Rainwater E-News 6/8/08
SUMMER BACKYARD ASTRONOMY CONTINUES FRIDAYS IN JUNE
Next Friday we will have David Teske telling us about the summer constellations. If you’d like to know the stories behind the scorpions and birds in the summer sky, then you should arrange your schedule to come to Rainwater this Friday at 7pm. David has been sharing about the sky for decades and is an engaging speaker. We will get out telescopes after the talk to view the Moon and other sky objects. Please tell your friends and plan on a pre-talk picnic in the pavilion.
June 13: Summer Constellations, David Teske
If your schedule is busy for this weekend, then plan on the next two programs.
June 20: Celebrate the Summer Solstice, Jim Hill
June 27: Here Comes Jupiter!, Arthur Keith
COMING EVENTS The web site calendar is now working
“Astronomy for Teachers” class, June 8-13
Busy Hands Quilters: June 10, 1 pm
Next year’s Mid-South Star Gaze: April 22-25, 2009
NEWS FROM THE HILL
The big news this week is that the long hoped for high speed internet is in the near future. French Camp Academy will be letting a contract shortly to run fiber optic lines to all their dorms and since we are “on the way” to one of the dorms, we will be able to tap into the line to get it to the Sangre facility. Once it’s there we can connect to the fiber optic we already have and run it back to the classroom and meeting room. After that we can add equipment to create a local “hot spot” for people to connect to the internet with their laptops.
We are slowly getting better at using the new Sangre telescope. Belgian amateur astronomer Alexandre Lhoest came by to some of our programs and stayed far into the night to help us with getting CCD images and using the MaximDL program.
Last week we did programs for 60 children at the Welty museum in Jackson on Wednesday, then returned to do a program for 300 foundation members at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. Special thanks go to members of the Jackson Astronomical Association who came and helped by setting up their telescopes. Also to Jack Huerkamp for helping solve a problem setting up the new video camera.
ASTRO NEWS: If you have info or links you’d like to share, let us know.
Sunday and Monday will be an interesting event. We are halfway between the 2004 and 2012 Venus transits so for 45 hours Venus will pass directly behind the Sun. You can follow the event by checking at the SOHO website. (see the LASCO images) http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/
A newly revised map of our home galaxy is revealed at the summer AAS meeting. http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7039 Mapping our Milky Way is as hard as mapping a forest from inside it. This story gives the history of attempts to make such a map and has a diagram of the revised map that has taken years and tens of thousands of images with the Spitzer space telescope and radio astronomy observations. A related article lets you see the infra-red images that led to the new map. http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7004
Continuing with galaxies, a strong correlation has been found between the tightness of the winding of the spiral arms of galaxies and the mass of the central black hole. http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7018
News from the Phoenix lander on Mars-water ice found!? http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/31/BAUR1117NC.DTL If you want to look back at thousands of Mars images from other missions go to http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/Mars To see some wonderful color images from the ESA Mars Express mission go to http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/index.html
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