This month's meeting of the Ogden Astronomical Society will be held this Thursday June 11, 1998. Members will convene in the Ott Planetarium on the Weber Star University campus at 7:30 p.m.
Another "Show and Tell" type program is planned for June. Following the Show and Tell meeting held a few months ago, numerous members expressed their approval of such an open forum and asked if it could be repeated. All topics are fair game. Members currently working on telescopes and other projects are encouraged to bring them along and share your creations with the other OAS members.
Bring along your favorite ideas for discussion.
A general rap session is expected.
The next in our series of public star parties on Antelope Island is scheduled for Saturday June 20, 1998. Members wishing to arrive early and enjoy a Tail-Gate party are encouraged to show up around 5:00 p.m. Bring something to share. Bugs were not a major factor at the May 30 event until the mosquitoes got busy around sundown.
This month's slide presentation at dusk will be presented by Seth Jarvis, Vice President of the Salt Lake based Clark Foundation and an administrator of Project ASTRO UTAH. Last month's Antelope event was very successful. See the attached article.
[Web editor's note: For more information (AND PICTURES TOO) you can
take a look at the press release
for the June Antelope Island star party.]
The
following news release was forwarded to the OAS by the Hansen Planetarium:
The West Australian Geological Survey has renamed the Teague Ring as the Shoemaker Impact Structure in honor of the astro-geologist Gene
Shoemaker. This crater is some 30 km across, about 100 km north east of the small town of Wiluna, West Australia.
Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker did field work on the structure in 1985 and 1995. They had planned to visit it again during their 1997 visit to Australia, but these plans were canceled by the road accident in which Gene died.
If you didn't attend the Willard Elementary school star party on the 15th you missed something. Confidential sources report that the event began orderly enough with thirty or forty students, parents and teachers attending and ready to view the universe. Aside from a couple of building lights the skies were satisfactory for deep sky viewing.
Then there was the sound. It started as
a hiss, then a swoosh and the water began to bath the observing site. No
one had remembered to switch off the sprinkler system. OAS
members, fearing for their prized instruments, scooped up the most important
items and scurried for dry land. This wasn't easy for all; can you see
Cliff "scooping" his LX200 or Doug picking up B.O.B? Many of the visitors
were kind to sacrifice their dry state by holding the sprinkler heads or
standing on them until the astronomers could remove the 'scopes. The area
was cleared quickly and no permanent damage had occurred. "That was the
quickest end to a star party I ever saw" one OAS member reported. The club
received a nice thank you card from the school and the $50.00 went into
the telescope fund despite the tribulation.
President Steve Peterson called the meeting to order at 7:35 p.m.
The Willard Elementary school is tomorrow. Antelope Island is set for the 30th. A volunteer is needed to run the slide show at Antelope.
John Sohl reported his e-mail has been fouled up lately. He gave two addresses that should work for him.
Doug brought club shirts and caps for purchase. Dave Miller has one Astro. Calendar left for sale. Deloy and Karen Pierce are making final preparations for the Grand Canyon star Party.
The night's speaker, Adam Johnson, was introduced. "Misconceptions and Common Sense" was the title of his presentation.
A recap of upcoming events was given. Meeting adjourned to a rap session at 8:45 p.m.
You would not have believed the sky conditions
on Saturday May 30, 1998 as OAS members began to assemble at White Rock
Bay on Antelope Island State Park. Considering the unstable weather we
had endured up to this time, to actually have clear skies and a calm wind
was almost too much to expect. But that is what we had on the island and
as a result things went very well.
Considering how wet things have been over
the past few months there were surprisingly few bugs to contend with. The
park service seems to have a handle on the pest control problem for now.
Only when the sun began to set did the mosquitoes get busy. A little bug
spray, though, did a more than adequate job of keeping them away.
Cliff and John, and a few other OAS members, assembled the public address system and spread the projection screen, i.e. the sheet, against Cliff's motor home with the usual bungee cords. Power cords were run and the projector was assembled. John took
the stage for the evening's slide show.
OAS members were filing into the viewing
area parking lot even after the sun had set. It wasn't long before the
only space left was on the road. The entire telescope area was full of
telescopes and visitors waiting to see the program. Dr. Sohl gave another
informative and entertaining picture tour of the universe. Even before
the show was over, scores of visitors of all ages were browsing through
the maze of optics and astronomers.
One of the most popular objects for viewing
was the moon. A beautiful crescent about two days before first quarter
gave viewers a fine opportunity to see craters, mountains and mare on the
surface. Do you know that one of the most common questions is "can you
see where the astronauts landed?" In addition to the moon, plenty of nebulae
including globular, open clusters, galaxies and double stars were available
to see. Unfortunately, there are no planets to see unless you wait until
near dawn. The skies were beautiful.
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
Contact: Jane Platt
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE APRIL 21, 1998
NASA ASTRONOMERS FIND PLANET CONSTRUCTION
ZONE AROUND NEARBY STAR
NASA astronomers using the
new Keck II telescope in Hawaii have discovered what appears to be the
clearest evidence yet of a budding solar system around a nearby star. Scientists
released an image of the probable site of planet formation around a star
known as HR 4796, about 220 light-years from Earth in the constellation
Centaurus. The image, taken with a sensitive infrared camera developed
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows a swirling disc of dust around
the star. Within the disc is a telltale
empty region that may have
been swept clean when material was pulled into newly formed planetary bodies,
the scientists said.
"This may be what our solar
system looked like at the end of its main planetary formation phase," said
Dr. Michael Werner of JPL, who co-discovered the region, along with Drs.
David Koerner and Michael
Ressler, also of JPL, and
Dana Backman of Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. "Comets may
be forming right now in the disc's outer portion from remaining debris."
The discovery was made on
March 16 from the giant 10-meter (33-foot) Keck II telescope atop Mauna
Kea, Hawaii. Keck II and its twin, Keck I, are the world's largest optical
and infrared telescopes. Attached to the Keck II for this observation was
the mid-infrared camera, developed by Ressler at JPL and designed to measure
heat radiation.
The four scientists reported
their discovery in a submission to Astrophysical Journal Letters. The disc
was discovered independently and contemporaneously at the Cerro Tololo
Observatory in Chile by another
team of scientists, led by
Ray Jayawardhana of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge,
MA, and Dr. Charles Telesco of the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Koerner of JPL said the finding
represents a "missing link" in the study of how planetary systems are born
and evolve. "In a sense, we've already peeked into the stellar family album
and seen baby pictures and middle-aged photos," Koerner said. "With HR
4796, we're seeing a picture of a young adult star starting its own family
of planets. This is the link between discs around very young stars and
discs around mature stars, many with planets already orbiting them."
"This is the first infrared
image where an entire inner planetary disc is clearly visible," Werner
said. "The planet- forming disc around the star Beta Pictoris was discovered
in 1983 by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), and also later imaged
with the Hubble Space Telescope, but glaring light from the star partially
obscured its disc."
The apparent diameter of
the dust disc around HR 4796 is about 200 astronomical units (one astronomical
unit is the distance from Earth to the Sun). The diameter of the cleared
inner region is about 100
astronomical units, slightly
larger than our own solar system.
HR 4796 was originally identified
as an interesting object for further study by Dr. Michael Jura, an astronomy
professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The star, HR 4796,
is about 10 million years old and is difficult to see in the continental
United States, but is visible to telescopes in Hawaii and the southern
hemisphere.
The discovery of the HR 4796
disc was made in just one hour of observing time at Keck, but the JPL team
plans to return to Hawaii in June for further studies. They hope to learn
more about the structure,
composition and size of this
disc, and to determine how discs around stars in our galaxy produce planets.
They plan to study several other stars as well, including Vega, which was
featured prominently in the
movie, "Contact."
The Harvard/Florida research
team that also found the HR 4796 disc included Drs. Lee Hartmann and Giovanni
Fazio of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Scott Fisher
and Dr. Robert Pina of the University of Florida.
JPL's use of the Keck telescope
is supported by NASA's Origins program, a series of missions to study the
formation of galaxies, stars, planets and life, and to search for Earth-like
planets around other stars that might have the right conditions for life.
The W. M. Keck Observatory
is owned and operated by the California Association for Research in Astronomy,
a joint venture between the University of California, the California Institute
of Technology and NASA. Use of the Keck Observatory for Origins research
is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL
is a division of Caltech.
The research of both teams
was supported in large part by the NASA Origins Program, with additional
support to the Harvard/Florida team from the National Science Foundation,
the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, and the Smithsonian Institution;
and with additional NASA support for the Caltech/JPL-Franklin & Marshall
team, including use of the Keck Observatory.
The Keck II image of HR 4796
is available on the web at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/98/hr4796.html
. The image and information on the MIRLIN camera is available at http://cougar.jpl.nasa.gov/mirlin.html
. A false-color image of the HR 4796 disc is available at http://www.astro.ufl.edu/news/
. Information on the Keck Observatory is available at http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu:3636
. Information on the Origins program is available at:
#####
4/20/98 JP
#9840 Submitted by Bradley
Powell
Well it's that time of the year to get out the telescope, dust it off and take a look at some of your favorite objects. One of mine is M57 (NGC 6720) Position 18517n3258. The famous Ring Nebula in Lyra is probably the best known example of a planetary nebula. The term "Planetary nebula" is purely descriptive, implying no connection with planets. The Ring Nebula was found by the French astronomer Antoine Darquier of Toulouse in 1779. Sir William Herschel, in 1785, referred to the nebula as "among the curiosities of the heavens". The nebula is visual magnitude 9.
The first s image of M57 was taken with a F6.3 focal reducer and a ST-6 CCD camera. Time/Date: 00:50:07 31 May 1997 Exposure Time: 10 seconds Post Processing: Histogam Modification.
The second one is an image of M57 taken at f10 with a 2X barlow and a ST-6 CCD camera. Time/Date: 23:27:33 1 July 1997 Exposure Time: 30 seconds Post Processing: Mid Range. Note the double Star just above the ring in the last image.