The store

Every year, Hands On Optics, hosts The Eastern Astronomy Show. Several RAS members, like myself, John Raymond, and Bill Jeffries, have gone in the past and liked it, so John organized a road trip for the 2009 event (Saturday, Oct. 31). Joining John and me, were Bill Jeffries, Dave Walton, Tim Streagle, and Jim Langley.
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Thanks to everyone who came out for the skywatch at Woodlake.  It was one of those events where the weather made it a tough call whether to have the skywatch.  Reports at the site indicated clearing and there was some clear sky to the west, so it made sense to go ahead with the event.
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Clouds prevailed, however, but thanks very much to John Raymond and Terry Barker for bringing their telescopes.  Hopefully we will have better weather next time.  Please watch the calendar and website for updates.

I post stuff periodically on the club’s Twitter site, richastrova. Up to this point, you had to have a Twitter account to see those postings, but now we’ve made those “tweets” available from the club’s web page. If you go to the web site, and page down, looking in the right hand column, you’ll see them, under the title “Twitter feed.” (more…)

The best time to view this shower will be tomorrow morning, before sunrise. I plan on going out to the scout camp around midnight–is anyone else up for going? Send me an email, and maybe we can ride together.

If it’s like last night,there will be a very nice Iridium flare tonight, 20 Oct, at  8:02 pm. It will be  -5  magnitude, 38° high, in the NNE direction.

October 19, 2009: The Orionid meteor shower peaks this week and it could be a very good show.

“Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, the source of the Orionids,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour.” (more…)

Cindy Bowers and I went to a NASA tweetup with the crew of the STS-127 space shuttle in Washington, DC this week. I have the story on my web page.

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Alert!

The Bryan Park Skywatch scheduled for the rain date of September 28 has been cancelled due to maintenance on the soccer fields.  We will resume the Bryan Park skywatches in October.

Thanks to everyone for helping out with the skywatches.

We have three more skywatches scheduled for September:  Bryan Park on September 24, the Masonic Home on September 29 and Meadow Glen on September 30.  Please let John Raymond or me (president@richastro.org) know if you can help out with any of these events.  Thanks very much to everyone who has participated in our fall events.  We appreciate all of the support.

The annual conference of the Virginia Assoication of Astronomical Societies will be held in Charlottesville on September 12 this year.  The Charlottesville Astronomical Society has scheduled a great lineup of speakers, a BBQ dinner and star party at McCormick Observatory.  More information is available at http://www.cvilleastro.org/vaas/.

Please join us at the conference if you can.