Pewaukee Astronomy Club

News and Information About the Pewaukee Astronomy Club and the Harken Observatory

Archive for the ‘Sky Events’ Category

Eclipses! Saturday Presentation

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

This Saturday, March 13 at 7 PM Greg Buchwald will give a talk entitled “A Dozen Years of Chasing the Shadow: Observing Solar Eclipses”  As always, the event is free and open to the public — please join us! 

Greg has travelled the world to observe 8 Solar Eclipses.  He will share photographs and videos of his experiences from places like the Galapagos Islands, China, Turkey, Zambia and more!  Additionally, Greg also volunteers at the Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, home of the world’s largest refractor telescope.  He was part of the team that found pre-discovery images of Pluto taken at Yerkes.  These were very helpful in calculating precise orbital elements for the Dwarf Planet.

Here are some of his images: Continue Reading…

Posted in Imaging, Sky Events, Solar System | Comments Off

Things Passing In Front Of Other Things. . . Part I

Friday, March 5th, 2010

We often speak of the stars as being fixed in the heavens or refer to their motion only in vast time scales compared to our lifetimes.  But the things that truly pique our interest in astronomy involve movement.  The planets, for example, are special because they move relative to the fixed stars.  Even the word “planet” comes from the Greek word for “wanderer”.  Because things in the sky actually do move, they occasionally pass in front of other things. . . and those events can be both visually striking and provide insight into our place in the Universe.  In this article, I will focus on things that pass in front of our star, the Sun. Continue Reading…

Posted in Sky Events, Solar System | 2 Comments »

Another Nova in Scutum

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Another nova was tentitively discovered by H. Nishimura in Japan and I went to the observatory Tues night to see if I could confirm it. Yup – its there! I took an AAVSO finder chart wit me, but it was scaled for the Stellarvue D80. I actually used the LX200 scope with a smaller field of view so it took a little “star-hopping” to locate the star field. I measured a position of RA 18h 43m 45.62sec, Dec -07deg 36min 42.0sec. I measured it at about magnitude 8.2, so it appears to still be brightening from Continue Reading…

Posted in Imaging, Sky Events, Stars | 4 Comments »

Nova in Sagittarius

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Nova_Sgr_10282009_0011UT_annotated

Image of the nova – a star that was not visible there before.

A little while back, I subscribed to the special notice bulletins from the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). I thought that it might be interesting to hear about unusal variable stars, novas and perhaps even a supernova should one of those appear. One of these notices arrived in my inbox on Monday. There was a newly discovered nova in the constellation of Sagittarius. I wondered, could we observe this at the Harken Observatory?

Since I had never tried to do this before, I could not resist trying! The weather map showed Continue Reading…

Posted in Deep Sky, Sky Events, Software, Stars | 2 Comments »

Bad Behavior has blocked 5 access attempts in the last 7 days.

Pewaukee Astronomy Club is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache