It seems we will have some clear skies tonight at last.
Therefore observing tonight (Friday 24th February) is ON!
The location is North Turramurra Golf Club.
There is a map here:
http://nsas.org.au/contact/north-turramurra-golf-club/
The Sun sets at 7.39pm.
The Moon is a very thin 2 day old crescent and probably won’t be visible.
I will aim to be there to open the gates around 7pm.
Peter Nosworthy
Due to thunderstorms moving in, and a forecast of cloud behind them until late tonight, observing at North Turramurra is cancelled tonight. We’ll try again next Friday.
The NSAS February General Meeting will be next Tuesday, location for this meeting only to be the Fr. Mac Pavillion (old sports pavillion we previously used). The time is 7:30PM, as usual. Our speaker this month is Franceso di Mille from the AAO and Las Campanas Observatory. His abstract follows:
Highly collimated gas ejections are among the most dramatic structures in the universe, observed to emerge from very different astrophysical systems—from active galactic nuclei down to young brown dwarf stars. I will present the discovery of a giant, highly collimated jet from Sanduleak’s star in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). With a physical extent of 14 parsec at the distance of the LMC, it represents the largest stellar jet ever discovered, and the first resolved stellar jet beyond the Milky Way.
I will also talk about the Las Campanas Observatory and the Magellan telescopes.
Just a reminder for anyone interested that Observing at North Turramurra this month will be tomorrow, Fri the 17th, and next Fri the 24th. Tomorrow’s forecast is not good, so watch this space.
Sydney University’s Science Forum has a free one hour lecture titled “A New Way of Looking at the Sky”, to be presented by Professor Bryan Gaensler on Wednesday 14 March 2012. The talk synopsis is below:
Ever since Galileo first turned a telescope to the sky in the 1600s, the push has been to build telescopes that reveal the wonders of the night sky in ever more detail. Despite all the many discoveries astronomers have made over the centuries, there are still fundamental unsolved problems about the Cosmos. How has the Universe evolved from the Big Bang to the present day? What is the extreme physics that drives the sudden changes we see in the night sky? And what are the Dark Energy and Dark Matter that make up a staggering 95% of the Universe? To make further progress, we need to do astronomy in a different way: instead of peering at tiny patches of stars in detail, we now need to step back and look at huge parts of the sky at once.
Here in Australia, we are now embarking on an exciting journey to develop this new way of looking at the sky. Professor Bryan Gaensler will describe the exciting technology that is taking shape across Australia, and will explain the amazing discoveries that we are making about the Universe through this bold new approach.
More details, plus the registration form can be found here:
http://sydney.edu.au/science/outreach/forum/lecture1.shtml
Just a reminder that NSAS activities restart tomorrow night with the Theory Group at 7:45 at Regis Hall, and that the venue for the GM for next Tuesday the 21st is changed back to the Fr. Mac (sports) Pavillion due to a scheduling conflict. Hope to see you at either/both. If you haven’t paid your membership renewal, I’d suggest doing it tomorrow, as otherwise the Committee will generate a letter asking whether you wish to remain a member.
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