RAC

Gayle Riggsbee from the Charlotte Amateur Astronomers Society was tonight’s speaker.  His topic was “Building the 200 inch Hale Telescope.”  Gayle began his talk with the topic of constructing large telescopes; especially those equatorially mounted using a split ring design.  Today, large telescopes are computer controlled and mounted on altitude-azimuth type mounts.  The Hale 200 inch is the most massive equatorially mounted telescope ever constructed.  He showed some other examples of equatorially mounted split ring scopes. Gayle’s talk initially focused…

The March 25, 2011 RACOBS outdoor meeting was clouded out, so an indoor meeting was held at the Museum.  Doug Lively presented a slide show about beginning astronomy tips to a small group of 13 people.  Doug focused on concepts and ideas to help beginners get a good start in the hobby such as what you can see with the naked eye, what the constellations are, how to observe the sun, moon, and planets, and the types of telescopes in…

Regular meeting Mar. 11, 2011. Tonight’s meeting was titled “Photographing Auroras” by Michel Tournay.  Michel is from the James Bay, Quebec, Canada.  It was a pleasure to listen to his French-Canadian accent during the talk. Initially Michel described the processes that are responsible for creating aurorae on Earth – the solar wind and coronal mass ejections interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field.  He showed an interesting image of the mirror image aurorae that happen at the same time in the…

It was not a huge crowd, Frank W. with his binocular set up, Mike K. with his 8″ Schmidt Cassegrain telescope, new members Greg B. with his 12″ goto dob and Gary S. with one of the club’s 8″ loaner dobs.  Additionally I counted 7 guests.  I may be missing a few folks so my sincerest apologies.  There was not a cloud in the sky and the seeing was not as bad as predicted, however the transparency seemed lower than…

Tonight’s guest speaker was Rod Streeper who is the North America operations manger for Redshift 7.  His talk was “Redshift 7.”  Lucky for us, Rod lives in Shelby NC and was able to drive in for our program.  Rod’s talk began with what is a planetarium program and what does it do.  He covered specific aspects of Redshift 7 such as what catalogs are included, how the graphics work, images included, how to plan an observation session, and how to…

A good crowd of people showed up at Bigwoods for the Club observing session.  By one count, we had 21 people and 12 telescopes.  The weather showed mercy on the group by not being brutally cold as January can be on clear nights.  As usual, there was a good mix of telescopes available.  There were several good size Dobs present, some regular Newtonian scopes, a couple of refractors, and several Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes.  The crowd thinned out a lot by midnight,…

Tonight’s meeting was called to order by Ian Hewitt.  It was the first regular meeting in three months since the November and December meetings were cancelled due to the holidays. Ian introduced tonight’s speaker: Rob Teeter of Teeter’s Telescopes.  Rob’s talk was titled “Teeter and his Telescopes.”  Rob, who lives in New Jersey. told the Club about his career in telescoping building.  Starting in 1998, he has built 72 scopes so far.  His first scope was an 8″ f/6 Newtonian…

Tonight’s talk was “Current Research on the Origin of Dark Matter” by Dr. Michelle Shinn from the Jefferson National Lab in Newport News Virginia. In addition to being a physicist, Dr. Shinn is also an amateur astronomer and member of the Back Bay Astronomers. One of the interesting observations Dr. Shinn talked about tonight was that “regular matter” observed in spiral galaxies would not be enough to make them stable. There must be some kind of other matter present. She…

Regular meeting Sept. 24, 2010 – RAC Club Swap Meet. Tonight was a regular indoor meeting at the museum, but it was a bit unusual as it was a departure from our normal meeting format of a talk and then a business meeting. Tonight was our second and hopefully annual Club swap meet. Members brought equipment that they wished to sell. Other members and guests came hoping to pick up some used bargains. The Club raffled off several items including…