June 2016 Volume 22 Number 12 Page 1

Star Gazer News

Newsletter of the Delmarva Stargazers www.delmarvastargazers.org

Upcoming Events: Meeting ! June 7

th 7 PM Smyrna Church

Star Gathering ! June 3-5 Dusk Trap Pond SP

From the Prez... Good day stargazers, hope everyone is well and looking up. If you came out for the star party last week, thanks. Thursday and Friday were quite damp- though Fri-day night about 10:30 there was a little break, Leo and the Big Dipper showed themselves. I quickly got out my bin-oculars and looked at Jupiter, that way we could say we did observe Friday. It only lasted about 15 minutes though, and the rain came back. At least, after some cobbling together of DVD players and a projector we were able to watch a few vid-eos. Thursday was one on aurora hunting in Alaska, and Friday we watched The Martian. Even with all the rain, everyone managed to stay fairly dry. The field also drains fairly well, it is a drain field after all. We had no problem with cars or RVs getting stuck in the mud, there was no mud, just damp sandy soil. Saturday was a better day, the forecast looked good. People started showing up and by the time the fish was cooked we had clear blue skies. Telescopes were set up or being set up as the sun set. Jupiter was one of the first things to see, and it was really nice- very steady and clear, the Great Red Spot was easy to see along with a lot of other detail. Unfortunately, it did not last long, we ended up with about two hours of observing before the sky clouded

over. The sky did not clear up until the next day sometime. Out of the last three years, this is the first star party that has been mostly rained out, fortunately there are many more new moons this summer. Speaking of observing, hear is a copy of the schedule for the upcoming season:

June 3-4 July 1-2 (&3) July 29-30 Sept 2-3 Oct 28-29 Trap Pond is not available- Blackbird or Tuckahoe Dec 2-3

I plan to be there, weather permitting and I hope to see a lot of us out. At our meeting in May Lyle showed us our new club telescope, and we got a chance to try it out Saturday night. It seemed to do well, once we got it set up and aligned. Of course the time it takes to set up is way to much when you are used to a Dobsonian= The Moon is heading towards full now, maybe we will get a few clear nights as it heads back to new. If we do, take advantage of it, get out and see something. Till next time==.Pete

Ask DMSG Over the last few years membership has dropped considerably in the Delmarva Stargazers. Attendance at meetings and Star Parties has also dwindled. The Club Officers are concerned that maybe there is something that could be done to encourage people in this hobby. For this author, it is extremely relaxing to just look up. Be it with a telescope, binoculars, or just be-ing on a lounge chair looking up with my eyes. It gets me outta the rat race. I'm removed from the pseudo-urgent lifestyle of modern America. I can feel my blood pressure drop 30 points. So here's the deal: TELL US ! Is there some-thing we are doing wrong? Is there something you

want us to do? Use this email address and tell us. Keep it clean, and keep it positive. So write to "ask_dsmg@yahoo.com". Tell us what's on your mind. You can also write if you are having difficulties with your astro equipment and we'll try to find help, if possible. Since this works with an all volunteer basis, we may not respond immediately, so please, some patience. We can also help if you are new to astronomy and just need guidance getting started. Clear skies and keep looking up, Pj

June 2016 Volume 22 Number 12 Page 2

This article is provided by �ASA 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!

�OAA's Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) to revolutionize Earth-watching By Ethan Siegel

If you want to collect data with a variety of instruments over an entire planet as quickly as

possible, there are two trade-offs you have to consider: how far away you are from the world in

question, and what orientation and direction you choose to orbit it. For a single satellite, the best of

all worlds comes from a low-Earth polar orbit, which does all of the following: • orbits the Earth very quickly: once every 101 minutes,

• is close enough at 824 km high to take incredibly high-resolution imagery, • has five separate instruments each probing various weather and climate phenomena, • and is capable of obtaining full-planet coverage every 12 hours.

The type of data this new satellite – the Joint Polar Satellite System-1 (JPSS-1) -- will take will be essential

to extreme weather prediction and in early warning systems, which could have severely mitigated the impact of

natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Each of the five instruments on board are fundamentally different and com-

plementary to one another. They are: 1. The Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), which will measure the 3D structure of the atmosphere, water va-

por and temperature in over 1,000 infrared spectral channels. This instrument is vital for weather forecasting up

to seven days in advance of major weather events. 2. The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), which assists CrIS by adding 22 microwave chan-

nels to improve temperature and moisture readings down to 1 Kelvin accuracy for tropospheric layers. 3. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument, which takes visible and infrared pictures

at a resolution of just 400 meters (1312 feet), enables us to track not just weather patterns but fires, sea tempera-

tures, nighttime light pollution as well as ocean-color observations. 4. The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS), which measures how the ozone concentration varies with

altitude and in time over every location on Earth's surface. This instrument is a vital tool for understanding how

effectively ultraviolet light penetrates the atmosphere. 5. Finally, the Clouds and the Earth's

Radiant System (CERES) will help

understand the effect of clouds on

Earth's energy balance, presently one

of the largest sources of uncertainty in

climate modeling. The JPSS-1 satellite is a sophisticated

weather monitoring tool, and paves the

way for its’ sister satellites JPSS-2, 3 and

4. It promises to not only provide early and

detailed warnings for disasters like hurri-

canes, volcanoes and storms, but for

longer-term effects like droughts and cli-

mate changes. Emergency responders, air-

line pilots, cargo ships, farmers and coastal

residents all rely on NOAA and the Na-

tional Weather Service for informative

short-and-long-term data. The JPSS con-

stellation of satellites will extend and en-

hance our monitoring capabilities far into

the future.

June 2016 Volume 22 Number 12 Page 3

Your 2015-2016 Officers Office Officer Phone email President Peter Graham President-elect Pj Riley 302-738-5366 dmsg_pjr@yahoo.com Secretary Treasurer Kathy Sheldon 302-422-4695 memomsheldon@comcast.net Past President Lyle Jones 302-382-3764 worm1647@comcast.net ASK DMSG helpline ask_dmsg@yahoo.com

Libra From Wikipedia Libra is a constellation of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for weighing scales. It is fairly faint, with no first magnitude stars, and lies between Virgo to the west and Scorpius to the east. Beta Librae, also known as Zubene-schamali, is the brightest star in the constellation. Three star systems have planets. History and mythology Libra as depicted in Urania's Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c.1825 Libra was known in Babylonian astronomy as MUL Zibanu (the "scales" or "balance"), or alternatively as the Claws of the Scorpion. The scales were held sacred to the sun god Shamash, who was also the patron of truth and justice. It was also seen as the Scorpion's Claws in ancient Greece. Since these times, Libra has been associated with law, fairness and civility. In Arabic "scorpion's claws", and likely similarly in other Semitic languages: this resemblance of words may be why the Scor-pion's claws became the Scales. It has also been suggested that the scales are an allusion to the fact that when the sun entered this part of the ecliptic at the autumnal equinox, the days and nights are equal. Libra's status as the location of the equinox earned the equinox the name "First Point of Libra", though this location ceased to coincide with the constella-tion in 730 because of the precession of the equinoxes. Libra is a constellation not mentioned by Eudoxus or Aratus. Libra is mentioned by Manetho (3rd century B.C.) and Geminus (1st cen-tury B.C.), and included by Ptolemy in his 48 asterisms. Ptolemy cata-logued 17 stars, Tycho Brahe 10, and Johannes Hevelius 20. It only be-came a constellation in ancient Rome, when it began to represent the scales held by Astraea, the goddess of justice, associated with Virgo. Characteristics Libra is bordered by the head of Serpens to the north, Virgo to the northwest, Hydra to the southwest, the corner of Centaurus to the southwest, Lupus to the south, Scorpius to the east and Ophiuchus to the northeast. Covering 538.1 square degrees and 1.304% of the night sky, it ranks 29th of the 88 constellations in size. The three-letter abbreviation for the constellation, as adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922, is 'Lib'. The official constellation boundaries, as set by Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of 12 segments. In the equatorial coordi-nate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between 14h 22m 08.08s and 16h 02m 17.23s, while the declination coordinates are between -0.47° and +30.00°. The whole constellation is visible to ob-servers south of latitude 60°N. Notable features Stars Overall, there are 83 stars within the constellation's borders brighter than or equal to apparent magnitude 6.5. The brightest stars in Libra form a quadrangle that distinguishes it for the unaided observer. Traditionally, Alpha and Beta Librae are considered to represent the scales' balance beam, while Gamma and Sigma are the weighing pans. Alpha Librae, called Zubenelgenubi, is a multiple star system divisible into two stars when seen through binoculars, The primary (Alpha2 Librae) is a blue-white star of magnitude 2.7 and the secondary (Alpha1 Librae) is a white star of magnitude 5.2 and spectral type F3V that is 74.9 light-years from Earth. Its traditional name means "the southern claw". Zubene-schamali (Beta Librae) is the corresponding "northern claw" to Zubenel-genubi. The brightest star in Libra, it is a green-tinged star of magnitude 2.6, 160 light-years from Earth. Gamma Librae is called Zubenelakrab, which means "the scorpion's claw", completing the suite of names refer-ring to Libra's archaic status. It is an orange giant of magnitude 3.9, 152 light-years from Earth. Iota Librae is a complex multiple star, 377 light-years from Earth, with both optical and true binary components. The primary appears as a blue-

white star of magnitude 4.5; it is a binary star indivisible in even the largest amateur instruments with a period of 23 years. The secondary, visible in small telescopes as a star of magnitude 9.4, is a binary with two compo-nents, magnitudes 10 and 11. There is an optical companion to Iota Li-brae; 25 Librae is a star of magnitude 6.1, 219 light-years from Earth and visible in binoculars. Mu Librae is a binary star divisible in medium-aperture amateur telescopes, 235 light-years from Earth. The primary is of magnitude 5.7 and the secondary is of magnitude 6.8. Delta Librae is an Algol-type eclipsing variable star, 304 lightyears from Earth. It has a period of 2 days, 8 hours; its minimum magnitude of 5.9 and its maximum magnitude is 4.9. FX Librae, designated 48 Librae, is a shell star of magnitude 4.9. Shell stars, like Pleione and Gamma Cassio-peiae, are blue supergiants with irregular variations caused by their abnor-mally high speed of rotation. This ejects gas from the star's equator. Sigma Librae was formerly known as Gamma Scorpii despite being well inside the boundaries of Libra. It was not redesignated as Sigma Librae until 1851 by Benjamin A. Gould. Planetary systems Libra is home to the star Gliese 581, which has a planetary system con-sisting of at least 6 planets. Both Gliese 581 d, and Gliese 581 g are de-batably the most promising candidates for life, although Gliese 581 g's existences has been disputed and has not been entirely confirmed or agreed on in the scientific community. Gliese 581 c is considered to be the first Earth-like extrasolar planet to be found within its parent star's habit-able zone. Gliese 581 e is possibly the smallest mass exoplanet orbiting a normal star found to date All of these exoplanets are of significance for establishing the likelihood of life outside of the Solar System. The family of candidate habitable planets was extended in late September 2010 to include exoplanets around red dwarf stars be-cause of Gliese 581 g, which is a tidally locked planet in the middle of the habitable zone. Weather studies show that tidally locked planets may still have the ability to support life. Deep-sky objects Libra is home to one bright globular cluster, NGC 5897. It is a loose clus-ter, 40,000 light-years from Earth; it is fairly large and has an integrated magnitude of 9. Astrology As of 2002, the Sun appears in the constellation Libra from

October 31 to November 22. In tropical astrology, the Sun is considered to be in the sign Libra from September 23 to October 22, and in sidereal astrology, from October 16 to November 15. Namesakes USS Libra (AKA-12) was a United States navy ship named after the constellation. Notes While parts of the constellation technically rise above the horizon to observers between 60°N and 89°N, stars within a few degrees of the horizon are to all intents and purposes unob-servable. Objects of magnitude 6.5 are among the faintest visi-ble to the unaided eye in suburban-rural transition night skies. See chart on pg. 7

June 2016 Volume 22 Number 12 Page 4

Here is a story of Hercules’ slaying the many headed Hydra=please consider the following= 1) the Middle East is the scene for Greek mythology 2) change the names “Hercules” to the “West” and “Hydra” to “ISIS" or “Taliban” 3) resurgence, insurgents=the many heads of today's Islam fundamentalist factions and then peruse the possibility of future civilizations studying today's West vs fundamentalist Islam struggles in the same way we view the Hercules vs Hydra myth. Don=

The Lernean Hydra The second labor of Hercules was to kill the Lernean Hydra. From the murky waters of the swamps near a place called Lerna, the hydra would rise up and terrorize the countryside. A monstrous serpent with nine heads, the hydra attacked with poisonous venom. Nor was this beast easy prey, for one of the nine heads was immortal and therefore indestructible. Hercules set off to hunt the nine-headed menace, but he did not go alone. His trusty nephew, Iolaus, was by his side. Iolaus, who shared many adventures with Hercules, accompanied him on many of the twelve labors. Legend has it that Iolaus won a victory in chariot racing at the Olympics and he is often depicted as Hercules' charioteer. So, the pair drove to Lerna and by the springs of Amymone, they discovered the lair of the loathsome hydra. First, Hercules lured the coily creature from the safety of its den by shooting flaming arrows at it. Once the hydra emerged, Hercules seized it. The monster was not so easily overcome, though, for it wound one of its coils around Hercules' foot and made it impossible for the hero to es-cape. With his club, Hercules attacked the many heads of the hydra, but as soon as he smashed one head, two more would burst forth in its place! To make matters worse, the hydra had a friend of its own: a huge crab began biting the trapped foot of Hercules. Quickly disposing of this nuisance, most likely with a swift bash of his club, Hercules called on Iolaus to help him out of this tricky situation. Each time Hercules bashed one of the hydra's heads, Iolaus held a torch to the headless ten-dons of the neck. The flames prevented the growth of replacement heads, and finally, Hercules had the better of the beast. Once he had removed and destroyed the eight mortal heads, Hercules chopped off the ninth, immortal head. This he buried at the side of the road leading from Lerna to Elaeus, and for good measure, he covered it with a heavy rock. As for the rest of the hapless hydra, Hercules slit open the corpse and dipped his arrows in the venomous blood. Eurystheus was not impressed with Hercules' feat, however. He said that since Iolaus had helped his uncle, this labor should not count as one of the ten. This technicality didn't seem to matter much to anyone else: the ancient authors still give Hercules all of the credit. Even so, Pausanias did not think that this labor was as fantastic as the myths made it out to be: to him, the fearsome hydra was just, well, a big water snake.

June 2016 Volume 22 Number 12 Page 5

Transit of Mercury Here is a pic of mercury moving across the sun this morning around 8:15 (May 9 2016)=before it clouded up!!! This was taken with a Takahashi F102 Fluorite refractor, Thousand Oaks glass solar filter, and Canon T4i at prime fo-cus=and processed in Photoshop all mounted on a Great Polaris German Equatorial mount.. WHEW! i do like the perceived roundness, i.e., edge darkening of the solar sphere. Don=

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A Martian Story on the Cheap Bob Bunge My father is a live radio man; as in commercial radio. In his mid-forties, he gave up a career in photography and bet every-thing on the purchase of a small radio station in middle Tennes-see where he spent the rest of his working days running the sta-tion. But his interest in live radio impacted me long before these events, when from a young age, we had a family tradition of lis-tening to Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast on Halloween. This famous live broadcast of 1938 caused panic along the US east coast when listeners tuned in a little late and thought Martians were really invading New Jersey. So when I became interested in astronomy in my late teens, Mars was a natural target. But seeing details on Mars is a challenge and difficult. It requires access to a good telescope every two years during an opposition and a good amount of skill and patience. And not all oppositions are created equal with the really good ones only happening every 10-15 years. By 1988, I was blessed to have regular access to a very good 31-inch tele-scope and saw amazing detail and the Moons of Mars during one of the best oppositions of the century. During this period, I learned if I drew the planet, I trained my eye to see more detail. So I’ve drawn it ever since. During the late 1990’s I managed to work my homemade 20-inch telescope into a pretty good Mars instrument and made many drawings in 2003 and 2005. I had also constructed a very fine 4-25-inch f/10 planetary telescope that was a Mars mainstay when it wasn’t practical to pull out the big gun. But as the opposition of 2016 approached – Mars will appear largest in a telescope on May 22nd, I took a different tack. In the 1960’s Columbus (Ohio) Astronomical Society member Jay Elkes, as a teenager, purchased a classic Criterion RV-6 6-inch f/8 reflector. By the 1980’s, the mount was inoper-able, Jay had moved on to a larger Dobsonian, so he donated the optical tube assembly to CAS. Tom Burns and Harold “Dick” Suiter then built a dobsonian mount for the OTA so CAS could raffle it off to raise some funds. It so happened I came home on leave from US Navy the day before the raffle and threw in $20 for a dozen or so tickets. That weekend, Tom’s little girl pulled one on my tickets. Unable to take the telescope back to the Navy with me, I took the scope back to my parents and loaned it to my Mom who would some-times look at the Moon with it. From there it moved to Tennessee and WBRY. Circle around to 2007. My parents have sold the station and are cleaning house in preparation for retirement in Las Ve-gas, so the telescope moved to Maryland. For the next several years, my wife, Cathy, used it for lab exercises in her Introduction to Astronomy class she teaches at Northern Virginia Community College. About 2011, I modified the mount to allow the use of a Sky Commander digital setting circle system so she could find Uranus and Neptune from a site almost within sight of the Wash-ington Monument. This January, I dusted the old telescope off. I also re-trieved an ancient Meade German equatorial mount from the attic. This mount had been acquired, a few feet short of the dumpster, from a NASA contractor who had discovered it was cheaper to get optics from Meade by ordering a complete telescope and throwing the OTA and mount away than asking Meade to custom make the optics. After sitting in a storage room for a number of years, the space was needed so the mount headed to the trash. The mount had in the past supported the 4-25 planetary telescope. But the RV-6 over time had shown itself to be a supe-rior planetary instrument, if not just because of aperture and longer focal length. However, the pier of the mount had always been too short, especially for the longer 6-inch.

So in one of those moments of clarity, I realized I could hack a piece of 4x4 treated lumber that was left over from a swing set project into fitting into the mount’s steel pipe pier. A week later, the project was done; the wooden pier was shaped to fit inside the metal pier and sunk into the ground in a good location in the back yard. A plywood mounting plate was created from spare wood to allow the 6-inch to easily attach to the mount all the while retaining its dobsonian bearings. Much of the hardware was left over from a rebuild of the 20-inch telescope. A fun evening was spent tweaking the mount by rotating the metal pier to get polar alignment even though I could not directly see the north star from my best location in the yard. To do this, I did a rough align-ment by compass. I then used a simple method described in Les-lie Peltier’s book “Starlight Nights” to do final alignment using two stars near the celestial equator. When finished, a star near the equator will stay in a high power eyepiece for 3-4 hours. Good enough for my visual planetary dreams. After a couple of views in April, and a record 15 days of rain, on May 14th, at 3:30am, it all came together with splendid seeing conditions. At 234x, using an old Brandon Dakin 2.4x bar-low and a shiny new 11mm Nagler eyepiece I won as a door prize at last year’s Greenbank (West Va) Starquest (yes, it rained the entire star party, but hey, there weren’t many people there for the door prizes!), Mars arrived in all of its orange/pink glory to show

off Syrtis Ma-jor, Sinus Me-ridiani and e ven o r o -graphic clouds over the great Tharsus Volca-nos on the limb of the planet. With an appar-ent diameter of 17.9 arc sec-onds, Mars was larger than I’ve seen it since 2005. I now look for-ward to some more views over the next

two months before Mars shrinks away from Earth and disappears into the glow of the Sun to await for 2018.

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June 2016 Volume 22 Number 12 Page 8

How to Join the Delmarva Stargazers: Anyone with an interest in any aspect of astronomy is welcome NAME_______________________________________________________________New_______Renew___________ ADDRESS_____________________________________________________________________________________ CITY, STATE & ZIP______________________________________________________________________________ E-MAIL ADDRESS (If any)_________________________________________________________________________ Please attach a check for $15 made payable to Delmarva Stargazers and mail to Kathy Sheldon, 20985 Fleatown Rd, Lincoln, DE 19960. Call club President Lyle Jones at 302-382-3764 for more information.

Transit of Mercury Joe Morris The day before the May 9, 2016 transit of Mercury across the Sun, the weather forecast for clear skies was not good so I jumped in my camper and drove to mid-NJ and stayed overnight in a truckstop parking lot. The next morning was clear and I shot images for about the first four hours of the transit until the clouds from down south finally caught up with me. This one was taken with a Lunt 80mm H-alpha solar scope on an old Super-Polaris mount. The camera was a ZWO ASI174MM Monochrome. I shot 1000 frames each time and culled through the shots and stacked them with Regis-tax 6 software. Image processing was done in PixInsight to bring out the prominence's and surface details of the Sun.