RAC met on January 29, 2016. There were about 47 members and guests in attendence beginning at 7pm with a talk, “Unmasking Europa” by Dr. Rick Greenberg. Many thanks Dr. Greenberg for agreeing to share his knowledge of this Jovian moon with us. After the meeting, a short business meeting was held. Phyllis Lang reported club finances in proxy for Steve Izzo, club treasurer. About 40% of the 2015 club members have paid dues for 2016. Members have another…
RAC enjoyed a special pre-Astronomy Days presentation on Friday, January 29 by Professor Richard Greenberg entitled “Unmasking Europa: the Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon”. Professor Greenberg is a Professor Emeritus of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. He discussed his research and that of others in regard to the Jovian moon Europa. Dr. Greenberg’s research team derived the thin-ice model of Europa which describes an active icy crust that covers a liquid saline water ocean of about…
Please join us for a special meeting Friday, Jan 29 at 7pm for “Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon” by Dr. Richard Greenberg. The meeting is in the 4th floor Environmental Conference Center in the Nature Research Center at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.
CALENDAR SYNC WITH GOOGLE These quick instructions will allow you to add events from the RAC calendar to Google Calendars. Any calendar app which accepts .ics files (which is the gold standard) should work, just the steps will be different. On your computer, open Google Calendar. On the left side, find “Other calendars” and click the down arrow . Select Add by URL. Enter ‘http://raleighastro.org/events.ics’ in the field provided. Click Add calendar. The calendar will appear on the left side…
The notification bar is used to show timely information at the top of the page for members (and optionally) the general public. In order to change this, navigate to the WPFront->Notifcation Bar menu entry. Te settings page contains all the field needed to configure the bar. The top part of the screen is displayed below: In this part of the screen, you should not make edits. Just insure that the Enabled box is checked. It is also highly recommended that…
There is not much user maintenance required on the RAC site. This post describes common tasks for officers in managing users. User List The User menu on the site dashboard allows you to view the current user listing for that site. You can access it via the Users or Users->All Users menu listing. If there are any actions needed you will see a red circle with the number indicating the outstanding number of actions needed (see above). Electronic Payment User Process…
Officers and Admins can create a user account manually, as opposed to requiring a user to go through the registration process. In order to create a user manually, go to the Users->Add New menu entry: Once you click this, you will see the new user screen: At a minimum the following fields need to be set. Username – must be unique on the site Email Role – See the Managing Users help post for more information on roles Optionally, you can set…
Events (calendar entries) are created separately than pages and posts. In order to mange the events, select the Events menu on the site dashboard. The default action is to list the current future events list. Editing an Existing Event In order to make changes to an event, click the event on the list to get the event editing screen. alternative, you can create a new event by clicking Add New. On this screen, you can change the event particulars: Title…
All member can create posts for the front page/site through the backend dashboard. In addition, officers and committee members can create and edit pages and other people’s posts. Any post not created by an officer or committee member must be approved by an officer or administrator before it is made public. Officers are notified via email when a member post is submitted for approval. For editing pages, the process is similar for posts, so the post process is shown below.…
The December 2015 meeting of the Raleigh Astronomy Club featured Dr. Nicholas Law, a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UNC Chapel Hill. Dr. Law gave an excellent talk on a state of the art telescope called Evryscope. This telescope will look at larger areas of the the night sky and be invaluable for for Exoplanet research.
Treasurer’s report 4 new members this month Financials were presented to the club. Telescope Loaner Program Many thanks to John Sadler for his efforts to go through the telescope loaner pool, clean out the storage shed, and revitalize the program. The blue Coulter 10.1″ dob is being offered up for sale via a silent auction. Email John if you would like to bid on the telescope. He will tell you if you are the high bidder or not. One bid…
<strong>Telescope Loaner Program</strong> Telescope loaner program continues to be updated. John S. is weeding through good scopes, those in disrepair, and those which might be better used outside the loaner program. He is also putting together “kits” to make the scopes more complete and easier to loan out. The 17″ dob (which was donated to the club a long time ago) was sold to one of Fred’s friends, Michael Searle. This was a difficult decision, but MIchael built a similar…
August 27, 2015 28 members and guests attended the meeting Lecture: Dr. Blondin, professor of physics at NC State, spoke about modeling the gas disk around X-Ray binaries The talk was recorded and available on YouTube.
The October meeting featured a special presentation by RAC member and NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador Ian Hewitt. Ian has been following the progress of the New Horizons mission to Pluto & Charon for several years. He shared some of the science results from the mission so far, some preceding and others following the close flyby of Pluto and Charon on July 14, 2015. Ian recorded the talk and it is available on the RAC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T7UlVB6-Eo
The Fall observing season is here and that means good weather for getting out under the stars. For the early fall sessions, which usually have mild weather and decent conditions, the club was able to observe in August and September 2015, but was clouded out in October. However, two out of three was not bad and members got in some eagerly awaited time under the stars.
