October 2014

Beginning balance Sept 1, ending balance Sept. 30: $1191.33

Election of new officers tabled to November meeting

Program for November TBD

Stargazing and story-telling party around the campfire at Mike Woods' house evening October 18

Upcoming astronomical events from Daryl:

Total lunar eclipse October 8, part of a tetrad of lunar eclipses

Partial begins 4:15 am; total 5:25 am; midpoint of total 5:55 am; totality ends 6:24 am; partial ends 7:14 am.

Orionids meteor shower early morning October 22; best viewing after 1 am.

Earth passes through Halley's comet for this one. Meteors will be at high speed; therefore brighter and may have nice tails

Two weeks later (October 23), a solar eclipse but only partial here; we would see only 45%. Total around the north pole area

Comet flyby of Mars--120,000 miles away. Visibility magnitude -6 from Mars (i.e. brighter than Venus for us); NASA may be able to get photographs

Daryl's program--A Brief History of Early Astronomy:

Johannes Gutenberg: 1398-1468

Invented the printing press 1440. This was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment. He printed 30,000 volumes of different books including the Bible.

Martin Luther: 1483-1546

German monk; his father had a copper mining business. He was the oldest son and his father wanted him to study law which he didn't want to do--so he dropped out of school and entered a monastery and became a monk. He used to beat himself to drive out evil thoughts. He ran into trouble with selling Papal indulgences--i.e. buy a soul out of Purgatory. Luther was an excellent Bible scholar and found nothing in the Bible that authorized issuing Papal indulgences. He nailed his 95 discussion points (theses) to the door of the Wittenburg church on October 31, 1517. This put people in the mood to say that anything that the Church says isn't true. Gutenberg's printing press, in turn, distributed Luther's theses. Luther was put under house arrest and started translating the Bible into German. His work unified the language base in German. Tyndale then used Luther's German Bible to translate it into English. The Catholic Church at that point wanted to say that some scientific ideas were OK but others not.

Nicolaus Copernicus: 1473-1543

Copernicus maintained that the Sun was the center of the universe. He couldn't think that orbits couldn't be circular. He could explain retrograde motion. The earlier Ptolemaic view of the universe held that Earth was at the center and this was the position held by the Catholic Church.

Tyco Brahe: 1546-1601

Polish astronomer; he wore a prosthetic nose. He set up an observatory and made the most accurate star/planet maps of anyone up to that time, accurate to 1 1/2 minute of an arc.

He also discovered the supernova of 1572 in Cassiopeia, SN 1572.

He used parallax measurements.

He had a semi-heliocentric view of the universe. The sun orbited the earth; Mercury and Venus orbited the Sun; Mars, Jupiter and Saturn also orbited the Sun.

He maintained that the heavens had to be based on circular and spherical models.

Johannes Kepler: 571-1630

Kepler was Brahe's student. He developed 3 laws of planetary motion and saw the great comet of 1577 when he was 6 years old. SN 1604 comet in constellation above Scorpio.

1st law: orbits are ellipses

2nd law: Law of equal areas--radius vector sweeps out equal areas in equal times. An imaginary line drawn from the sun to any planet sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time.

.3rd law: T (time) 2/R (radius) 3 ratio is the same for Earth as Mars; the ratio is nearly the same for all the planets; basically, every planet has the same T2/R3 ratio.

Mercury = 0.98

Venus = 1.01

Earth = 1.00

He couldn't explain why planets moved the way they did.

Galileo Galilei: 1564-1642

Developed rudimentary concept of motion. Invented the telescope. When he applied Kepler's law to Jupiter's moons, they obeyed. Kepler's law applies to any orbital system.

Isaac Newton: 1642-1726

He put everything together that his predecessors worked on.

He fled London, due to the plague there, and went to his mother's farm and watched apples fall...and this led, eventually, to his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

He is the co-inventor of the calculus; he determined that force varies as the inverse squares of the distance between two objects. He invented the reflector telescope. He calculated the distance of Earth to the Moon. He explained planetary motion.