B.C.A.A.S. MEETING MINUTES
February 12, 2009
Attendees: 21
Meeting started at 7:32pm and ended at 9:44pm
Barb opened the meeting and thanked all who attended the board meeting on Jan.22. Also, Linda was absent so Barb gave the treasurers report.
The next club meeting will be on March 12 at 7:30pm in the Planetarium. We will see the IYA program “Two Small Pieces of Glass” and possibly “Cosmic Collisions”. On April 3 we will have a joint program with the Museum instead of the regular meeting. The next flying field star party will be on Feb. 21.
The next Night Sky Network teleconference will be on Feb. 19 with Dr. Connie Walker on Dark Skies Awareness. The next will be on Mar. 26 with Kris Koenig on 400 years of astronomy and Mike Simmons on 100 Hours of Astronomy. These start at 9pm, call 1-888-455-9236 and give a pass code of NIGHT SKY NETWORK. Barb will send out an email reminder a few days before each session.
We talked about the Iridium 33 Satellite and Russian Cosmos Satellite collision over Siberia. Barb asked that more club members complete the survey she sent out. Our Pegasus newsletter will be published every other month – contact Melody with any articles you want included. Dan thinks he will have the new web site complete by the next meeting - the look and feel will be very different and will include daily RSS feeds from a variety of sources. Lane described the new Yahoo newsgroup for the club and requested that more members accept their emailed invitations to participate. A French satellite has found the smallest exoplanet yet – less than two times Earth’s diameter with a 20 hour year (hot stuff!) orbiting a sunlike star 390ly away in Monoceros. There are now nine new formal names for gaps in Saturn’s rings. Dave’s wife has identified a new moon phase: “used”. As part of the IYA, the public can vote to select the next object Hubble will view- you can choose from a list of objects Hubble has not yet imaged – vote at http://youdecide.hubblesite.org/ Astronomy magazine sent us two comet fragments which were passed around the room. Lane gave a short presentation on Archeoastronomy, the first of a series aimed at covering basic astronomy topics in each meeting.
The
Pennsylvania Outdoor Lighting Council, which Barb is a member of, is seeking
candidates for this award for their “Good lighting Award”.
David Graff gave the main presentation – “Searching for Dark Matter and Planets with Gravitational Lensing” As an astronomer, David worked on this project for several years. Einstein’s mathematical models of relativity showed lensing was possible but it was not detected until appropriate technology was brought online in later years. Astronomers begin to use lensing of galaxies and clusters to more accurately measure the mass of galaxies and clusters to confirm the presence of “dark matter”. Parallel studies that used lensing of stars (called microlensing) proved that the majority of dark matter does not consist of low-mass stars in the galactic halo so it must be made up of some exotic super-particles as yet undiscovered. Microlensing has also been used as a method to find exoplanets. All this work was reviewed by David using graphs, images and animation for a very informative presentation. It is always good to hear it from someone who was there – and he’s a member of BCAAS!
Lane Davis, Secretary