- Intro & Welcome by Chris Purse
- New maps of the Apollo 17 LRV traverses – Phil Stooke, University of Western Ontario
- Phil is revising his new Moon book
- Lunar Rover traverses mapping derived from limited data
- Finding the lunar rover tracks on photos taken from the surface with photos taken from orbit
- Apollo 17
- EVA 1 – Active Seismic Mapping experiment
- EVA 2 – Victory Crater
- See the maps on this site – Apollo Landing Sites
- Apollo 15 & 16 traverses are available now
- Apollo 17 traverses soon
- Ascent stages were deliberately crashed on the surface to jettison unnecessary payload before the return flights.
- The lunar rovers could only be driven the distance that the astronauts
- M42 Orion Nebula – Dave Payne
- Narrowband image and a more natural looking RGB image
- Imagining the 3D details of the nebula
- Atomic hydrogen is visible
- Molecular hydrogen is not visible unless UV hits it
- 21cm Hydrogen Signal
- The friendly skies – Saskatchewan Star Party – The Globe and Mail – described by Les Welch (who attended)
- Fred Lum night sky time lapse
- Star party highlights
- Comet I3/Atlas – Randy Enkin
- Discovered on July 1, 2025
- Fast hyperbolic shallow track through the solar system
- Only the third interstellar comet discovered – I1/Oumuamua, I2/Borisov
- Every major telescope is observing this comet
- Core is at most 20km across
- Sun-facing emissions visible
- Nickel to Iron ratio is unique (involving carbonyls)
- Neil deGrass Tyson StarTalk: Is It A Comet or Alien Technology?
- Dark Sky Reserve – Hanle, Ldakh, India – Natasha van Bentum
- 22km radius in a wildlife reserve
- First Dark Sky Preserve in India
- Himalayan Chandra Telescope operates in the same region
- Bortle 1 skies
- 17,000′ altitude
- 24 local villagers have become astronomy ambassadors
- News articles – BBC & The Guardian
- Space Mission News – Chris Gainor
- Planetary Society reports on cutbacks
- JPL 11% staff cuts
- NASA 20% have left
- Shawn Duffy is the current acting NASA administrator, but Jared Isaacman may be the next NASA administrator
- Lunar module for Artemis III rumours
- Artemis II mission will likely orbit the Moon in February 2026 with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen aboard
- APOD has disappeared as of Oct 2nd due to USA government shutdown
- JUNO mission – extension
- Events
- RASC Victoria Council meeting – this Wed, October 21 7:30PM on Zoom – info to be sent out by the President to members
- Astrophoto SIG delayed until next week – Davy Payne
- FDAO AGM this Saturday – Lauri Roche
- RASC National 2026 Observers calendar pre-orders – contact Lauri (lauri@victoria.rasc.ca)
- C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) – Randy Enkin
- James Di Francesco, DAO Director profiled Comet Lemmon photo taken by Steve Martin using his Seestar robotic telescope
- Randy tried to image the comet using his Olympus dSLR using a tracker with a poor result
- Members observed the comet from the VCO at 4AM after it rose – Reg Dunkley
- C/2025 F2 SWAN – finder chart by David Lee
Video transcript of meeting
Astronomy Cafe – Oct 20, 2025
