Category Archives: March 2019

From the Director

      by Rex Parker, Director Seeing the “Invisible” Deep Sky. Lest you despair that the famed Messier objects are forever lost in the glare of skyglow in central New Jersey, consider this. It was Alfred Lord Tennyson who … Continue reading

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From the Program Chair

By Ira Polans The March meeting of the AAAP will be held on the 12th at 7:30PM in the auditorium (Room 145) of Peyton Hall on the Princeton University campus The featured talk is by Scott Tremaine of the Institute … Continue reading

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Amazing Astronomy

by Gene Allen It took ten years and $1.3 billion to build the largest observatory on the planet, and it has an expected useful lifetime of only fifty years. The entire installation is rather bleeding edge technology. ALMA is the … Continue reading

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What a Success!

by Gene Allen, Outreach Chair Our evening at Stuart Country Day School was a rousing success. It was not a success in terms of showing the fourth grade girls the night sky, because as soon as it got dark enough, … Continue reading

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Pictures

“Skies were clear last night and the seeing was pretty good. Here’s a photo I took of M42 using my 10 inch Ritchey-Chretien…” – Robert Vanderbei on 4 Feb, 2019

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the squish factor

by Theodore R. Frimet oh baby, it’s cold outside! I reached out to the universe, by email, on February 8th 2019, at 11:55 AM, with the following plea, and embedded an image from https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES obtained a few minutes before said … Continue reading

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Were Apollo manned moon landings fake ?

by Prasad Ganti In a recent gathering of friends and family, this topic came up. There are some conspiracy theorists who believe that NASA faked the moon landings. The reasoning is that the enormous pressure during the cold war to … Continue reading

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Snippets

compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan How NASA’s Curiosity Rover Weighed a Mountain on Mars With a bit of technical improvisation, scientists worked out that the bedrock of Mount Sharp appeared to be less dense than had been expected. For … Continue reading

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