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.
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August Meeting – Dark matter and energy
The club is hosting Professor Shane Larson from Northwestern University in Chicago for the August 9th Meeting at the “Party Palace” located at 8616 N Lehman Road, just north of Bigelow Gulch Road. Pot luck before the meeting starts about 6:30 pm, presentation scheduled for 7:30 pm.
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The Cosmos abounds with matter that emits copious amounts of light, both in the spectrum of visible colors we perceive with our eyes as well as in invisible light such as x-rays and radio waves. But in the latter half of the 20th Century we discovered that a significant part of the Universe is filled with matter that doesn’t emit ANY light at all. In the last two decades, we have discovered an even more mysterious material that appears to be driving changes in the scale of the Universe. These dark influences are known as “dark matter” and “dark energy”, and can only be perceived by their gravitational influence on all the bright, shining matter we know and love. In this talk we’ll discuss why we think the dark matter and dark energy are out there, and explore some of the ideas we have for discovering just what it might be.
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Shane Larson is a research professor of physics at Northwestern University, where he is the Associate Director of CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics). He works in the field of gravitational wave astrophysics, specializing in studies of compact stars, binaries, and the galaxy. He works in gravitational wave astronomy with both the ground-based LIGO project, and future space-based observatory LISA. He was formerly a tenured associate professor of physics at Utah State University. He is an award winning teacher, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is an avid amateur astronomer, observing with two homebuilt Dobsonians, a 12.5″ named EQUINOX and a 22″ named COSMOS MARINER. He contributes regularly to a public science blog at writescience.wordpress.com, and tweets with the handle @sciencejedi .
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!
April Meeting
John Bentham gave an excellent talk on the history of cosmology, ending with a chart of the four fundamental forces of nature and the quarks that form hadrons.
Paul will give the April presentation, which springs off that chart and describes all known natural processes for forging the periodic table of elements which represent the nearly 5% of our universe with which we can see and interact. The other 95% we have yet to develop any understanding.
Our April 12th meeting will be back at the “Party Palace,” our summer venue just northeast of Bigelow Gulch and Argonne. Many club members are expected to be out of town for the total solar eclipse. We are postponing the equipment swap meet until our May meeting, which will also be at the party palace. Club members will get first dibs on all the equipment we are parceling out, after which it will go up on Craigslist, Marketplace, or other outlets.
We will be continuing our rekindling of the before-meeting BBQ tradition. Burgers and soft drinks will be provided. Members and guests are encouraged to bring side-dishes and desserts, let’s make this a potluck! BBQ begins at 6:30.
With the extra room and quiet location at the “Party Palace”, there is room to safely set up telescopes. Need help with learning to set up or use your new telescope? Want to do a bit of observing with experienced observers? Bring the ‘scope!
March Meeting
The March topic will be multiverses, presented by John Benham, a Gonzaga astronomy and astrophysics professor for many years. Friday, March 8th 7:30 PM at the Providence Auditorium.
February Meeting
Board member and experienced observer Matt Wallin will give an introductory talk on observing this month. Also we’ll elect a new board for 2024. See you there!
January Meeting – The Rosetta Mission
In 2004 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Rosetta mission to explore a comet. It took ten years to reach it, in 2014, and a few more years before the analysis was complete and the photos were released to the public. It’s been five years since then, and while many may have had an opportunity to peruse the images during the pandemic, many of us likely missed it. SAS President Paul Yost will take us to 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on January 12th, 2024. See the event page for more details!
November Meeting – the Axion Experiment
Please join us on Friday as Dr. Noah Oblath of Pacific Northwest National Labs walks us through ADMX, the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment.
The axion is a hypothetical particle that solves both long-standing problems in nuclear physics and could be responsible for some or all of the dark matter of the universe. It is considered by many to be the most natural and elegant explanation, and there is strong support in the physics community for efforts to detect axion dark matter.