Club Meetings

John Conrad will be joining us for:

A unique tour of the Solar System, enabled by 6 decades of NASA spacecraft explorers…

From the formation of our home system billions of years ago, to the pervasive influence of our sun across the planets, to the highlights of our search for life, water, and clues to our origin – and future.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting; meet members who share your astronomy enthusiasm, talk about observing plans, using telescopes and all things astronomical.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

Our own Josh Wright will be presenting “observing tricks and tips to ensure a unique observation of the elusive G&H Stars within the Trapezium of Messier 42”.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

From a historical and insider’s perspective, you’ll understand how and why mankind embarked on the Space Age six decades ago. Then you’ll learn how modern rockets work, from their World War II / Cold War beginnings right through the global activities of today’s spacefaring nations – and into a future increasingly impacted by today’s visionary entrepreneurs.

John Conrad, our NASA/JPL Ambassador will be presenting.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting. One of our members will give an overview of his visit to the Great Telescope at Birr Castle (aka The Leviathan of Parsonstown) in Offaly County, Ireland. Plus, members will chatter about observing, upcoming star parties and outreach events.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

Josh Wright has some important StarFest information.  Help us get prepared for the big night!

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

Bob Button will be our quest speaker.

Bob Button is a award-winning writer and journalist and published author since he was 12 years of age.  He joined NASA in 1960 as a public affairs officer during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo man-in-space programs.  Please see the rest of his bio in the forums.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

Dr. Veronique Petit will be our Guest Speaker.

Massive stars, which can have up to one hundred times the mass of our own Sun, are the powerhouses of our Galaxy. They shape their surroundings though their intense radiation and winds, trigger the formation of new generations of stars, and produce almost all of the heavy chemical elements in the Universe through nuclear reactions in their cores. Understanding the life-cycle of these stars is thus of great importance to astrophysics, even more so since the recent detection of gravitational waves, which originate from the coalescence and merger of black holes and neutron stars formed when massive stars die. These waves, now detected by the 2017 Nobel prize-winning LIGO experiment, are revolutionizing the field of stellar astrophysics by providing much-needed observational constraints on the endpoint of massive star evolution. Dr. Petit will discuss the most important factors dictating the evolution of massive stars, including an important factor has only been recently recognized and is a subject of intense research at UD: the presence of a surface magnetic field. These surface magnetic fields have the potential to dramatically alter the life-cycle, and ultimate fate, of a massive star.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting.

CAS’ VP Robert Werkman will speak of his observing trip to the pristine dark skies of New Mexico.

Join us at the Crow’s Nest Preserve for our monthly club meeting. Tonight’s topics include observing in Cold Weather. Also, recaps of observing sessions and trips to local, far and farther dark sites.