Tonight I took a break from the late nights of working and attended the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association meeting at Steward Observatory.
The Beginner's Lecture started the evening with an interesting talk by Mary Turner about how she selects objects each month for public star parties.
We were then treated to an interesting lecture by Loretta McKibben about her work with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera ("HiRise"), which is on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. The spacecraft is just now reaching it's orbit around Mars and has begun sending pictures back. I think the first high resolution science imaging will actually start tonight. The Lunar and Planetary Lab at the U of A is having a big celebration on campus tomorrow and will have all sorts of Mars stuff going on. Ms. McKibben's talk was really entertaining and we got to see several high resolution images projected on the huge multimedia screen in the lecture hall. One neat feature of this mission is that all the data is intended to be made public almost immediately. They are also allowing the public to have input about which features of the Martian landscape will have imaging priority. I wonder what Percival Lowell would think if he could see some of these results.
I think I'll listen to my X Minus One program, "Martian Death March". The picture above, which is from the first HiRISE image, easily fits the desert terrain described in the story.
Back to the meeting - it was really a great meeting and I stayed interested for the whole time - from start to finish the meeting was over 3 hours. One highlight for me was when Andrew Cooper announced to everyone the results of the Messier Marathon, which Larry and I won. Many other TAAA members also did quite well, and many of them were not using go-to scopes.
It's cleared up tonight but once again I won't be observing. I need to get up quite early to take the kids to a Boy Scout fishing derby, and then I'll have to work tomorrow afternoon. I sure can't wait for the busy season to end.
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