This month we will again meet at our new winter venue, Spokane County Fire District 9 firehouse, located at 3801 E Farwell Rd in Mead, at 7:00pm. Matt Wallin will be giving a presentation on the rocket engines used in the US manned space program. There will be a bit of history, some physics pertinent to rocket engines, and an overview of the technical engineering, tracing its development from the Mercury Redstone rocket to the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner. Hope to see you there!
Author Archives: Matt Wallin
November Meeting
This month’s general meeting will be held at our new winter venue, the Spokane County Fire District 9 firehouse, located at 3801 E Farwell Rd in Mead. After extensive inquiries by our board, we found many venues to be unaffordable. District 9 is accommodating us gratis, many thanks to District 9, and to SAS Secretary, Ed Gill, for doing much of the legwork and setting up these arrangements. We can expect ample space with a parking situation that will be well plowed this winter. Food and drink, with the exception of water, are prohibited by this venue, however, all who are interested, there are plans for a post-meeting meetup at the Hop Mountain Taproom & Grill, located a couple miles north at 14017 N Newport Hwy. This month’s topic is a bit of a rerun, but hopefully the many new members and those unable to attend the original February presentation at our previous winter venue, Sacred Heart, will find my presentation on “Telescopes, Eyepieces, and Optics” to contain some useful information about choosing equipment and getting the best performance from it.
October Meeting
This month’s General Meeting on October 11th, will be social event, a Star Party, at the “Party Palace” located at 8616 N Lehman Road, just north of Bigelow Gulch Road. The Potluck dinner will begin at the usual time 6:30pm, our burgermaster is unfortunately unable to attend this month, the main course will be Pizza for this meeting, please bring sides and deserts! With a cooperative sky, there is a potential for Aurora viewing and photography. For members who would like help and guidance with their telescope, this meeting will be a great opportunity to receive advice from experienced astronomers. The club projector will be set up inside, any imagers who would like to share their work with fellow club members in an informal setting are welcome to commandeer the projector. This will be the final meeting at this location for this year. The club continues the search for its winter venue, several members have investigated options and made suggestions, many thanks for those efforts. Hope to see you at the Party Palace for some food, conversation, and some group observing.
July Meeting
We will be meeting this month on our usual day, the second Friday, July 12th, at the Party Palace/Bigelow Gulch location, general meeting to start at 7:30pm. The program for this meeting will be a virtual presentation by Greg Jones, a Rose City Astronomer, instrument maker, and collaborator on the FlexSpec project team. FlexSpec1 is a high performance spectrograph for the analysis of astronomical spectra and the team has decided not to commercialize their efforts, instead releasing the design as an open source project, with CAD files, 3D printing .STL files, great documentation, and more, freely available. The FlexSpec1 is exciting in that it brings high performance spectrography within reach of much broader user base of potential investigators by extensive use of 3D printed structural elements, and use of primarily off-the-shelf optics and electronics. The potential for FlexSpec to dramatically increase the possibilities for citizen science and Pro/Am (professional/amateur) collaboration are enormous! Myself and the SAS board are excited to help spread the word about this capable and accessible instrument.
Thank you to all who brought potluck items to share at the June meeting, it’s these little acts of participation and engagement that can help build our astro community into something special. Hope you can join us for the pre-meeting BBQ and Potluck July 12th at 6:30pm.
June Meeting
Due to a unforeseen scheduling conflict, our Bigelow Gulch meeting location is unavailable for the second Friday in June. We will be meeting at the same location on the third Friday, June 21, please mark your calendars! This month’s meeting topic will be a presentation by the club President, Matt Wallin on the topic low light human vision and visual astronomy. The presentation will give an overview of the physiology of human vision, then transition to a review and discussion of the book “Visual Astronomy of the Deep Sky” by Roger N. Clark. Clark distilled the extensive science that was done in the pre-war and WWII era to understand low light human vision and it’s capabilities. Clark then adapted that data to an astronomy context and had many scientifically based recommendations for visual astronomers. Clark’s insights can give a scientific method to analyze what observations may be within the potential of your equipment, and recommendations to see the most possible at the eyepiece. His insights are a real eye-opener (I’m so sorry, I had to). I will keep the terrible puns to an absolute minimum in the presentation, promise 😉 Hope to see you at the 6:30 pm BBQ/Potluck!
May Meeting
This month we meet again at our Bigelow Gulch location, the Party Palace, at 7:30pm. Again, I would like to invite all to a pre-meeting BBQ, to start at 6:30pm. I would also like to reiterate an open request for potluck items to share.
This month’s meeting is a swap meet and auction. A changing storage situation means some of the club inventory that is unsuitable for our telescope lending library or outreach must go. Our bylaws require that club members be given first dibs on this equipment and we wouldn’t have it any other way! Items up for auction include several older equatorial mounts, several Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes, tripods, and more! We should have plenty of table space for members to bring their own items for sale or trade.
We have plenty of room to set up telescopes, and with the favorable weather forecast and moon phase, bring your scopes! Anyone needing help learning to setup or use your new scope, be sure to bring it to the meeting.
For those looking for more observing or imaging, this would be a great night to head out to our dark sky location out at Fishtrap Lake. With great conditions in the forecast and a favorable moon phase, you are all but certain to have fellow astronomers to keep you company!
In Focus – The Virgo Galaxy Cluster
In my pre-pandemic articles I focused on a well placed constellation for the month. This month I’d like to focus on the Virgo galaxy cluster, in lieu of the whole constellation of Virgo – I’m trying not to write a tome here! Some time ago, around this time of year, I wrote about Coma Berenices, another great galaxy hunting constellation, and as I exclaimed in that article: “spring is galaxy season!”. The inclination of the ecliptic, the plane of our solar system, with the plane of our own galaxy, means that around the vernal equinox we have that beautiful band of stars, the Milky Way, situated around the horizon. This orientation leaves a clear view out of our galactic disk, free from the obscuring effects of relatively local dust and gases. Seeing beyond our own galaxy, we are mostly left to see the myriad of other “island universes” (a term coined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant).
To observe galaxy clusters is to begin to observe our universe at scale of its largest structures. The description “The Cosmic Cobweb” is sometimes used to describe the clumps, knots and filaments of matter, as well as the large and larger voids between them. The large scale structure of the universe has also been likened to soap bubbles, with the borders and intersections of the bubbles representing the filaments and nodes of matter. In our corner of the Cosmos, our 10 Million light year (Mly) diameter Local Group of galaxies, dominated by the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and M33, along with approximately 80 smaller dwarf and irregular galaxies, are gravitationally connected to the Virgo Cluster. With a diameter of 15 Mly the Virgo Cluster is the closest galaxy cluster to our own Local Group, at a distance of about 54 Mly, and it is far more densely populated with approximately 1500 members. The Virgo cluster is not much larger than our Local Group but has far more members, her, the Virgo Cluster and our Local Group, along with approximately 100 other groups and clusters, form the Virgo Supercluster The immense gravity of the the Virgo Supercluster attracts our own Local group, resulting in a phenomenon called Virgocentric Flow
As amateur astronomers, we enjoy the night sky with whatever instruments we have, however modest. Luckily, great examples of nearly every class of object exist for any size glass, and galaxy clusters are no different. The Virgo Galaxy cluster can be enjoyed with everything from binoculars on up! With a modest 8” scope, well over 200 objects are visible, and instruments capable of wide fields will often have half a dozen or more galaxies visible at a time!
James Webb Space Telescope First Images Celebration
The Spokane Astronomical Society has been chosen to partner with NASA to celebrate the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope! The celebration is expected to take place in July and will mark the beginning of Webb’s science mission. We will provide updates as NASA provides details and materials in the months to come, watch this space!