To: EVAC Members and friends:
The East Valley Astronomy Club will conduct our July meeting this Friday
evening - July 20th. The meeting will take place in the usual location -
the Shakespeare room at the Southeast Regional Library in Gilbert, beginning
at 7:30 pm. This month's agenda will include club business, member
presentations, our featured speaker, as well as an opportunity to catch up
with friends and meet some new ones.
Our featured speaker will be Ted Blank, an EVAC member well known by many of
us. Ted has previously lived and worked around the country, as well as
internationally, and then decided to relocate to Arizona for some darker and
clearer skies. Ted is a passionate "sidewalk astronomer" who loves to share
his telescope views with the public and talk about astronomy. One of Ted's
research interests is using occultations to measure the sizes and shapes of
asteroids and discover new binary star systems.
Ted's presentation on Friday will cover many aspects of the New Horizons
mission to Pluto. The New Horizons interplanetary probe was unique in many
ways including achieving the fastest speed of any spacecraft thus far. New
Horizons flew past the orbit of our moon in only 9 hours, and traveled more
than 3 billion miles to rendezvous with Pluto in just nine years. New
Horizons buzzed by Pluto at a distance of just 8,000 miles, taking photos
and gathering scientific data as quickly as possible, then slowly sending
the data back to Earth over the next year. In the best tradition of
scientific exploration, Pluto turned out to be full of surprises - an active
surface, an atmosphere with multiple layers, and a giant heart-shaped
"iceberg" made of frozen nitrogen.
As an encore to the discoveries at Pluto, New Horizons will have traveled
another one billion miles by the end of this year for its New Year's day
rendezvous with Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69. That flyby will be the
most distant in the history of space exploration. Ted will also share his
experience as part of the small group deployed by the New Horizons team to
Africa and a remote part of Patagonia to be in just the right place at just
the right time to catch 2014 MU69 occult a distant star so as to capture
important data to help mission flyby planners better determine the
spacecraft trajectory and understand the size, shape, orbit and environment
around MU69.
Meeting location:
Southeast Regional Library
775 N. Greenfield Road
Gilbert, AZ 85234
(The corner of North Greenfield Road and East Guadalupe Road)
Note that the library will be closed at meeting time, so please use the
entrance facing Guadalupe Road.
As usual, non-members who are passionate or even curious about astronomy are
very welcome to attend Friday's meeting as our guests.
See you there!
Rob Baldwin
Vice President, East Valley Astronomy Club
vp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:vp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Not a member of the East Valley Astronomy Club, but want to be? In addition
to our regular monthly meetings, our members enjoy a club only star party,
and a club deep sky observing session every month. Members also receive
highly discounted membership in the national Astronomical League,
participate in community outreach activities, and have the ability to earn
sanctioned certifications to many observing programs. Check out our website
for more information http://www.evaconline.org/default.asp , to review our
new members guide, and to complete a membership application.
