Apr 2018

15 people in attendance

Treasurer's Report:

March 1st, Beginning Balance: $2962.10

New Membership, Doggett Family: $30

March 31st, Ending Balance: $2992.10

Report on the Astronomy Night at the Tulsa Central Library on March 6:

About 50 students, wide range of ages, attended, with about 95 people total including adults. Abby and Lashawn Bollenbach, Rick Buck, Evan Zorn and Denise Gregg participated from the Club. John Land and several others participated from the Tulsa Astronomy Club. The library had a large room set up for us adjoining a breezeway, where we set up telescopes. The large room had two long tables, plus they had put up posters and even set up a screen with appropriate videos and music! The crafts were very popular--comet necklaces and solar system hats--and there was also face painting.

Upcoming Sunfest--

Denise will submit application. We still need to get a canopy as the one Steve had was his own, not the Club's.

Star Party Committee:

The star party committee (Karen, John Grismore, Rick Buck and his daughter, Bob Young, Craig and Denise) met for lunch at Hideway March 5. We even got a free lunch as Karen tossed a basketball for the March Madness promotion they had, and the ball made it into the hoop! We looked at May 4 for a possible Star Party date as moon not high, but we need to check out park situation to see which ones might be dark enough to have a good party. Jo Allyn Lowe Park and Sooner Park are under consideration as well as Tri County Tech and for a public event, possibly the BCC parking lot. Denise has found out who Steve’s contacts were with Tri County, the City Parks and the BCC so we have those in hand, along with the standard waiver that Tri County wants to attach to star party announcements.

Abby Bollenbach has applied for a Youth Service Award from the Astronomical League. Very well deserved!!

Highlights from Abby's news and images--

First and foremost--

Visionary physicist Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge, England, early Wednesday morning, March 14, 2018. Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot released a statement: “Today, the world lost a giant among men, whose impact cannot be overstated." We noted in the meeting that he passed away on pi day. It was also pointed out at the meeting that Einstein was born on pi day.

Image highlights--

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a massive dust structure -- about 150 billion miles across -- around HR 4796A, a young star located 220 light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus.

A series of Hubble images taken over two years tracks the demise of a giant dark vortex on Neptune. The oval-shaped spot has shrunk from 3,100 miles (4,990 km) across its long axis to 2,300 miles (3,701 km) across, over the Hubble observation period. Image credit: NASA / ESA / M.H. Wong & A.I. Hsu, University of California, Berkeley.

A remarkable new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows Arp 256, a stunning system of two barred spiral galaxies in an early stage of merging.

A wonderful image was captured using ALMA, revealing a curious pattern of rings and gaps in the dust surrounding the young star AS 209. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / D. Fedele et al.

The Chinese satellite that was on a path to hit Earth arrived in the South Pacific off the coast of South America on April 1 at 8:16 pm.

Main Program--Astronomy's Impact on Oklahoma--Bob Young, Derek Herrman and Denise Gregg

Derek kicked off the presentation with Celestial Tales of the Central Plains. He presented two absorbing stories that originated from U.S. Central Indian tribes. He noted that American Indians observed the skies--the stars, Moon, constellations and the Sun. On occasion they would move from one area to another based on their interpretations of celestial events as would relate to weather and farming. They developed stories of why things are the way they are. One of the stories he presented likened the Milky Way to scattered ground cornmeal--a very apt analogy!

Then Denise showed examples of horn coral (fossils) she has gathered in Bartlesville and passed them around. The horizontal rings on the fossils are growth rings similar to tree rings. Growing a little each day, coral skeletons keep a daily archive of past ocean temperatures by depositing layers of calcium carbonate. The monthly deposits also correlate to the lunar cycle. Corals grow more in the dry season than the wet season, indicating the presence of seasons some 280-300 mya when these corals lived in Bartlesville (middle-upper Pennsylvanian period). The corals' fine lines also note the diminishing number of days in the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Corals from the Silurian period (444-419 mya) show 420 lines between seasonality bands, whereas in the Devonian period, a few million years later, there were only 410 little lines. Why is the Earth slowing down? It has to do with the Earth's relationship to the Moon. When the Earth rotates, gravity pulls ocean water toward the Moon. The slow sloshing of that water slows the Earth's rotation down a tiny bit. When the Earth slows, its rotational energy is transferred to the Moon, which causes the Moon to move faster and pull away from the Earth, centimeter by centimeter. And over time, this has resulted in the Earth's rotation around the Sun being appx. 365 1/4 days now. (Horn coral supplied by Denise; explanation of rings supplied by Bob.)

Then Bob discussed the Ames Discovery in western Oklahoma, about 20 miles SW of Enid. The 8-plus mile wide Ames structure is buried by about 9000 feet of sediment, making it barely visible on the surface, and the hidden structure wasn't recognized until 1991 when a prolific oil field was discovered. About 60 wells have been completed in this Arbuckle formation, which includes granite breccia (referred to as Arbuckle siliceous by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission). Most of the oil production is from fractured and brecciated granite of the central uplift. Breccia is rock made of broken fragments, in most areas cemented together. Cumulative production for Arbuckle wells is about 10.9 MMBO (million barrels of oil) and 11.9 BCFG (billion cubic feet of gas). How does this relate to astronomy? About 450 mya a meteor struck north-central Oklahoma, creating an impact crater--an astrobleme--more than 8 miles wide. The Ames Crater is one of six oil-producing craters in the U.S.

In figuring out that this was a meteorite crater, these were ruled out--atoll (which develops over millions of years from sunken volcanic islands, when reefs build up around a crater), volcano, and sinkhole. In figuring out it was a meteorite crater, the impact structure and presence of metamorphic rock (shock indicator) were clues.