Northern Sydney Astronomical Society » NAG

NSAS Events for September

bobsastro — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:02:19 +0000

NSAS starts off September with the Theory Group on Tuesday the 14th at 7:30, with more lectures in the “Understanding the Universe” series. Murray Suters will chair. The GM will be on Tuesday the 21st at 7:30, followed by our September speaker, Dan Zucker from Macquarie University Physics Dept, whose presentation will be “Building Galaxies in our Backyard”. See the separate abstract. The New Astronomers Group follows on Tuesday the 28th at 7:30. Roy Jordan will announce the agenda later in the month. All meetings will be at St. Ignatius, and as usual, visitors are welcome to all the meetings.

Observing will be the Friday nights, 10 and 17 September at North Turramurra, with Sat the 18th as the weather alternate.

New Astronomers Group – 24th August 2010

sydneystargazers — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:41:22 +0000

The August session of the New Astronomers Group will be held this Tuesday night at 7:30 pm.

If anyone has an issue with their telescope, please contact us via the menu option above and let us know ahead of time of the issue you have with the scope and we will try and help you solve the problem.

The New Astronomers Group will be looking at some of the galaxies, nebulae and clusters that are visible during August and early September.

We will also look at how you can observe live images directly from telescopes around the world . This means in theory for a very small monthly fee that you can look at objects in the sky in both the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere…. weather permitting for each of the telescope locations.

We will end the night with a Q&A session. Here any members or visitors can ask questions or talk about events during the month. If you would like to suggest topics for future sessions such as how to starhop through the night sky or which filters are used for looking at which planets, please feel free to make a suggestion.

If you had a great observing session during the month, please feel free to tell us about it.

The New Astronomers Group will be held at it’s normal location

http://nsas.org.au/contact/st-ignatius-college-map/

NSAS Events for August

bobsastro — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:27:23 +0000

In August, the first NSAS event is the Theory Group on Tuesday the 10th, where this dedicated group will see further lectures in the series “Understanding the Universe”. The August General Meeting is on Tuesday the 17th, and the guest speaker is Orsola De Marco, Associate Professor of Physics at Macquarie U. She will present a talk on the subject “Planetary Nebulae: death shrouds of lonely stars or aftermath of binary interactions?”. See the separate post for an abstract. The New Astronomers Group meets Tuesday the 24th, and after the big turnout in July, we suggest anyone with a scope who has questions on how to set it up, use it, or observe, come along. All meetings are at St. Ignatius at 7:30PM.

NAG – 27th July : PowerPoint Presentation

sydneystargazers — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:14:52 +0000

The PowerPoint presentation that was going to be shown tonight at the New Astronomers Group has now been uploaded to the website. Unfortunately technical issues resulted in the short presentation not been shown at the NAG tonight, however you can now download the file and view it on your own computer.

If you do not have PowerPoint on your computer , you can download a free PowerPoint Viewer off the Internet which will allow you to view the file.

The PowerPoint presentation contains screenshots showing a number of objects that you can see from Sydney for the month of August. The screenshots were taken of the night sky as it should appear around 9pm for the next few week or so.

The presentation also includes a sky chart for August 2010 whixh is available from the Sydney Observatory website. Each month you can download the chart for the current month from the observatory and print it out for use in the field.

To download the PowerPoint Presentation file, click on the following link.

NAG Presentation 27th July 2010

NAG – 22nd June : Powerpoint Presentation

sydneystargazers — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:11:53 +0000

Tonight was a pretty good night for NAG with a good turnout of members.

I am adding tonight’s powerpoint presentation to this post for you to download and view at your leisure.

Some of the points reviewed tonight:

:- A technique of using barlow lenses and extension tubes to increase magnification and improve your view of objects with a better eye relief.

:- Brief coverage of the Personal Solar Telescope by Coronada which allows you to view features of the Sun such as prominences , filaments, spicules and of course sunspots…….. without costing you an arm and a leg.

:- View of the Milky Way using an H-alpha filter

:- A sample of objects you can see in the skies over Sydney in the next 4 weeks.

:-Covering the June 3rd fireball seen on Jupiter as well as the reason for the Southern Belt disappearing .

:- Attaching digital cameras to your telescope using adapters……. including iPhone Adapters

Click on the link to download the Powerpoint Presentation NAG Presentation June 22

New Astronomers Group – 22nd June

sydneystargazers — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:38:35 +0000

We are hoping to have an observing session on the night…… however the weather forecast for tomorrow is not looking good. But there are some signs the weather may improve but this will not be known until Tuesday morning’s forecasts. We will update the website if observing will be held on Tuesday night.

If the NAG observing session is cancelled, we will have an alternate program in place.

Program is as the following.

1. Bring in your telescopes if you need help with resolving any issues or want to learn how to use them better. Bring them in even if the observing session is on .

2. A trick you can use with barlow lenses to improve your view of the night sky. See the rings of Saturn with a 32mm lens and experience good eye relief.

3. Demonstration of connecting digital cameras to telescopes.

4. How to observe the Sun safely and see images like this without spending a fortune

Viewing the Sun without spending a fortune (Click to Enlarge)

5. We look at some of the interesting objects to see over Sydney in the next 4 weeks

6. We look at the current changes in Jupiter

7. Our Observing sessions for the next 4 weeks.

8. Question and Answer Section. This is where members and visitors can ask questions or make suggestions on anything astronomy or club related.

NSAS Events for June

bobsastro — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:09:54 +0000

NSAS starts out in June with the Theory Group on Tuesday night the 8th. The lectures this month are ” Galileo and the Copernican Revolution”, and “Refinements to the Heliocentric Model”. On Tuesday the 15th is the June General Meeting. The speaker this month is George Hobbs of CSIRO and ANTF, who will speak on “Pulsars and Gravitational Waves”. “Observations of millisecond pulsars may provide the first means to detect the elusive gravitational waves that are predicted by General Relativity. If these waves are detected then we’ll have a means to study supermassive black hole binary systems and even probe the universe less than a second after the big bang. The Parkes telescope in Australia is providing the World-leading data sets for this search. I will describe our project, explain how pulsars are discovered and observed and how, using the pulsar observations, we will hopefully be able to detect gravitational waves.” Finally, if everything is sorted out, the New Astronomers Group meets Tuesday the 22nd, with the program TBA. Observing for the month of June will be on the Fridays 11th and 18th, with Saturday the 19th as backup.

Some objects to look at at Observing in May

sydneystargazers — Thu, 13 May 2010 07:12:59 +0000

At the last New Astronomers Group session , I gave a presentation showing some of the many objects that are visible from Sydney for the month of May.

This presentation has been updated to show some of the objects visible tomorrow night which is promising to be a very good night for observing. Plus we are having a free sausage sizzle so it should be a fun night.

The presentation is a powerpoint presentation file. If you do not own microsoft office or do not have other suitable software able to view powerpoint files, you can download a powerpoint viewer from Microsoft for free at the following link.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=048dc840-14e1-467d-8dca-19d2a8fd7485&displaylang=en

The Powerpoint Presentation (10 megabyte file) showing visible objects for tomorrow night can be downloaded at the following link 14th May 2010 Objects

May Meetings

bobsastro — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:33:20 +0000

May meetings are as follows: Tuesday May 11, Theory Group at St. Ignatius; Tuesday May 18, General Meeting at St. Ignatius, speaker is Minnie Mao from CSIRO who will talk about the Evolution of Galaxies; Tuesday May 25, New Astronomers Group at St. Ignatius. Members and visitors are welcome at all meetings.