Last night was my first visit to the Huachuca Astronomy Club, which meets the second Friday of each month at the Cochise Community College in Sierra Vista, Arizona. It's about an hour and a half drive from my home in Tucson.
It was a nice meeting, a bit smaller than the TAAA meetings but that makes it easier to meet people. The main speaker was Hal Povenmire, an author and very knowledgeable scientist who spoke about tektites, meteors, and lunar grazing occultations. I was especially fascinated by the occultations part of his talk, and purchased a copy of his book on the subject afterwards (he even signed it for me!)
Since the moon will be occulting various stars in the Pleiades several times this year, I thought it would be interesting to learn about it. I don't think any of the grazing occultations of the Pleiades that are coming up this year, where the star slips along the rim of the moon, will be visible from Tucson but I'm not sure about that.
I also picked up a club t-shirt and since I joined the club, I got the club name badge. So I guess I will have to go back - it' worth the trip.
On the way home we enjoyed views of the nearly-full moon through the moonroof on my car. Of course I mostly watched the road :-)
We also noticed a bright star low on the Southern horizon, far below Sirius. Larry looked it up later and identified it as Canopus! That surprised me because I would have thought Canopus (Alpha Carinae) was too far south to observe from Arizona, but then I realized at Dec -52.7 it should be just above the horizon in Southern AZ. Of course it was much too low for me to ever see from the observatory, but I'll have to try to observe it through the scope sometime when we are out at the dark sky site.
Tonight I'll be at a business event but hopefully I'll get home around midnight and be able to get out and open the dome and attempt to grab a picture of the new Supernova in M100, a.k.a. SN2006X.
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