Our first meeting of the new year will feature Rev. George Coyne, S.J. of the Vatican Observatory. His presentation is titled "The Dance of the Fertile Universe: Did God Do It?" The idea of intelligent design has been popularized of late from many directions. What are the thoughts of a scientist and astronomer who also happens to be a Jesuit? Fr. Coyne's article about The Evolution Debate in the January 2008 issue of Physics Teacher magazine provides a preview. We present it here, with permission of the author, for your download and perusal:

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We will be publicizing this meeting more widely than usual. Expect a larger crowd, and arrive early for good seats. This should be a very interesting meeting. Hope to see you all there.

PHOTOS BY ROGER SERRATO

Dan opened the meeting with a few items of club business, and reported on our successful Veteran's Day event at Anthem. You can read more about that here.

Dan introduced Gene and, after a minor glitch with the laptop/projector system, the evening's show was underway..

Gene covered the background info on occultation techniques, the history of IOTA, and provided screenshots of some of the specialized software used to predict, record, and analyze occultations. Using a VCR patched into the projector, he showed some actual footage of past occultations. Timing, or course, is of the essence, and much effort goes into accurately synching the time signal (these days usually via GPS) with the video recording. We were surprised to learn that, except for those with specialized computers designed for video capture, most video recording is still done on tape.

This is an image from Gene's presentation, showing his "camp" in the desert. His equipment is deployed, and he's just kicking back and waiting for the asteroid's shadow.

Another image from Gene's presentation shows the results we all wanted to hear about. It's a 2D plot of the occultation showing the measurements of many observers. You can see that some were "hits" and others were "misses." Even the "misses" help, since they constrain the asteroid's size and shape. Turns out 9 Metis is only roughly spherical, with a diameter of around 200 km. It is slightly elongated, with one end pointed and the other broad. It was discovered on April 25, 1848 by Andrew Graham. Every occultation helps to further refine its size and shape. As IOTA points out, occultation measurements are one of the areas where amatueur astronomers can still make significant contributions to the science of astronomy.

Here we see some of the members in attendance. It was a low turnout, with only 6 members present, perhaps because of the special date and impending holiday.

Our sincere thanks to Gene Lucas for enlightening us on the finer points of asteroid occultation measurements. Gene didn't have time to get into any discussion about his Bino-Reclin-O binocular observing chair (still under development), but he promised he'd return in the future and demonstrate a working prototype. We look forward to seeing him again. The meeting adjourned at 8:45 pm.

Speaker Scheduling: As you can see from our events schedule above, and our Lectures page, as of this writing, we have booked all speakers for the remainder of this season. Fr. George Coyne S.J. of the Vatican Observatory is scheduled for our special (Monday night) January meeting. Dr. Jeff Hester of ASU has our April 30th date, for an exciting "open Q&A" night (read more below). Scott Schoneman of Orbital Sciences Corporation has committed to speak at our March 26th meeting on recent developments in private launch systems. And our own Roger Serrato (who knows more about astronomy hardware and methods than you may suspect from his humble demeanor) will be speaking at our February 26th meeting about hardware tips and tricks all amateur astronomers should know.

Q&A for Dr. Hester: Our April 30th, 2009 meeting will be a first of its kind for DFAC. Dr. Jeff Hester of ASU (and HST) will field open questions from members for the entire evening. This is your chance to ask a professional astronomer about anything you want to better understand. Dr. Hester is knowledgeable about all areas of astronomy, from its ancient history, to cutting edge cosmology. We are asking members to submit their questions ahead of time so that the good Doctor can bring appropriate supplementary multimedia with him on his laptop. Of course, you can also ask a question in "real time" at the meeting, but the list of prepared question will have priority. To submit a question, simply email me by January 31st, 2009, and include your question in your email. I will compile the list of questions and forward it to Dr. Hester.

Surely there's some astronomy question that's been puzzling you. I know I've got a few. Send your questions my way, and I'll stop calling your Shirley. Then hear the answers to your questions on April 30th!

Veterans Day Parade: This event was a great success. We decided to post the photos on our North Sky News page, rather than run them in Quid Novi. The ideas was to put them somewhere that casual browsers of our website would more likely encounter, rather than burying them in an ever deepening archive of newsletters. This kind of community involvement is good advertising for DFAC, so we posted the event photos where more people would see them. This will very likely become an annual gig for our club. Well worth a November afternoon's work.

Thanks for reading Quid Novi. If you have feedback, you know where to reach me. Until next we meet, clear skies!

"God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds."

— Giordano Bruno, 1584, "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds"