The Science Museum of Virginia will be hosting a special evening event on July 15 from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM called SkyDay night. The Museum will have special IMAX Theater shows, Live Science shows and demonstrations.  The Richmond Astronomical Society will have its regular monthly skywatch in support of the event augmented by our three-panel image display, Russ Hummel and his space suit along with a video camera coupled to one of our telescopes with the image projected to a nearby screen. Please join us if you can.

RAS recognized two winners at the 2011 Metro Richmond Science Fair on Saturday, March 19.

Terry Barker made the presentation of two $50 checks to Vijay Govindarajan of Godwin High School, for his project “Developing an Alternative Earth-Based Lunar Regolith Simulant for Future Space Exploration,” and to Ashley Hedberg, also from Godwin High, for her project “On the Use of Moon Illumination as a Predictor of Barometric Pressure.”

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Dark matter is our best explanation for why galaxies stay together when they don’t seem massive enough to keep up gravitational attraction. But now a largely-dismissed alternative theory has some actual proof backing it up. This could get complicated.

Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.

Image of the GIANT solar eclipse, with a special present included!

The singularity is here–run http://ow.ly/37PC8

Scientists have said that these temperatures are actually 1 million times hotter than the surface of the sun. http://ow.ly/37PxO #astronomy

The RAS Fall picnic was definitely a success.  Thanks very much to Tim Streagle and the Heart of Virginia Scout Reservation for use of the facility, for supplying grilling equipment and for providing such a great stargazing venue afterward.  Thanks also to Prashant Reddy for coordinating the event and the menu and making sure that everything went smoothly.

The weather was great and the evening was a lot of fun.  It was wonderful to see everyone.

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The annual meeting of the Virginia Association of Astronomical Societies will be held this year on the campus of Roanoke College in the Colket Center (221 College Lane, Salem, VA) on October 9 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM with evening observing opportunities.  More information is at:

http://www.rvasclub.org/vaas/index.htm
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RAS had three telescopes at the latest skywatch for the Petersburg National Battlefield Park Service at City Point in Hopewell. And it’s a good thing we had as many scopes as we did, because we were surprised by a sizable group of scouts that had come for a rocket and astronomy activity earlier in the day. With parents, we probably had 100-125 viewers in attendance.

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