RAC

Saturday, June 4th: My 10 PM car count at our Jordan Lake observing site was 11, so at 1-1/2 persons per car we had around 16 or so observers Saturday night. 

Our speaker tonight was Tony Rice who is a NASA Ambassador.  Tony’s topic was “Visions and Voyages for Planetary Science 2013-2022.”  In the title, Tony was talking about NASA’s decadal survey & the plan for the next 10 years.  Tony pointed out that NASA depends on the science community to identify and prioritize projects. The classes of missions are Discovery missions with a budget of $500 million per project, New Frontiers with a budget of $1 billion per project, and…

April 22, 2011 RACOBS.  For the second month in a row, cloudy weather prevented our outdoor observing session.  In addition, since this was Good Friday which is a state holiday, the Museum was closed preventing an indoor meeting.  About a dozen members met at a restaurant in Cameron Village instead.

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…