Jun 2018
Financials:
Beginning balance May 1, 2018 $3032.10
2 family renewals $30.00
Rick Bryant expense $122.86 for BAS youth members’ individual work folders
Ending balance May 31, 2018 $2939.24.
17 attendees, including 1 guest…and a guest speaker, John Moore from the Tulsa Astronomy Club!
Kristi and Derek attended the Tulsa Astronomy Club meeting May 18 at the Jenks Planetarium. A professor from OU who curates old books made a presentation on their digitizing of manuscripts dating from the Renaissance to modern times.
Sunfest: We had over 30 people put their names on the lists to get Club emails; we estimate that about 100 people visited our booth. That may be a new record!
Bartlesville Library loaner telescopes: They have two to loan out for their summer loaner program.
Abby will present on Cassini at the June MSRAL annual meeting!
Woolaroc Astronomy Day is August 18. If interested in participating, contact John Land with the Tulsa Astronomy Club.
Abby received first place in the Horkheimer Service Award, which enables her to attend the ALCON meeting in July in Minnesota all expenses paid!
Long time BAS member Phil Lorenz passed away on May 14.
Abby’s news highlights:
Image of two “sprite” lightning captures from above Earth
Stunning images of Jupiter from Juno spacecraft
Astronomers using ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory have discovered an unusual laser emission from the planetary nebula Menzel 3 (often referred to as the Ant Nebula), which suggests the presence of a binary stellar system in its center. The discovery is described in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured the sharpest image ever of the Tarantula Nebula and its rich surroundings.
A team of astronomers from the Australian National University and the University of Crete has determined the 3D structure of the interstellar molecular cloud Musca, and discovered that the cloud is vibrating with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves.
An international team of astronomers has found that a small Kuiper Belt object called 2004 EW95 is a carbonaceous (carbon-rich) asteroid -- the first of its kind to be confirmed in the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of icy debris that extends far beyond the orbit of Neptune
John Moore presentation on the New Horizons Mission to Pluto and Beyond:
Definition of occultation: one object in front of another
Eclipses are occultations
Occultations can be “grazing”
Profile occultations can involve multiple occultation captures
John has worked with Ted Black of the International Occultation Association, which is an amateur astronomy grouop for recording occultations.
In 1894 Percival Lowell established the Lowell Observatory, initially to study Mars. In 1905 he postulated that there was a planet beyond Neptune. In 1929 Clyde Tombaugh was hired by the Lowell Observatory to find it. It was named Pluto on January 23, 1930.
Science magazine announced it in March 1930.
However, we really didn’t know too much about Pluto until the New Horizons mission.
New Horizons was launched with 5 solid rocket boosters on Jan. 19, 2006. It passed the Moon in just 9 hours, reached Jupiter in February 2007 and the Pluto system in July 2015. (In the meantime, Hubble found 4 more moons around Pluto.)
New Horizons discovered that Pluto and Charon spin and orbit in the same time period. Pluto is 35 times the distance from the Sun that the Earth is. Pluto is a complex ice structure with ice-mountains as big as the Rockies. Over time, it has gotten redder in color. It has a rock core with water ice on top of that. It has H2O, N2, CH4 and CO. There is evidence of glacial flows and possibly cryovolcanoes.
Charon has a complex geology, with water ice.
Hubble discovered MU69, a tiny, icy object in the Kuiper Belt in 2014. It is a trans-Neptunian object. In June-July 2017 there was an MU69 occultation of 3 stars, visible across South Africa and Argentina June 3-July 10. John went to both countries, armed with a Skywatcher 16-inch Dobbs telescope with a laser pointer and right angle finder. In South Africa (June) the team struck out—the path of occultation was 100 miles north of what they anticipated. In Argentina they were able to capture the occultation. The observations they made indicated that there are two kidney-shaped objects in MU69—it may be a binary or close binary system about 30 km in diameter.
In January 2019 New Horizions will reach the Kuiper Belt itself.
The New Horizons craft has no moving parts—it has to reposition itself in order to study a given object from a given angle. It takes 9 hours to turn itself around, 4 ½ hrs to go half way. It has a long range camera and reconnaissance imager.
Distances in an asteroid occultation are measured in parts of seconds.
Osiris-Rex mission was launched Sept 8, 2016 to visit asteroid Bennu.