Night Sky News
A monthly newsletter from Bob Thompson, President, Shasta Astronomy Club
Greetings from the astronomy club,
We have star parties scheduled for Saturday the 4th of Sept and Saturday the 11th of Sept at the Mines, Trailhead parking lot at Whiskeytown Lake Park starting just after sunset. (around 8:00 PM)
Our last one in August brought out quite a large crowd to see the wonders of the universe. ie: the moon, meteors, double stars, nebulae and all. The sky was ok until about 10:00pm when it started to cloud up and by 11:00pm, was very cloudy and by midnight had bright lightening flashes. At 12:20am, on the way home, I hit some hail out on Hwy 299. Overall, it was still a good night and a lot of folks had fun with astronomy questions that we tried to answer. Quite a few scopes showed up too and that helped to satisfy the need of the crowd.
At last report, our good friend, Tom Richards is doing well after his recent hip replacement operation. All the best to you Tom, we miss you at the star parties, a lot. Hope to see you out next year with that beautiful 17" dob.
Below are some interesting new astronomy topics.
We're finding a huge number of exo planets out there but so far, no new Earths. However, we're getting closer with smaller planets being found.
A pulsar has been found using people power with their computers. It's called the people's pulsar. It's a neutron star spinning at a high rate and giving off a beam of energy directed toward Earth. There's going to be much more astronomy done using this method in the future.
The conveyor belt theory tries to explain the Sun's recent elongated 'cool' period. Do you feel cooler these days?
The solar system is a little older than we had thought, by a couple of million years or so.
Dark Matter Eldorado---there a small galaxy out there that is made up almost completely of 'dark matter'. It's hard to see since very little of it is visible. But the gravity is there.
The moon has shrunk a little since it's origin. That's not surprising since we all do.
The missing matter in our universe is being looked for under ground in a deep dark mine.
Looking at ENA's at the edge of Earth's magnetopause.
It does look like many extinctions took place at the time of impact of a huge asteroid 60 million years ago. Some say that's that but I'm not so sure.
String theory, which has been around for a couple of decades is finally being tested. Is it really a 'theory of everything'? Doubters say if it can't be tested then it's not really science, it's fiction. We'll see. The jury is still out.
Clear skies,
Bob
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