[AANC Contacts] JPL's Tim Thompson at SJAA tonight august 9th

[Jane Houston Jones]

Join the San Jose Astronmical Association tonight, Saturday, August 9th 
at 8:00 p.m. for their monthly meeting. The directions to the meeting, 
located at San Jose's Houge Park (near Campbell and Los Gatos)  are 
here: http://www.sjaa.net/directions.html

The speaker is Tim Thompson from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 
Pasadena.  Tim's talk is "Astrophysics, cosmology, and the age of the 
universe".  Tim is an amateur astronomer as well as a professional 
astronomer and astrophysicist.  He has served two terms as president of 
the Los Angeles Astronomical Association, is on the board of the Mount 
Wilson Observatory Association, and is also president of the Pasadena 
chess club.  He has worked at Pasadena's JPL since the 1980's.  More on 
Tim's talk here:  http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/  More about Tim here: 
http://www.tim-thompson.com/index.html

After the talk - at approximately 10:00 p.m. some of us hope to set up 
telescopes to view the Moon and Mars, seeing permitting.  Mars won't be 
rising until about 9:45 p.m. and won't be high enough to aim telescopes 
at until 10:30 p.m. So this might be too late or too far for most of 
you. If you are in the neighborhood, or plan to attend the talk, then 
stick around for some views. 

Mars is only 0.40 AU from earth now.  That's 37 million miles from 
earth.  In early June it was 54 million miles from earth.  On August 
27th Mars will be 34 million miles from earth and only a little bit 
larger than it is right now.  I've been out observing it every night 
(almost) from my back deck and sketching the red planet through a small 
refractor telescope. I've included plenty of basic information along 
with every one of my Mars sketches to help those new to Mars Mania. 
http://www.whiteoaks.com/sketches/mars2003.html

I've been adding observing locations, local club newsletter writeups, 
images of Mars each month leading up to opposition, and lots of 
interesting articles and stuff to the AANC Mars Observing Guide. If you 
haven't had a look for a while, check it out the red Mars link on   
http://www.aanc-astronomy.org/aanc.html

If your club, science center, planetarium or observatory has Mars events 
planned but not listed yet, please send them to me, and I'll add them to 
the page.  We'll be getting lots of press inquiries (they have started 
already), so a complete list of Northern California events will be very 
useful.


Jane

-- 
Jane Houston Jones
San Rafael, CA
jane at whiteoaks.com
http://www.whiteoaks.com