Jan 2019

Attendance: 25 people. 5 new members, including a first-time visitor!

Previous Meeting Notes: Notes for December 3, 2018 meeting, as posted on BAS website, voted approved by the membership.

Treasurer's report:

Dec. 1, 2018 beginning balance $2,996.92

No new deposits

One debit for supplies for the telescope donated to the library: $89.11

Ending balance Dec. 31, 2018: $2,907.81

Reminder: Dues due if you haven't already paid!

Committee reports:

Astronomical League news/activities by Kristi Herrman—

The 2019 MSRAL (Mid States Region of the Astronomical League) annual convention will be June 14-16 in Kansas City, MO. The host for this meeting will be the Astronomical Society of Kansas City. Registration is not active yet. There will be a star party at the Powell Observatory in Louisburg, KS. Members of the BYA youth club will attend and BAS members are welcome to join them!

BYA Youth Club news by Rick Bryant—

At the December meeting, the youth built refractor telescopes at a cost of only $10.00 each. They tested them and compared to what Galileo built, the BYA's scopes were better, and cheaper to build!

The January meeting will take place Jan. 21 at the BYA's new permanent location, Our Savior Lutheran Church at 300 N Madison Blvd, Bartlesville 74006. At the meeting, voting will take place on the BYA's annual name-the-club contest (with logo design). Project work will also be done toward awards--Astronomical League Awards (Sky Puppy for beginners as well as Beyond Polaris for more advanced members), in addition to the BYA's own awards program.

Old business:

Craig recapped the presentation of the telescope to the library on Dec 19, 2018. A picture and article were in the Examiner-Enterprise Dec 23, 2018 in the Living section. Thanks to Rick Bryant, Lashawn Bollenbach, Kristi Herrman, Abby, and Derek who worked on obtaining and preparing the telescope. Craig bought two books on objects you can find with smaller telescopes to go in the telescope case the library obtained. Denise brought a copy of our basic astronomy handout and a January star chart to the library and found out the telescope is actually checked out--yea!

New business:

Members' email address check: Derek has forms to fill out (to give back to him) with Club members' current email addresses so he can make sure Club information is up to date

Replacement banner for SunFest and Club events: The membership agreed that we do want to get one, so we will start work on getting one. We will keep the wording on the banner simple.

Solar eclipse glasses sorting Jan 26: Abby is working on this in conjunction with the Masons. The thousands of solar eclipse glasses to sort will be delivered by truck on Jan. 25 and the actual sorting will take place Jan. 26 from 10 am-4 pm at the Masonic lodge at 610 NE Washington Blvd. (Note: This event will *not* be preceded by a Masons' breakfast!). We will need volunteers from the Club to help sort the glasses. A silent auction will also take place and if members can donate items to auction, that will be appreciated. Proceeds from the auction will be used for BYA activities.

St. John's school program: Rick Buck is working on this with Elizabeth Thrash, director of advancement and mission development at St. John's School, as well as science teacher Mrs. Chang. They are thinking of having events in March and May. If you would like to participate in this, contact Rick Buck.

Tulsa Air and Space Museum Planetarium event: Craig is still working on this with Kyle and Luke to try to get group rates. Would probably do on a Friday night in February or March.

Upcoming Club events organized by Rick Buck:

Total Lunar Eclipse party Jan 20 for members and their guests (not open to the public) at Our Savior Lutheran Church from 8 pm Jan 20 - 2 am Jan. 21. Coffee and hot chocolate will be provided! Rick said it would be nice for the Club to do something for Our Savior in appreciation for their opening the church to us to use for a star party.

Star party for members and their guests (not open to the public) Feb. 2 at the Bolingers' farm. John Blaesi brought up the idea of bringing in pizza to start the evening and the members thought that would be fun! Start time of the event TBD. Directions will be provided to all members by email prior to the event.

Abby's astronomy news highlights:

    • Abby showed us her NASA Mars InSight "boarding pass"!

    • The Mars Curiosity rover has been traveling to the lower part of Mount Sharp, and the rover shared some color images that provide us extraordinary sights of the bizarre rock formations on the Red Planet. Mars seems to be strangely familiar. Curiosity project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada, said that "Curiosity's science team has been thrilled to go on this road trip through a bit of the American desert" which is just what the rocky images look like.

    • In 2003, scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Center made the first-ever detection of trace amounts of methane in Mars’ atmosphere, a find which was confirmed a year later by the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. In December 2014, the Curiosity rover detected a tenfold spike of methane at the base of Mount Sharp, and later uncovered evidence that Mars has a seasonal methane cycle, where levels peak in the late northern summer. Since it’s discovery, the existence of methane on Mars has been considered one of the strongest lines of evidence for the existence of past or present life. So it was quite the downer when on Dec. 12, the science team behind one of the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spectrometers announced that they had found no traces of methane in Mars’ atmosphere.

    • On June 2nd, 2003, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission left Earth to begin its journey to Mars. Six months later, on December 25, the spacecraft fired its main engine and entered orbit around Mars. This Christmas will therefore mark the fifteenth anniversary of the orbiter’s arrival and all the observations it has made of the Red Planet since then. Appropriately, the Mars Express mission was able to commemorate this occasion by capturing some beautiful images of a Martian crater that remains filled with ice all year round. This feature is known as the Korolev crater, which measures 82 km (51 mi) in diameter and is located in the northern lowlands, just south of the northern polar ice cap.

    • Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft has beamed home its first close-up images of Ultima Thule, a lump of rock the shape of an unfinished snowman that lies 4 billion miles away on the edge of the solar system. Taken as the probe sped past the body in the early hours of Jan 1, the pictures reveal a dark reddish object about 21 miles long and 10 miles wide that spins on its axis once every 15 hours or so. The color image she showed of Ultima Thule, revealing its reddish tint, was taken at 05.01 GMT on New Year’s Day from a distance of about 18,000 miles, 30 minutes before the probe made its closest pass of the space rock.The spacecraft snapped thousands of images of the object, known formally as 2014 MU69, in a fleeting encounter that set a record for the most distant flyby in history. From a billion miles beyond Pluto, it takes data sent at the speed of light about six hours to reach Earth. “Meet Ultima Thule,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator, as he unveiled the images at a press conference on Wednesday. The scientists originally described the object as shaped like a bowling pin, but Stern said he had changed his mind on seeing the new picture. “That bowling pin is gone. It’s a snowman if anything at all,” he said. The odd shape of Ultima Thule is thought to have come about when swirling ice and dust particles coalesced in the early life of the solar system and eventually led to two large lumps of rock colliding and sticking together. Stern said that the gravity of each “lobe” was enough to keep the two parts of Ultima Thule in contact.

    • An international team of astronomers has detected helium escaping from the upper atmosphere of HAT-P-11b, a Neptune-mass exoplanet located in the constellation of Cygnus, about 122 light-years away. The inert gas is in an extended cloud that is escaping from HAT-P-11b, just as a helium balloon might escape from a person’s hand.

    • NASA’s OSIRIS-REX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) has found water on the asteroid Bennu. Bennu is OSIRIS-REx’s only target, and though the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid on December 3rd, some of its instruments have been trained on the asteroid since mid-August. And two of those instruments detected water on Bennu.

    • A new series of daytime images of Europa from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has helped astronomers create first global thermal maps of this icy moon.

    • From Oct. 31 to Nov. 11, 2018, Parker Solar Probe completed the first solar encounter phase, speeding through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and collecting unprecedented data with four suites of cutting-edge instruments. The PSP will orbit the Sun 24 times, for 24 solar encounter phases. During the mission, the probe will use 7 Venus gravity-assist flybys to incrementally shrink its orbit around the Sun. The Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument captured an image of a coronal streamer on Nov. 8th, 2018. Coronal streamers are structures of solar material within the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, that usually overlie regions of increased solar activity. The fine structure of the streamer is very clear, with at least two rays visible. Mercury is visible in the background.

    • The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) snapped stunning images of a short-period comet called 46P/Wirtanen as it was making its closest approach to Earth in four centuries. (Abby and some other Club members saw the comet.) Comet Wirtanen is in the Jupiter family of comets and has a diameter of about .75 miles.

  • Nancy Grace Roman, a former NASA executive who is often described as the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope, has died at 93.

Tonight’s Program: Okie-Tex Star Party - Rick Bryant, Rick Buck, Abby and Gianna

    • Rick titled his presentation "S"-Okie-Tex (Soaky-Tex) because of all the rain they had. The BYA team that went to the event were very good sports about it! He modeled the presentation after a child sending postcards home to Mom while away at summer camp!

    • Okie-Tex is one of the top 10 star parties in the country. It is held at Camp Billy Joe in far west Oklahoma in the Panhandle, 5 miles from Colorado and 2 miles from New Mexico. It's 430 miles from Bartlesville, a 7 hour 15 min drive (not counting rest/food stops). One of the reasons the event is held there is the dark skies--not just overhead, but all the way to the horizon, as there are no large cities or towns nearby.

    • Another reason they attended was to go to two days' worth of PixInsight photography seminars.

    • OkieTex has two "mascots"--plastic flamingoes. After days of rain they saw a beautlful, double rainbow. They also saw 5 species of cacti along with interesting fossils and rocks, including "blueberries"--iron accretions in sandstone. They also went to Clayton Park in New Mexico to see dinosaur tracks--about 18 inches long.

    • The weather finally cleared up enough to do some astrophotography on the Friday night, which was fortunate because they needed to leave on Saturday as 6 inches of snow was forecast Saturday night and a road grader to help them out would not be available until Tuesday.

    • Rick Bryant showed us his beautiful image of the Milky Way taken with a Canon DSLR on a tripod, 14 mm lens, 3 X 20 second exposures, f/4, 400 ASA. Rick Buck had a very colorful image of NGC 6992, the Veil Nebula, that he processed from 500 exposures he took!

    • This event normally attracts about 450-500 people but due to the weather about 250 people came. Some this year came from as far as Australia and Japan.

Other photos: Rick Bryant showed us an image of Comet 46P/Wirtanen in Taurus. The Pleiades could also be seen in the image taken in his backyard, with the comet 45 degrees to the west, with a quarter moon out. He used an ASI 1600 camera with a 50 mm EOS lens, 180 X 9.3 second exposure, f/2.8, 80 gain. He used the Sharp Cap program and the stacking and stretching of the images he took, to get to the one he showed us, took 7 1/2 hours.

Next meeting Feb 4 - Topic: PixInsight by Rick Buck