Highlights of the July Sky

- - - 1st - - -

PM: A waxing gibbous Moon forms a broad triangle with Jupiter and Spica.

- - - 3rd → 7th - - - DAWN: Venus is about 7° south (lower right) of the Pleiades low in the east.

- - - 6th - - - PM: Saturn is about 3° below a waxing gibbous Moon.

- - - 9th - - - Full Moon 12:07 am EDT

- - - 11th - - - DAWN: Venus lines up with the Pleiades above it and orange Aldebaran below it.

- - - 13th - - - DAWN: Venus is 3° north (upper left) of Aldebaran.

- - - 16th - - - Last Quarter Moon 3:26 pm EDT

- - - 20th - - - DUSK: A slim crescent Moon is about 3° lower right of Venus.

- - - 23rd - - - New Moon 5:46 am

- - - 24th - - - DUSK: A super-thin waxing crescent Moon is 5° to the lower right of Mercury.

- - - 25th - - - DUSK: Mercury and Regulus are separated by just 1°. Look low in the west, about 8° to the lower right of the Moon.

- - - 28th - - - DUSK: A crescent Moon is 3° above Jupiter. Spica shines about 8° to their left.

- - - 30th - - - First Quarter Moon 11:23 am EDT

Observing Session: Saturday, July 15 @ 9:30 pm

Saturn & Super Summer Nebulae - Kalamazoo Nature Center

Perseid Potluck Picnic: Saturday, July 29 @ 6:00 pm

Kalamazoo Nature Center - See Page 4 for Details

Observing Session: Saturday, July 29 @ 9:30 pm

The Moon & Saturn - Kalamazoo Nature Center

KAS

Inside the Newsletter. . .

June Mee ng Minutes....................... p. 2

Observa ons...................................... p. 3

Perseid Potluck Picnic........................ p. 4

NASA Space Place...............................p. 5

July Night Sky..................................... p. 6

KAS Board & Announcements............p. 7

KAS Eclipse Shades............................. p. 8

July 2017 Prime Focus Page 2

The general meeting of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society was brought to order by President Richard Bell on Friday, June 2, 2017 at 7:11 pm EDT. Approximately 40 members and guests were in attendance at the Kalamazoo Area Math & Science Center (KAMSC). Richard began his President’s Report by thanking Jean DeMott, Joe Comiskey, Rich Mather, Don Stilwell, and Dave Woolf for assisting him at Parchment North Elementary on June 2nd. Jean sold Eclipse Shades after Richard’s eclipse presentation, while the others shared views of the Sun. (Special thanks to Rich, Don, Dave, and Jack Price for also helping with solar observing at Lawton Elementary on June 7th.) The KAS will also be selling Eclipse Shades during the Kindleberger Festival in Parchment on July 15th from 9am - 3pm. This year we’ll be setup in the main sales area, but we do hope to conduct solar observing and maybe even offer hands-on activities. We are looking for members to represent the KAS at the second annual “Quadruple Conjunction” of West Michigan astronomy clubs on July 22nd. This year’s gathering will be held at the Stephen F. Wessling Observatory near Fremont from 8:30 - 10:30 pm. Mike Sinclair was asked to introduce our guests speakers, but he began with an overview of KAMSC itself. KAMSC was established in 1986 through a grant from The Upjohn Company during their 100th anniversary. Mike has been with KAMSC since 1988, which makes him the longest active staff member today. KAMSC is a half-day “pull-off program” that serves 12 high schools in Kalamazoo County. They accept the top 3% of students who are interested in math, science, and technology. They have a full array of courses that range from introductory information technology, advanced computer science and programming, calculus, physics, geology, biology, and astronomy. Mike then introduced the five students that presented Proof of Concept: Science on a High-Altitude Balloon. What

follows is a report of the project from the students themselves (a copy of their PowerPoint presentation can be viewed at this link): Our physics research project was to create and implement a high altitude balloon, designated the KAMSC Astronomical Research Balloon 1 (KARB 1), capable of flying to approximately 100,000 feet and to collect data along its path. Due to the many facets of this task it was divided up among 5 group members lead by a group leader. First in order to authorize the launch of a high-altitude balloon, the rules and regulations of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had to be followed. The requirements of the FAA regarding launching an unmanned balloon are described throughout the code of federal regulations (CFR) 14, and the FCC CFR 47. The FAA regulations describe where a balloon can be launched, as well as the size and weight of the payload. The FCC determines how the balloon is allowed to interact with people on the ground. On the day of launch the local airport was alerted that the balloon had been launched, in addition, 24 hours prior to launching the balloon, a notice was made to the local FAA field district office. The launch procedure for the weather balloon was as follows. First we chose an open field to launch from, and made sure all the equipment was ready to go. Then used the tank of helium to fill the weather balloon up until it had lift equal to the weight of the balloon and payload plus two pounds for the desired accent rate. Once the balloon was filled, rubber bands, duct tape, and electrical tape were used to seal the balloon and attach the payload. Finally, it was slowly released in segments, being careful not to let it tangle. To track the payload we used two systems; a Spot Trace Anti-Theft tracker, and a radio transmission system. For the Spot Trace tracker we simply used the tracker itself and a smartphone with the SPOT appt. The tracker communicated the latitude and longitude of the payload every five minutes, and the app plotted those coordinates on a map. The app tracked the payload from launch in Vicksburg, MI to near Lima, OH. For the radio transmission system we used an Arduino Uno with a HABduino Shield. The Ardunio Uno and HABduino Shield took data from a GPS antenna and broadcasted it to a vehicle mounted antenna, connected to a computer which decoded the signal, giving us the payloads location and altitude. Original plans for the scientific instrumentation onboard the payload included a Pentax mirrorless camera; a GoPro camera; an altimeter; a barometer; thermometers; a magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope combination; and a homemade gamma ray detector. Due to time constraints only the two cameras and the altimeter were included. The gamma ray detector was constructed but unfortunately prior to launch a component was damaged and a new one was not able to be obtained. The Pentax K-01 mirrorless camera performed exactly as intended, taking

The K.A.R.B. Team (from left to right): Autumn Locey, Haylee Bowsher, Zach Siwik, Owen Langejans, and Griffin Abbott. (Abigail Knauss was unable to attend.)

June Meeting Minutes

July 2017 Prime Focus Page 3

pictures from launch all the way to burst altitude. However, after recovery it was found that the GoPro HERO3+ stopped recording shortly after it was started. We believe it overheated and shut down while the balloon was being filled. This research project utilized many key physics principles including the Haversine formula, Midpoint Riemann sum (important in finding total distances), the Mean Value Theorem for integrals (finding average velocities) and the ideal gas laws. Using these we found the jet stream at 6,000 to 8,000 meters above sea level, and the balloon reached ~76 mph while in the jet stream, the balloon traveled a total 154.1 miles, and after it popped the balloon reached a velocity of 118 mph. After the snack break, members shared some Great American Eclipse updates. Richard reported that he and Jean DeMott hope to view the eclipse from the Jim Moss Arena, located on the Wind River Reservation near Riverton,

Wyoming. Jack Price is coordinating orders on a special commemorative lapel pin being offered by the Astronomical League (pictured at left). Individual pins cost $6, but orders of 10 or more only cost $4 each (shipping charges are extra). Karen Woodward said she and her family are considering viewing the eclipse from

Western Kentucky, but are concerned about heavy traffic. Members encouraged her to contact the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. There are also reports of some states closing highways in the hours leading up to the eclipse. Members are strongly encouraged to contact local authorities for more information. Remember, best advice is to get near your chosen spot at least two days in advanced. Keep checking the weather as well and give yourself time to head for clearer skies if necessary. Joe Comiskey send he has rolled out his telescope and observed from the driveway recently. Jim Kurtz has also done some solar imaging from home. (Richard shared Jim’s images on Twitter.) Jack noted that the June issue of The Reflector published an image of the Moon taken by KAS member Mike Melwiki (page 26). Mike used an iPhone 5s and his homemade 10-inch f/6 Newtonian to take the image. LIGO detected its third gravitational wave on January 4th. The cause were two merging black holes, one estimated to be 25 - 40 solar masses and the other between 13 - 25 solar masses. The result was in 50 solar mass black hole. The black holes were around 3 billion light-years away from Earth when they collided, making this merger the farthest one yet observed. The Hubble Space Telescope (along with the Spitzer Space Telescope and Large Binocular Telescope) may have discovered a “failed supernova.” A 25 solar mass star in NGC 6946, the Fireworks Galaxy, was began to brighten in 2009 but winked out of existence in 2015. The star is thought to have collapsed directly into a black hole. Astronomers estimate at least 30% of such stars may die in this way. A new impact flash was seen in Jupiter’s north polar region on May 26th. This is the sixth time an impact has been ever observed on Jupiter. NASA’s Solar Probe Plus has been renamed the Parker Solar Probe in honor of Eugene Parker, an astrophysicist who specialized in space weather. The meeting concluded at 9:13 pm.

This month and the next should be very exciting as we near the epic total solar eclipse on August 21st. Indeed, the last few weeks leading up to the Great American Eclipse should be so hectic we’ve decided to go on hiatus! For the first time since I’ve been involved with the KAS, we have no scheduled activities during the month of August. A majority of the membership will be taking full advantage of the eclipse and taking an extended vacation, myself included. Therefore, the Board thought it best to forgo our regular activities and leave members unencumbered. No Public Observing Sessions will be held in August, and we’ve moved the Perseid Potluck Picnic to July 29th. This means there will be no general meeting on July 7th (or 14th). The theme of the July meeting is always Gadget Night, so we’re encouraging members to share their astronomical doodads (homemade or otherwise) during the picnic. We’ll also ask members one by one to share their final eclipse plans while we wait for dinner. Whatever your plans, please be sure to document your experience. Take pictures or shoot video of your friends, family, etc. during the eclipse and plan to share your experiences at either the September or October General Meeting. Both those meetings will be dedicated to eclipse reports. It took approximately 2½ hours for everyone to share their experiences of the partial solar eclipse and transit of Venus in 2012, so I imagine we’ll need two full meetings for the membership to tell their eclipse stories. In addition to the picnic, we will hold Public Observing Sessions at the Kalamazoo Nature Center on July 15th and July 29th (immediately following the picnic). Our luck with the weather was better in June than it was in April and May. Let’s hope skies are even clearer in July. There may be some unscheduled events in July as well. As I type this, the weather for the Astrophotography Workshop on June 30th looks awful. If members are still interested in learning how to snap their own shots of the eclipse, then please feel free to contact me and let me know if you’d like to reschedule the workshop for sometime in July. Plus, as soon as I finish this issue of Prime Focus, I’m hoping to create my imaging script with Eclipse Orchestrator. If all goes well, and I can figure that software out, perhaps I can teach it to you! Would anyone be interested in an Eclipse Orchestrator workshop? It would likely have to be in late July on a Tuesday or Thursday evening after my astronomy class at KVCC. There’s a similar version for the Mac called Solar Eclipse Maestro. Perhaps somebody else could lead a demonstration of how to use that program as well? The August issue of Prime Focus will be solely dedicated to the Great American Eclipse. I hope to have a series of articles about all facets of the eclipse. As always, I’d like some input from the membership. What type of articles, if any, would you like to see? Have you read some interesting articles online? Then please send me a link and perhaps I’ll ask for permission to use it. I’d like to do all I can to help build excitement for the big day!

Mark your calendar. Hope for good weather. It's time for the big social event of the summer for the KAS. So get ready to party! Here are the details:

The KAS will provide the hot dogs, hamburgers, and veggie burgers (by order). You will be required to bring your own beverages, table service, lawn chairs, bug spray, and a dish to pass. Condiments will be provided by the KAS.

While dinner is cooking we will have solar observing available through KAS member telescopes (weather permitting). Members are encouraged to share their custom creations as part of Gadget Night and final plans for the Great American Eclipse while we wait for dinner.

After dinner, we’ll hold a Public Observing Session - gates open at 9:30 pm. Stargazers should be prepared to observe the deep sky delights of the summer Milky Way, and maybe even some early Perseid meteors.

This gathering will take place rain or shine, so be prepared for whatever Mother Nature throws our way!

WHEN: WHERE:

Saturday, July 29, 2017 Kalamazoo Nature Center Arrive at 6pm • Dinner starts at 7pm 7000 North Westnedge Ave.

July 2017 Prime Focus Page 5

When Stamatios (Tom) Krimigis was selected for the Voyager mission in 1971, he became the team's youngest principal investigator of an instrument, responsible for the Low Energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. It would measure the ions coursing around and between the planets, as well as those beyond. Little did he know, though, that more than 40 years later, both Voyager 1 and 2 still would be speeding through space, continuing to literally reshape our view of the solar system. The solar system is enclosed in a vast bubble, carved out by the solar wind blowing against the gas of the interstellar medium. For more than half a century, scientists thought that as the Sun moved through the galaxy, the interstellar medium would push back on the heliosphere, elongating the bubble and giving it a pointy, comet-like tail similar to the magnetospheres − bubbles formed by magnetic fields − surrounding Earth and most of the other planets "We in the heliophysics community have lived with this picture for 55 years," said Krimigis, of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. "And we did that because we didn't have any data. It was all theory." But now, he and his colleagues have the data. New measurements from Voyager and the Cassini spacecraft suggest that the bubble isn't pointy after all. It's spherical. Their analysis relies on measuring high-speed particles from the heliosphere boundary. There, the heated ions from the solar wind can strike neutral atoms coming from the interstellar medium and snatch away an electron. Those ions

become neutral atoms, and ricochet back toward the Sun and the planets, uninhibited by the interplanetary magnetic field. Voyager is now at the edge of the heliosphere, where its LECP instrument can detect those solar-wind ions. The researchers found that the number of measured ions rise and fall with increased and decreased solar activity, matching the 11-year solar cycle, showing that the particles are indeed originating from the Sun. Meanwhile, Cassini, which launched 20 years after Voyager in 1997, has been measuring those neutral atoms bouncing back, using another instrument led by Krimigis, the Magnetosphere Imaging Instrument (MIMI). Between 2003 and 2014, the number of measured atoms soared and dropped in the same way as the ions, revealing that the latter begat the former. The neutral atoms must therefore come from the edge of the heliosphere. If the heliosphere were comet-shaped, atoms from the tail would take longer to arrive at MIMI than those from the head. But the measurements from MIMI, which can detect incoming atoms from all directions, were the same everywhere. This suggests the distance to the heliosphere is the same every which way. The heliosphere, then, must be round, upending most scientists' prior assumptions. It's a discovery more than four decades in the making. As Cassini ends its mission this year, the Voyager spacecraft will continue blazing through interstellar space, their remarkable longevity having been essential for revealing the heliosphere's shape. "Without them," Krimigis says, "we wouldn't be able to do any of this." To teach kids about the Voyager mission, visit the NASA Space Place: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/voyager-to-planets This article is provided by NASA Space Place. With articles, activities, crafts, games, and lesson plans, NASA Space Place encourages everyone to get excited about science and technology. Visit spaceplace.nasa.gov to explore space and Earth science!

Caption: New data from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager show that the heliosphere — the bubble of the Sun’s magnetic influence that surrounds the solar system — may be much more compact and rounded than previously thought. The image on the left shows a compact model of the heliosphere, supported by this latest data, while the image on the right shows an alternate model with an extended tail. The main difference is the new model’s lack of a trailing, comet-like tail on one side of the heliosphere. This tail is shown in the old model in light blue. Image credits: Dialynas, et al. (left); NASA (right)

The Shape of the Solar System by Marcus Woo

July Night Sky..............................

NORTH

EA

ST

WE

ST

A lways a grand sight, a slender waning crescent Moon will be 3° to

the lower right of Venus on July 20th. Look in the eastern sky starting about 2 hours before sunrise. The evening of July 24th brings an excellent opportunity to see a razor thin waxing crescent Moon. Start your search

low in the western sky about 20 minutes after sunset. Mercury should be easy to spot almost 5° to the Moon’s upper left. More challenging is Regulus, located just over 1° to Mercury’s upper left. Binoculars will be of benefit, so bring them along! Mercury and Regulus close their gap to

within 1° of one another on the evening of July 25th. The slim crescent Moon has now moved 8° to Mercury’s upper left. Keep those binoculars handy! The Moon, now an obvious crescent, passes 3° above Jupiter on July 28th. Blue-white Spica, in Virgo, twinkles about 8° to the left.

SOUTH

This star map is property of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society. However you may make as many copies as you wish free-of-charge, so long as it is for non-profit educational purposes and full credit is given to the KAS.

www.kasonline.org

This map represents the sky at the following local standard times:

Late June 12 am

Early July 11 pm

Late July Dusk

PRESIDENT 

Richard S. Bell

VICE PRESIDENT 

Jack Price

TREASURER 

Rich Mather

SECRETARY/ALCOR 

Roger Williams

PUBLICITY MANAGER 

VACANT

MEMBERS‐AT‐LARGE 

Joe Comiskey 

Mike Cook

Sco  Macfarlane

Don S lwell

E‐MAIL a BOARD MEMBER 

July 2017 Page 7

in the

Did you know that you could purchase products from Orion  Telescopes  &  Binoculars in the KAS’s online store, the SkyShop?

Purchasing Orion products through the SkyShop gives the KAS a commission. Don’t see an item that you want to buy? Please contact us and let us know and we’ll add it or send you a special link ASAP.

─ skyshop.kasonline.org ─

Public Observing Sessions

Kalamazoo Nature Center ─ 7000 N. Westnedge Ave. ─

Saturday, July 15th

Saturday, July 29th

− http://twitter.com/kzooastro/ −

Read about the latest news and activities of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society. Stay informed about upcoming events in the night sky. 

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© July 2017, Stargazer Productions

Kalamazoo Astronomical Society c/o KAMSC 600 West Vine, Suite 400 Kalamazoo, MI 49008

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