by Rex Parker, PhD director@princetonastronomy.org

November 11, 2025, Meeting on Campus.  With the close of a very successful season of public observing nights at Washington Crossing Observatory, our main venue for several months will be the evening meetings at Peyton Hall on campus the second Tuesday each month (7:30pm).  Our guest speaker Nov 11 will be Romain Teyssier, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University.  Dr Teyssier studies cosmology and galaxy and star formation. He is the main author of the RAMSES code, a massively parallel open-source code used to model large scale astronomical structures using supercomputers.  This has inspired an international community of researchers to employ RAMSES for cosmology with high spatial resolution.  This presentation will provide AAAP members with insights to how cosmology is being practiced today.  The Nov 11 meeting will also be run via Zoom as usual, but it’s better to attend in person at Peyton Hall if you can.  Please see Victor’s article in this issue for more information.  I hope to see you on Nov 11!

Be Part of the Unjournal Club.  We’ve developed the tradition of the member “10 min talk”, which I like to call the Unjournal Club (a take-off from the journal clubs found in many science grad student programs).  This runs at the top of the 2nd hour of the regular meetings after the main speaker has finished.  The plan is to help break the boundaries between members and share our interests in astronomy.  Here I am asking you to volunteer to give an “unjournal” club session!  For example I gave a talk last month on the Mars Perseverance rover finding a possible biosignature fossil on Mars based on a recent paper in Nature.  But the unjournal club talks don’t need to be scholarly, journal-like topics at all, they only need to engage members with what you care about in astronomy.  If you aren’t there in person you can still do a talk via Zoom which works great with PowerPoint slides or simple text or photos.  To get on the schedule for an upcoming meeting (e.g., Nov 11), please contact me or program chair Victor Davis.

Announcement:  Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA) Is Now Part of the AAAP Astroimaging Group.  Members interested in EAA activities (“astrovideo”) are invited to join the AAAP Astroimaging Group.  This includes smart telescopes such as the ZWO SeeStar and Unistellar telescopes.  Meetings going forward will include discussions of equipment and software for EAA as well as astrophotography. Please contact Michael Dimario at astroimagers@princetonastronomy.org and Gene Allen at secretary@princetonastronomy.org to sign up or share ideas for the meetings.  The next session is  planned for Dec 30. 
Brilliant Star Forming Regions in the Autumn Sky.  I’ve been observing some of the deep sky objects well-positioned in the northern sky over the past few weeks of good weather.  Using narrow-band filters in astrophotography allows us to see through some of the light pollution and get images of some remarkable nebulae in the northern region around the constellation Cepheus. The image below of the NGC 7822 (H-II region) in Cepheus was taken with a 12.5-in reflector telescope using a dual H-alpha and Oxygen-3 narrow band filter with color camera, The intense red color in the image comes from hydrogen-alpha emission from interstellar clouds of ionized hydrogen gas.  The pillar-like condensed gas cloud structures in NGC 7822 are formed by stellar winds radiating from massive new stars embedded within the nebula. The radiation ionizes the gas and forms compressed, high density regions of both gas and dust to generate the pillars and darker globules, in turn contributing to more new stars being born.    

Nebula NGC 7822 in the Constellation Perseus.  The pillar like columns are high density regions being compressed by the stellar winds of newly born stars.  Image from NJ by Rex Parker using a 12.5 inch reflector telescope with dual-narrow band filter and ZWO ASI2400MC camera.