RAC

There was a special indoor meeting for the Raleigh Astronomy Club on Friday, January 24,2014. We were fortunate to have Russian Space Policy expert Yuri Karash on the state of the Russian space program. As a former cosmonaut trainee and journalist, he was able to provide a fascinating look at the space program and provide context around public attitudes toward space inside Russia. He is now working with on a super realistic space game/experience. For more details on the Space…

Dr. Patrick Treuthardt, Ph.D. Assistant Director, NRC Astronomy Laboratory was the presenter in the December meeting. His talk was divided into three sections.  The first he gave an overview of the formation and evolution of galaxies.  The second section, he showed examples of different galaxy formation –both the expected and the unexpected.  Lastly, he discussed some of the recent research in the field.  All during the talk, he answered questions that came up.

On Saturday November 9th the Raleigh Astronomy Club hosted a public observing session at North Cary Park.  Despite some thick cloud cover the club proceeded with the event by delaying the start time one hour.  The weather forecasts had estimated the clouds to clear by 9pm but is was closer to 9:45pm until there was a substantial enough amount of clearing, though there were pockets of clearing by 8pm.

The morning of Sunday November 3rd, 2013 saw a rare hybrid solar eclipse. The type of eclipses has features of both an annual and total solar eclipse. Unfortunately, here in North Carolina, the eclipse was already well underway at sunrise and only showed as a partial eclipse. Although the morning dawned quite cool, several groups went to locations in North Raleigh and Cary to view the event. The weather was very clear and with a low horizon, it was a…

The October indoor meeting features Gary Stephenson, Chief Meteorologist for Time Warner’s News 14, speaking on his interest in astronomy and the challenges of communicating astronomy and science related topics to the general public. This was also the first regular meeting held in the new Nature Research Center on the new Thursday schedule. The new venue was really great!

The September observing session lived up to everyone’s expectation with cool, but not cold temperatures and good skies. The Milky Way was clearly visible from Big Woods and made for a very nice site. About 20 members and first time guests attended the event. Mike Keefe and Doug Lively gave the visitors and first time attendees a lot of help and good advice on telescopes. Way to go!! Joe Pedit also shot this image of the southern sky and the…

The September indoor meeting feature and on-line presentation from Tom Field, contributing Editor to Sky & Telescope magazine. Tom, from his home in Seattle, provided a great introduction to affordable spectroscopy for amateur astronomers that was both informative and very entertaining.