A line of severe thunderstorms caused CAAS to cancel our Astronomy Day event on Saturday May 10.  Since we had planned to hold our monthly meeting there as well it was canceled as well.  Our next scheduled event will be the June 14 regular monthly meeting.

This is the event we talked about last week. There will be 20-30 Cub Scout ages 7-10 with 1 adult per 3-4 boys. It is at First Church of the Nazarene in Beebe. They will be cooking hot dogs and burgers and we are welcome to join them for that. They have a parking lot available for us to set up and it sounds like it has a reasonable view. There will be electricity nearby if you need it. My contact, Brenda, asked if we needed extension cords but I figured anyone who did would bring their own.

Here are the directions from their web site: http://beebenazarene.com/directions.html
The church is located at 104 Campground Road in Beebe, Arkansas. Just take exit 31 off of Hwy 67/167 and follow Hwy 31 South. Go all the way through town and cross the railroad tracks. Go 1/4 of a mile and turn left on Campground Road. Proceed about 1/4 mile, and you will see the church on the right. We’re at the corner of Campground Road and Apple Street.

They would like us to do a regular star party, showing the boys what we can that evening.

I won’t be able to attend but several of you indicated you could probably help. Please let me know if you can.

John Reed called the meeting to order at 7:20, the nice weather and good food enticed us to run late.  There were 25 members and visitors in attendance.

John told us about several upcoming start parties:

• The Nebraska Star Party on July 25th (http://www.nebraskastarparty.org/)
• The Texas Star Party on June 1 (http://www.texasstarparty.org/index1.html)
• The All-America Star Party (date unknown).

Closer to home, the Red River Astronomy Club is having one of their Burger Burn star parties on May 3rd.

On May 10th, CAAS will join the Pinnacle Mountain State Park to hold an Astronomy Day event.  We’ll start  at 2 PM for solar observing and bubble making and then later we’ll have scopes out for night time astronomy.  Since this event falls on our normal meeting night, we will hold a short business meeting before the night time events start.

For our presentation, Rocky Togni gave a very interesting presentation on “space” stamps.  Postage stamps that were created with space travel themes, mostly real but some fanciful.  It was very entertaining and afterward he gave out stamps to the children there.

Afterward we went to the observing field and socialized and observed.

Jim Dixon

Join us this coming Satuday, April 12th at 7 PM, for the next CAAS meeting. We will be at our normal location, River Ridge Observatory. If you need directions, click the contact button.

The meeting will be preceded by a potluck dinner at about 6 PM.

Presentation: The Space Race and Philately by Rocky Togni   

Timothy Ferris opened his book “Seeing in the Dark” with the excitement of the late 50’s and Sputnik. Living near Cape Canaveral (Now Cape Kennedy) he witnessed many of the U.S. launches in those exciting early days. The Space Race between the United States and Russia served to propel the technologies of both countries and you could say substituted for the Nuclear war between the two super powers that fortunately never happened. It also propelled many youngsters into technological careers and hobbies such as Astronomy. Rocky Togni will present the Space Race as seen through the stamp issues of each country at our regular monthly meeting Saturday April 12. There will be Space stamps for all kids who attend.

The Moon will partially obscure the Pleiades during the early evening of April 8. The event starts between 8:30 CDT and lasts about 2 hours depending on your definition of “Pleiades”. It looks like only one of the Seven Sisters will be occulted but several minor members will be obscured by the Moon. If you have a webcam or video camera, this might be a good opportunity to capture some occultation footage. In the image below, the lower Moon is at 8:30 and the higher reflects where it will be 2 hours later.

Stefan Seip (Rocky Nook, Inc. 2008) 155 pages. $29.95 (less at Amazon) ISB: 978-1-933952-16-1

What astronomer hasn’t wished to record the splendor of the night sky to review later? It is natural to want to be able to recall those glorious evenings that are so few and far between, like looking at a family album. Astrophotography is a way to do that but as anyone who has tried it can tell you, that can be daunting.

In Digital Astrophotography: A Guide to Capturing the Cosmos, Stefan Seip provides a solid introduction to several digital techniques for recording the visible universe. After a first “Before You Start” chapter describing the basics of resolution, focal length and ratio, Seip breaks the remainder of the book into four main categories of digital astrophotography: the Digital Compact Camera (DCC), the Webcam (WC), the Digital SLR (DLSR), and the dedicated Astronomical Camera (AC).

The ubiquitous Digital Compact Camera is inexpensive and most everyone already has one so getting started takes little or no money. They are self contained so no computer is required to acquire the images. On the downside, they are often not very flexible in use, mounting to a telescope may be difficult, and some simply don’t have the needed features such as long exposure. The book provides tips for connecting the camera to the telescope for either through the optical tube assembly for high power imaging or piggy back for low power. The author then covers after the fact image processing with popular software.

The Webcam, introduced first for live images over the Internet, has had an enormous impact on planetary imaging in the last decade. Like the DCC, many people already have one and they are inexpensive if not. Also like the DCC, some webcams are better suited to astrophotography than others. Unlike the DCC, they do require an attached computer and typically they are used for through the telescope imaging only. Seip provides tips for purchasing the webcam and accessories for attaching it to the telescope. He goes into detail on setting up the software, the critical focusing, tips for acquiring the images, and processing with the popular (and free) Registax application.

Next, Seip covers the Digital SLR which has the advantages of the DCC but far fewer of the disadvantages so as a fixed lens and limited functionality. Of course, DSLRs are a big step up price wise from the previous two camera types but that price is coming down. Since DSLRs have removable lens, you can switch focal length very easily and also shoot through the telescope much more easily. They also usually have much larger chips making for larger fields of view and more sophisticated software than their DCC cousins. They do tend to be prone to electronic noise and tend to run through batteries so you need to take measures to overcome both issues.

Finally, Seip discusses dedicated Astronomical Cameras which tend to be more sensitive, cooled to reduce electronic noise, and more dynamic range than any of the previous camera types discussed. Of course, they cannot be used for normal photography and must be controlled by a computer. The author covers the details of these cameras, what accessories you might want, as well as the software you might use to acquire and process your images.

Digital Astrophotography: A Guide to Capturing the Cosmos provides a solid introduction to the art for the beginning astrophotographer. If you follow his tips and techniques you should be soon producing good images of night sky objects. However, if you are not new to the subject you may find the book of limited value.

Review by Jim Dixon

It’s 10 o’clock, and do you know where your Oriental Honey Buzzard is?

Tracking the whereabouts of birds and other migrating wildlife across thousands of miles of land, air, and sea is no easy feat. Yet to protect the habitats of endangered species, scientists need to know where these roving animals go during their seasonal travels.

Rather than chasing these animals around the globe, a growing number of scientists are leveraging the bird’s-eye view of orbiting satellites to easily monitor animals’ movements anywhere in the world.

The system piggybacks on weather satellites called Polar Operational Environmental Satellites, which are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as a European satellite called MetOp. Sensors aboard these satellites pick up signals beamed from portable transmitters on the Earth’s surface, 850 kilometers below. NOAA began the project—called Argos—in cooperation with NASA and the French space agency (CNES) in 1974. At that time, scientists placed these transmitters primarily on buoys and balloons to study the oceans and atmosphere. As electronics shrank and new satellites’ sensors became more sensitive, the transmitters became small and light enough by the 1990s that scientists could mount them safely on animals. Yes, even on birds like the Oriental Honey Buzzard.

“Scientists just never had the capability of doing this before,” says Christopher O’Connors, Program Manager for Argos at NOAA.

Today, transmitters weigh as little as 1/20th of a pound and require a fraction of a watt of power. The satellites can detect these feeble signals in part because the transmitters broadcast at frequencies between 401 and 403 MHz, a part of the spectrum reserved for environmental uses. That way there’s very little interference from other sources of radio noise.

“Argos is being used more and more for animal tracking,” O’Connors says. More than 17,000 transmitters are currently being tracked by Argos, and almost 4,000 of them are on wildlife. “The animal research has been the most interesting area in terms of innovative science.”

For example, researchers in Japan used Argos to track endangered Grey-faced Buzzards and Oriental Honey Buzzards for thousands of kilometers along the birds’ migrations through Japan and Southeast Asia. Scientists have also mapped the movements of loggerhead sea turtles off the west coast of Africa. Other studies have documented migrations of wood storks, Malaysian elephants, porcupine caribou, right whales, and walruses, to name a few.

Argos data is available online at www.argos-system.org, so every evening, scientists can check the whereabouts of all their herds, schools, and flocks. Kids can learn about some of these endangered species and play a memory game with them at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/poes_tracking.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

It was a cold and clear evening after a news making snowfall in March (yes, March) in Arkansas (yes, Arkansas).

President John Reed called the meeting to order at 7:10

17 members and guests were in attendance.

We welcomed new members John and Carolyn Pittman to their first meeting.  Welcome, John and Carolyn!

Two weeks ago, CAAS hosted a session of the PMSP Master Naturalist program.  Despite the weather, it was a success with John doing a planetarium presentation for the appreciative group.

The February Lunar Eclipse was a bust in Arkansas due to clouds.

Astronomy Day on May 10 is the next scheduled outreach event for CAAS.  Including that, we have six scheduled events for Pinnacle Mountain or Woolly Hollow State parks.

John reminded members of upcoming major star parties - French Camp in Mississippi, Heart of America in Kansas, Texas Star Party, and Okie-Tex.

We discussed the status of the light shed letter project.  Wade has been working on it but non of us were sure of the status.

Don Ferren gave a presentation about Charles Messier and doing a Messier Marathon to attempt to see as many of the objects as one cares to.

Since the weather was so cold, the marathon was postponed to March 29th.  The marathon will be at CAAS.

by Patrick Barry

At one time or another, we’ve all stared at beautiful images of spiral galaxies, daydreaming about the billions of stars and countless worlds they contain. What mysteries—and even life forms—must lurk within those vast disks?

Now consider this: many of the galaxies you’ve seen are actually much larger than they appear. NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a space telescope that “sees” invisible, ultraviolet light, has revealed that roughly 20 percent of nearby galaxies have spiral arms that extend far beyond the galaxies’ apparent edges. Some of these galaxies are more than three times larger than they appear in images taken by ordinary visible-light telescopes.

“Astronomers have been observing some of these galaxies for many, many years, and all that time, there was a whole side to these galaxies that they simply couldn’t see,” says Patrick Morrissey, an astronomer at Caltech in Pasadena, California, who collaborates at JPL.

The extended arms of these galaxies are too dim in visible light for most telescopes to detect, but they emit a greater amount of UV light. Also, the cosmic background is much darker at UV wavelengths than it is for visible light. “Because the sky is essentially black in the UV, far-UV enables you to see these very faint arms around the outsides of galaxies,” Morrissey explains.

These “invisible arms” are made of mostly young stars shining brightly at UV wavelengths. Why UV? Because the stars are so hot. Young stars burn their nuclear fuel with impetuous speed, making them hotter and bluer than older, cooler stars such as the sun. (Think of a candle: blue flames are hotter than red ones.) Ultraviolet is a sort of “ultra-blue” that reveals the youngest, hottest stars of all.

“That’s the basic idea behind the Galaxy Evolution Explorer in the first place. By observing the UV glow of young stars, we can see where star formation is active,” Morrissey says.

The discovery of these extended arms provides fresh clues for scientists about how some galaxies form and evolve, a hot question right now in astronomy. For example, a burst of star formation so far from the galaxies’ denser centers may have started because of the gravity of neighboring galaxies that passed too close. But in many cases, the neighboring galaxies have not themselves sprouted extended arms, an observation that remains to be explained. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer reveals one mystery after another!

“How much else is out there that we don’t know about?” Morrissey asks. “It makes you wonder.”

Spread the wonder by seeing for yourself some of these UV images at www.galex.caltech.edu. Also, Chris Martin, principle scientist for Galaxy Evolution Explorer —or rather his cartoon alter-ego—gives kids a great introduction to ultraviolet astronomy at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/live#martin.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption (color image):

In this image of galaxy NGC 1512, red represents its visible light appearance, the glow coming from older stars, while the bluish-white ring and the long, blue spiral arms show the galaxy as the Galaxy Evolution Explorer sees it in ultraviolet, tracing primarily younger stars. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS/GALEX).

Caption (greyscale images):

Galaxy NGC 1512 is represented in both images. The visible light image on the left shows the glow of older stars, while the Galaxy Evolution Explorer ultraviolet image on the right shows the ring and long, spiral arms, tracing primarily younger stars. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS/GALEX).

Saturday evening, February 23rd, CAAS participated in the Pinnacle Mountain State Park Master Naturalist program. About 25 to 30 people attended. John Reed, Carl Freyaldenhoven, Rocky Togni, and Jim Dixon represented CAAS. It was totally cloudy so John used Stellarium to give them a tour of the virtual sky. The group was appreciative and seemed to really enjoy the evening even despite the weather.