Astronomical Society of Eastern Missouri

 Now the Milky Way runs from North to South in the warm August sky. Though it is hard to see the Milky Way in an urban area one can still find it by finding Cygnus the Swan. Cygnus flies down the center of it. Looking at Cygnus with a pair of binoculars reveals stars in the hundreds.

 Our Sun is located in the Cygnus, Orion arm so when we look at Cygnus, or Orion we are looking down this arm in either direction and see more stars than if we look straight out of the arm.

 Don’t miss Albirio located in the swans beak.  It is a beautiful double, there will be no doubt you’ve found it  one star is bright blue, the other gold.  A pair of binoculars will seperate the pair.

 Another double that is a good object  for binoculars is Epsilon Lyrae. it is one of the stars that form the triangle with Vega, and splits from one to two stars with a seven power binocular. A telescope shows those two to be doubles also. As a matter of fact it is a multi system of nine stars. Oh, the other star in the triangle, zeta Lyrae is also a scope double.

 The night of 8/9th the Moon is near Neptune. Also  August ninth Castor, Pollux, Venus, Mercury, and Procyon are low in the E.N.E. horizon about 45 minutes before dawn. They will be joined by a crescent Moon on the 21st and 22nd.

 Look for the Persied meteor shower on the 12th.

 Marilyn Savant, said it best, " May your sleepless nights be caused by starry skies."

Marv

Recently I’ve been asking amateur and professional astronomers alike what got them interested in astronomy in the first place.  For me it was the brilliant skies visible most nights from the farm where I grew up in central Oklahoma.  I came to St. Charles County in 1965 and I seem to recall some good nights from long ago, but I can’t really remember the last time I saw "decent" skies from here.    Sometimes it is a struggle to maintain enthusiasm for visual observing and I’m afraid I know of several seasoned observers who have lost most, if not all, their desire to even try.  Trying to motivate beginners is an even larger challenge.  At our recent class for beginners, a young woman wanted me to show her children (about 8 and 10) a star!  Oh how I wish we could have turned out the lights, stepped out the back door and witnessed the glory of the summer Milky Way which was just over our heads, but totally invisible.

Well, I can’t live like this.  I have to find a solution.  So I’ve decided to see how many of the famous Messier objects I can find with binoculars from my yard in Wentzville or the site at Weldon Spring or other areas typical of our urban environment.  In fact, I’ve decided to pursue and get the Astronomical League certificate for binocular Messiers.  Now I own a pair of 10×25s for bird watching and won a nice pair of 7×50s at the National Convention in Kansas City a year ago, but I’m not totally crazy in my plans - I also have access (as do all members) to the ASEM 25×100s!

Last Monday (July 24) I went down to Weldon Spring to see what I could see in the Scorpius, Sagittarius, Scutum region which is on the meridian slightly after dark (if you can really call it that).  For a test of sky quality, I have been trying to see the faintest star in the Little Dipper bowl (which is high this time of year).  It is almost exactly 5th magnitude - and I haven’t seen it yet from an urban setting.  I guess I will have to learn a 4th mag star to look for. 

Anyway, in about two hours from roughly 10:00 pm to midnight, I found 22 Messier objects (which I logged for later submission for the certificate).  The nebulosities in such famous objects as the Lagoon Nebula (M8), Trifid (M20), etc were quite washed out, but the underlying open clusters were quite easy to identify.  I was especially pleased by the globulars such as M22 (a rival to M13, IMHO), M4 in Scorpius (and M80 was not nearly as bright but easily seen), M10 and M12 in Ophiuchus.  At midnight, the outlines of the Milky Way could just be made out.  It wasn’t so obvious that a beginner would have noticed it without a little coaching, but it was there.

The following Wednesday (July 26) I decided to see what could be seen from my home in Wentzville.  My front yard faces West and there is a street light not 75 feet from my front door.  I could read the star chart without a flashlight (never mind putting a red filter on it).  But there were some more "easy" M objects there to be harvested.  My biggest problem was that I couldn’t see the field stars to star hop efficiently.  Ophiuchus is a big, mostly blank area outlined by brighter stars and I had to "hop" a long way from the edges to the objects in the center.  But I found them.  After a while I moved to my back yard, which faces East and "only" suffers from a neighbor’s rude light that shines directly at our back door.  Some nearby trees cut down on the amount of sky area and, again, it was difficult to find fainter stars to start my "hopping."  Nevertheless, in about 2 hours I found another 11 objects for my log.  Now I have 33 of the 50 required to get the certificate.

If I can do it, so can you.

These pages are updated frequently and we hope everyone enjoys this but, as the sites get bigger, it becomes harder for the readers to keep up.  We are working to get even more contributors so the situation will only intensify.

However, Technology to the rescue!  Our web pages have a feature known as RSS feeds  (note the little icon at the bottom of the page that says RSS).  Some of you may know about, and use, this technology already, but for the rest of you it is a neat tool.

The basic idea is that every time an addition is made to the web page, a small file on the site is updated.  There are programs available (I will describe one below) that allow your computer to read this file and let you know of any changes and provide you a link directly to them.  No more reading the whole web page to find out what’s new for yourself.

There are many ways to do this but the one I like is to add an extension to the Firefox browser (you ARE using Firefox, aren’t you?).  If you are one of the few who haven’t dumped Internet Explorer, go over to

Get Firefox.

and get Firefox.  (Do it now, I will wait.)

From within Firefox, navigate to

Sage

follow the links to install Sage (it’s easy).

You’ll have to exit from Firefox and re-start it for Sage to be activated but then turn on Sage from the Tools menu or press Alt-S.  Sage has some pre-installed web sites which you can delete if you like (but try them out to see what Sage does).  Now, if you navigate to one of our pages, click on the magnifying glass in the Sage sidebar and Sage will look for the little file and display it.  Click that you want to save it and Sage will add it to its menu.  Now you can click on the link whenever you feel the need for an up date on our web page and, voila!, they will be listed for you.  (This also works with other pages that might interest you - if they have the feature enabled.)

Jim Moody and I used his 16-inch LX200 in his observatory to image Jupiter on the evening of July 26, 2006. The seeing was very poor but his fine telescope and image processing produced a good result. The image on the left shows the GRS and the red oval above and preceding it near the left limb. South is at the top and the planet rotates from right to left. The diagram on the right is courtesy Jupiter section of the British Astronomical Association. It shows all of the cataloged belts and zones on Jupiter. Good seeing to all from Jim Melka.

If you want your lawn watered, just ask me to schedule a public star gazing event near your house!  It started out clear in the morning and all day long the moisture in the air kept rising, condensing and turning into clouds.  Finally, about 4:30 pm all that moisture fell out of the clouds and even generated a severe thunderstorm alert.  By 6:30 pm it looked mostly over and that it might clear, although the satellite images showed very little cloud motion, so I went over to the park to be ready - just in case.

A couple of our members called me on my cell phone and I discouraged them from coming but one other member showed up anyway.  For a while the clouds lessened and we could see nice blue sky.  There was a nice, colorful sunset.  But it didn’t get better.  We could never see a trace of the crescent Moon.

But we had a good time anyway!  There were at least five carloads of hopeful sky watchers who showed up, including a few who seemed interested in following up with our club activities.  One fellow brought a brand new 10-inch telescope that would fit in a carry on bin on an airplane.  The trusses were a carbon fiber material that bent around to pack, but which would ’spring’ open to position all the elements properly (somewhat like backpack tents).  I asked him to demonstrate it at one of our meetings.

This just reinforces my determination to get a permanent meeting site where we can accommodate the public rain or shine (literally!).