At the July 14 meeting of the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club, 8:00 pm at the Lanesville Community Center, Phil Orbanes will reveal some indecorous truths about a dozen famous stars and their lifestyles, from Aldebaran to Sol, from the intemperate “live fast and die young” crowd to the more introspective and generally cool-headed class M red dwarves, whom, for example, you would be less likely to meet in a bar.

In a colorful presentation, and with a wink and a nod, Phil will let us know the ways in which astronomy’s HR diagram of stellar life cycles can be explained by the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and which star would show up where, from Barnard’s Star to the Dog Star.

Phil takes as his point of departure a passage from GAACster Bill Waller’s The Milky Way: An Insider’s Guide, where we learn that “[like] snowflakes — and people — each and every star has its own distinct appearance and behavior.”

Beginning from this simple premise, Phil paints a fascinating picture of the lives of an even dozen of the most famous stars, from nearby Proxima Centauri to distant, and decidedly less well-behaved, Sirius. We’ll even see that Hollywood and Gemini are not all that different: like Lassie, Castor is really a half-dozen stars.

This meeting will be a lot of fun. And like most GAAC meetings, you’ll leave knowing something really interesting that you didn’t know when you arrived. July 14, 8:00 – 9:30 pm, Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan Street.

The Gloucester Area Astronomy Club meets on the second Friday of the month at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan Street in Lanesville. More information on the club can be had on their website, http://gaac.us, the club Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/gaacpage, and on twitter, @GAACster.

Friday’s program at the Lanesville Community Center will feature a presentation by our own Paul Duval on his September 2015 trip to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, home to a remarkable astronomy exhibition.

The exhibits included a planetarium and even an amateur astronomy exhibit. Paul went on a one hour inter-planetary walk through a scale model of the solar system, and got a chance to observe through a number of exotic and historic telescopes.

In addition to the featured presentation by Paul Duval, Friday night is also Jim Koerth night at GAAC. Jim, one of GAAC’s founding members, will be pulling up stakes and moving to North Carolina in the next few weeks, so come in, have some cake, and say bon voyage to an original GAAC stalwart.

You won’t want to miss Jim’s farewell or this colorful record of Paul’s trip — come early for a good seat, good things to eat, great conversation, and to see and hear all about adventures of a GAACster in the Deutches Museum.

The Gloucester Area Astronomy Club meets at 8:00pm on the second Friday of every month at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan Street in Lanesville. For more info on the club, see the website, Facebook page, or follow the club on Twitter, @GAACster.

Photo Credit: Roger Porter

Weather permitting, Halibut Point State Park and the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club will be hosting a star party Saturday evening, May 27, next to the HPSP Visitor Center. Everyone is invited! Come look through the club’s telescopes at a thin crescent moon, Jupiter and its moons, and an array of distant deep-sky objects like galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. Unless we have overcast skies, GAAC will have telescopes set up from dusk to 10:00 pm for public viewing. Of course there is no cost.

Please park in the paved lot off of Gott Ave and walk the short distance up the hill to the Visitor Center, and please keep white lights to a minimum, so everyone’s eyes get a chance to adapt to the dark.

The Gloucester Area Astronomy Club meets at 8:00 pm on the second Friday of the month at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan St. in Lanesville. There is no cost, and the public is welcome. For more info on the club, see the website, the club’s Facebook page, or on Twitter, @GAACster.

At this month’s GAAC meeting, 8:00 Friday night, May 12, at the Lanesville Community Center, we are thrilled to host Ed Los, a long-term member of the “Digital Access to a Sky Century team at Harvard” (DASCH). Ed will bring us up to date on the project to digitize over 500,000 images of the night sky collected on glass photographic plates between 1885 and 1993.

Image: Portion of Plate b41215 of Halley’s comet taken on April 21, 1910 from Arequipa, Peru with the 8-inch Bache Doublet, Voigtlander.

These images offer us far more than mere historic value. They have greatly advanced what we know of the composition of stars, their inherent luminosities and distances, and, as a 100-year record of the skies, they are sure to continue to inform our understanding. Already as part of this ongoing project more than 162,000 plates, along with data from a card catalog and 1200 associated log books, have been scanned into digital files, to preserve them and make them more readily available to researchers.

Ed will explain the ongoing project and its importance to our knowledge of the night sky, and will tell us some of the many ways that these data are even now helping us understand the universe around us. We’re very pleased to have Ed as this month’s presenter, for what is sure to be an entertaining and informative evening at GAAC. We hope to see you there.

The Gloucester Area Astronomy Club meets on the second Friday of the month at 8:00 at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan Street, Lanesville. All are welcome; no special knowledge or equipment is needed to have a great time. There is plenty of free parking, and there is no cost. For more on the astronomy club see our website or Facebook page, or follow us on Twitter, @gaacster. Come see us!

Friday night, April 14, from 8:00 pm to 9:30 is the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club’s “Welcome to Amateur Astronomy Night.”

This annual event is always a favorite. We’ll be featuring a group of quick, ten-minute presentations on topics of interest to anyone interested in pursuing astronomy, as well as a roomful of different binoculars and telescopes to inspect and ask questions about, and all the great conversation and goodies you’ve come to associate with GAAC meetings.

You’ll be able to find out more about what you need to get started, how to do astrophotography, places to shop and how much to spend, what you’ll be able to see, the advantages of different telescope optical designs and brands, and much more. And we’ll be raffling off a really nice pair of binoculars!

It all happens at 8:00 pm on Friday April 14th, at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan St. in Lanesville. All are welcome, there’s plenty of free parking, and there is no cost. No special knowledge is required to have a great time. See you there!

At our annual Gloucester Area Astronomy Club Holiday Party, Friday December 9, 8:00 pm at the Lanesville Community Center, we’re lucky enough to have Dr. Mario Motta with a presentation on his latest astronomy science project, an investigation of a white dwarf star (WD 1145+017) in Virgo that is orbited by the remains of a disintegrating small planet or asteroid.

The star seems to be tearing apart a small planet, leaving multiple small planetesimals and cometary trails in its wake. The story of the destruction of an actual planet is going to lead to a really interesting evening.

Mario’s been following and charting the disintegration, and is going to share his process and results with us on the 9th. It’s always fun to hear speakers who can report first-hand on actual astronomical events, and our December 2016 holiday party will be one of those rare nights.

Join us!

The Gloucester Area Astronomy Club meets on the second Friday of the month at 8:00pm at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan Street, Lanesville. There are no dues or fees, and all are welcome. Find out more about GAAC at http://gaac.us, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/GAACpage, or on Twitter, @GAACster.

This Friday evening, November 11 at 8:00 pm, GAAC is thrilled to have an old friend, UNH’s John Gianforte, whom some of you may remember from a series of talks earlier this year at the Sawyer Free Library, or from his previous GAAC talks.

GAAC has reshuffled their schedule just a bit. Mario Motta’s terrific program on the destruction being wrought by star WD1145+17 is now scheduled for our Holiday Party on December 9. Watch for Mario’s Sky & Telescope article on this very topic later this year.

Now, has GAAC got a program for you on Friday!

On Friday October 14 at 8:00 pm please join the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club for an evening with astrophysicist Alan Hirshfeld, author of Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe. 

Dr. Hirshfeld will share his insights into a watershed period of science—roughly 1830-1920—when amateurs and professionals were developing the photographic and spectrographic tools of modern astronomy.

As Dava Sobel described his work:  “Starlight Detectives is just the sort of richly veined book I love to read—full of scientific history and discoveries, peopled by real heroes and rogues, and told with absolute authority.”

Reviewers at Scientific American said of Starlight Detectives that “astrophysicist Hirshfeld chronicles the radical changes in our conception of the cosmos that have accompanied the advent of modern astronomy over the past century and a half, [a period Hirshfeld describes as] ‘a remarkable and complex period in the development of humanity’s oldest science’…”

This evening promises to be informative and a lot of fun; arrive early for a good seat, great conversation, cake, and an overall good time.

GAAC members meet at the Lanesville Community Center in the Lanesville neighborhood of Gloucester MA, at 8:00 pm on the second Friday of every month, for presentations, discussions and activities related to observational astronomy. All are welcome. There is plenty of parking, and there are no dues or fees. No special knowledge or equipment is needed to have a great time. For more information, see the club Facebook page, website, or follow the club on Twitter, @GAACster.