The NEKAAL Observer

These were the discovery images of 2012 SY49 taken 9-23-12 at my backyard observatory Sandlot. I originally designated this object as lb3720. I sent the data to the MPC and they put the object on the NEO Confirmation Page. After 2 nights of followup by a few observatories in New Mexico, Arizona, and Indiana, the MPC put out an electronic circular announcing 2012 SY49 as a NEO.

Soon after NASA’s Sentry (JPL) proclaimed it to be a Virtual Impactor. 2012 SY49 can come as close as 20,000 miles above the earth’s surface. This pass it will be a comfortable 2-3 lunar distances. The object is estimated to b only about 25-30 meters in diameter but at 36,000 per hour if it did impact it would carry a 8 megaton wallop.

Gary

How to Watch a Meteor Shower

The requirements for successful meteor shower-watching are simple: a dark site, a comfortable perch, warm clothing, time, and your eyes. That’s it.

Binoculars and telescopes are a hindrance for these events. Meteors can appear anywhere across the sky, so the wider the view, the better. The most important thing is darkness, away from city lights and as little moonlight as possible. You’ll be looking up, so support for your head and neck will make viewing much more comfortable. A reclining chair or blanket on the ground will work nicely. Having warm clothing or blankets may seem strange, especially for warm-weather showers like the Perseids, but it cools off during the night, and you’ll be there a long time. Some people like sleeping bags for meteor viewing.

Speaking of time, meteor activity always picks up after midnight, since that’s when your location on Earth turns into the debris stream that creates the meteor shower. Each shower has its own characteristics; in general, as the shower radiant (where the meteors appear to originate) rises higher, the number of meteors that become visible increases, and that’s in the early morning hours.

Meteor showers can be recorded, and some like to set up cameras to catch an image of a meteor. You can make it as simple or complex as you choose. Enjoy the sky show!

Prez Sez

One of my favorite things to do is to show people neat things in the night sky. But NEKAAL has also gotten some pretty neat stuff because of our outreach activities—more on that later. We’ve had a pretty active summer on the Outreach front. The Venus Transit on June 5 gave us the chance to show this once-in-a-lifetime event to over 160 people. WOW!

We added two more Open Houses at Farpoint, and attendance has been great all summer. (It’s about the only good thing that’s come from this hot, dry weather!) We’ll be open all night on August 11 for the Perseid meteor shower, which is kind enough to peak on a weekend this year. Great stuff!

NEKAAL was one of the first clubs to join NSN, back in 2004. Since then, we’ve received toolkits containing training videos, material and supplies that have been used all over northeast Kansas. Topics have included the Sun, the solar system, telescopes, black holes, and many more. The star maps handed out at Farpoint came from one of the earliest toolkits, and we’re still handing out dozens each year. What do we have to do to get this stuff? Just use the material and log five events a year with NSN. You can’t beat free!

BUT THERE’S MORE!

If a member club logs two events in a quarter, they’re entered in a drawing for more stuff. NEKAAL has won four times, receiving materials with a retail value in the hundreds of dollars. First was a moon globe and books, including an Atlas of the Moon, all in residence at Farpoint. We also won the Solarscope that was used at the Venus transit. My favorite was a special award—a tiny little lunar meteorite. Last week we received our latest prize, a 12” Mars Globe from Sky and Telescope, which I’ll bring to the general meeting on July 26.

All of these things are pretty neat. But to me, the best thing is still sharing astronomy with others. Just can’t beat it.

Thanks to all who attended NEKAAL’s June 28, 2012 General Meeting at the Topeka/Shawnee County Library. I had the honor of presenting a three-part program, and there are a lot of websites you can visit to expand on my all-too-rushed subjects. Rather than watch the attendees trying to scribble in the dark, I thought I would have mercy and tell them the website addresses will be available here.

Don’t just surf–DIVE DEEP. Join a program of your choosing, DO SOME SCIENCE!

Part I: SAS

Society for Astronomical Sciences

SAS Newsletters etc

Part II: Citizen Science — Astronomy

The Sky is Your Laboratory (book)

Galaxy Zoo

the Milky Way Project

Moon Zoo

AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers

Center for Backyard Astrophysics

Lowell Observatory

LARI, the Lowell Amateur Research Initiative (9 programs)

Part III: Secret Weapon Websites

Heavens Above (satellites, iridium flares, sky charts)

Comet Chasing

CalSky (local nightly almanac)

Astromart (Classifieds, etc)

See you at next month’s meeting!  [July 26, 7:00 pm, at the Topeka-Shawnee County Public Library]

Venus Transit. Jun 5th, 2012 at Lake Shawnee.

You may think that this message is late. It really isn’t, if you look at the Martian calendar—only 1/6 of a year has passed since I became NEKAAL president. Mea culpa anyway. But it has given us a chance to test out some of the new things we’re trying, and so far it’s looking pretty good.

Russ Valentine has created a Meetup group on the internet for NEKAAL. We’ve had a number of people come to general meetings and Open Houses at Farpoint through it. The more, the merrier! We’ve got some neat topics lined up for General Meetings; check the schedule online for topics. We had a sizeable turnout for the Ad Astra event at Washburn on April 21. The planets have been parading through the evening sky so far this year, and meteor showers are occurring during the dark of the moon. It’s looking good for 2012.

There are several sky events coming up soon that you should note, though for opposite reasons. The partial lunar eclipse on June 4 will be a bust in northeast Kansas—we’re too far east to see anything. But we will be well placed for the Venus transit the next evening, on June 5. We’re setting up some scopes for solar viewing to watch the transit, which start about 5PM. The sun will set while Venus is still visible against the solar disk, but that should give us several hours of history. Just in case your calendar get filled for the year 2117, better make it to the lake!

One of the things we’re doing differently this year is the Open House schedule at Farpoint during the summer. We still have a respectably dark sky out there, particularly when compared to in town, so there are 2 dates scheduled for the months of June and July. So many people haven’t even seen the Milky Way, so we’re giving them extra chances to enjoy our dark site. Check the schedule on the website, and come out and enjoy.

Here’s a very quick image of today’s sun. I took it using the 80 mm f/6.25 Apogee refractor and a Cannon EOS rebel XS.

OK,  It’s no longer just today’s image but a few images taken over several weeks showing the changing face of the sun..
Gary

And still taking images of Arp’s Peculiar Galaxies for the Astronomical League program, I’ll post a few recent ones. These are taken at Farpoint Observatory with the 27″ “Tombaugh” reflector.

Arp 120 (above) is a seriously disturbed galaxy pair, with an amazingly distorted trails of stars. Those small dark patches in the star trails are real–rogue dark nebulas blocking some of the light.

Arp 242 is a crowd-pleaser, two galaxies that appear to be making several passes at each other and gravitationally smearing each others’ shapes before parting ways or (more likely) eventually merging. Not sure which, yet–please ask again a few billion years from now.

Two more gravitationally interacting galaxies. If your monitor is adjusted well, you’ll see two streams of stars between the galaxies. The tiny bright spots in the galaxies’ arms are star-forming areas. Any time you have stars and surrounding gas colliding with this bulk and force, you have to expect lots of new stars to form.

Arp 286 shows yet more galaxies being distorted by each other’s gravity. And it’s almost always gravity that makes the shapes of Arp Peculiar Galaxies so, well, peculiar. It’s not their fault–if we had 200 billion solar masses stretching us up close for billions of years, we might look a bit peculiar, too.

Here’s an image of a recent supernova in the constellation Leo. M95’s ‘new’ star was spotted March 16th by Paolo Fagotti of Italy. I’ve marked its position in the image I took Mar 22. I estimated the magnitude at 13.2 R.

Recommended: a time-lapse video of minor planets (asteroids) as they are discovered over the past 30 years or so. This new one is updated to mid-2011.

Watch it in the highest resolution your PC will allow. Now, here’s the link!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE Turn off the music if you don’t care for it. This video compresses 30 years into about 3 minutes; it might be easier to follow details of the 7-minute version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqC1QjlVUYk

Notice 3 things as you watch:

• Discoveries (flashing in white) follow the earth around its orbit. You can’t discover distant rocks in broad daylight!
• There are more discoveries in northern winter (top of screen) than in northern summer (bottom of screen).
• Discoveries tend to “pulse” 12-13 times per year, especially in later years when we’re looking for fainter and fainter objects. You can only see them on nights near the new moon.