Monthly meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month at 7:30 PM online at this link

Join us at RavenCon April 24-26. We'll also have telescopes there for daytime and evening viewing.

Events

Observatory Open House

by

John Barnett will be hosting an open house at the RAS Ragland Observatory on Thursday, April 22, starting at 8:00 PM.  The 8.5 day old moon will be in Cancer, near Mars and the Beehive cluster. Saturn will be high in the east.  Watch the Richastro Yahoo Group or check back at this site for weather … Read more

A deal on the Ottewell Calendar?

by

If you ‘re not familiar with the Ottewell Calendar, this may be a good way to get introduced to it. For those who are not faimiliar with this treasure, it’s a large (11 x 15 inches) paperbook compilation of information about sky events for the coming year.

Read more

Road trip–Hands On Optics

by

The store

Every year, Hands On Optics, hosts The Eastern Astronomy Show. Several RAS members, like myself, John Raymond, and Bill Jeffries, have gone in the past and liked it, so John organized a road trip for the 2009 event (Saturday, Oct. 31). Joining John and me, were Bill Jeffries, Dave Walton, Tim Streagle, and Jim Langley.

Read more

Woodlake Skywatch

by

Thanks to everyone who came out for the skywatch at Woodlake.  It was one of those events where the weather made it a tough call whether to have the skywatch.  Reports at the site indicated clearing and there was some clear sky to the west, so it made sense to go ahead with the event. … Read more

Twitter feed

by

I post stuff periodically on the club’s Twitter site, richastrova. Up to this point, you had to have a Twitter account to see those postings, but now we’ve made those “tweets” available from the club’s web page. If you go to the web site, and page down, looking in the right hand column, you’ll see them, under the title “Twitter feed.”

Read more

Orionid Meteor Shower viewing

by

The best time to view this shower will be tomorrow morning, before sunrise. I plan on going out to the scout camp around midnight–is anyone else up for going? Send me an email, and maybe we can ride together.

Iridium flare tonight (Oct. 20)

by

If it’s like last night,there will be a very nice Iridium flare tonight, 20 Oct, at  8:02 pm. It will be  -5  magnitude, 38° high, in the NNE direction.

Orionids should be good this year

by

October 19, 2009: The Orionid meteor shower peaks this week and it could be a very good show.

“Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, the source of the Orionids,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour.”

Read more

NASA tweetup

by

Cindy Bowers and I went to a NASA tweetup with the crew of the STS-127 space shuttle in Washington, DC this week. I have the story on my web page.