hi all,
The next IAS/SDAS talk will be on Thursday, October 14th when Dave Gradwell will speak about “The Sun: How to Observe it and What to See”. Dave has taken many stunning images of our nearby star and will tell us about the tools and techniques available nowadays for the solar observer.
The venue is Gonzaga College in Ranelagh, Dublin at 8pm. All are welcome and admission is free. The meeting room is up the stairs immediately after you go through the doors of the school.
Do try and make it along to this particular meeting as we will also have a
very special announcement to make.
The IAS will hold a public observing night on Friday, October 15th at 8pm (until 10pm.) Members will have telescopes set up beside the car park on the City side of the James Joyce Tower in Sandymount. Passersby and visitors will get views of Jupiter, the Moon, and other celestial sights.
Maths Week Ireland
Maths Week Ireland started on October 9th and many events are taking place nationwide. Highlights can be found at
www.mathsweek.ie
Looking up
The International Space Station is making a series of morning passes at the moment. You can generate predictions for your location at
www.heavens-above.com
or use the pre-determined pass series I created for my site in Terenure
www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?s...renure&alt=65&tz=GMT
Martin McKenna in Northern Ireland said to me last week that he has seen Comet 103P/Hartley-2 with the unaided eye. Another observer confirmed last night that he too has seen the comet without any optical aid. The comet is diffuse though and requires a reasonably dark site to spot but can be easily found with the right chart. Get these at
www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/102632669.html
and
www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/starwatch
(where the Guardian newspaper has a regular sky notes column by Alan Pickup.) A very nice chart for Hartley-2 is available from the Guardian Starwatch page at
www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/11/starwatch-comet-hartley
Jupiter lords over the evening sky in Pisces and remains on view almost the whole night. A small telescope will let you see the dusky cloud belts of its turbulent atmosphere and the disk is a noticeably oblate shape because of the planet’s rapid rotation (Jupiter turns once in less than 10 hours.) Saturn was first to slip into the solar glare last month and is now first to reappear in our morning skies whereas Venus and Mars are still too close to the Sun. You should spot magnitude 0.9 Saturn paired with Mercury (-1.3) on the morning of the 8th but you will need binoculars to tease them out of the dawn glow. Saturn is better placed by the end October though when it is rising at 04:45UT. Mercury is visible the first week of October but is rapidly losing altitude and will be lost to our view after the 8th.
A Pluto Landmark
Next Sunday marks the mid-point of the journey of New Horizons, NASA’s ambitious mission to investigate Pluto and its three moons. The probe was launched in January 2006 and passed Jupiter in February 2007 to boost its speed with an assist from the planet’s gravity. Closest approach to Pluto occurs on 2015 July 14 and scientists hope to then re-target the spacecraft to some Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects.
Mission objectives include mapping Pluto and its largest moon Charon, studying their surface composition and analysing Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere. Planetary scientists had to lobby hard to get the mission off the ground in the first place as it originally succumbed to a number of budget cuts.
Interestingly, the probe carries some ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh along with other artefacts.
John
