Clubs, clubs, clubs!

With more free time I've started to explore what Dayton has to offer and I've joined some clubs -- the Dayton Stamp Club, Dayton Gem & Mineral Society and the Miami Valley Astronomical Society. As it turns out, all three have some very interesting programs and speakers. 

Messier is famous for making a list of objects he wasn't looking for!

Lori Cutright is an astronomy professor at Sinclair Community College and at the last meeting of the Miami Valley Astronomical Society she talked about Charles Messier and the Messier List. Messier was a French astronomer most notable for publishing an astronomical catalog consisting of nebulae and star clusters that came to be known as the 110 "Messier objects". The purpose of the catalog was to help astronomical observers, in particular comet hunters such as himself, distinguish between permanent and transient visually diffuse objects in the sky. At low northern latitudes, particularly around latitude 25 degrees north, it is possible to observe all Messier objects in one night during a window of a few weeks from mid-March to early April. In that period the dark nights around the time of the new moon are best for a Messier marathon.

The sample was placed in the box on the left for analysis.

At the last meeting of the Dayton Gem & Mineral Society, the program was a presentation by Dr. Amanda Hunt, associate professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College.  With an associate she discussed and demonstrated use of the Handheld X-ray fluorescent analyzer, which has the capability to quantify or qualify nearly any element from magnesium to uranium. Members of the club brought in specimens for  analysis by the XRF. The club was founded in 1961 and is a member of the Midwest Federation of Mineralogical & Geological Societies.

He says that Stonehenge had nothing to do with religion!

Dr. Brad Schaefer, a Louisiana State University astronomy professor, explored (Pseudo) Science in Archaeology as he presented “Archaeoastronomy is Not All Bad” at SunWatch, part of the Boonshaft Museum, where the Miami Valley Astronomical Society meets. “I have a distinctive style of combining history and astrophysics, where I use old or very-old data to critically answer modern front-line science questions.  For example, I have used Tycho Brahe's original astrometric measures of the position of the 1572 supernova to solve the long-running big-time controversy as to whether the so-called 'Star G' is the ex-companion star of the exploding system, with my answer being 'no', thus breaking one of the few good arguments for the single-degenerate progenitor model.  I have used detailed and exhaustive textual analysis of the ancient Chinese records of a transient event from 186 AD to prove that this was not a supernova, but rather was the known appearance of a periodic comet.  I have used the photometric reports plus the heliacal rise/set dates (with my modern algorithm) to derive the peak magnitudes of the Type Ia supernovae of the years 1006, 1572, and 1604 to get peak magnitudes and then a value for the Hubble Constant.  In an now-nearly-unique methodology, I have recovered vast amounts of data from dusty archives to collect light curves of recurrent novae, going far back in time.  The most extreme example, is for the canonical recurrent nova T CrB, I have recovered >100,000 magnitudes from 1829 to present in both B and V colors, measuring the unique and weird pre-eruptions and post-eruption events that are identical across the 1866 and 1946 eruptions.  Part of this means that I am predicting a third eruption in the year 2022.”

Actress Doris Day sent Klug her first stamps!

Speaker at the last meeting of the Dayton Stamp Club was Cincinnati-area stamp collector, writer and philatelic leader Janet Klug, who is chair of the U.S. Postal Service's Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee. Klug is a former two-term president of the American Philatelic Society and has been chair of the New Initiatives Committee on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum's Council of Philatelists. She writes regularly for Linn's Stamp News and Scott Stamp Monthly and her books include “Guide to Stamp Collecting” and “100 Greatest American Stamps.” Her writing has concentrated on helping beginning collectors, increasing the knowledge of more advanced collectors, and unusual aspects of philately. One of her collections, for example, was tin-can mail: Food cans that were used to enclose mail for Pacific islands that were then dropped from airplanes into the sea. "I hope stamps will be relevant for a long time to come, because stamps teach and entertain. I think about how much I have learned by collecting stamps. The long-running Black Heritage stamps have taught me about amazing individuals such as Bessie Coleman. Without stamps it is unlikely I would have come to know her story," Klug said.