Astronomy Cafe – Oct 27, 2025

Intro & Welcome by Reg Dunkley
Sid Sidhu Memories
- 40 years of membership with Victoria Centre. Contagious enthusiasm – Reg Dunkley
- “Hello young lady” – Marji Welchframe
- Monthly meetings at UVic “borrow books” – David Lee
- “Hello young man” – Garry Sedun
- Chris Gainor
  - Sid was always involved with lots of people at our events
  - Sid received the Newton Ball Award twice
  - Encounters with Sid were always positive
  - A leader in public outreach
  - Sid received the first RASC National President’s Award in 2010 from Dave Lane
- Borrowed a telescope and reminded our volunteers at the Saanich Fair counter – Susan Grady
- Lauri Roche
  - “Now relax and sit yourself down” when viewing through a telescope
  - Sid would conscript volunteers rather than ask meekly
- Sid was a marathon volunteer – both at events and for outreach efforts – Reg Dunkley
- Dave Robinson met Sid through his work and were good friends with both Carol and him for many years.
- Sid Sidhu – 1936 – 2025 – In Memorium
3I/ATLAS Interstellar Comet from Mars – Phil Stooke
- Perseverance mission raw images of the comet
  - The comet appears in the images, but detail is poor
- ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter – better comet images
Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon
- Reg Dunkley
  - Widefield taken with an iPhone 16 Pro from Reg’s home on the Oak Bay shoreline
  - Williams Optics 61mm refractor and Canon 3Ti with no tracking – 16 x 2 sec exposures stacked
  - 3D plot from PixInsight
- Online images- Randy Enkin
  - ISS, Debra Ceravolo, and others on Facebook
  - Virtual Telescope Project (Gianluca Masi) live cast the comet with meteor afterglow
- Bill Weir – visual observations using a 4″ refractor, binoculars and unaided eye from Metchosin
WR134 Astrophotograph- Dave Payne
- Wolf-Rayette star with a blue arc in a molecular cloud with repeating bow front arcs
- Proposed explanation using a cartoon – Bugs Bunny crashes through a wall and leaves his profile behind
- No conventional scientific explanation for what is going on with WR134
Astrophotos from Vince Geisler, new member
- Observes using a Compustar 8 telescope and a ASI294mm Pro imager from urban Victoria
- NGC 891 galaxy
- Caldwell 30 and the Fleas – big galaxy in Perseus surrounded by small distant galaxies
- Elephant Trunk dark nebula “Dragon’s Head”
- Cygnus Wall
- Crescent Nebula, Wolf Rayet 136, NGC 6888
- Bubble Nebula
- Dumbell Nebula
- Ring Nebula
- The “Flower” Moon in RGB
- M51
- Sunspots
Aldebaran – Randy Enkin
- “The Eye of the Bull”
- The History of Our Universe in 21 Stars
- Halley observed Proper Motion in Aldebaran in 1718
- Aldebaran is red – 4,000º Kelvin
- Huggins and Miller built a spectrometer in 1864 and detected 9 Earth elements in Aldebaran’s spectra