September 2023 Meeting Notes

Bartlesville Astronomical Society Meeting Minutes

September 7, 2023

• Opening and Welcome

•     Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup

• 21 in attendance this evening (in person and via Zoom)--14 members and 7 visitors

• Announcements

•    Anyone planning to go somewhere for the solar eclipses?

•    Craig talked with Blair Ellis at the Education Service Center—the Bartlesville school aren’t planning a school event on October 14 for the annular eclipse.

• https://icarusshades.com - Andrew Oleson

•    Annular - October 14, 2023

•    Total - April 8, 2024

•    Kalamazoo Astronomical Society meeting September 8

•    The program is “Two Great American Eclipses” by Richard Bell

• https://kasonline.org to register

• The Kalamazoo club is doing a seven-part eclipse series starting November 3 featuring a series of special guest speakers, one of whom is Fred Espenak, who wrote Totality:  Eclipses of the Sun along with our Club’s own Ken Willcox. 

• Braum’s after the meeting

• Tonight’s Program

•    Lauren Herrington, “A Look Inside the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute”

•    Lauren was a summer camp counselor at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI), near Rosman, North Carolina.  While at PARI, Lauren led planetarium shows, worked in PARI's historical glass plate archive, and operated a 25" telescope.

•    PARI was established in 1963 as a NASA tracking station, operated by the Goddard Space Flight Center.  PARI was involved in the development of satellite communications; the first color photo of Earth taken from space was downloaded at PARI. 

•    PARI no longer serves as a NASA tracking station.  Run at one time by the Department of Defense, it was transferred to the U.S. Forest Service in 1991.  In 1998, Don Cline visited the facility, took steps to acquire it, and the facility became the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute.  PARI is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to educating future generations of scientists.

•    PARI has two very large telescopes, each 26 meters in diameter.  It also has a 12-meter radio telescope, which is used by students; a 4-meter telescope; a 5-inch refractor optical telescope and a 25-inch reflector optical telescope.

•    PARI’s classroom is in the former NASA control room!  There are still old circular graphs for temperature and humidity control in it.

•    PARI has a museum which contains a space flight exhibit; an ATS satellite (Applications Technology Satellite); fossils; fluorescent gems and minerals; and meteorites, including meteorites from the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies.

•    PARI grows calandro succulent plants.  Calandro plants were grown in space by a Russian cosmonaut! 

•    PARI has a “Moon Tree”, presented to PARI by Rosemary Roosa, the daughter of Astronaut Stuart Roosa, Command Module Pilot of Apollo 14.  This tree is descended from trees whose seeds have traveled to the Moon!

•    PARI has about 5,000,000 historical glass plates; this facility is second only to Harvard in the number of plates it has.  Plates have been donated to PARI by various universities.  These plates date back to the times before digital cameras.  This summer, Lauren catalogued some of these plates by indexing them digitally.  She also scanned them, in case data in the plates breaks down later.

•    PARI is also part of NASA’s fireball and meteor tracking network. 

•    Lauren showed us a fragment of an iron-nickel meteorite that fell in the Sikhote-Alin mountains of Russia in 1947.

• Observing and Imaging Reports

•    Craig showed images of lunar craters, Jupiter and Saturn taken by Sonny in Hawaii.  Sonny’s images of Jupiter and Saturn were highly stacked—he took thousands of video frames of each and stacked the best ones. 

•    Starlinks—lots of these recently!  Craig captured images using a 10-second exposure; the Starlinks looked like a gray streak!

•    Craig and Denise went to Osage Hills State Park to get an update on having star parties there, including an update on car parking permits.  If we have a star party and go inside the Park gates, all cars need to have a permit.  If we have a party at the park entrance (not going inside the gates), you would still need to have a permit if you drive your car into a restroom area, since there isn’t a restroom area at the entrance.  To get a permit, you need to have your car’s registration in hand, in addition to your driver’s license.  You can order a permit online or get it at the Park during their regular business hours.  At this time, the standard price for a daily pass is  $10.00 and a yearly pass is $75.00.  Passes are free if you are over age 62 and there may be discounts for tribal membership and/or military service.

• Astronomical News and Events

•     Star Party - Saturday September 9 at Jo Allyn Lowe Park; weather looks good.  We will gather about 8 p.m.

•    Okie-Tex September 8-16

•    Brian May of Queen helped on 3D images of Pluto and selecting a sampling site for OSIRIS-REX.  Sample will return on September 24.

• Craig mentioned a new book that has just come out, Exploring the Moon with Robert Reeves:  Observing and Understanding Our Natural Satellite.  It is available in paperback, hardcover and Kindle.

• Virgil Reese - Astronomy news:

• Comet C/2023 P1 (Nishimura) will make a 78-million-mile-distant flyby past Earth on September 12 and not return to the inner solar system for 400 years.

• Virgil showed an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of the Ring Nebula.  This image revealed some 20,000 small clumps, some of which are starting to look like comets.  The JWST will study these clumps further.

• On September 6, JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, launched the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM).   This is a JAXA/NASA collaborative mission, with participation also by the European Space Agency.  The goal of this mission is to investigate celestial X-ray objects in the Universe with high-throughput imaging and high-resolution spectroscopy.

• The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov observatory (HAWC) has discovered high energy gamma rays originating from the Sun.  It is not known at this time just why this is happening.

• In 2024, NASA will begin sending suitcase-size wheeled robots to the Moon as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

• NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions are still ongoing!  As of August 2023, Voyager 1 was 15 billion miles away from Earth, making it the furthest man-made object from Earth.  Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion miles away from Earth.    After losing contact with Earth earlier this summer, a message was sent to Voyager 2 to re-orient its antenna, and it worked!

• NASA thinks there may be trillions of rogue planets in our Milky Way galaxy.  And could there be an Earth-sized Planet 9?

• Harvard astronomer Ari Loeb thinks he has discovered particles on Earth’s seafloor that came from an interstellar object!

• Is there a bubble relic of the Big Bang?  An arrangement of galaxies in a very large bubble a billion light years wide has been discovered.  This bubble has been named Ho’oleilana, a Hawaiian name inspired by the chant, Kumulipo, which tells the story of the creation of structure in the universe.

• Sprites have been seen 50 miles up offshore Puerto Rico, due to a passing Hurricane Franklin.  Could these sprites have also been sparked by meteorites?

• India’s Chandrayaan-3 craft has successfully landed on the Moon’s south pole.  The craft has a rover which has taken an initial walk on the Moon.

• On August 20, the Russians attempted to land their first moon lander in 47 years.   The Luna-25 craft crashed into the Moon.

• NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter was originally intended to make three flights above Mars.  It has now made 59, with a total of over 100 minutes in the Martian atmosphere.  The helicopter’s top speed is 15 mph and it can travel up to 59 feet high.  The helicopter weighs four pounds and has two four-foot carbon fiber blades.

• Business

•    Minutes of previous meeting are posted online by Denise Gregg - Approved

•    Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn

•    Ending balance July 31, 2023:  $13909.77

•    Postage paid for Astronomical League guides $12.00

•    Ending balance August 31, 2023:  $13897.77

•    Request for NASA speaker

•    We haven’t been notified of a speaker yet; we have requested one for our November 6 meeting.

• http://www.universe-of-learning.org

•    Committee Reports

•    Astronomical League news and activities - Denise Gregg.  Denise will send in the next quarterly AlCor report mid-September.  She asked at the meeting if anyone had any updated contact information; she had also sent an email about this prior to tonight’s meeting.

•    Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant—Rick was not in attendance this evening.

•    Library Display

•    We have August reserved for 2024.

•    This will be an opportunity to highlight meteor showers, which we haven’t done up to now.  August is the start (with the Perseids) of the late summer/fall/early winter meteor shower season.

•    If anyone has any other ideas, let Denise know.

•    FCC - Evan Zorn

•    We signed an agreement to use a storage room at the Washington Park Mall for one year on September 1 at no charge to us!

•    As part of the agreement (at no charge to us), the mall has asked us to set up a window display.  (Other groups like OKM Music have done this.)  This will be a great way to reach mall-walkers!  Ideas wanted for the display!

•    Denise notified Rice Creek Storage on September 1 that we would not need the 10 X 10 climate-controlled unit that they had set aside for us.  (Since Denise and Craig visited Rice Creek Storage in July, Denise had not been contacted by them about moving in; Rice Creek was waiting for the HVAC in the climate-controlled units to be installed in August and Denise had not been notified that this was completed prior to September 1.)

•    We need to clear our items in our storage room at the First Christian Church and move them to our room at the mall.  Possible date September 29.

•    New Business

•    Elections

•    Library Telescope—Denise put in an application for this in July but has not heard anything back yet.

•    Binocular purchase program from Vortex Optics

•    50% of MSRP

•    Youth group?

•    Club - interest in loaning to members

•    Library?

•    OHSP?

•    Girl Scouts?

•    OHSP telescope?

•    OHSP dark sky

•    Club telescopes

•    Do we want to have a loaner scope or binoculars?

• Adjournment

•    Next meeting October 2 at library, speaker will be Byron Labadie on “Understanding Optical Glass for Refractor Telescopes and Lenses”.

• Ice cream at Braum’s!!!

• Motion to adjourn