December Potluck Celebration at Mendenhall Community Center

We won’t be meeting at UH this December. Instead we’ll meet at the Trini Mendenhall Community Center, 1414 Wirt Rd, Houston, TX 77055 for our annual year-end celebration! It's potluck so bring your family favorites—the club will provide spiral ham and turkey breast.

Party Agenda

5:30 pm Setup and Gift Exchange table. Place potluck items in kitchen and grab a chair in the auditorium. Optional Gift Exchange: Keep gifts to $15 and bring your wrapped item to the sign-in table
6:00 pm Dinner lines open
7:00 pm Movie! PBS 400 Years of the Telescope: A Journey of Science, Technology and Thought
8:00 pm Gift Exchange
8:15 pm Clean up

RSVP

We are sending an online RSVP and signup form to all members using SignUpGenius.com. They don’t spam, but if you prefer, please RSVP to info@astronomyhouston.org and let us know you’re attending.

Directions to Mendenhall.

Ignore map below. Format does not change for meeting notices

November 4, 2016 is the Annual Membership meeting where we elect the incoming leadership team. You also won’t want to miss our annual meeting speaker. This year is Dr. Lisa Whitehead. Says Professor Whitehead

The neutrino is one of the elementary particles which make up the universe. Neutrinos are produced in the fusion reactions inside the sun and other stars, by natural radiation inside the earth, by supernovae, and by charged particles bombarding Earth’s atmosphere.  Despite their abundance, they are difficult to study because they interact very rarely.  I will give an overview of the history of neutrino physics, from the postulation of their existence to last year's Nobel Prize for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, and describe what we hope to learn in the future.

To many amateur astronomers, space is the volume between the stars and other deep sky objects we love to observe which has nothing in it. It turns out that this is only mostly correct, as there is a very tiny amount of stuff in interstellar space. But the stuff that is there has had a profound effect on how we view the universe, and is hugely important to the evolution of our galaxy and even of life itself. 

Come take a brief tour of our home galaxy and as we travel we'll explore the (almost) nothing that is the interstellar medium.

At the Novice session

In September, Allen Wilkerson will tell you everything you need to know about the HAS Loaner Telescope Program. The HAS has a number of telescopes that have been donated over the years for the purpose of loaning out to the membership after you have been a member for a short time. Allen will tell you about these telescopes, which ones are easiest to use for novices, how to care for them and how to go about borrowing one. The Society depends upon responsible use of the program in order to be able to continue making this fantastic benefit available to members. We recommend to everyone that they take a look at the various telescopes at star parties before making a decision on buying their first telescope.

At the end of the presentation, our president Rene Gedaly will talk a bit about the Texas 45, an observing list she designed to be completed at our dark site.

The years 2000-2010 were the golden age of amateur asteroid discovery, when it was possible to discover multiple asteroids on a single night with amateur-level equipment. Dellinger will tell the story of his years in the Fort Bend Astronomy Club’s asteroid team and show exactly how they did it. They were one of the more successful amateur teams in the world, with several hundred asteroids to their credit. Along the way they had a few adventures, so Joe will have some good stories to include as well.

At the Novice Session
Director Bram Weisman will show us the various ways to collimate or line up the optics of a Newtonian telescope. Newtonians are great for their simplicity and ease of setup but have to be collimated much more frequently than other types of telescopes. If you have a Newtonian or think one is in your future, this talk is a must.

SlidesLive has been billed as TED Talks for everyone. It’s also the software HAS uses to record its monthly speaker presentations. What you may not know is that its founder and CEO loves the night sky and believes in the promise of science to build better worlds. Come hear this engaging young entrepreneur share a 19th century story which inspired him to build the company he has today.

At the Novice Session
Debbie Moran, Novice Chair, reprises her Telescope 101 talk for our recent new members. You will learn about the most common telescope designs, the role of eyepieces, and the basic terminology used to describe telescope optics.

Some resources to use as you plan your route to UH are:

• www.houstontranstar.org to check roads and travel weather
• www.uh.edu/emergency to check conditions at the University of Houston

HAS is very pleased to have the following Science Fair students present their HAS award-winning project at our main meeting:

• Andrew Cianciolo:  “UV Light Will Take Your Sight”
• Aaryan Shenoy:  “Photographic Emulsions in Gratzel Cells”
• Anirudh Suresh: “Modeling Sharp Jumps in Flux Tube Entropy in the Earth's Magnetosphere”
• Nithin Parsan:  “Applying Kirigami Design to Create NextGen Sun Tracking Solar Panels”
• Hasnain Khan and Mujtaba Hussain:  “Novel EHD Devices and Their Use With Spacecraft”

At the Novice Session
Learn astronomical sketching from our own Scott Mitchell. He’s good. Learn a few tips from a master.

In 2010 Bill Spizzirri visited the VLA, a radio observatory in New Mexico
with 27 giant movable antennas. Bill explains what it is, how it works, why it's important.

He’ll also give a bit of radio astronomy history and will show his own up close
photographs & videos as well as videos provided by the observatory.