| January 16
| AstroSchool at 7PM. Topic: AstroFilters
Followed by: 2014 HAL Elections, Special Announcement, then Speaker Wayne Baggett. Topic: Going Deep: Stars in M31
|
| February 20 |
AstroSchool at 7PM. Topic:"Astronomical image processing 101: Calibration and Integration”.
Followed by: Our guest speaker this month (via pre-recorded video) will be “Uncle” Rod Mollise, a Sky and Telescope contributor, author of many fine books on observational astronomy, and all-around fun guy. Rod will be giving a presentation titled “In the footsteps of William and Caroline”, about his quest to observe all 2,500 of the Herschel objects. It should be a great presentation of particular interest to visual observers. |
| March 20 |
Joe Bohannon is giving a 45 minute presentation on his trip to the Winter Star Party. |
| April 15 |
Dr. Brian Jackson from the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. His talk title will be "The Exoplanet Revolution".
Astroschool, 7 pm: Star Hopping and Star Charts |
| May 15 |
Joint meeting with Society of Women Engineers, equipment show and tell. |
| June 19 |
Guy Brandenburg of the National Capital Astronomers' telescope making class presents a talk entitled: "Current Trends in Amateur Telescope Making"
Prior to the meeting, at 7 pm, there will be an Astroschool presentation on "Image processing 102: Basic workflow for one-shot color deep sky images". It will outline, at a relatively high level, a general purpose workflow you can use to process your one-shot color images (e.g., from DSLRs or color CCDs). This presentation picks up roughly where the recent "Image processing 101: Calibration" presentation left off.
|
| July 17 |
In addition to our normal meeting segments, our Astronomical League Coordinator Steve Jaworiwsky will be giving a talk about Astronomical League observing programs, and Chirs Todd will be giving a talk about citizen science projects (and how to detect an exoplanet with your DSLR and a camera lens). |
| August 21 |
Our guest speaker is Dr. Peter McCullough, who will be giving a talk titled "From the XO Project to TESS, Vignettes in Discovering Transiting Planets". An abstract of the talk is below.
From 2017 to 2019, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will observe nearly the entire sky, searching for transiting planets around nearby, bright stars. One precursor to TESS is the XO Project which has been observing from ground-based observatories with equipment in the high-end range of the devoted amateur astronomer. The speaker has led the XO Project since 2003 and is a member of the science team participating in NASA's TESS mission. He will summarize the two projects and describe some of the contributions amateurs have made to XO and might make to TESS. The speaker will give a short presentation, allowing ample time for questions and discussion. |
| September 18 |
Chris Misckiewicz presents |
| October 16 |
Title: The Exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt with the New Horizons Mission
Speaker: Hal Weaver (New Horizons Project Scientist, JHU/APL) |
| November 20 |
Dr Wayne Baggett speaks and does a show and tell about spectroscopy |
| December 18 |
Annual pot luck holiday meeting. We will also discuss the state of the observatory, the January officer elections, and show recent member astrophotos. |
