Astronomy Cafe – June 15, 2020

Sketching by Victoria Centre Members

• Online collection of astro sketches created by our members
• Phillip Teece’s Messier Sketches – observations from 1973 to 1978 from Victoria
• Diane Bell
• Dorothy Paul

Kuiper belt talk at the Wednesday Night UVic Astronomy Open House at 7:30 PM

Using New Horizons Probe for Parallax

The distance between the Earth and New Horizons offers a very long baseline that facilitates parallax measurements. Check out the interesting article here.

CANadian Virtual Astronomy Seminar Series (CANVAS)

The next talk in the CANVAS series will be given Paul Weigert of Western on Monday June 22 at 11:00 PDT. Dr. Weigert’s talk is titled ‘ Interstellar asteroids and comets: what are they and where do they come from?’

Visit the CANVAS webpage – http://astroherzberg.org/canvas/ – for the schedule of talks, a link to the YouTube channel, and links to the recorded talks and upcoming talks.

The Zoom link for Monday’s talk is – https://zoom.us/j/97943735055?pwd=alhsVC9vdUVTUHBoenZKRzFleGVxdz09

Noctilucent clouds from Edmonton – Alistair Ling

Daytime Lunar Photo from Mike Nash

During this cloudy interlude RASCals have had to resort to desperate measures to capture Astro objects. Despite multiple layers of cloud and a rising Sun, Mike managed to get a remarkable amount of detail in this image taken at 9AM on Sunday June 14th. He writes: “The filter works well enough, but not perfect – on screen the sky is grey rather than a completely visible light-blocking black. Alignment points (for stacking software) needed to be set at a much higher brightness than I would normally do.” Check it out

Observing

• This Week’s Sky – Skynews magazine
• This Week’s Sky At a Glance – Sky & Telescope magazine