Messier marathon - 2014

This year Messier marathon Star Party was very low in participation.
Nobody stayed whole night and I stayed only until about 3 A.M. when batteries in my camera died.

At first it was cloudy and windy, but later on clouds disappeared and wind become calm.

Unfortunately light pollution from Baltimore, Frederik and Washington DC decrease level of observation.

I've added only about half a dozen newly observed objects in my list. My general target for that night was Virgo Cluster, but with sensitivity of my scope and level of light pollution I could barely spot the most bright objects without being sure that they are the ones I'm looking for.

So, my goal failed that night.

However, I did very clear Photo Lapse movie and made couple of wonderful pictures of Saturn and M13 using Club telescope. (Big thanks Tom Renn and Curtis Roelle for the big help)

Additional thanks to Curtis Roelle for hosting the event.

Also, please fill free to download copy of Messier Marathon observation guide presentation developed by WASI member Ron Smith.


And here are the pictures:

Saturn

Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules.

Here is me trying to spot something (credits to Tom Renn)

US Science and Engineering Festival

Event was held in Washington, DC convention center April 26-27, 2014.

Convention center in DC is huge and it was full of presenters. It would require a week just to go through all boots, tables and activity rooms and another couple of months to participate in all activities. Some people spend their entire life doing that.

I do not know how many thousands of people attended the event, but whole building was overcrowded. Security had to maintain "one way streets" to redirect people.

Here are some pictures.

Pavilion before the opening.
NASA pavilion in the center. Big Hadron Collider is on the left

Our proud team

Nearby exhibition of K-Nex

Walmart presented new design of delivery track

Skip teasing kids

Celestron exhibition

Marvel characters

Kids building structures from macaroni and marshmallows 

 Tall wooden towers - absolutely amazing.

Skip cooking a comet

All ages are entertained

Little troublemaker

Comet flies

Sometimes it become scary

April's WASI meeting

April's meeting in Bear Branch Nature Center gathered more people than usual because we had a special guest speaker from University of Maryland Marc Swisdak.
Special thanks to Curt Roelle to arrange that presentation.

Mark worked with NASA on Voyager mission and bring a lot of very interesting info about it
in his presentation “The Voyager Mission and the Edge of the Solar System.”.

After Mark Swisdak we had some club announcements and some BAU staff.

After the meeting we went outside and had a little star party.
Skies were almost perfect. Only the problem was a Moon which is going to be full only next week, but was already extremely bright that night. There were even shadows on the ground as we had a projector on the parking lot.

I've tried to take a picture of Mars, which is in the closest approach to the Earth these days, but it wasn't so good. Just a fuzzy, little bit reddish ball.

Then I tried my camera enhancement lens which is supposed to double the power.
However, picture of the Moon was so big that did not fit into the screen.
I want to give credit for that picture to Tom Renn, who helped me to point and keep steady my crappy telescope.

34th Annual Central Pennsylvania Consortium Astronomers' Meeting

That was very interesting event I attended today.

 34th Annual Central Pennsylvania Consortium Astronomers' Meeting was held in Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.


Here are few links related to the event:
1. Event's main page

2. Event's schedule

3. Pictures from the College's campus

And here are pictures are from the event:

The beautiful building where we met:


Building inside

 Reception desk

Auditorium is ready for gusts and speakers 

Ryan Lane (Dickinson College).
Presenting: "Modeling the Evolution of the Cataclysmic Variable V723 Cassiopeia"

Arpita Roy (Penn State University).
Presenting: "The Quest for Habitable Worlds Using Doppler Spectroscopy"

Harold Williams (Montgomery College)
Presenting how to do 3D video

Niel Brandt (Penn State University).
Presenting: "A Good Hard Look at Growing Supermassive Black Holes in the Distant Universe"

During coffee brakes attendees met in the hall and shared poster presentations.

F&M ARCC Students (Franklin and Marshall College), "The Arecibo Remote Command Center at F&M" 

Stephanie Klein (Kutztown University),
"High Resolution Optical Spectroscopy of R Arae: An Active Interacting Binary Star with a Blended Spectrum" 

 Drinking coffee and learning.

Jenae Shoup (Kutztown University),
"Photometric Analysis of the Recently Discovered W UMa Star NR Camelopardalis: Period change and Spot Migration" 

Billy Cimorelli (Kutztown University), "Multicolor Light Curve of the Recent Supernova SN2014J" 

It looks like most popular one:
Scott Rogers (Kutztown University),
"Spots on the Move for the Magnetically Active Binary System DV Piscium" 

After lunch we jumped back into space science.

Andrea Lommen (Franklin and Marshall College)
Presenting: "Einstein's Last Legacy: Measuring Wrinkles in Space-time"

Emma Handzo (Franklin and Marshall College)
Presenting: "Characterizing the Timing Noise of NANOGrav Pulsars"

Howard Bond (Penn State University)
Presenting: "The Curious Case of Hevelius's Nova of 1670, CK Vulpeculae"

John Stein (Geneva College)
Presenting: "Building an Affordable Observatory at Geneva College"

Jack Madden (Franklin and Marshall College)
Presenting: "Automating the Visual Task of Pulsar Identification"

Jonathan Hargis (Haverford College)
Presenting: "The Predicted Number and Distribution of Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies and the Implications for Lambda+CDM"

Closing the event.

I just want to say thank you to organizers, speakers and all contributors to the event.

If I understood 10% of what presenters are delivered it's a very big deal, because itpushed me to some wonderful ideas I can pursue in the future.

THANKS THANKS THANKS to you guys!