The picture below is 100% pure luck. The right place, the right time. I had just re-aligned my mount and slew to the Moon as a test. On a whim I pulled out my phone and just held it over the eye piece. As I pressed the button the jet flew past.
I lined up the Moon nice and neat, When a jet made the image complete. By sheer stroke of luck, As I clicked—what a pluck! Now my photo’s both sky and the fleet.
All pictures here are taken with a Redcat 51 telescope, ZWO ASI2600MCDuo camera, Optolong L-Pro filter, and a ZWO AM3 mount. Processed with PixInsight.
Bubble & Lobster Claw Nebulae in Cassiopeia, 27–29 JulyM31, Andromeda Galaxy, 21–23 AugustNGC 6888, Crescent Nebula and surrounding nebulosity in Cygnus, 10–12 August
Every year I look forward to viewing the Perseid Meteor Showers. This year did not disappoint.
After seeing a spectacular fireball Friday, August 8th night, I decided to chance the full moon and put out some equipment for last night’s (August 12th) peak viewing.
The heavens panned out and I’m delighted with these lucky catches.
Equipment used was a Nikon D3100, Bulb setting, 3 second exposures with intervalometer.
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Observes Interstellar Comet NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Aug. 6, with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument. The research team has been analyzing insights from Webb’s data, and a preprint is available online…more
-space.com
How old is Jupiter? Meteorite ‘raindrops’ help scientists pin down gas giant’s age Mysterious spherical droplets in meteorites aren’t just cosmic oddities. They’re evidence of planetary formation. In some cases, to learn more about our solar system, all we have to do is look at evidence found on Earth. Researchers from Japan’s Nagoya University…more
-NYT
This Powerful Telescope Quickly Found 2,100 New Asteroids More than a million asteroids, some of them potential threats to Earth. Asteroids with tails like comets. Interstellar objects that happen to be swinging by our sun. (Could they be alien spaceships?) More distant worlds including, perhaps, a ninth planet, which could fill in the story of our solar system’s turbulent youth….more
-NYT
Onionlike Space Explosion May Be a New Type of Supernova Carl Sagan once said we are all made of star-stuff. Astronomers have long predicted that some of the heavier elements in the universe that comprise our very being, like carbon and oxygen, are forged inside stars and released when they die and explode in powerful supernovas….more
-NYT
Scientists Find a Quadruple Star System in Our Cosmic Backyard Zenghua Zhang, an astronomer at Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues were combing through catalogs of stars in search of cold brown dwarfs, interstellar objects that fall somewhere between planets and stars. They found something odd, and rare, in the Milky Way….more
-NYT
Rainer Weiss, Who Gave a Nod to Einstein and the Big Bang, Dies at 92 Rainer Weiss, who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for developing a device that uses gravity to detect intergalactic events, like black holes colliding, and who helped confirm two central hypotheses about the universe: the Big Bang theory of how and when it began and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92….more
-NYT
Uranus Was Hiding a Moon Outside Its Rings The space around Uranus just got a bit more crowded. On Tuesday, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope announced the discovery of a moon orbiting around the pale blue ice giant, bringing its total number of satellites to 29. The latest addition, tentatively known as S/2025 U1, is tinier and fainter than any of the planet’s….more
-NASA
NASA IXPE’s ‘Heartbeat Black Hole’ Measurements Challenge Current Theories An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), has challenged our understanding of what happens to matter in the direct vicinity of a black hole. With IXPE, astronomers can study incoming X-rays and measure the polarization, a property of light that describes the direction of its electric field….more
-NASA
NASA’s Hubble Uncovers Rare White Dwarf Merger Remnant An international team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic rarity: an ultra-massive white dwarf star resulting from a white dwarf merging with another star, rather than through the evolution of a single star. This discovery, made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s sensitive ultraviolet observations, suggests these rare white dwarfs may be more common than previously suspected…more
-NASA
NASA’s Apollo Samples, LRO Help Scientists Forecast Moonquakes As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults there. Faults are cracks in the Moon’s crust that indicate that the Moon is slowly shrinking as its interior cools over time. The contraction from shrinking causes the faults to move suddenly,….more
It’s Mid-Summer in AAAP. Enjoying your “summer vacation” in Jersey or other exotic destination?It’s been a good stretch of weather for nature and green plants around here in central Jersey. That’s a favorable trade-off from last fall when overly dry weather and drought was inescapable even though the skies were often clear. So, have you found an opportunity during the brief episodes of clear skies this summer to do any telescopic observing? Have you tried your hand at celestial-terrestrial photography with the Milky Way this summer? DSLRs, and cell phones such as the iPhone with night-mode setting, can capture the night sky with landscape surprisingly well, especially on vacation at a darker sky location. What have you discovered that is new to you, about the stars and the natural world and the cosmos? What deeper questions arise in your mind as you go about your life with family, friends, work, and daily activities? Sharing those thoughts, questions, and ideas about astronomy and physics is the raison d’etre for our club! You can read about one of my projects with the color of stars below.
Here’s some good news for the club: the electrical cable problem has been repaired at Washington Crossing Observatory. The permit was granted by the state and the professional electrician we hired completed the job in mid-July. We now await only final inspection and “flipping the switch” by JCP&L. I’d like to especially thank Michael Mitrano for relentlessly staying on top of the permitting and finding the electrician. Also, a big thanks go to Dave Skitt for troubleshooting the problem and working to get it fixed, and providing an AC generator to power the observatory in the interim.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Launching the New AAAP Website (beta). The AAAP is ready to launch a new, completely re-designed website. While our current website has been effective and offers a classic feel, its origins go back to the mid-90’s with various updates along the way. Changes in coding, formats, and approaches for modern websites prompted this upgrade, along with a desire for increased capabilities for club activities, security, and member usefulness. With this in mind, we are now launching the AAAP new website as beta version. Members may access the new site at the URL address below. Please note the site is not yet fully populated with content, hence the beta-designation. Some of the new members’ features and expanded capabilities of the website will require a log-in (for security), and guidance will be provided to members in the near future. We’ll keep the original site going in parallel till around September. In the meantime, we ask you to access the new site and begin to feel your way around. In September we will review feedback and offer tips on using the new site. https://www.princetonastronomy.org/beta/
Major thanks go to the website development committee: Jeff Pinyan, Mike DiMario, Gene Allen, Debbie Mayes, and Surabhi Agarwal. In particular I and the Board thank Jeff for his skilled work and time and effort put into actually creating the website.
How to Really See the Colors in the Stars. The sense of color in the stars by naked eye is subjective and often subtle. But color is an important property that relates to fundamental physics of the stars. In the scheme developed by astronomy, the letter sequence “OBAFGKM”, designates the stellar types from bluest/hottest to reddest/coolest. Mostly due to the expense and complexity of spectroscopes applied to telescopes, it’s been difficult and a bit arcane to get into amateur astro-spectroscopy. However, at nominal cost a low resolution yet modestly effective diffraction grating (the component that disperses light) with standard 1.25” filter threads is available. This approach works with eyepieces, or better with astro-cameras in a variation on the standard telescope imaging setup. Below are some initial results from my equipment in NJ in early July, using the “Star Analyzer 100” diffraction grating — a 100 lines/mm transmission grating. I attached this in place of filter on my ZWO ASI-071MC camera and 12.5” reflector telescope, with adapter to give about 80mm spacing from grating to sensor (spacing is critical to disperse the spectrum to fit the width of the imaging sensor).
In the panels below, the star is in the left center of the field (the zero-order spectrum) and the colorful first-order spectrum is dispersed to the right of each star. The color patterns and the intensities across the wavelengths of light are related to the composition, temperature, size, and physics and chemistry of the stars. Specialized software can make a graph of intensity vs wavelength (pixel position) from the original FITS image files. Though not shown here, this can reveal dark absorption minima in the spectra, the “fingerprints” of chemical composition.
Shown below are spectra of two of the brightest stars of summer, Vega (blue-white type-A) and Antares (red giant type-M). Differences can be readily seen in the extended red/orange and lesser blue of Antares compared with Vega. The Ring Nebula M57 displays only blue-green and red components in the spectrum, consistent with O-III and H-alpha emissions that we see in astrophotographs (you may recall a similar spectrum of M57 first shown by Bob Vanderbei at AAAP at a meeting a few years ago). This was all from one night in July… many other stars are waiting in the wings to have their true colors revealed!
Director Rex Parker opened the meeting in the NJ State Museum Planetarium at 1930 with 66 attending. He introduced Treasurer Ira Polans who introduced Dr. Jacob Hamer, Assistant Curator of Planetarium Education at the NJ State Museum. He first gave us a brief sky tour then showed a new presentation Spark: The Universe In Us about the creation of elements in stars and various types of stellar explosions. The planetarium program was followed by his talk Tides in the Solar System and Beyond.
A period of questions followed the talk and the meeting was adjourned at 2113.
As of June 11, we have 216 active members. So far in CY2025, renewals number 49 and expirations number 28, giving us a 64% retention rate. We have added 23 new members.
by Ira Polans, Treasurer, treasurer@princetonastronomy.org
The income statement and balance sheet below show the AAAP’s financial results for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2025, and our financial position at the beginning and end of the year.
The AAAP had a $4,813 surplus for the fiscal year. The chart below shows member dues for the past 10 years:
Dues were paid by 197 members during the fiscal year – down slightly from 203 the year before.
Our cumulative reserves are close to $31 thousand, over six years of the association’s expenses at last year’s level.
Following the end of the fiscal year, we have spent over $5,000 in observatory electrical repairs. Even with that, we are in a very strong financial position.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the report.
Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton 