WILL’S WORDS BRENDA’S MINUTES

OCTOBER 2016 ISSUE THE CLUB WEB SITE:

asset-astronomer.org

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ASSET Meeting Location

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PLANETARIUM

STARGAZER ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTH EAST TEXAS

P O BOX 654

GROVES, TEXAS 77619

ASSET NEWSLETTER

President - Will Young

president@asset-astronomer. org

Vice-President - Kyle Overturf

vice-president@asset-astronomer.org

Secretary - Brenda Tantzen

secretary@asset-astronomer.org

Treasurer - Eddie & Cat Trevino

treasurer@asset-astronomer.org

Newsletter Editor - Howard Minor

newslettered@asset-astronomer.org

ASSET Meeting

Friday 7:00 PM

October 14th

find out more about

AL Observing Programs

ASSET Minutes September 9, 2016

Will presented information

about the total solar eclipse happening

August 21, 2017. It will traverse the United States

from the NW to the SE. He’s already planning

where he will be situated for this momentous

event. Check out the website beingintheshad-

ow.com if you are interested in learning about so-

lar eclipses. Will would encourage each of us to

pick an observing program from the list on the AL

website and tell about it at a meeting. There are

many programs to choose from. The Houston All-

Clubs meeting is 10/7 (our ASSET meeting night),

with A-Day on 10/8 at the George Observatory.

The Eldorado Star Party is October 24-29. I have

been to this location, although not the star party,

and it is a great spot to do some observing. It is

just west of Sonora on IH-10.

Attendance: 27 October refreshments: Bill and Linda

Brenda Tantzen

ASSET Secretary

ANNUAL ASTRONOMY

DAY AT THE GEORGE

SAT. OCTOBER 8TH

see page 2

ELDORADO STAR PARTY

OCT. 24TH TO THE 29TH

see page 2

2016 seems to be flying by without

any signs of slowing down. As I

write this the Okie Tex Star Party is

underway. We hope everyone out there has clear

skies and a great time! If you missed that one the

Eldorado Star Party is coming up at the end of Oc-

tober. There's still time to get in on the action for

that one. As we get near the end of the year we

need to discuss where and when our annual holiday

dinner will be. We will have a group dinner instead

of having a general meeting in December. Give me

your ideas. If you have a favorite restaurant and

want it added to the list of potential places you can

email me and I'll add it. Last year was lots of fun.

We will talk more about this at the October meeting.

Astronomy Day is coming up as well!!! This is the

largest astronomy event in our local area. Do make

it out if you can. Thanks for being an awesome club!

We will see you at the October meeting! WILL

We have 2 new members, Linda Matthews

and Jay Willis. Be sure to say hi to them at

the October meeting of ASSET. PAGE 1

OBSERVERS’ PAGE

PAGE 2

+ TRAN-

RITTER SAB-INE

ARM-COL-

An Astronomy Team

To Take Care Of All

Your Astronomical

Needs

Clayton 713-569-7529

Ron 979-702-0258

ELDORADO

STAR PARTY

ESP October 24 – 29, 2016 Rates

$42 if you pre-register ONLINE on or before Oct 10, 2016. ($21 for each add’l family member) It is getting late!

REGISTER BEFORE THE 10TH

THE ANNUAL ASTRONOMY DAY AT THE GEORGE TELESCOPE & OBSERVATORY

Brazos Bend State Park - October 8th, Saturday 3:00PM - 11:00PM,

The Houston area Astronomy Clubs plus ASSET participate in this big annual

event. As many as 4,000 to 5,000 people could show up to look though your tele-

scope. You can bring your scope and set it up on the George Observatory deck.

Get with Will for the information you need to do that. It takes 2-1/2 hrs. or so to get

there. All the activities start about 3 PM, and it is the greatest astronomical event

in the area each year. Even if you don’t set up a scope, come and enjoy a look

through the 36-inch. There are displays and various astronomy programs going

on; face painting, astronomy badge making. Also water and food is available.

Meet astronomy members from the other clubs. There will 20 to 30 telescopes set

up for you to look through. A really great family time in a beautiful state park.

THE “ALL CLUBS MEETING” GOES WITH A-DAY Bill has sent a note reminding us of not only A-Day, but of the All Clubs Meeting. “The All Clubs meeting is on Friday evening the 7th of Oct, at 6:30:PM, at the new planetari-um with the new state of the art projectors. The presentations probably will be the world’s greatest outer space show that you will ever see. The meeting is in the Houston Museum of Nat-ural Science near the zoo, and it is in the planetarium.” “I will be introducing the presidents of each club or organization at the meeting, so I hope to see our ASSET club members there. It is free and usually comes with a drawing and refresh-ments. Then on Saturday the 8th is the A-Day at the observatory, and basically starts at 3:00 pm till around 11:00 pm; then they start clean up. I hope that many of our members will attend both functions.” BILL For you new members please contact Will, Bill or myself with questions.

SOUTH TROPICL ZONE

Just a note from Jane and I, that we have been enjoying some naked eye observing. We have watched Mars race eastward though Scorpius into Sagittarus. At one point it made an equilateral triangle with Saturn & Antares, then a diamond with a star in the head of Scorpius. Very nice!

Also I have a 80mm spotting scope with a white filter on it and been fol-lowing a few Sunspots. At one point I stopped looking and put my lens cap on the eyepiece and without thinking, took the filter off the objective; in a few minutes I put it back on. Then I noticed I had a nice tiny burnt round hole in my eyepiece cap. Just shows you can’t let your guard down when you are enjoying the Sun. This time it only destroyed my lens cover. The Sun is not forgiving, if we make a mistake!

WHERE ARE WE? We live on a planet called Earth that

is part of our solar system. But where is our solar system? It’s a

small part of the Milky Way Galaxy. A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems. A galaxy is held to-gether by gravity. Our galaxy, the

Milky Way, also has a supermassive

black hole in the middle.

WHO HAS HEARD OF A “BLACK MOON,” NOT ME! A rare celestial event took place Friday night, the 30th of September. No one would have seen it unless

you knew about it and happened to be in the right spot at the right time? Also it was pretty difficult to

actually see. For the first time since 2014, a black moon rose in the western night sky. A black moon is

the second new moon of the month, occurring about once every two and a half years. Unfortunately,

because the Sun is shining on the side facing away from Earth, all we could have seen is the shadow.

And as we all know, a shadow combined with a black sky will make the moon practically invisible, but

here the sky will still be lighter and a dark shadow may be visible. The last black moon appearance

happened in March 2014. The new moon appeared Friday night with the event starting at 7:11 p.m.

CDT and was (in)visible in the Eastern Hemisphere for only the Americas to enjoy. I sent this reminder

out last Wednesday and I hope you saw it or made an attempt to view it. It took an unobstructed view of

the western horizon. Did you get out and give it a try?

Construction is complete now

A NEW DESIGNED RADIO TELESCOPE BY THE CHINESE Construction of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope

(FAST) is now complete. The FAST project began in 2011 and is suppose to be

ready this year. It is currently undergoing testing and commissioning. It has a

novel design, using an active surface for pointing and focus-

ing, meaning the surface can be moved and reshaped. It will

take three years to calibrate the various instruments so it can

become fully operational. FAST has a fixed primary reflector

located in a natural hollow in the landscape, focusing radio

waves on a receiver suspended 460 ft. above it. Although the

reflector diameter is 1,600 ft., only a circle of 300 m diameter

is used (held in the correct parabolic shape and "illuminated"

by the receiver) at any one time. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia PAGE 3

WHAT ARE THOSE HOLES IN THE MOON? Galileo discovered that the Moon was not a perfect sphere, but had both mountains and cup-like depressions, the latter of which he gave the name craters. The word crater was adopted by Galileo from the Greek. Galileo built his first telescope, and turned it to the Moon for the first time on November 30, 1609. It is found that Craters typically will have some or all of the following features: A surrounding area with materials splashed out of the ground when the crater was formed; this is typically lighter in shade than older materials due to exposure to solar radia-tion for a lesser time. A raised rim, consisting of materials ejected but landing very close by. A crater wall, the downward-sloping portion of the crater. A crater floor, a more or less smooth, flat area, which as it ages accumulates small craters of its own.

PAGE 4

This article is provided by NASA Space Place. With articles, activities, crafts, games, and lesson plans, NASA Space Place encourages everyone to get excited about science and technology. Visit spaceplace.nasa.gov to explore space and Earth science!

One Incredible Galaxy

Cluster Yields Two Types of

Gravitational Lenses

By Ethan Siegel

There is this great idea that if you look hard enough and

long enough at any region of space, your line of sight will

eventually run into a luminous object: a star, a galaxy or a

cluster of galaxies. In reality, the universe is finite in age, so

this isn't quite the case. There are objects that emit light

from the past 13.7 billion years—99 percent of the age of

the universe—but none before that. Even in theory, there

are no stars or galaxies to see beyond that time, as light is

limited by the amount of time it has to travel.

But with the advent of large, powerful space telescopes that can collect data for the equivalent of millions

of seconds of observing time, in both visible light and infrared wavelengths, we can see nearly to the edge

of all that's accessible to us.

The most massive compact, bound structures in the universe are galaxy clusters that are hundreds or

even thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way. One of them, Abell S1063, was the target of a recent

set of Hubble Space Telescope observations as part of the Frontier Fields program. While the Advanced

Camera for Surveys instrument imaged the cluster, another instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, used an

optical trick to image a parallel field, offset by just a few arc minutes. Then the technique was reversed,

giving us an unprecedentedly deep view of two closely aligned fields simultaneously, with wavelengths

ranging from 435 to 1600 nanometers.

With a huge, towering galaxy cluster in one field and no comparably massive objects in the other, the ef-

fects of both weak and strong gravitational lensing are readily apparent. The galaxy cluster—over 100 tril-

lion times the mass of our sun—warps the fabric of space. This causes background light to bend around it,

converging on our eyes another four billion light years away. From behind the cluster, the light from distant

galaxies is stretched, magnified, distorted, and bent into arcs and multiple images: a classic example of

strong gravitational lensing. But in a subtler fashion, the less optimally aligned galaxies are distorted as

well; they are stretched into elliptical shapes along concentric circles surrounding the cluster.

A visual inspection yields more of these tangential alignments than radial ones in the cluster field, while

the parallel field exhibits no such shape distortion. This effect, known as weak gravitational lensing, is a

very powerful technique for obtaining galaxy cluster masses independent of any other conditions. In this

serendipitous image, both types of lensing can be discerned by the naked eye. When the James Webb

Space Telescope launches in 2018, gravitational lensing may well empower us to see all the way back to

the very first stars and galaxies.

If you’re interested in teaching kids about how these large telescopes “see,” be sure to see our article on

this topic at the NASA Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/telescope-mirrors/en/

Galaxy cluster Abell S1063 (left) as imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Frontier Fields program. The distorted images of the background galaxies are a consequence of the warped space dues to Einstein's general relativity; the parallel field (right) shows no such effects. Image credit: NASA, ESA and Jen-nifer Lotz (STScI)

PAGE 5

CASINI SPACE CRAFT BEGINS ITS FINAL YEAR?

The Cassini Spacecraft is going to plunge repeated-

ly between Saturn and its rings, and finally execute a

headlong plummet into the body of Saturn itself. After

orbiting Saturn since 2004, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is

about to begin its “grand finale year.” The spacecraft will

begin a series of dives between the planet and its rings in

April 2017, building toward a dramatic end of mission, a

final plunge into the planet six months later. Beginning on November 30, 2016, Cassini’s orbit

will send the spacecraft just past the outer edge of Saturn’s main rings. A close flyby of Saturn's

giant moon Titan will reshape the spacecraft's orbit so that it passes through the gap between

Saturn and the rings. The spacecraft is expected to make 22 plunges through the gap, an unex-

plored space only about 1,500 miles wide – beginning with its first dive on April 27. Cassini will

use the final plunges between Saturn and its rings to make the closest-ever observations of Sat-

urn. Cassini’s grand finale will come to a dramatic end on September 15, 2017, as the spacecraft

dives into Saturn’s atmosphere, returning data about the planet’s chemical composition until its

signal is lost. Friction with the atmosphere will cause the spacecraft to burn up like a meteor

soon afterward. "We may be counting down, but no one should count Cassini out yet," said Curt

Niebur, Cassini program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The journey ahead is

going to be a truly thrilling ride."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space

Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in

Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL de-

signed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.

Astronomy Binoculars Will Amaze You!

Lets look at a couple of objects in the Constellation of Cepheus. In astronomy binoculars power is very important. 10X (power) to 15X or even 25X is ideal for seeing most double stars & clusters with them. Stabilization binoculars will many times do away with tripods. Mu Cephei, is that red star, called the “Garnet Star”. It is a red supergiant that would extend out past Jupiter, if it were our Sun! Like Betelgeuse, it is reddish to the naked eye, maybe some yellow in it. It is also a variable, from 3.4 to 5.1 magnitude. If you have a tele-scope, look at it that way too. It gets redder! Close near by is Delta Cephei, and few stars offer as much ob-serving pleasure as this one. It is a double that is 41” (seconds) wide. At 10X you may need a tripod, but 15X there will be no problem. The companion is 6.3 magnitude, but delta is a variable also, and has a 5 day period, that goes from 3.5 to 4.1. City observers may have a little problem seeing it when it is 4.1.

I rotated Cepheus as it would appear in the NE sky and enlarged the area of the stars Mu & Delta. Get out your atlas or planisphere to find Cepheus in the evening northeast sky. delta

mu

PAGE 6

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM?

WHERE ARE THE PLANETS?

OCTOBER 2016 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Moon Closest to Earth, Perigee

Moon farthest

from Earth,

Apogee

NEW

3RD

FULL

1ST ASSET CLUB MEETING 7:00PM

October brings some neat arrangement of the planets & stars. VENUS rising in the west at dusk early in

the month. The disk is gibbous at 14”(seconds) and is in Libra. On Oct. 26th & 27th, a wonderful align-

ment occurs. Saturn, Venus & Antares are in a vertical line, 30’(minutes) after sunset in the southwest.

SATURN is in Scorpius and Venus will join Saturn there by the end of October for the passing above.

Saturn is heading for the SW horizon, so get your scopes on it this month before it disappears. MARS

is fading now and is in Sagittarius at the top of the “teapot”, Lamba Sagittari. Mars shrinks to only 8”.

URANUS & NEPTUNE are now both in good observing position. Uranus is in Pisces & Neptune is in

Aquarius. Please get the Oct. issue of S&T for their positions the rest of the year and into next spring.

S&T explains in detail where they are located. Well what has happened to Jupiter? JUPITER & MER-

CURY have quickly slipped to the morning sky. At the end of the 1st week of Oct. Jupiter is joining Mer-

cury, which is just a little higher and on Oct. 11th they are passing each other, less than 1 degree apart.

Mercury is –1.1 mag. and Jupiter is –1.7 mag., but binoculars will be helpful for a spectacular view.

Again, poor old PLUTO is in its last month to observe, at 14th magnitude, in the “teaspoon” of Sagittari-

us. While you have your Sky & Telescope magazines out check the July issue as it gives the exact posi-

tion of Pluto during October. It is very rewarding to see one time, so find a member of the club that has a

12” or larger telescope and go to our Magnolia Ridge dark site to find it. The MOON leaves the skies at

the 1st and last of the month when it is in the new phase. A crescent Moon is near Venus & Jupiter on

the 1st. Also it occults Aldebaran again on the night of Oct. 18 & 19 around midnight.

1st Photos of far side of the

Moon 1959

2016 Draconids Meteors

October 20-21, 2016 Orionids Meteor Shower

Lapetus Moon of Saturn

Discovered

Triton, Moon of Neptune

Discovered 1846

ON OCTOBER 4TH IN 1957, THE YEAR I GRADUATED

FROM HIGH SCHOOL, SPUTNIK WAS LAUNCHED

HALLOWEEN