Astronomy Meeting tonight at HFCC for FAAC club and visitors

Well it's about that time of the month 3rd Thursday for the FAAC Astronomy Club meeting at HFCC in Dearborn Michigan.  

It is held in the conference center near the UAW offices in the front auditorium area.  We are actually in the smaller conference room, not the larger auditorium.  People who show up for that meeting can park in the staff parking lot near the front conference center and enter in through the back door.  Just tell the guard if the gate is closed that your visiting and attending the Astronomy Club meeting.  I can't recall the main topic of this months meeting and will post this before I spend time looking it up.  It was some astronomy subject that should prove to be interesting to astronomers.  Usually the meeting has two subjects.  They have a longer subject and a shorter tech talk subject.  They also have introductions and members often comment on what they observed or did that involved astronomy briefly at the beginning of the meeting.   There is also usually Pizza and Pop beverages and a donation box which members will often put some donation, which often offsets the cost of the pizza with a little extra money for the purpose of furthering astronomy through a scholarship donation or equipment fund for the club. 

Been spending a little bit of time editing video and reading about computer editing programs for video and the Macintosh today.


Comet PanStarrs will be showing up next month and hopefully will provide interesting views after the middle of the month of March.  I plan on doing some observing of the comet, but much of this will likely be in other locations which we should announce.  This for low horizon viewing.  It will actually be visible before sunset and also before the sun rises later in the month of March, due to it's position in the sky (north of the sun later in the month).  Objects north of the sun toward the north pole in certain positions (distances from the sun) will become more "circumpolar" in their nature, that is to say they are more visible.  Objects near the celestial north pole are always visible from northern latitudes.  Like the north star.  They would be always visible even in the daylight if the sun wasn't making the sky so bright.   If we look up in the morning we can see the north star before the sun rises.  If we look up at night we can see the north star after the sun sets.  It's always visible due to the rotation of the earth and the way the earth is pointed at it for those of us high enough above the equator.  Objects slightly north of the sun but close to the sun's position, may rise slightly before the sun and set slightly after the sun.  Think of it as a long string stretching down from the north star with the sun swinging fixed on that string, this is a very basic example.  If a knot was up on the string some distance from the sun and between the north star and the sun, that knot would be visible before the sun swung up into view and after the sun swung down below the horizon.  The closer the knot would be toward the north star, the earlier and later we'd see it in front of or behind the sun.  If the knot or in our case a comet was close enough to the north star above a certain angle it might remain in the sky visible during the entire night.   For a comet to glow it needs to reflect sunlight.  As comet Panstarrs L4 moves away from the sun it will get dimmer and dimmer and it will start to move toward a path that takes it closer to the north star.   But it will become so dim only large telescopes with long exposure photographs will be able to see it.  When it's visible it will be closer to the sun and hopefully we'll see a nice long tail and coma display.   This comet has likely been traveling from the Ort cloud for millions of years and it will take 110,000 years for it to return to that cloud after it passes the sun.  It's orbit will be such that it will pass the sun and then travel out never to return.




 DONATED COMPUTER to be setup.

Tim Campbell donated a Mac Mini to the school system for HJRO.  The plan is to have it run Windows and our current software and also a Macintosh OSX operating system.  This should allow streaming of video from the observatory for certain projects, mostly school related.

We may have this computer setup fairly soon at HJRO.  We'll have to go through all the setup issues over time and probably will spend a few days out there setting up and testing the system.  I'm not sure when the setup will happen.  At first, they will be installing VM ware on a donated Mac Mini.  More details on that computer later in a different post.