Newsletter of the Peterborough Astronomical AssociationThe ReflectorVolume 16 • Issue 3

March 2017ISSN 1712-4425peterboroughastronomy.comtwitter.com/PtbAstronomical

On August 21, 2017, North Americans will enjoy a rare treat: The first total solar

eclipse visible from the continent since 1979. The sky will darken and the temperature will drop, in one of the most dramatic cosmic events on Earth. It could be a once-in-a-lifetime show indeed. But it will also be an opportunity to do some science.

Only during an eclipse, when the moon blocks the light from the sun’s surface, does the sun’s co-rona fully reveal itself. The corona is the hot and wispy atmosphere of the sun, extending far beyond the solar disk. But it’s relatively dim, merely as bright as the full moon at night. The glaring sun, about a million times brighter, renders the corona invisible.

“The beauty of eclipse observa-tions is that they are, at present, the only opportunity where one can observe the corona [in vis-ible light] starting from the solar surface out to several solar radii,” says Shadia Habbal, an astrono-mer at the University of Hawaii. To study the corona, she’s traveled the world having experienced 14 total eclipses (she missed only five due to weather). This summer, she and her team will set up identical imaging systems and spectrome-

Marcus Woo

Illustration showing the United States during the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, with the umbra (black oval), penumbra (concentric shaded ovals), and path of totality (red) through or very near several major cities. Credit: Goddard Science Visualization Studio, NASA

Solar Eclipse Provides Coronal Glimpse

See “Eclipse 2017” on page 16

ters at five locations along the path of totality, collecting data that’s normally impossible to get.

Ground-based coronagraphs, instruments designed to study the corona by blocking the sun, can’t view the full extent of the corona. Solar space-based telescopes don’t have the spectrographs needed to measure how the temperatures vary throughout the corona. These temperature variations show how the sun’s chemical composition is distributed — crucial information for solving one of long-standing mysteries about the corona: how it gets so hot.

While the sun’s surface is ~9 980 Farenheit (~5 800 Kelvin), the corona can reach several millions of degrees Farenheit. Researchers

have proposed many explanations involving magneto-acoustic waves and the dissipation of magnetic fields, but none can account for the wide-ranging temperature distribution in the corona, Habbal says.

You too can contribute to sci-ence through one of several citizen science projects. For example, you can also help study the corona through the Citizen cate experi-ment; help produce a high defini-tion, time-expanded video of the eclipse; use your ham radio to probe how an eclipse affects the propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere; or even observe how wildlife responds to such a unique event.

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President’s Message

Letter from the Editor

The Reflector is a publication of the Peterborough Astronomi-cal Association (P.A.A.) Founded in 1970, the P.A.A. is your local group for astronomy in Peterborough and the Kawarthas.

The Reflector

www.peterboroughastronomy.com • jaime.a.mb10@gmail.com Phone: 705.748.2038Club Mailing AddressJaime Morales, PresidentPeterborough Astronomical Association1587 Redwood DrivePeterborough, ON K9K 1N9

TRAPPIST-1

Y ou’ll be forgiven if you don’t think you will ever see another clear night this winter. They’ve definitely been

few and far between. Perhaps spring will turn a corner. We can only hope for clear skies on Saturday, March 25. That’s when the Peterborough Astronomical Associa-tion will host a public viewing session on Armour Hill in Peterborough as an Earth Hour event. People around the world will be asked to turn off their lights as a way to continue putting climate change front and centre in people’s mind. And if you are on social media then use the hashtag #un-eheurepourlaterre to promote our event. Earth Hour begins at 8:30 PM but get there around 8 PM to help organize.

This month John Crossen explains the Worm Moon of March if your curiosity is tickled. He also has a cool story about Tabby’s Star or the WTF star. And it may be a few months away, but a eulogy fo the Cas-sini mission seems a good time as any.

O n February 22nd, nasa released to the media, “nasa Telescope Reveals Largest Batch of Earth-Size, Habit-

able-Zone Planets Around Single Star”. I am talking about TRAPPIST-1, three of its seven planets are located in the habitable zone. According to nasa all of these seven planets could have water. A planet in the habit-able zone does not mean that the planet is habitable, our moon for example, it is in the habitable zone but is not habitable. For a

Rick Stankiewicz reports on the atmo-spheric optical phenomena known as a light pillar. He also has part two of his New Mex-ico trip from January. This time it’s a visit to the Apache Point Observatory, home of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 2.5 telescope.

And check out the wonderful images from Brian McGaffney and John Chumack.

Till next month.

Phillip Chee Editor, The Reflector

Earth Hour

planet to be habitable it needs water, a lot of water! This discovery brings together scien-tists from different disciplines, i.e. chem-ists, geologists, astronomers, biologists, nasa call it, Astrobiology. According to the literature, a habitable zone is not static; it changes over time as the star evolves. To conclude, keep tuned to the next nasa an-nouncement.

Jaime Morales

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Beware the Worm Moon of March

March 12’s full Moon goes by two names, the Worm Moon and the Crow Moon. But whichever you prefer, March 12 is also the night to set your clocks forward because Daylight Savings Time begins at 2am Sunday.

See “March” on page 15

John crossen

T he Worm Moon isn’t at all creepy crawly. It’s really a good thing, espe-cially for you gardeners. The Worm

Moon is the name given the Full Moon in spring when the worms started turning up the soil. It originated with the native peo-ples and was passed on to the new settlers. The night of the Worm Moon is also the night to set your clocks forward one hour because Daylight Savings Time begins Sun-day morning. While we’re mooning each other, here’s more lunatic talk.

March kicks off with a First Quarter Moon on the 5th. That’s a good phase to ob-serve the Moon because the sunlight casts long shadows on the lunar surface which highlight the mountains and craters. As mentioned the Worm Moon arrives on the March 12.

Any night with a Full Moon is a good night for reading or TV. I say that because the Sun is shining directly on the Moon’s surface, so all the details are lost. Plus the Full Moon glare washes out all but the brightest stars.

The Third Quarter Moon arrives on the 20th. That coincides with the Vernal Equi-nox when there are equal amounts of day light and night time. It also marks the first day of spring.

The Third Quarter Moon is the least seen by people. They’re usually in bed by the time it rises. However, in the morning hours after the Sun rises the Third Quarter Moon is still visible for a few hours.

New Moon or no Moon is on the 28th. For stargazers, that’s great because there is no

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rick stankieWicz

Light Invaders!

Late this past January there was a display of an atmospheric phenom-enon that occurs from time to time

in the winter months. It is not particularly rare, but it is unusual and tends to catch people’s attention. I average a couple times each winter when I will catch a display simi-lar to the one illustrated here. The trick is to be out and about on a cold winter’s night when the conditions are right or you need to have friends and relatives that will alert you when they see something unusual in the sky. On this particular night my son and daughter-in-law were heading home from our home south of Peterborough when they noticed what they thought initially were northern lights. They phoned me and said it looked like a curtain of lights. I hustled outside to have a look and from my front porch, 10 km south of Peterborough, I could see lights to the north, but they were not northern lights, but instead “light pillars”. Grabbing my gear and dressing warm (it was -13°C outside) I headed north toward Peterborough for a better view and the at-tached images. see “Light Pillars” on page 15

These were classic light pillars. You need a perfect storm for them to occur, but when the conditions are right they are unmistak-able. You need a stable air column (not too windy), hexagonal plate-like ice crystals in the lower atmosphere floating in a “stacked” formation and this all has to be above a source of light pollution. There were all three that night. I had time to capture a few images, but as I worked my way closer to the city to find the source of the light pollu-tion (light shining up) creating these pillars, they started to fade. In just a half hour they were gone, so good luck and good timing are important to witness this phenomenon. There is no telling how long the affect will last. If the wind picks up or the crystals thin or the light source terminates, the pillars are gone.

These “false aurora” can look like spec-tral lines in the sky and do in fact indicate the temperature of the light source by their colour, as on this night. They may look like auroras, curtains of light or StarWardian “light sabers”, but unlike aurora and light

Light Pillar image taken on January 29th around 9:30 p.m. EST, with tripod mounted Canon 60D ISO800 for 4 second, with Sigma 17-70 mm @17 mm ƒ/3.5.

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Dr. Tabetha Boyajian. Raising money for her project meant raising public interest among the astronomical community. When the possibility of the fluctuations be-ing caused by an alien-made structure broke, the news media had a holiday and Tabatha’s Star made headlines.

Are You Ready For the WTF Star?John crossen

R ight off the top you have to understand that WTF stands for “Where’s The Flux”. And flux is the

problem. This star, KIC 8462852, keeps dimming then bouncing back for no logi-cal reason and on no regular schedule. Its fluctuations are irregular. And what makes it more frustrating is the fact that this is the only star of its kind so far discovered. So there’s nothing to compare it with. It would be like making a study of the Earth’s geog-raphy from a picture of one mountain.

It’s not a normal variable star whose cycle can be predicted such as the star Algol. Algol varies in brightness on a regular three day cycle. The universe is filled with highly pre-dictable variable stars like Algol. These stars can vary due to internal temperature fluc-tuations or because they are being eclipsed by a companion star in a binary system. But this star has been a head-scratcher since it was brought to Tabetha Boyajian’s attention four years ago when she was studying as-tronomy at Yale University. And by the way, Tabetha credits a group called “The Planet Hunters” for making the actual discovery.

They would have been looking for stars that varied in brightness on a regular basis. But after a number of different observa-tions, they turned the puzzler over to Dr. Boyajian.

It has been suggested that something massive, with roughly 1,000 times the area of Earth, is blocking the light coming from what has also become known as “Tabby’s Star”. As Tabetha investigated this perplex-ing celestial object, a colleague suggested something unusual, at least from a scien-tist: Could it be an alien-built megastruc-ture? As Carl Sagan once said “an extraordi-nary idea requires extraordinary evidence”.

Aside from that somewhat spooky sug-gestion, nobody is quite sure what it is. One

thing that is certain is that telescope time at any major observatory costs money. And that’s one thing funding grants aren’t avail-able for unless you have some idea of what you are going to discover.

So Dr. Boyajian moneyed-up via a kick start program. Interest in the star had grown thanks to her guest appearance on the ted educational show and numerous mentions in astronomy periodicals. She has since raised $107,000. A set of privately run robotic telescopes owned by the Las Cum-bres Observatory Global Telescope Network, including this pair at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, will be used to study the WTF star.

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New Mexico Adventures Part II: Exploring the Apache Point

Observatory (APO)

continued on next page

This past January (2017) when my wife Valerie and I were planning a trip to New Mexico, I realized that

most of the sites we wanted to see were located in the southern part of the State and the city of Alamogordo was a well situated base of operations for a number of specific sites. On top of the list was The Apache Point Observatory (apo). This is a research facility located on Sacramento Peak (elev. 9,200’) overlooking a valley with Alamogor-do and the White Sands National Monu-ment. The apo is the Astrophysical Research Consortium (arc) of six universities, in-cluding Washington, Johns Hopkins, New Mexico State, Colorado (Boulder), Virginia and Georgia State.This site is open to the public during the day throughout the year, but only to walk around outside. If you wish to have any sort of a tour it must be arranged at least two weeks in advance by contacting the apo di-rectly off their homepage link: http://www.apo.nmsu.edu/

I started this process before leaving on our trip to New Mexico and was in contact with Beth Mitchell, Program Manager and Public Information Officer for the apo. We were able to arrange a date and time that best suited everyone’s schedule. We found ourselves heading up from Alamogordo on a Thursday morning (January 19th). The route takes you first to the small mountain com-munity of Cloudcroft, then on to Sunspot. This is the closest community to the apo and is more what you would call a com-munity of “researchers”, but it does have its own post office. Even though there was no snow when we left Alamogordo this day, we sure encountered lots by the time we reached Sunspot. The temperatures were just below freezing and they had just had a dump of snow the day before. You will see plenty of evidence of this in any of the attached outside images in this article. It made for a gorgeous winter setting for our tour.

rick stankieWicz

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See “APOLLO” on page 12

continued from previous pageThere are four telescopes currently oper-

ating at the apo:1. The arc 3.5 m2. The Sloan Foundation 2.5 m (Sloan

Digital Sky Survey or SDSS)3. The New Mexico State University

1.0 m4. The arc Small Aperture 0.5 mEach telescope has a specific purpose

and is state-of-the-art, with a large suite of instruments to support the science required for the arc and SDSS researchers. Some of these telescopes have helped discover some of the furthest objects from Earth and helped create one of the largest publicly accessible catalogues of cosmic objects. We arrived well before the scheduled tour, so we could have a look at the outside facilities. See the attached images of the four above mentioned telescope “domes”.

Our tour started by meeting Beth and being introduced to the staff members who had volunteered to answer our questions and give us a glimpse of the equipment and some of the inner workings of the facility. First, we met with Kaike Pan, Manager of Night Operations and Alex Fredrickson, Telescope Technologist, for the SDSS 2.5 m Telescope. We started by checking out the

operations building for the SDSS Telescope and this is where the masking plates are prepared prior to an operation session. These control what region of the sky and what objects are observed and studied. These large cylindrical aluminum disks are pre-drilled with a specific configuration of holes that facilitate probes to be plugged in and ultimately collect the “star-light” data required for the research being conducted. Each plate can have a thousand holes and there are upwards of 10,000 plates used to date. Research continues in the mapping of galaxies and their evolution. Next we toured the inside of the SDSS dome. It could not be opened, with the threat of more inclement weather, but at the business end of the 2.5 m telescope were tanks of liquid nitrogen, required as a subzero cooling agent for the internal workings of the cameras involved. One of the unique aspects of this particu-lar dome is how it encloses the telescope. The telescope is on a pier that allows it to rotate horizontally at a fixed location, but the dome “enclosure” will “slide away” on tracks, to expose the telescope to the night sky and when in full operation the telescope looks like it is sitting on a flat deck over-

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PHOTO GALLERY

Sculptor Galaxy

NGC-253 Sculptor Spiral Galaxy, a.k.a. NGC-253 the Silver Dollar/Coin Galaxy.

As one of the brightest galaxies in the sky, the Sculptor Galaxy can be seen through binoculars and is near the star Beta Ceti. It is considered one of the most easily viewed galaxies in the sky after the Andromeda Galaxy. it is Located at 11.4 million light years away in the southern Constellation of Sculptor. Caroline Herschel first spotted NGC 253 in 1783 during her comet Survey. Taken at Okie-Tex star Party with a 5.5-inch Newtonian and modified Canon Rebel Xsi, ISO 1600, 30 minute exposure.

Best Regards,

John Chumack www.galacticimages.com

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Fish Head Nebula

I have attached this new medium resolution of IC 1795 also known as the “Fish Head Nebula” (shown here in the center of im-age). This is an extension of the immense nebula IC 1805 also known as the Heart Nebula, shown attached to IC 1795 and extend-ing up to the area of the right. This is a huge emission nebula rich in ionized gas, and some rich star formation. The entire region is part and parcel of IC 1795, IC 1805, and IC 1848 (The Fish Nebula, The Heart Nebula, and the Soul Nebula respectively). This rich star and nebulosity rich region is in the Perseus Arm of our Milky Way Galaxy, and is between 6 000 and 6 500 light years from us.

Thanks for looking.

Tech Data: Medium resolution images made up of bin1 and bin2 merged with HA data, and RGB light frames. Synthetic lumi-nance was derived in PI and PS to allow proper normalized blending. Taken on November 28th, from the Nutwood Observatory here in Bancroft, Ontario, Canada. Acquisition about 8 hours in hazy hazy skies.

Telescope used was a modified Ceravolo 300mm ƒ/4.9 and guided using ASIG on an M E mount.

Brian McGaffney

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YF-12A, AF Ser. No. 60-06935. The Lockheed YF-12A experimental interceptor is the fastest jet fighter we mortals can devise. It has a top speed of Mach 3. That’s 3 360 km/h or 2,100 mph. But as you now know, Mother Nature can move a lot faster.

Buckle Your Seatbelt I’m Putting the Pedal to the Metal

John crossen

I f you are at the equator reading this article, you are zipping around at 1 670 km/h that’s 1,037 mph in old-folk

lingo. Of course you don’t notice it because you’re rotating right along with dear old terra firma. Thankfully so is the atmosphere otherwise we’d have a headwind that would play havoc with Donny Trump’s hairdo. Then again, you could probably water ski behind a sailboat.

Of course Earth is also orbiting the Sun at 110 000 km/h. That’s translates into 30 km/s or 19 miles/sec. It’s a good thing there are no speed limits or traffic cops in space, otherwise Earth’s traffic ticket would be astronomical.

Speaking of astronomical, our Milky Way Galaxy is also putting its spin on things. So hold on to your hats. You and yours are cur-rently whisking around inside our galaxy at 220 km/s. That’s 720 000 km/h or 450,000 mph.

Next up is the speed at which our local group of galaxies is moving relative to the cosmic microwave background (a heat map created by the Big Bang). This is where we slow down a bit, but just a smidge. Six hun-dred km/s is the speed at which our local galaxy group is whistling along. That’s 0.2% of the speed of light.

We can’t leave any discussion of speed in the universe without mentioning the speed of light. That’s roughly 300 000 km/s or 186,000 mph for those of you still playing dragons and dungeons. According to Ein-stein, nothing can exceed the speed of light. This leads to some interesting hypothetical questions. If you were traveling at the speed of light and held up a mirror, could you see your face in it? It’s just a little something to ponder. I know in my case I shutter to think of seeing my face, as does the mirror.

Let’s slow things down a bit and visit the Cassini Spacecraft which has been orbiting Saturn and its moons for nearly a decade now. Sadly that’s about to end, but definite-ly not with a whimper. Instead Cassini will take us on the ride of our lives as it dives into the outer regions of Saturn’s rings.

Astronomers are calling this Cassini’s Ring-Grazing Orbits. Not only will we be getting some amazing images, but Cassini has two instruments that can sample par-ticles of the rings as well as the gases within them. That’s where the ring-grazing comes from.

I’ll have more on this in the next. It’s wor-thy of far more than a mention.

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September 15 of this year will see the end to one of the most spectacu-lar and successful missions ever for

nasa and its partners the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Cassini Spacecraft was launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn on June 30, 2004. It has since made a significant number of discov-eries.

Let’s start with the obvious, the incredible images of the planet and its rings. The im-age of Earth as seen from beneath Saturn’s rings is nothing short of stunning and per-haps a little humbling. Cassini also gave us our first close up images of the tiny moons Prometheus and Pandora, both of which orbit Saturn from within its rings.

Cassini also toured the largest four of Saturn’s 53 moons. Our biggest surprise here was the discovery of water geysers shooting up from the surface of Enceladus. Cassini flew through the geysers to analyze their content. The findings indicated that a large body of water containing familiar minerals lay beneath the Enceladus’ icy surface.

Highlight of the mission was the launch of esa’s Huygens probe from Cassini to Saturn’s giant moon Titan. The large orange

John crossen

Cassini Spacecraft Set to Crash Into Saturn

moon is cloaked in a thick layer of methane gas which also comprises the atmosphere near Titan’s surface. As Huygens descended to Titan’s surface it sent back images of mountain ranges and mammoth lakes, one of which has since been named Ontario Lacus due to its similar appearance to Lake Ontario. But appearance is where any simi-larity ends.

Titan is so cold that methane and ethane, which are gasses at Earth-like tempera-tures, become liquid on Titan. Therefore its lakes and rivers are comprised of liquid methane. It even rains methane on Titan. The images taken of Titan’s surface show us a world where water is frozen to the point that it is as hard as granite. In short Titan is like Earth, only backwards.

Cassini also orbited Saturn in a north/south route showing us the huge hurricanes at the North and South Poles. It also gave us our first image of the huge hexagon struc-ture at Saturn’s North Pole.

Now Cassini is preparing to do a con-trolled descent through the rings after which it will slip beneath Saturn’s cloudy surface and its 13 year mission will be over. For us space cadets it has been one sweet ride. But there’s another Mars rover to come, so we keep looking up.

The Cassini Mission takes its name from Giovanni Cassini, the first man to clearly

discern Saturn’s rings through a telescope.

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APOLLOcontinued from page 7

hanging the side of the mountain. It ends up more exposed to the elements, but with full access to the night sky. Somewhat like a SkyShed, but not a roll-off roof, rather a roll-off building. Pretty cool design!

Another program conducted at the apo that we were unaware of until our tour, was the Apache Point Observatory Lunar-rang-ing Laser Operations (apollo) instrument project. With the aid of retroreflectors left on the surface of the Moon by past Apollo and Russian moon missions, high power lasers are used to reflect off the equipment on the Moon and beam back to the arc’s 3.5 m telescope mirror. This allows periodic measurements of the lunar orbit around the Earth, the distance to the Moon and the relative acceleration of the Earth and Moon toward the Sun. The accuracy, when gauging these distances, is to within 1 to 2mm! There was a scale model of a “lunar reflector” on the wall of the apo offices (see attached) and it is only about a metre square and is a number of triangular mir-rors linked together like inverted pyramids, that focus the laser beam from Earth and reflects it back.

Lastly, it was on to see the facility hous-ing the arc 3.5 m telescope. Our tour guide was Ted Rudyk, the Telescope Operations Specialist. We learned that Ted was not only a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (rasc), but is actually a transplanted-Canadian who just moved from Toronto last May to start his job at the apo. Ted was willing to give us a tour as he went about his daily rounds to check the operations and functions of the 3.5 m tele-scope. While he went about checking every panel, bearing and hose, he was answering our questions and pointing out interest-ing features to us. We were just thrilled to be able to be behind the scenes and up close and personal. Unfortunately, none of the telescopes at the apo were going to be operating this particular evening because another dump of snow was heading in from the south. However, this did not stop Ted on his appointed rounds, as these facilities need to be checked and serviced daily, to ensure that they will be ready to “rock and roll” when the skies are clear. At facilities like these, researchers around the world

continued on next page

Vo l 16 • I s sue no. 3 • March 20 1 7 • 1 3 The Reflectorcontinued from previous page

are lined up (at least on-line) to conduct their research and time is money, so all the staff working on site play a critical role in keeping things operational to maximize the research potential.

Ted started from the ground (base) up, checking clearances and even for the ef-fects that one Miller Moth (euxoa auxiliaris) might have on the operation. Just one moth can stop the mechanism that moves this huge telescope. This can be a real concern, as these insects move to higher elevations in the summer months as a part of their life cycle. Who knew? Even the metal “rail and wheel” system for rotation of the dome, needs to be checked regularly for signs of wear and tear (and there is).

Then we moved up to the top level to check the spectrometer and cameras. The cameras and their housings are so big they need a heavy duty dolly to move them and put them in place. There were different model cameras for different purposes, but most required liquid nitrogen to cool them. Those were the ones with the white frosted hoses attached to them. This part of the tour felt like it was taking place in a refrig-erator. Toques and gloves not optional.

With the dome closed, we watched as the telescope aspect was moved from 90 degrees to about 15 degrees. It was a very

smooth operation and this allowed us to stand right next to the primary mirror. It reminded me of my 12” Dobsonian reflector at home and that I should maybe clean it every year, like they do this 3.5 m behemoth. They all get dirty and spotty. Even with a protective blade system, telescopes can pick-up dirt. This telescope is a single pri-mary mirror, Ritchey-Chretien design and the secondary mirror is 1 m in diameter. Behind the primary, they use a honeycomb design for support and to reduce the over-all weight, but it is very brittle. The whole mechanism sits on a cushion of air to help stabilize it. Sounds like quite the balancing act, but it works.

As our tour ended, the clouds were rolling in from the south and the snow was start-ing to fall. This was our signal to get off the mountain. We made it safely to lower eleva-tions and on our way back to Alamogordo the snow actually stopped falling, once we hit the 8,000 ft. elevation mark.

We had a fantastic time and want to thank all the staff who volunteered to tour us through their segment of the apo. It was a thrilling and unforgettable experience by which all others will be measured. It goes to show that a little pre-planning can go a long way and being an rasc member doesn’t hurt either.

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The Sky this MonthMercury lost in the Sun’s glare early in the month and reaches superior con-junction on the 7th. Emerges in the eve-ning sky mid-month.Venus is stationary on the 2nd and then begins retrograde motion in cen-tral Pisces moving towards inferior conjunction on the 25th. Reaches high-est heliocentric latitude 8° north of the Sun on the 14th and can therefore be seen both in the morning and eve-ning for a few days before emerging as morning star at month’s end.Mars in Pisces at the opening of the month and moves into Aries on the 8th.Jupiter in retrograde motion in Virgo before reaching opposition on the 7th .Saturn is low in the dawn sky in Sag-ittarius by the end of the month. Third quarter Moon passes north 3° on the 20th.Zodiacal Light in northern latitude in the west after evening twilight for the next two weeks from the 14th.Daylight Savings Time begins at 2 AM on the 12th.Spring Equinox arrives at 6:29 AM on the 20th.

Moon PhasesFirst Quarter 6:32 AM March 5Full Moon 10:54 AM March 12Last Quarter 11:58 AM March 20New Moon 10:57 PM March 27

Vo l 16 • I s sue no. 3 • March 20 1 7 • 1 5 The Reflectorcontinued from page 3March

Light Pillars

moonlight to wash out the stars. So if it’s a clear night and you’re at a good dark-sky location far from city light pollution, make a point of going out and looking up.

Springs constellations are just starting to creep up the eastern horizon in the later hours of the night. Leo the Lion is actually moving overhead along with Cancer the Crab. Below them are Crater and Corvus, the Goblet and Crow respectively.

Those with a slight case of insomnia may wish to hang in a bit later while Boötes the Herdsman and Virgo the Virgin take to the sky. Virgo with a wheat sheaf in her hand always reminds me of spring plant-ing time. And indeed, March 20 is the first day of spring. Even though the crocuses may not have peeped through the snow yet, the spring constellations are here and it’s getting warmer. So get outside and start looking up.

continued from page 4

sabers, they will not move or change, other than pos-sibly fading or brightening in intensity. They are akin to “solar pillars”, as to how they are formed and the way they appear to the observer.

Solar Pillars can occur any time of year because the conditions that create this af-fect are the similar hexagonal plate-like ice crystals like in light pillars, but instead in the upper atmosphere, where it is always cold. The crystals also need to be stacked in a column and the light source being sunlight or moonlight, reflect-ing off the bottoms (or tops), as in these cases, toward the views eye. The affect is a long pillar or column of light. Typi-cally, solar pillars occur close to sunset or sunrise. They are often more noticeable when the Sun is just below the ho-rizon or hidden by clouds, to help block the strong rays that would otherwise wash out the column af-fect. They can be quite striking and distinct sometimes. (See the attached image from January 2003).

So, wherever you go or whatever you do, keep looking up!

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ArticlesSubmissions for The Reflector must be received by the date listed below. E-mail submissions are preferred (Microsoft Word, OpenDoc, ASCII and most common graphic formats are accept-able). If your article contains photso or graphics, please provide a separate file for each. Typed or hand-written submissions are acceptable pro-vided they are legible (and not too long.) Copy-righted materials will not be published without written permission from the copyright holder. Submissions may be edited for grammar, brev-ity, or clarity. Submissions will be published at the editor’s sole discretion. Depending on the volume of submissions, some articles may be published at a later date. Please submit any ar-ticles, thoughts, or ideas to:phillip.chee@gmail.com

Next submission deadline:March 25 2017

Meetings The Peterborough Astronomical Association meets every first Friday of each month, except July and August, at the Peter-borough Zoo Guest Services and Rotary Educa-tion Centre (inside the main entrance at the north end of the Zoo) at 7 p.m. P.A.A. general annoucements will begin each meeting with the guest speaker starting at 7:30 p.m.

Eclipse 2017Otherwise, Habbal still encourages ev-

eryone to experience the eclipse. Never look directly at the sun, of course (find more safety guidelines here: https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/safety). But during the approxi-mately 2.5 minutes of totality, you may remove your safety glasses and watch the eclipse directly — only then can you see the glorious corona. So enjoy the show. The next one visible from North America won’t be until 2024.

For more information about the upcom-ing eclipse, please see:

nasa Eclipse citizen science pagehttps://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/citizen-

science

nasa Eclipse safety guidelineshttps://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/safety

Want to teach kids about eclipses? Go to the nasa Space Place and see our article on solar and lunar eclipses! http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/eclipses/

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!

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