RAC News

The 2013 NC Science Festival started on Friday, April 5th with a “Statewide Star Party,” where groups all over NC held public observing on the same day. After weeks of planning, gloom, and rain (from an unusually cool Spring) we were rewarded with an awesome sky, an excellent Museum program, and enthusiastic crowds for these festive and exciting observing events. In fact, before dark we had lines at each of the telescopes at all the events. We would like to…

In the March 2013 meeting, Dr Juthika Khargharia presented on the techniques to measure the mass of black holes in x-ray binaries developed by Dr. Khargharia.  These results have been accepted by the Astronomical Journal.  This talk covered a lot of ground and it generated many questions.  This was quite a popular meeting.

Over 10 members of the Raleigh Astronomy Club came out to Science Thursday 3/15 at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences to view comet PanSTARRS and some other objects. Over 50 members of the public came out to brave the cold and windy conditions.

The Raleigh Astronomy Club (RAC) partnered with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Time Warner Cable to kick off Thursday Night at the Museum on Febuary 28th. The museum will now be open later into the evening/night on Thursday Nights.  RAC set up 6 telescopes and 1 binocular station outside the museum on the Bicentennial Plaza.  Additionally the club had a table set up inside the Nature Research Center (NRC) near the entrance to provide visitors with more…

This past Saturday, the Raleigh Astronomy Club hosted it’s first Telescope Tune Up Clinc of 2013 at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s Prairie Ridge Ecostation.  It was well attnded despite the cold weather and cloudy skies.  Attendees learned about  telescope basics, alligning finders, collimation, polar alignment and lots of advice that was out of this world. 🙂

RAC hosted a telescope observing session for the public at North Cary Park on Saturday evening, January 19 from 7pm to 9:30. As always, the event was free. Attendance was good for a cold January evening. About 100 or so people of all ages visited the telescopes and asked many questions. RAC members provided 18 telescopes for viewing, from small refractors to reflectors to Schmidt-Cassegrains. Most telescopes provided views of the moon and Jupiter which were great crowd-pleasers. Others showed…

The RACOBS for January 11th was clouded out, rather fogged out!  However about ten or so members showed up for a short presentation of Grazing Lunar Occultations by our own Mark Lang. This was an incredibly interesting presentation about a topic not often discussed in amateur astronomy circles.

Despite the threat of high clouds early and cold temperatures, a small group of observers showed up at our observing site for the Dec. 14 RACOBS.  Surprisingly, the skies were clear up to around 9:30 giving us a couple of good hours of observing.  There were four club members present with telescopes.  Jeff M. had his new, fully automated Meade 8″ SCT, Phyllis and Mark L. used a 14.5″ Dob, and Jim D. used his 14″ Dob.  We had five…

16 RAC members and a few guests gathered to watch and photograph the annual Geminid meteor shower Thursday night/ Friday morning. While everyone pursued different activities, all fought dew, frost and cool temperatures that reached into the upper 20s. The sky conditions were just good enough for imaging and visual observers to have some success. We had no clouds, but transparency was surprisingly mediocre due to significant atmospheric aerosols and high humidity. Transparency improved during the post-midnight hours but never…

We had a nice turn out for RAC’s November 9th RACOBS, approximately 20 or so members and about 8 guests were present at one time or another.  The skies were very clear and the seeing was quite steady.  However dew was a factor later in the observing session.  The last of us packed up and headed home about 1:30am.