The SBAU Forum

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On 8/8/2020 11:11 PM, Jerry wrote:
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> Monday, August 10
> Today is 30th anniversary of the Magellan radar mapper’s arrival at Venus. Magellan was a keystone mission in our understanding of Earth’s sister planet, mapping 98 percent of the venusian surface down to features smaller than 328 feet (100 meters).
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> You can find Venus in the east this morning, rising higher in the three hours before sunrise. It glows a stunning magnitude –4.5 and appears 24" across. Its disk is nearly 50 percent lit. The planet is located in the northeastern corner of Orion, between Taurus (above it) and Gemini (below) on the sky. The Hunter’s familiar figure stretches southwest of the planet. In addition to the familiar three stars of Orion’s Belt, look for golden-hued Betelgeuse and bright, blue Rigel, the figure’s right shoulder and left knee, respectively. They’ll be easier to spot as the constellation rises higher in the slowly brightening dawn.
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> The Moon passes 4° south of Uranus at 5 P.M. EDT. Like Venus, the ice giant is also a morning object; two hours before sunrise, you’ll find it high in the east, glowing at magnitude 5.8 in the constellation Aries. At that time, the Moon is about 8° southwest of the planet and located in Cetus the Whale. Given the bright Moon, finding our seventh planet may be a bit of a challenge in binoculars or a small scope. It’s a mere 4" across and should appear as a dim, “flat” star with a soft gray color. Although the Moon will stay in this region of the sky for several days, it will continue to wane and dim, so you may want to revisit Uranus in a few days to see if it’s easier to locate with less background light.

[Clavius crater image]
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> Tuesday, August 11
> Last Quarter Moon occurs at 12:45 P.M. EDT. Just like First Quarter Moon, now is a great time to look at features along the terminator dividing night from day on our satellite. In this case, however, the early morning hours are the best time to observe the Moon, as it rises before midnight and sets this afternoon, then won’t rise again until after midnight on the 12th.
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> For Northern Hemisphere observers, some of the best features visible through binoculars or a small scope during this lunar phase are the dark, smooth Mare Imbrium and Mare Nubium; the bright, rayed crater Copernicus, and the sweeping line of the Apennine Mountains. Other large craters you may spot include Plato, Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, and Arzachel. In the rugged lunar south, Clavius may stand out as a large crater with several smaller craterlets creating a swooping curve within it. Clavius was made famous in the motion picture “2001 A Space Odyssey” as the crater containing the moon’s monolith.
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> [Perseid meteor shower image]
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> Wednesday, August 12
> The well-known Perseid meteor shower peaks this morning with a maximum rate of 100 meteors per hour. These spectacular meteors come from the trail of debris left by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the Sun every 133 years.
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> The shower’s radiant is high in the northeast around 2 A.M. local time. With the relatively bright Last Quarter Moon nearby in Aries, you will likely see rates much lower than the expected maximum. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking an early-morning stroll outside — the Perseids streak into our atmosphere at nearly 40 miles per second and bright meteors often leave behind long, glowing persistent trains.
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> Venus reaches greatest western elongation (46°) at 5 P.M. PDT. The planet remains an early morning object, however, so the best time to view it is in the hour or two before sunrise.
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> Thursday, August 13
> Tonight is a great night to check out two famous circumpolar constellations: Ursa Major the Great Bear and Cassiopeia the Queen. These familiar celestial sights are situated on opposite sides of North Celestial Pole, so during the night they appear to swing around Polaris, the North Star. From higher latitudes they never appear to set, always visible above the horizon.
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> An hour after sunset, you can find the two constellations at roughly the same height above the northern horizon. The most recognizable part of Ursa Major is the Big Dipper asterism, which at this time appears on its side with its handle sticking straight up. In reality, the Big Dipper is only a small portion of the Great Bear, representing her stretched-out tail and hindquarters. Across the North Celestial Pole is Cassiopeia, whose equally recognizable W shape is tilted at about a 45° angle to the horizon. As the hours tick by, you’ll see the Big Dipper swing low, its cup tilting upward, while Cassiopeia swings higher. She first tips onto her side and ends the night upside-down as dawn on the 14th streaks the sky with light.
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> Friday, August 14.
> As darkness falls following sunset, swing your scope to Jupiter, hanging above the southeastern horizon in the constellation Sagittarius. The planet shines at magnitude –2.7 and should be easy to spot, with magnitude 0.2 Saturn just 8° to its east. Both will stay in the south all night, setting in the southwest in the early morning hours before sunrise on the 15th.
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> By dusk, Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, is in the middle of a trek across the face of the planet, finally slipping off the disk at 10:51 P.M. EDT. Following the moon is its dark shadow, which slips onto the planet just before Ganymede exits and takes about three hours to cross. At 11:24 P.M. EDT, Io slides in front of Jupiter’s eastern limb; the smaller moon is much closer to the planet and its shadow follows just 44 minutes later, when Ganymede’s shadow is merely halfway across.
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> If you happen to miss the moons’ trek across Jupiter, don’t worry — you’ll have another chance later this month to watch them take a similar journey overnight on August 21/22.
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> This Week
> For a few hours after sunset, Scorpius the Scorpion is visible in the southern sky. It should be easy to pick out his golden magnitude 1 heart, Antares, so named because it is easy to mistake the bright star for Mars. The star’s apparent brightness, even at its distance of 550 light-years, means it’s extremely luminous — about 10,000 times brighter than the Sun. With a mass at least 10 times that of the Sun, it will someday explode in a supernova, certainly visible from Earth.
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> If you have binoculars or a small telescope, shift your gaze less than 1.5° west of the star to find M4 (NGC 6121), a magnitude 5.4 globular cluster just over 26' across. A group of more than 100,000 old stars, M4 often appears as a faint, wispy ball like a puff of cotton. Larger binoculars or telescopes should pick out some of the cluster’s outer stars, although the center, packed with so many glowing suns, may still appear nebulous.
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> Main belt asteroid 7 Iris is headed toward a hairpin turn next week against the background stars of Sagittarius. It’s located less than 1.5° southwest of M23 (NGC 6494), a young open star cluster discovered in 1764. The best time to find the faint magnitude 9.8 point of light is between sunset and moonrise; wait until the sky is as dark as possible, which will aid in your search.
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> Over the next several days, try returning to this region with your telescope to photograph or sketch Iris’ position each night. You should see the asteroid track westward day by day, approaching a magnitude 9.5 star that marks its turnaround point. It will swing around the star next Saturday, quickly starting to move east again after that.
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> SPACEX SN5 TEST HOP SUCCESS
> On Wednesday August 4 at the SpaceX facility in Boca Chica in Texas, the lower portion of the StarShip (fuel and engine section) successfully completed a take off and landing. The SN5 assembly performed perfectly, rising to a height of about 150 meters, using one Raptor rocket motor. The full up starship with the nose cone and passenger section plus a full load of fuel, will be outfitted with 6 Raptor engines. To achieve Earth orbit the Starship will also sit atop a booster powered by 37 Raptor engines.
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> The booster will land back on Earth for later re-use while the Starship itself is designed to land on and take off from the moon or Mars. It will not require the booster section, except from Earth.
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> Black Neutron Star?
> For more than a decade, astrophysicists have wondered why nature appears to show an odd restraint in the way it slays stars. In life, they range from pip-squeaks to behemoths.  Small ones simply burn out and fade away, but something more curious happens to the jumbo-size variety. When such a star dies, its great bulk causes its innards to implode as a core-collapse supernova. The process sparks a cataclysmic explosion and compresses some of the remains into astrophysical exotica—often a neutron star or, for the very heaviest suns, a black hole. Yet a pronounced rift appears to divide the weight classes of these two types of massive stellar corpses. Although astronomers have spotted neutron stars weighing up to around two solar masses and black holes as light as five, middleweight cadavers have gone entirely missing—until now.
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> Last Tuesday the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration announced the first conclusive detection of a stellar remnant falling into the so-called mass gap between neutron stars and black holes. After months of calculations, researchers at LIGO and the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy concluded that such waves rippling through Earth last August—an event dubbed GW190814 that was initially classified as a black hole consuming a neutron star—actually came from a 23-solar-mass black hole swallowing a mysterious 2.6-solar-mass object. Whether the smaller body is the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole—or a truly exotic beast, such as a star made of particles distinct from those of normal stars—its existence suggests that the theories describing the most extreme stellar fates need updating.
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Filling in for Madame K, Vice President Baron Ron Herron had SBAU space news to fill in for two 15 minute segments at 730am and 830am on Thursday, August 6, 2020.  Attached is audio recorded. Download and play!
President Jerry Wilson, Outreach Coordinator Chuck McPartlin, and Weebmaster Tom Totton participated.

Attached is audio file of the program, so download that and play.

Topics for discussion were made by President Jerry Wilson:
On 7/25/2020 11:21 PM, Jerry wrote:
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> Monday, July 27
> First Quarter Moon occurs at 8:33 A.M. EDT, making this evening is an excellent time to consider some lunar observing. With moonrise occurring in the afternoon, the Moon will still be high in the south at sunset and won’t set until after midnight. Even a small telescope or pair of binoculars will bring out immense detail on our satellite’s face, which appears to observers on Earth as half in daylight and half in darkness during this phase. The line dividing the two is called the terminator, and it’s an excellent starting point for your observing campaign. Along this line, features will appear with the sharpest contrast, as taller mountaintops and crater rims catch the sunlight, while lower-lying areas remain in shadow. Along the terminator at First Quarter are several craters, including Archimedes, Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, Arzachel, and Maginus.
>    Also visible are several darker “seas,” or maria, which are actually the smooth remnants of ancient lava flows. Among those that are easy to spot at First Quarter are the isolated Mare Crisium in the Moon’s upper right quadrant (for Northern Hemisphere observers), as well as Mare Serenitatis, Mare Tranquillitatis, and Mare Fecunditatis, which form much of the large, dark region to Crisium’s lower left.
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> Tuesday, July 28
> If you have a larger telescope with an aperture 10 inches or greater, this morning after moonset (around 1 A.M. local time) is the perfect time to observe the famous Eagle Nebula (M16), home to Hubble’s famous Pillars of Creation. Of course, you won’t get quite that good a view, but you’ll still enjoy this beautiful emission nebula and its embedded star cluster (NGC 6611) in detail, particularly if you’re set up for even some simple astrophotography.
>    M16 is roughly 25° high at 1:30 A.M. local time for northern observers. You’ll find it in the same region of the sky as bright Jupiter and Saturn, so swing your scope to the planets before or after for some stunning views. A low-power eyepiece will make finding the nebula easier once you’re in the right region of sky, about 6.5° southeast of magnitude 3.3 Sinistra (Nu [ν] Ophiuchi). Once you’ve spotted the Eagle, you can increase the magnification and use averted vision — looking slightly away from the region you want to see — to bring out its dimmer, delicate detail. It may even appear to glow with a faint green light to your eye.
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> Wednesday, July 29
> The Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower peaks early this morning with a maximum rate of about 20 meteors per hour. The best time to watch for meteors is an hour or two before sunrise — at 4 A.M. local time, the shower’s radiant in Aquarius will be about 30° high in the south-southwest for observers at mid-northern latitudes. You’ll find the radiant about 17° northwest of the bright star Fomalhaut in Piscis Austrinus.
>    Early morning meteor hunters will also get an added bonus: Jupiter and Saturn both lie nearby in Sagittarius. Jupiter shines at magnitude –2.7, while Saturn is magnitude 0.1. Both make great targets with binoculars or a small telescope, which will reveal Saturn’s rings and, depending on when you look, three or four of Jupiter’s largest moons. Io disappears behind the giant planet’s western limb about 4:10 A.M. EDT, emerging from the shadow 6:50 A.M. EDT. The sky will likely be too bright for East Coast observers to catch its reappearance, but those in western states stand a good chance of seeing the tiny moon pop back into view.
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> Thursday, July 30
> Neptune, Mars, and Uranus create a trio of planetary delights early this morning. By 1:30 A.M. local time, all three are well above the southeast horizon, with the Red Planet blazing at magnitude –1. It’s currently among the dim stars of Pisces the Fish, but you can use two nearby bright stars to find it: Draw a line between Hamal in Aries and Fomalhaut in Piscis Austrinus, and Mars is the only bright object halfway along it.
>    27.5° west of Mars is magnitude 7.8 Neptune — you’ll need at least binoculars to see its small, bluish disk, but a telescope is better. And just 23° east-northeast of Mars is magnitude 5.8 Uranus. Keen-eyed observers may see it without optical aid from a dark location, but binoculars or a small scope will bring its gray disk into view for anyone to enjoy.
>    Follow the line from Mars to Uranus further still, and you’ll hit the sparkling Pleiades. This open star cluster is easily recognizable and requires no optical aid to enjoy. Many mistake it for the Little Dipper because of its small, dipper-shaped configuration, but the former is both larger and currently much higher overhead in the north, sprouting from the North Star (Polaris) at the end of its handle.
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> Friday, July 31
> Step outside an hour before sunrise this morning to view Venus and Mercury, preceding the Sun in the eastern sky. At that time, Venus is 24° high, while Mercury is just 3° above the horizon. The two will gain altitude with time but the sky will continue to brighten as well.
>    Although its phase is increasing, magnitude –4.6 Venus is receding from Earth. This morning, it appears 43 percent lit, but its disk is only 27" across. It’s located about between the bright stars Aldebaran in Taurus and Betelgeuse in Orion, just northeast of a line between the two. It’s nearly level with magnitude 3 Alheka, Taurus’ zeta star.
>    Mercury, at magnitude –0.7, is 68 percent lit and 6" wide. It’s located in Gemini the Twins, whose bright stars Castor and Pollux glow nearby. Pollux is just 7° northeast of the planet. See how long you can follow the planets and stars into the brightening dawn.
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> The Earth has a new mini-moon, for a while anyway. Near Earth asteroid 2020 CD3 has been captured into an Earth orbit. It actually orbits the sun in an orbit very near to earth’s orbit. It was spotted by Catalina Sky Survey on February 19 of this year, as a dim object moving swiftly across the sky. Multiple observations have confirmed that it has been gravitationally bound to the Earth for about 3 years. The object is very small and faint at about 2 to 3.5 meters in diameter. The orbit is not stable so that it will soon be flung away from the Earth. This is the second NEO known to have captured as a mini moon. The first was 2006 RH120 which orbited the Earth from June 2006 to September 2007. 2020 CD3 is expected to leave Earth orbit this year.
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> Five years since its historic flyby of Pluto and 18 months since meeting Arrokoth, NASA’s New Horizons is now involved in a new astronomical endeavor. Together with the Subaru Telescope, it will observe yet-to-be-discovered celestial bodies and maybe even visiting ones.
>    New Horizons is in a region of space known as the Kuiper Belt, which is believed to be rich in fragments of the Solar System’s formation known as small bodies. Despite large numbers of these objects, finding them is a challenge because they are tiny and spread out over large distances.
>    “We are using the Subaru Telescope because it is the best in the world for our search purposes. This is due to its unique combination of telescope size – one of the very largest anywhere – and Hyper Suprime-Cam’s (HSC) wide field of view, which can discover many Kuiper Belt objects at once,” Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, said in a statement.
>    The area being studied by Subaru’s HSC is equivalent to 18 full moons in the sky. Astronomers estimate that hundreds of new Kuiper Belt objects will be discovered in this way and about 50 will be observable with New Horizons.
>    Kuiper Belt objects from Subaru’s point of view will appear fully illuminated by sunlight. From New Horizons' perspective, it will be only partly illuminated as it is much closer to these objects than Earth. This difference will provide researchers with important data about these cosmic fragments.
>    “The search area is within the Milky Way, and thus there are many nearby stars including bright ones, which make the observations even more difficult. The observation team is doing its best to take high-quality data by utilizing the unique capabilities of the Subaru Telescope, and to investigate the origin of the Solar System together with New Horizons,” added Dr Tsuyoshi Terai, a core member of the observation team and a support astronomer for the Subaru Telescope in charge of HSC.
>    It is certainly possible that one of the newly discovered objects is in the right orbit for a future rendezvous with New Horizons. For example, Arrokoth was discovered in 2014, 12 years after the spacecraft was launched.
Even without another flyby, New Horizons continues to provide insight beyond its core mission of studying Pluto. Just last month, it was used to perform the furthest parallax experiment yet.
> The above article is from IFLScience! by Alfredo Carpineti.

> Helicopter_Still_Image-web.jpg
> Name  Ingenuity
> Main Job > A technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars. The helicopter will ride to Mars attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover.
> Launch Window> July 30 - Aug. 15, 2020
> Launch Location> Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
> Landing> Feb. 18, 2021
> Landing Site> Jezero Crater, Mars
> Length of Mission> One or more flights within 30 days
>> Key Objectives
> • Prove powered flight in the thin atmosphere of Mars. The Red Planet has lower gravity (about one- third that of Earth) but its atmosphere is just 1% as thick, making it much harder to generate lift.
> • Demonstrate miniaturized flying technology. That requires shrinking down onboard computers, electronics and other parts so that the helicopter is light enough to take off.
> • Operate autonomously. Ingenuity will use solar power to charge its batteries and rely on internal heaters to maintain operational temperatures during the cold Martian nights. After receiving commands from Earth relayed through the rover, each test flight is performed without real-time input from Mars Helicopter mission controllers.
>> Dimensions
> • Height: about 19 inches (0.49 meters)
> • Rotor system span: about 4 feet (1.2 meters)
>> Key Features
> • Weighs 4 pounds (1.8 kg)
> • Solar-powered and recharges on its own
> • Wireless communication system
> • Counter-rotating blades spin about 2,400 rpm
> • Equipped with computers, navigation sensors, and
> two cameras (one color and one black-and-white)

> Program Management
> The Mars 2020 Project and Mars Helicopter Technology Demonstration are managed for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of Caltech in Southern California.
> At NASA Headquarters, David Lavery is the program executive for the Mars Helicopter. At JPL, MiMi Aung is the Mars Helicopter project manager and J. (Bob) Balaram is chief engineer.
> For more information about the Mars Helicopter and NASA’s Mars Exploration Program,
> visit: mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter

Jurgen & all!
Please click on attached file to download the radio program, that I removed the commercials from.  Here is what JerryW gave as suggested topics for the show:
On 7/12/2020 12:01 AM, Jerry wrote:
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> Monday, July 13
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> If you’ve got a clear view to the south, try finding M24, also known as the Sagittarius Star Cloud, near the plane of the Milky Way tonight. It’s located just above the bow of Sagittarius the Archer and covers about 1.5°. Discovered in 1764, this gauzy grouping of stars is visible to the naked eye under good conditions, with detail more easily made out using binoculars or a small telescope. Despite its name, the Star Cloud is not actually a cloud, a galaxy, a nebula, or even a star cluster — it’s really a gap in the dark, dusty plane of the Milky Way where there is simply less dust present, letting us see all the way to the distant Sagittarius spiral arm. Imagers will likely spot the red-hued emission nebula IC 1284, which lies nearby, in wider shots.
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> Tuesday, July 14
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> Jupiter reaches opposition at 4 A.M. EDT. At that time, the gas giant will sit 385 million miles (619 million km) from Earth and will appear nearly overhead at midnight. You can catch it this morning in the southwestern sky, blazing at magnitude –2.8 in the constellation Sagittarius. Its disk spans 48" and at the time of opposition, all four of its Galilean moons will be on display. But act fast — by 4:17 A.M. EDT, Europa will disappear behind the planet’s western limb. It won’t reappear before sunrise.
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>    6.8° east of Jupiter is magnitude 0.1 Saturn, on its way to its own opposition early next week. Its disk currently spans 18" and its rings stretch nearly 42" east-west. The nearly 3,000-mile-wide (4,800 km) Cassini Division is on full display.
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>    The Moon passes 4° south of Uranus at 8 A.M. EDT. You can catch the magnitude 5.8 ice giant easily with binoculars or a small scope in the predawn hours. It currently lies in Aries, roughly halfway along an invisible line drawn between the bright stars Hamal and Menkar. An hour before sunrise, Earth’s satellite has already approached to within 10.8° of the planet, lying directly east of the ice giant.
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>    Today also marks the 55th anniversary of Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars — the first successful Red Planet flyby ever achieved. It is the 5th anniversary of New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto, also the first of its kind.
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>    Pluto reaches opposition tomorrow afternoon, so keep scrolling to find out how to observe it.
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> Wednesday, July 15
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> Pluto reaches opposition at 3 P.M. EDT. The tiny world shines at magnitude 14.3 and is 3.07 billion miles (4.95 billion km) from Earth. Nestled close to Jupiter and Saturn in the sky, Pluto is visible all night, with the best viewing later in the evening and early into tomorrow morning, when it’s highest above the horizon.
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>    To find it, center bright Jupiter in your scope — you can’t miss it. Pluto is about 1.8° east-southeast of the gas giant, with a disk less than an arcsecond across. If you can spot it visually, it will simply appear as a dim, dull “star.” Imaging through larger scopes with even a simple digital camera should help reveal it.
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>    The New Horizons flyby, now five years ago, revolutionized our understanding of the dwarf planet. Although the spacecraft’s brief visit is long over, its data is still revealing new details, including the possibility that Pluto formed “hot” through collisions, rather than through “cold” material slowly building up over time in the outer solar system.
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> Thursday, July 16
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> C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) should now be readily visible in the evening sky, soaring nearly 15° high in the northwest an hour after sunset. It will remain well above the horizon for those at northern latitudes for the next few hours. To get the best seeing, or atmospheric steadiness — which diminishes toward the horizon — you’ll want to observe as soon as darkness begins to fall. The comet has left Auriga and is now in Lynx; tonight, it’s about 26° west (below) the easily identifiable cup of the Big Dipper as the asterism sits sideways in the sky with its handle pointing upward early in the evening.
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> Friday, July 17
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> The Moon passes 3° north of Venus at 3 A.M. EDT. Two hours later, most observers should be able to catch the pair about 10° above the horizon, with Venus hanging between and just below our Moon and the bright star Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull. The waning Moon is a mere 12-percent-lit crescent; Venus has it slightly beat, now a 33-percent-lit crescent. Just northwest of the planet is the loose open Hyades star cluster, which spans roughly 5.5°.
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>    Today also marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz link-up in Earth orbit, the first international space mission. Three American astronauts aboard an Apollo capsule and two Soviet cosmonauts in a Soyuz spacecraft launched hours apart from the U.S. and Kazakhstan on July 15, 1975. Two days later, on the 17th, the craft rendezvoused; the spacecraft hard docked at 12:12 P.M. EDT and about three hours later, at 3:17 P.M. EDT, the crews met.
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> SpaceX to launch unmanned mining probe onto the  asteroid Pysche in 2022. The potential revenue stream of asteroid mining offers SpaceX another financial pipeline that may potentially fund scientific research outside of core, publicly viewed operations. Revenue from space mining operations could quickly surpass the high revenue projections of Starlink. Collectively, it’s all about operational independence (to the extent possible).
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>    ASTEROID experts at NASA have begun building a spaceship to explore the metal-rich Asteroid Psyche, potentially worth more than $10,000 quadrillion.
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>    There are so many valuable metals buried within the asteroid, it could make every single person on Earth a billionaire if it were returned to the planet. US-based space agency NASA has started building the unmanned probe that will fly to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, launching on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in August 2022.
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> This month a cosmic visitor is gracing the skies. A comet swept past the sun on July 3, and it has since become visible to the naked eye. The rare opportunity to glimpse the chunk of ancient ice from the outer solar system should continue next week, when astronomers hope it will become even brighter.
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>    Scientists using the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope first spotted the comet as it hurtled toward the sun on March 27. Informally dubbed NEOWISE after the telescope but officially labeled C/2020 F3, the comet gradually brightened as sunlight and solar wind caused it to release gases and form a tail. In early June it reached the far side of the sun, as seen from Earth. The resulting glare prevented astronomers from observing the comet for several weeks. By late June, however, it swam back into the optics of another space telescope, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Its fate was still unclear, however: Would Comet NEOWISE brighten or fade?
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>    On July 3 observers watched closely as the comet began the most perilous part of its journey: its nearest approach to the sun, which brought it within 44 million kilometers of our star. The intense light and heat from such close proximity tends to make comets disintegrate and disappear from the night sky. Earlier this year, such breakups befell two other comets, ATLAS and SWAN, that astronomers had hoped would light up Earth’s skies. But NEOWISE survived and emerged brighter than before to dazzle stargazers—provided they know where to look. Now, for the next few days at least, residents of the Northern Hemisphere can greet the passing visitor at dawn.
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>    “For many people in the Northern Hemisphere, especially if you’re closer to the midlatitudes, [the comet] should be visible an hour before sunrise, very low in the northeastern sky,” says Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn, a meteorologist and astrophotographer who captured an image of Comet NEOWISE over Toronto. “Right now it’s located in the constellation Auriga.” She recommends finding the comet’s exact spot using specialized smartphone apps with interactive maps of the constellations. Although already visible to the naked eye, the object is still faint, and binoculars would offer a better view.
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>    Starting around July 12, Comet NEOWISE will be visible in the evening as well, Lecky Hepburn says. About an hour after sunset, it will appear near the northwestern horizon. As the month progresses, it will rise higher in the sky, moving from the constellation Lynx toward the Big Dipper. On July 22 the comet will reach its closest point to Earth—a distance of 103 million kilometers—before continuing its cosmic flight. Whether it will still be visible to unaided eyes by then is uncertain, however.
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>    ‘Comets are like cats,” says Franck Marchis, an astronomer at the SETI Institute. “They are unpredictable.” If Comet NEOWISE’s outgassing exhausts its reserves of icy material, its bright tail could dissipate, effectively removing the object from view. On the other extreme, ongoing heating from the sun could cause the comet to disintegrate in a bright outburst, potentially resulting in a highly visible “great comet” of historic significance. This possibility would be “a spectacular event and a great show for the earthlings,” Marchis says. But “personally, I recommend walking up early and going to see it now, while we know it’s here.”
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>    After this encounter, astronomers expect Comet NEOWISE to bid farewell for quite some time. Its long, looping orbit around our star will next bring it back to Earth’s vicinity some 6,800 years from now.
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> July is the month of Mars.
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> Three missions are poised to launch toward the Red Planet this month, including NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and cache samples for future return to Earth.
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>    The action will start next week, if all goes according to plan. The United Arab Emirates' (UAE) first-ever interplanetary effort, the Hope Mars mission, also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, is scheduled to launch on July 14.
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>    The Hope orbiter will reach Mars in early 2021, then use three science instruments to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, weather and climate from above. The probe's observations should help researchers better understand Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, desert planet we know today, mission team members have said. That transition was driven by the stripping of Mars' once-thick atmosphere by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun.
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>    The Hope spacecraft was built by the UAE's Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University and the University of California Berkeley. And the project is breaking ground for more than just the UAE: Hope is the first planetary science mission led by an Arab-Islamic nation.
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>    China will follow with a landmark launch of its own a little more than a week after Hope takes flight. On July 23, China's first-ever fully homegrown Mars mission, known as Tianwen-1, is scheduled to lift off atop a Long March 5 rocket. (China put a piggyback orbiter called Yinghuo-1 aboard Russia's Mars mission Fobos-Grunt, which got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its November 2011 launch.)
>
>    Tianwen-1 is an ambitious project that consists of an orbiter, a lander and a 530-lb. (240 kilograms) rover that's the size of a small golf cart. Chinese officials have remained characteristically tight-lipped about the mission — they still haven't publicly announced a final landing site for the lander/rover pair, for example — but these robots' scientific gear suggests that Tianwen-1 will conduct a broad reconnaissance of the Martian environment.
>
>    The orbiter sports six instruments, including a high-resolution camera, a magnetometer and a mineral spectrometer, which will allow mission team members to determine the composition of surface rocks. The rover also has six instruments, including a weather station, a magnetic field detector and a ground-penetrating radar, which could spot subsurface water ice down to a depth of about 330 feet (100 meters).
>
>    If Tianwen-1 is successful, China will become just the third nation, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to land a spacecraft on Mars. And that epic touchdown may lead the way to even bigger things in the near future: Chinese space officials have voiced a desire to mount a Mars sample-return mission, which could perhaps launch as early as 2030.
>
>    The United States and Europe also plan to bring pristine Red Planet material to Earth, and that project will really get up and running with Perseverance's launch. The 2,315-lb. (1,050 kg) rover, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30 and land inside Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
>
>    Perseverance will use its seven onboard instruments to characterize the geology of Jezero and search for signs of ancient Mars life in the rocks of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago.
>
>    The six-wheeled robot will also collect and cache several dozen samples from particularly promising study sites. This material will be recovered and brought to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031, in a campaign conducted by NASA and the European Space Agency. Scientists in labs around the world will then scrutinize the Mars material in great detail, looking for signs of life and clues about the planet's evolutionary history.
>
>    Mars 2020 also aims to lay groundwork for crewed missions to the Red Planet, the first of which NASA wants to launch in the 2030s. For instance, like the Tianwen-1 rover, Perseverance is outfitted with ice-hunting ground-penetrating radar. And another of the NASA rover's instruments, the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide by volume. ("ISRU" stands for "in situ resource utilization." NASA is big on acronyms, in case you hadn't noticed.)
>
>    MOXIE isn't Mars 2020's only technology demonstration. A 4-lb. (1.8 kg) helicopter called Ingenuity will journey to the Red Planet on Perseverance's belly. After touchdown, Ingenuity will drop free and make a few short test flights in the Martian sky — the first-ever aerial exploration of a world beyond Earth.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad

Download and play the attached unedited audio file for our radio show from 858am to 10am Monday, June 22, 2020

On 6/20/2020 10:35 PM, Jerry wrote:
> Folks
> Here’s Mondays suggested topics. The bottom two are carried over from two weeks ago. We never got to them.
> See you Monday, Jerry
>
> MONDAY, JUNE 22
> ■ In bright twilight look for the slim crescent Moon, less then two days old, low in the afterglow of sunset. It's lower left of Pollux and Castor. Bring binoculars.
> TUESDAY, JUNE 23
> ■ The central stars of the constellation Lyra, forming a small triangle and parallelogram, dangle to the lower right from bright Vega high in the east. The two brightest stars of the pattern, after Vega, are the two forming the bottom of the parallelogram: Beta and Gamma Lyrae, or Sheliak and Sulafat. They're currently lined up vertically. Beta is the one on top.
> Beta Lyrae is an eclipsing binary star. Compare it to Gamma whenever you look up at Lyra. Normally Beta is only a trace dimmer than Gamma. Sooner or later, you'll probably catch Beta when it is definitely fainter than usual.
> One of the best globular clusters, M13, lies half way between Beta and Gamma. It is spectacular in even a small telescope.
> WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24
> ■ Look left of the Moon for Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation of Leo, in late twilight.
> THURSDAY, JUNE 25
> ■ Now spot Regulus to the Moon's lower right.
> ■ As evening grows late, even the lowest star of the big Summer Triangle shines fairly high in the east-southeast. That's Altair, a good three or four fists at arm's length below or lower right of Vega.
> Look left or lower left of Altair, by hardly more than one fist, for the compact little constellation Delphinus, the Dolphin.
> Next, look for Jupiter and Saturn very low three fists to Altair's lower right.
> FRIDAY, JUNE 26
> ■ Every morning now, Venus is getting a little higher and easier to spot in the east-northeast as dawn brightens. It is a thin crescent easily seen in binoculars or a small telescope.
> SATURDAY, JUNE 27
> ■ First-quarter Moon tonight and tomorrow. (The Moon is exactly first-quarter at 4:16 a.m. Sunday morning EDT.) On Saturday evening for North America, the Moon shines in the hind feet of the Leo stick figure, about 8° under Leo's 2nd-magnitude tail-tip star, Denebola.
> Denebola forms an almost perfectly equilateral triangle with brighter Spica off to its left and Arcturus, brighter still, above them. All three sides of the triangle are close to 35° long (35.3°, 35.1°, and 32.8°). This has been called the Spring Triangle, a name that certainly fits.
>
> THIS WEEK'S PLANET ROUNDUP
> Mercury is lost in the sunset.
> Venus is low in the dawn; look for it just above the east-northeast horizon. Look early enough before dawn grows bright, and you may be able to catch the Pleiades 9° above it. Binoculars help. Venus is on its way up to a fine showing as the bright Morning Star through summer and fall.
> Mars rises in the east around 1 a.m. daylight saving time, shining bright orange (magnitude –0.4) at the Aquarius-Pisces border. Watch for it to clear the horizon lower right of the Great Square of Pegasus. By the first light of dawn, Mars shines high and prominent in the southeast.
> In a telescope Mars has grown to 11 arcseconds in apparent diameter; we're approaching it as Earth speeds along in our faster orbit around the Sun. Mars is as gibbous as it gets, 84% sunlit. Look for the bright South Polar cap and for subtler dark surface markings.
> Mars will appear fully twice this diameter when it passes closest by Earth around opposition in the first half of October.
> Jupiter and Saturn (magnitudes –2.7, and +0.3, respectively) now rise around the end of twilight: Jupiter first, then dimmer Saturn following about 20 minutes behind, lower left of Jupiter. They're 5½° apart. Farther to Jupiter's right, the Sagittarius Teapot rests upright.
> The two giant planets shine at their highest and telescopic best around 2 or 3 a.m. daylight-saving time. They straddle the border of Sagittarius and Capricornus. Jupiter will reach opposition on the night of July 13th, Saturn on July 20th.
> Uranus (magnitude 5.8, in Aries) is very low in the east just before dawn.
> Neptune (magnitude 7.9, in Aquarius) is well up in the southeast before dawn begins, in the vicinity of Mars.
>
>
> Earth like planet around a Sun like star.
> By Katy Pallister   > 05 JUN 2020, 15:30
> In amongst archived data from the Kepler mission, a team of German and American researchers has identified an Earth-like planetary candidate, KOI-456.04, situated within its host star’s habitable zone. What sets this discovery apart from other known Earth-like exoplanets is that its star, Kepler-160, bears a striking resemblance to our Sun. Although the planet’s presence is yet to be confirmed, this exoplanet-star pairing could be one of the closest matches to the Earth-Sun system that we’ve found so far.
> “KOI-456.01 is relatively large compared to many other planets that are considered potentially habitable,” Dr René Heller of Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, and lead author of the research, said in a statement. “But it’s the combination of this less-than-double the size of the Earth planet and its solar type host star that make it so special and familiar.”
> Located over 3,000 light-years away from Earth, the star Kepler-160 is around 1.1 times the size of the Sun and has a surface temperature of 5200˚C, only 300 degrees less than Sun. The star is already known to have two exoplanets – Kepler-160 b, a rocky super-Earth, and Kepler-160 c, a Neptune-like gas giant – but the duo’s orbits are very close to the star, and are thought to be too hot to be habitable. Yet the possibility of a third planet, hinted at by variations in Kepler-160 c’s orbital period, tempted astronomers to take another look at the planetary system.
> Both previous planets were discovered by searching for periodic dips in Kepler-160’s brightness that indicates a transiting object. However, these temporary dimmings are hard to detect from smaller exoplanets, therefore Heller and his team created a new search algorithm that could more accurately pinpoint the presence of these planets.
> Lo and behold their improved approach found KOI-456.04. With an incredibly similar orbital period to Earth of 378 days, KOI-456.04 lies at a distance from Kepler-160 conducive to the existence of liquid water. But further analysis showed that this was not the culprit of Kepler-160 c’s distortions. There was in fact another non-transiting planet that was responsible, Kepler-160 d.
> “Our analysis suggests that Kepler-160 is orbited not by two but by a total of four planets,” Heller said.
> As described in their paper, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, indirectly confirmed Kepler-160 d has a mass between 1 and 100 Earth masses, and an orbital period from 7 to 50 days. However, this planet has fallen into the shadows of the more intriguing combination of the Earth-like KOI-456.04 orbiting within the habitable zone of the Sun-like Kepler-160.
> Most Sun-like stars discovered by Kepler have a Neptune-sized planet in a much closer orbit, too hot to be habitable (like Kepler-160 c). On the flip-side other Earth-sized planets that have been found in a star’s habitable zone, have tended to have red dwarfs as hosts – small, faint stars with a low surface temperature. These stars also differ from the Sun, in that they emit mostly infra-red radiation, rather than the visible light that we receive from the Sun. For this reason, amongst many others, the habitability of planets around red dwarfs is heavily debated.
> However, these concerns are not shared for Kepler-160, as not only does it radiate visible light, but it does so at a luminosity similar to the Sun. Meaning that newly found KOI-456.04 receives about 93 percent of the amount of sunlight that we experience on Earth. The researchers suggest that if KOI-456.04 were to have an inert atmosphere with a mild Earth-like greenhouse effect its surface temperature would be around 5˚C, roughly 10˚C less than Earth’s average temperature.
> Boasting an 85 percent chance of planetary possibility, KOI-456.04 has not yet reached the 99 percent benchmark needed for full confirmation. Astronomers suspect that they may need to wait for future space missions, such as ESA’s PLATO spacecraft before they get complete validation.
>
>
> Mars may have once had a giant ring that eventually got smooshed to form one of its oddly-shaped moons, new research suggests.
> Mars has two small, lumpy moons, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos orbits closer to the Red Planet and follows the line of Mars' equator. Deimos orbits farther away, along an orbit that's tilted by 2 degrees off the plane of the Martian equator. The wonky orbit adds evidence to the idea that Phobos may once have been a giant ring that eventually coalesced into its present shape.In 2017, a team of researchers argued in the journal Nature Geoscience that the Martian moons go through cycles — ripped apart into thin rings by the planet's gravity, then eventually forming moons again. In each cycle, the moon formed from the ring is smaller than its former self, with bits of the rings falling out of orbit and drifting out into space. Over billions of years, generations of moons would have gone through these cycles of ring-moon-ring, scientists suspect.
> Now, in a new paper published June 1 to the arXiv database,which has not yet been peer-reviewed, an team of researchers (some who were involved in the Nature Geoscience paper) showed that an ancient Martian moon, 20 times the size of Phobos, could have jostled Deimos into its current orbit.
> “The fact that Deimos' orbit is not exactly in plane with Mars' equator was considered unimportant, and nobody cared to try to explain it," lead author Matija Ćuk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a statement. "But once we had a big new idea and we looked at it with new eyes, Deimos' orbital tilt revealed its big secret."
> Two moons that follow similar paths around a planet can end up in a situation called "orbital resonance" where one bobs up and down around the other's orbit. As Live Science has previously reported, two moons of Neptune are currently resonating with each other like this.
> Here's what the scientists think happened in this ring-moon cycle to explain the current Mars setup: Deimos formed billions of years ago, and since it has sort of just been overlooking the dynamic ring-moon party. Over that same time, a giant ring encircling Mars got squished into a moon (or moons), dispersed back into a ring and then into a moon again, and so on. During one of these iterations, one of the moons (the giant mystery moon) knocked Deimos into its current ring, and then just like that this mystery moon vanished into its ring form. Then, a remnant of that ring, the scientists suspect, formed Phobos, which is the younger of the two Martian satellites.
> In order for this theory to work, the long-lost moon that formed out of a Martian ring would have needed to start moving away from Mars and into a resonance with Deimos that would have produced the more distant moon's current, angled orbit.
> Eventually, part of the ring-moon cycle will repeat again. The younger moon Phobos is losing altitude over Mars, and researchers expect that it will eventually break up and form a disintegrating ring around the planet.
> That will leave little Deimos orbiting alone, with only its lopsided orbit as a record of what else used to exist around Mars.
>

Download the attached file and listen to about 46min of the program, mostly w/o commercials

[Folks, this looks like a great deal with a clean scope and lots of useful accessories!  Aim that wedge at Polaris and you will be able to track the stars accurately.  Not sure why the photos are sideways, sorry!  TomT]

January 1, 2020
Here is the complete description and photos as you requested. This would need to be for local sale also due to shipping costs. (I would be willing to meet up anywhere from Goleta to Carpinteria if that helps.)

General Description
Meade 8" (203.2 mm), F/10 FL = 2000 mm Schmidt Cassegrain Model LX50 with 8 X 50 Finder scope, Fork, Wedge, Tripod, Hand Controllers and full set of eyepieces and adapters.

Specifics
Complete, Easy to set-up, and suitable for astrophotography (camera mount not included).
Eyepieces, and accessories included:
Plossl Eyepieces: (1-1/4” diameter) 40mm, 26mm, 20mm, 10mm, 6.3mm
Meade 2X Telenegative amplifier, air-spaced triplet (2X Barlow), 1.25" eyepiece holder, 2” eyepiece adapter, 2" to 1.25" eyepiece adapter, 90 degree and 45 degree prism star diagonals and Meade series 4000 f/6.3 Focal Reducer, one manual two-axis hand controller and one Meade Magellan II computer/corrector hand controller, Orion Carrying case to hold all eyepieces and accessories.

I'd like a price of $600 (Cash sale).

People from the club are welcome to respond directly to me at my email scottorlosky@yahoo.com.  Unlike Craig's list - amateur astronomers are a pretty trustworthy group.
Happy New Year.
Kind regards,
Scott Orlosky

Sign-ups for the 2019 SBAU Holiday Dinner at Harry's Plaza Cafe [see flyer here:
http://www.sbau.org/191107%202019%20SBAU%20Holiday%20Dinner%20Party%20Wed%20Dec%2011%20$30%20for%20$45%20app-buffet-dessert%20no%20drinks%201pg.pdf

Thanks to the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit Officers and Appointees, plus the many volunteers bringing in refreshments and participating at the many telescope outreaches and events.  Thanks to those also officially recognized by the Museum of Natural History by becoming Verified Volunteers.  Thanks to the Museum for providing the facilities, the Gladwin Planetarium and Farrand Hall, and for their staff's help.

SBAU Holiday Dinner Party –2019 Wednesday December 11
Harry’s Plaza Café-Appetizers at 6 pm: Sliders, Santa Barbara Rolls, Coconut Chicken Skewers, Spicy Dill Meat Balls, Fried Calamari and Potato Skins
Buffet Dinner at 6:30 pm: Tri-tip Roast, Grilled Chicken, White Fish Picatta, Fresh Vegetables, Baked Potatoes, and House Salad
Dessert: Cheesecake or Mini Sundae
Beverages:  Purchase your own –Sodas are $4

Wednesday December 11, 2019
Harry’s Plaza Café, In the Ranchero Room
3313-B State St. in the Loreto Shopping Center near Gelson’s

Appetizers at 6 pm; Buffet Dinner at 6:30 pm; Dessert at 730pm. 
Cost is $30 (for a $45 meal), however, "Purchase your own drinks (soft, beer, wine, hard)"
$300 deposit to reserve room made by Totton's; Club reimbursed via Treasurer ColinT

•Contact Tom and Cez to Sign up: 805-562-8795 or RefreshCoord@cox.net
CHECKS--MAKE OUT TO SBMNH (note: for 2019 SBAU Holiday Dinner)
SEND TO: Tom Totton, 7242 Del Norte Drive, Goleta, CA 93117

NAME                                       #     $        PAID?                                             (ENTREE PREFERENCE)               
Martin/JanetMeza                    2     60     chk#1101-CT-Museum did process
PeggyO'Rork                            1     30      chk #1101-as above
ArtHarris                                  1     30      cash-TT
Pres. Jerry/PatWilson               2     60     cash-TT
Chuck/PatMcPartlin                  2     60      cash-TT
Tom/CezanneTotton                 2     60      cash-TT
EdgarOcampo                           1     30      chk#2648-TT
VP. BaronRonHerron                1      30     cash-TT
TessaFlanagan/DuffKennedy   2      60     cash-12/6-CT
Treas. ColinTaylor/LindaLiker   2      60     chk#8977-TT
Tim & KarenCrawford               2      60     cash-11/15-TT
SecretaryCarol + 1 Moore        2      60     chk#575-11/15-TT from Charles
Farshad/RomaBarman              2      60     chk#2236 12/6-TT                                 (fish)
KenPfeiffer/LisaOsborn            2      60     chk#423 11/19-TT
KarlBlasius/ElisaJorquez          2      60      chk#151 11/19-TT
John/SueWest                          2      75      chk#4971 11/21-TT
BrandiAckerman                        1      30      cash-12/6-TT
JoeDoyle/ConiEdick                    2      60      chk#5199 11/21-TT
SuzanneSpillman                      1      30      chk#2171 12/2-TT
Bob/ChristaBrown                    2       60      chk#4331 12/4-TT
Bruce/BonnieMurdock               2      60       chk#4570 12/6-TT
SteveRosenburg                       1      30       chk#2709 12/6-TT

                                     Total#  37 as of 12/11/2019

Thinning out my astro stabe:

Four Celestron Plossl Eyepieces. In very very good shape. $50.00

17mm
13mm
10mm
4mm
With caps
http://dosgatos.com/au/equipment/celespls.jpg

Celestron Shorty Barlow. $15.00
http://dosgatos.com/au/equipment/shortybarlow.jpg

contact Tony Galvan,     2gatos@dosgatos.com

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