"How to use your eyes" -- SDAS meeting on May 14th

Hi all,

Good morning.

Hope everyone is well and enjoyed the spell of sunshine the last few days.

The last SDAS meeting of the season is on Thursday, May 14th in Gonzaga College, Ranelagh. The talk on the night is "How to use your eyes" and will start at 8pm. The talk will explore the physiology of the eye, techniques for visual observing, and speculate on how to adapt the eye specifically for astronomy. Admission is free and all are welcome. I'll also have a few books along from a recent clear-out of the bookshelves at home and people are welcome take them away at no charge.

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The International Space Station is currently making a series of evening passes until May 24th. You can create predictions for your location through www.heavens-above.com

Get details of what's up in the world of science during May from Mary Mulvihill's blog at scienceculturebulletin.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/may-update/

Derek Heatly, the IAA's prospective 'Ulsternaut' (Derek has booked a flight with Virgin Galactic), has a few dozen 8x10 colour photos of the famous flag-saluting picture of Apollo astronaut Jim Irwin on the Moon. Each is about 20 years old, and has this inscription printed on it: ''His love from the moon.'' But his signature beside it is genuine; by looking at the back you can see where the ink has dried out. I'm bringing some down to the IAA's IYA2009 Event at Castle Archdale, hoping to get £20 each, which is very fair. For postal enquiries, it would be £22 incl. recorded delivery. This is for his local cancer charity, so please support this good cause & get a nice souvenir into the bargain. Contact Derek on: spaceone@tesco.net

Get your fix of science news at www.newscientist.com/ -- I've been a subscriber to their e-mailed newsletter for some time and there are always interesting astronomy and space related news articles.

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Finding your way around the sky might seem daunting at first but there are many useful star charts on the internet that are created as a labour of love by amateur astronomers worldwide. An excellent resource is www.skymaps.com which has a monthly chart you can download for free. The double-sided A4 sheet also details celestial highlights for the month.

Star atlases extend the possibilities even more and using these in conjunction with your binoculars will reveal many wonders of the sky. Toshimi Taki in Japan has created two free atlases. One goes to magnitude 6.5 (the traditional limit for the faintest star you can see with the unaided eye) while the other is more detailed and shows stars to magnitude 8.5. Each set of charts plot hundreds of deep-sky objects (galaxies, clusters, nebulae, etc.) Go to Toshimi's home page at www.asahi-net.or.jp/~zs3t-tk/ and look for the Astronomy section in the menu on the left-hand side. Under "Tools for Observation" you'll see the link to the magnitude 6.5 atlas (option 2.) and the magnitude 8.5 atlas (option 3.) There is also a double star atlas available for small telescope users.

Another beautiful atlas has been created by a Russian amateur astronomer. This can be downloaded via the following links;

www.eproject.ru/beginners_star_atlas1.pdf (184kb)
www.eproject.ru/beginners_star_atlas2.pdf (184kb)
www.eproject.ru/beginners_star_atlas3.pdf (188kb)
www.eproject.ru/beginners_star_atlas4.pdf (182kb)
www.eproject.ru/beginners_star_atlas5.pdf (173kb)
www.eproject.ru/beginners_star_atlas6.pdf (204kb)
www.eproject.ru/catalog.pdf (65kb)

Going even deeper is a project to create a very detailed set of atlases for telescope users. Details about these are on the pinned thread at the top of the Cloudy Nights forum at www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/books

The above brief examples don't even touch on the many sky guides available such as the articles you can browse from the Cloudy Nights home page at www.cloudynights.com/index.php -- columns like Tom Trusock's "Small Wonders" explore the sky constellation by constellation.

Finally, the excellent free software Stellarium at www.stellarium.org is extremely useful and the application pointed out by Frank at www.star-map.fr/ definitely makes it worth trying to acquire an iPhone at some point :-)

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All the best,

John
South Dublin Astronomical Society
www.southdublinastronomy.org