Minutes of the November 29, 2008 Meeting of the Charlie Elliott Chapter of the AAC

The meeting was called to order at 3:25 p.m. by CE Chapter Director Theo Ramakers. There were 16 members and guests present.

First on the program was a presentation by Steve Bieger’s presentation, “Galileo’s Wonderful Universe”, a project now under production as a two-part planetarium program to be shown at Fernbank Science Center sometime in 2009. It follows the early development of the scientific revolution, where the old ideas of the universe were turned upside down and made irrelevant, thus giving birth to the field of modern astronomy. “Galileo’s Wonderful Universe” will be a chronology of the lives and science of five very famous people who, in their time, contributed to monumental leaps forward in human understanding and thus brought about what could truly be called a revolution.

A break for refreshments followed.

The next presentation was Part II of Steve Ramsden’s “History of Solar Observing” series. Part I (presented in September) covered religious beliefs and lore of early civilization’s sometimes mythic relationship with our nearest star up to and including an overview of modern solar observatories and available options for amateurs interested in solar observing and photography. Part II dealt with the types of observable phenomena on the solar surface from filaments to prominences to active regions. He also explained the methods by which amateurs could see these various features.

Jon Wood’s “Observing 101″ PowerPoint segment included upcoming rise/transit/set times for celestial objects in the coming weeks and was compiled using the software program Stellarium (available at http://www.stellarium.org/).

Theo Ramakers’ “Current Events” segment noted upcoming and past natural and manmade celestial activites, this time including:
* Sidewalk astronomy / outreach events with CEWMA members
* Updates on the Mars rovers
* News of two independant observations and images made by two amateurs of a new ray crater on Mercury
* A Jon Woods image of the recent Venus and Moon sky grouping
* Solar images by Stephen Ramsden
* An image of the newly discovered extra-solar planetary system discovered by direct imaging rather than measurement of “star wobble”; the system was discovered in November and the star, HR8799, is in the constellation Pegasus (coordinates 23h 07m 28.7s 21 deg 8′3″); see also http://www.keckobservatory.org/images/article_pictures/231_403.jpg and http://trustyservant.com/archives/242
* Some stunning images of the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour by member Angela Poore
* An image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked to International Space Station taken by Theo through his hand-guided scope from the CEWMA observing field on November 20
* An update on the plans of the European Space agency

The meeting was adjourned at approximately 6:30 p.m. The solar and current events presentation can be viewed on the CE astronomy website: http://ceastronomy.org/blog/events

The next gathering of the CE chapter of the AAC will be a pot luck dinner meeting at 3 p.m., Saturday, December 27; the speaker will be AAC member Rich Jakiel and the topic will be “Messengers from the Gods”.

Respectfully submitted,

Ken Poshedly
CEWMA Chapter Recording Secretary