NASA recently selected 75 student teams to begin an engineering design challenge to build rovers that will compete next spring at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center near the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Participating teams represent 35 colleges and universities, 38 high schools, and two middle schools from 20 states, Puerto … Read more
By John Raymond Lyra is a prominent and fascinating constellation that passes overhead for us in the mid-northern latitudes. Its visible most of the year. It has one of the brightest stars, Vega. The other bright stars are famous multiples: Epsilon, Zeta, Delta, Beta, Theta, and Eta. It has two bright Messier objects, planetary M57 … Read more
By John Roberts One of the hurdles that we amateur astronomers have is that most of us live in or near cities with bright night skies. Our home’s Bortle 8+ skies and round trip drive times of 3-5 hours to reach Bortle 3-4 sites means my 11 inch scope does not get used very much … Read more
This was a small group, and the sky adjacent to the building was extremely limited. Luckily the Moon was visible from the sidewalk right outside the front entrance. There were some landscape lights out front, but a paper bag over the closest one made us happy.
Dear members of RAC, RAS, CAS and the BRAC, Yesterday in Rustville , Va the genesis of what I believe will be an important effort to restore a historical telescope took its first step! Yesterday Jim Browder and Randy Tatum of the Richmond Astronomical Society delivered to the home of Josh Urban (a member of … Read more
The RAS site is a subdomain (ras2.teebark.com) of the WordPress multisite, teebark.com. teebark.com is hosted with hawkhost.com, and is owned by Terry Barker (terry@teebark.com). The URL, richastro.org is registered with mydomain.com. The site is built in WordPress, with GeneratePress as the theme, and uses the native WordPress editor, Gutenberg. A child theme (ras2-gp-child) is used … Read more
James River State Park will be hosting an astronomer’s observing weekend November 1-3, 2019. Many thanks to RAS member John Raymond for arranging this with the park and to Laura Rann with the park staff for coordinating the event. This location is one of the darkest sites in Virginia east of the mountains. The fee … Read more
RAS Membership Application Form RICHMOND ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP AND SUBSCRIPTION APPLICATION