Blog

Astronomy Day 2011: Many many thanks to all who helped out with this year’s Astronomy Day at the Science Museum. We had a steady flow of interested and engaged visitors. The activities included our traditional water rockets, solar viewing, telescopes on display, telescope construction, video astronomy, “Touch-a-meteorite,” indoor air pressure rockets and our roving astronaut. … Read more

Astronomy Day is coming: This year Astronomy Day will be Saturday, May 7.  As we have done for a number of years, RAS is planning to support a number of Astronomy Day activities at the Science Museum of Virginia.  Prashant Reddy is coordinating volunteer support for the event this year.  Please let him know if … Read more

February and March meetings: At the last meeting, Dr. Amy Treonis gave us a great overview of her work and research interests, specifically desert environments as analogs for Mars. You can read more about Amy and her work in astrobiology and extreme environments at the University of Richmond here. Sydney Mabry, one of our younger … Read more

Mention in the media:  The RAS skywatch scheduled for tonight, January 21, at the SMV was mentioned in an online news item at NBC 12 On Your Side.  Please join us and bring a scope if you can.  Dress warmly if you come, temperatures are expected to drop below freezing into the mid-twenties during the … Read more

Happy 2011:  I hope everyone had a great holiday season and enjoyed celebrating the arrival of 2011.  To greet the new year, we were treated with a Quadrantid meteor shower under a near-new moon. I spent about an hour or so taking in the sky and looking for meteors early this week.  I saw three … Read more

Thanks to Wayne Boggs and Richmond Alarm Company: As most of you reading this already know, it became necessary earlier this year to find a new location for our library volumes.  After we searched around quite a bit for an appropriate location and debated the various approaches for managing the library, Ken Wilson contacted RAS … Read more

Many many thanks! Our volunteers put forth a huge amount of time and effort to coordinate and support our many outreach events and skywatches as well as moving and organizing our library books, caring for our observatory and taking care of the club’s business and other activities.  I cannot begin to thank everyone properly.  It … Read more

A couple of months ago, several very dedicated graduate students from UVA presented at our monthly Richmond Astronomical Society meeting about the “Dark Skies, Bright Kids” program they are sponsoring in Charlottesville.  The program enhances science education at rural schools.  The graduate students have put a great deal of their personal time and effort into … Read more

Masayuki Tachikawa was observing Jupiter early on the morning of August 21st (18:22 Universal Time on the 20th), when his video camera captured a 2-second-long flash on the planet’s disk.  Check out this article in Sky and Telescope. The video of the flash is at this link and below along with an image captured by … Read more