone.
Ken co-authored a book, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, with Mark Littmann, and the book is due soon for a new printing—later this year or early next year. Ken passed away Feb. 26, 1999.
A note on eclipse viewing: you need a solar filter of course; if you have one that is only partial aperture, be sure to re-align it as the eclipse progresses or your pictures won’t be quite right.
You must put a filter on a spotting scope or any other lens that you use. Try to get a full aperture filter.
But do remember to take it off at totality, and then put it on again!
When totality approaches you see Bailey’s Beads--the mountain ranges on the Moon. You will also see solar promontories—pink/red streamers.
In Winnipeg, children were made to stay inside to watch the eclipse on monitors and so they missed some of the eclipse show, which was birds going to roost because they thought it was dark! They also missed the lunar shadow enveloping you.