June 2023 Meeting Notes
Bartlesville Astronomical Society
June 5, 2023
• Opening and Welcome
• Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup
• Thanks for your participation! May want to mute unless speaking.
• We had 31 in attendance this evening in person and via Zoom. We had 15 members and 16 visitors, including our guest speaker. That is the largest attendance we’ve had at a Club meeting since February 2020!
• Announcements
• Craig showed M101 SN 2023ixf
• On May 27, Craig and Denise attended a sidewalk astronomy event in May hosted by the Broken Arrow Sidewalk Astronomers. At this event, their mobile observatory was used to show astronomical objects to local visitors.
• Sunfest - June 2-4
• We had 268 visitors of the course of the weekend, from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon. We had eleven requests to be put on the newsletter list, and most of those also had interest in the youth group.
• Thanks to Evan, John B, John G, Craig, Luann, Gil and Meg for helping with setup, takedown and/or booth staffing!
• Library display - May
• Thoughts for next year?
• Thanks to the setup and takedown teams—John B, Craig, Evan, JoAnn, Luann, Gil, Meg, Gary and Bob.
• Thanks also to Bob for letting us use Our Savior Lutheran for our dress rehearsal setup for the library display!
• Anyone planning to go somewhere for the solar eclipses?
• Annular - October 14, 2023
• Total - April 8, 2024
• Tonight’s Program
• “Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars: The Quest for Life on Other Worlds”
• Dr. Christopher Johns-Krull – Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. Dr. Johns-Krull is the speaker that the Night Sky Network arranged for us to have for their expert guest speaker program for 2023!
• In his presentation, Dr. Johns-Krull reviewed planet formation, involving the process of core accretion. In core accretion, dust particles collide and stick together, forming large bodies over time. It takes about 10 million years for core accretion to form a planet the size of Jupiter.
• Gravitational instability and disk instability contribute to more rapid planet formation. Disk instability can form planets in as little as 500,000 years.
• The Orion Nebula is the birthplace of many young stars (i.e. only two million years old). Stars in the age range of 2-4 million years are prime stars for planet formation around them.
• The Hubble Space Telescope has been able to photograph young planetary disks blocking light from centrally located stars in the Orion Nebula—thereby indicating the presence of such young planets.
• Spectra are also used in planet discovery. With spectra, the intensity of light is observed as a function of light wavelength and spectrographs can be used to identify locations of possible planets by watching for shifts in spectral lines.
• The Doppler effect (sound coming towards you is higher-pitched, sound going away from you is lower-pitched) and light red shift and blue shift (light coming towards you is blue shift, going away from you is red shift) are used in the process of identifying planets. Observations of red-shifted and blue-shifted light as planets orbit their stars help to determine the existence of these planets.
• Could a given planet host life? The habitable zone is considered to be the area around a star where temperatures would support the existence of liquid water. In a typical star-planetary system, the planets closest to their star would generally be too hot to have liquid water, and those farthest away would be too cold. Spectrographs of planets are used to help define the elements present in planets’ atmospheres, to find those whose elements could sustain life.
• Dr, Johns-Krull and his team of scientists hope to be able to define a comprehensive set of criteria that would be necessary for a planet to support life.
• Observing and Imaging Reports
• Daryl imaged supernova SN 2023ixf
• May 17 M101 without supernova
• May 24 M101 with SN 2023ixf. Type II 21 million light-years distant. 100x brighter than before discovery!
• Astronomical News and Events
• Virgil Reese was not in attendance this evening.
• Business
• Minutes of previous meeting are posted online by Denise Gregg - Approved
• Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn:
• Ending balance April 30, 2023 $14,174.66
• Deposits:
• Dues $25
• Amazon Smile payments $16.03
• Withdrawals:
• Hideaway Pizza, library setup $27.44
• Drinks for library setup lunch $5.25
• Sunfest booth Fee $50
• $100 in donations for MSRAL door prizes
• Pizza for library take-down $45.85
• Ending balance May 31, 2023: $13,987.15
• Committee Reports
• Astronomical League news and activities - Denise Gregg
• MSRAL - Tulsa June 9-11, 2023
• Register at https://www.msral2023.org
• ALCon - July 28-30 Albuquerque, NM
• Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant—Rick was not in attendance this evening
• FCC - Evan Zorn
• Evan has signed the lease with the City for storage in our downstairs room at the First Christian Church from June through August at a total cost of $108.00. (Before signing the lease, we moved anything left in the upstairs storage room, after we donated telescopes to the Oklahoma City club, to the downstairs room.)
• Should we find alternate storage?
• If we donate documents, we should scan them first.
• New Business
• We will work on getting an application in for another library telescope.
• Should we get a telescope for Osage Hills State Park?
• Eclipse ambassador—Craig is participating in this program.
• Adjournment
• Next meeting July 3 at library - Daryl Doughty will present on “Confessions of a Lazy Backyard Astronomer”.
• Thanks!
• Ice cream at Braum’s!!!
• Motion to adjourn