While normally we have our meetings on our discord server, https://discord.gg/xFpFH8B , this week Dr. Freeland will be hosting it on WebEx, which you can join by clicking here.

Dr. Freeland will also be taking questions after his presentation, so feel free to join in and discuss astronomy!

We will be meeting on our discord server: https://discord.gg/xFpFH8B

Feel free to join and discuss Astronomy with other amateur astronomers from UMBC! 

We will be meeting on our discord, so feel free to join! Even if you can't make it to the event, the discord is a great place to talk all things astronomy related.

Discord link: https://discord.gg/xFpFH8B

Hope to you you all there!

We are meeting during our usual time, 9pm, in PHYS401. 

Hope to see you all there!

We are meeting tonight at our usual time and place: PHYS 401 at 9:00pm.

All are welcome! See you tonight!

We started the evening with Astronomy Club President, Katy-Ann Carr leading astronomy themed Jeopardy (the left side of the room won!).

During the talk, we focused on the development of ideas in Western thought that led to our current understanding of orbits. We mentioned Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Issac Newton. Next, we discussed the orbit of the Moon in detail. We made sure to highlight the Hill Sphere and the Roche Limit, two imaginary spheres in space (dictated by the gravity of the Earth) that would have affected our early Moon. With all of this, we were able to finally understand exactly why some Full Moons are larger and brighter than others and why we call them Supermoons!

Two fun objects we mentioned were Comet C/ISON and I/'Oumuamua*. Comet C/ISON was observed by the UMBC Observatory and followed a hyperbolic orbit--nearly parabolic! I/'Oumuamua was the FIRST object to visit our solar system from another and followed a hyperbolic orbit. A third was 2I/Borisov and was the second interstellar visitor! 2I/Borisov also followed a hyperbolic orbit.

We started the evening with Astronomy Club President, Katy-Ann Carr leading astronomy-themed Jeopardy.

During the talk, we focused on stellar evolution and how stellar lifecycles tie into the abundance of the chemical elements in the universe. We even talked about how high mass stars can end their lives as black holes.

After the talk, Jackson Ames and Jay Sharp presented on astrophotography and what the sky looks like tonight, respectively. Roy and Katy also brought attendees into the observatory for a tour of the facility.

Everything wrapped up just before 10pm.

For any commentary or questions, please e-mail us at observatory@umbc.edu

A copy of the presentation can be found here: https://prezi.com/titxed9pm3jk/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

The next Open House topic is on the Supermoon and will be on February 6!

This meeting is to (1) prepare for next week's Open House on Eclipses and (2) roll-out cepheid variable project.

Follow group meeting slides and add any other topics/info.

For the past few years, the UMBC Observatory was happy to host mentees and mentors from the UMBC REACH Initiative. REACH is a mentorship program at UMBC for women who are interested in pursuing STEM fields. UMBC [student] mentors work alongside high school students to help them gain experience in the fields of STEM they might not have been aware of before.

At our most recent event, we discussed how cameras work within our instrumentation. Everything from our own telescope Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) to cameras in general to smartphone cameras.

We talked about how different telescopes work, what they do, the things that we can learn from careful observations. In all of this the underlying topics is how we use light to figure all of this out!

After the discussion on instrumentation, we toured the observatory, and gave physical examples of the topics in the talk.