Tonight was the monthly Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association meeting. Since the sky has been a blanket of clouds lately it was nice to do something astronomical-related.
The meeting opened with Luke Scott giving a talk on observing the Moon. He did an excellent job with it, and wrapped up with a demo of the superb freeware, Virtual Moon Atlas.
Our main speaker for the night was Dr. Fulvio Melia, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, who gave a talk on Supermassive Black Holes. Dr. Melia has written several books including "The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy" (I got my copy signed at TSP after he spoke there last year). His talk was really great - he's a good speaker and certainly knows his topic. The picture of the galactic center shown above was one of many that he displayed; he had plenty of amazing images to show us, using telescopes of various wavelenghts. We also enjoyed the "movie" produced using data from 1993 - present, which shows very clearly several stars within a few light-days of the galactic center, moving in orbit around an invisible point. One of the stars has even completed its 15-year orbit, while another appeared to zoom in and reach perigee at only 10 light-hours from the black hole!
Amazing stuff to be sure. One thing I appreciated was Dr. Melia's acknowledgements throughout his talk that many things are still only in theory stage, rather than the over-confidence that seems to often accompany talks by theoretical astrophysicists.
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