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The Family Tree
Thought for the Month The SunTree Traveler
During August, some Organ, NM members are welcoming us and friends of SunTree to their backyard pool, hot tub, croquet pitch and ball fetching facility on the first, and also on the 28th of August. Like most of the SunTree events, these will be potlucks, so be sure to bring along an entrée, side dish, desert, snack or whatever for the starving SunTree folks.
Some El Paso members have invited the club back to their house on 14 August to celebrate the closing days of summer vacation for those re-entering the drudgery of schoolwork. Be sure to bring food since this is going to be another potluck and we certainly do not want the SunTree members to suffer malnutrition. The pool and hot tub will be in full working order.
If you look at the calendar for September, you will see that in the early part of the month, we are planning an event in connection with the State Wine Fair in Bernalillo, NM. We have been invited to Madonna's place in Rio Rancho for the weekend. Since it is so close to the beginning of the month, I thought that it is necessary to mention the event in the August newsletter. Even though we ask you to contact the club or the host for all of our events in order to aid event planning, this particular event calls for the newsletter to strongly emphasize this request. In addition to the normal need of meal planning and space management, this event will, have to be planned with the transporting of participants to the Wine Festival as well. Please be sure to contact SunTree or Madonna if you plan to participate. As with all of our club events, please notify the host or SunTree of your plan to participate and the particulars of that participation (schedule, planned lodging if appropriate and type of food you plan to bring to the potluck.
The Perseid Meteor Shower is Back – Better Than Ever! Venus has decided to continue a spectacular display, though she cannot top her transit of the sun. She is now in the morning sky before dawn. She gets brighter and brighter every day. 17 August should be a particularly bright day for her. A couple of days before that, out old friend, Saturn makes his appearance in the morning sky. Look for him just to the right of the crescent moon on 13 August. He runs up to join with Venus in a pairs skating demonstration on the mornings of 30 and 31 August. Now the big news! This year, the moon has decided not to compete with the Perseid Meteor Shower, so get your raincoats and stand out in that shower around 11 and 12 August (after midnight). The meteors will appear to be originating from a spot in the north east, just above the constellation Perseus (sounds logical to me). If you have problems identifying Perseus, you might be able to identify it by its position just below and to the left of Cassiopeia (that is that bunch of five stars in the northeast that form the letter W). Even if you cannot get out after midnight to watch the shower, get outside during that dark part of the month. Do not miss our current spectacular view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Even if you do not want to bother looking for planets and constellations, just go look at that spectacular sky during this month. More about the Perseid Meteor Shower: What will this year's shower look like. The "experts" say that this year's shower should be better than normal and possibly spectacular. So much for definitive information from the experts (I wonder if they are on the payroll of the Perseid Chamber of Commerce). Some of the information that is available, however shows that it just might be a spectacular event this year. Now I will go into some pseudoscientific hand waving and prove my point beyond any shadow of doubt. Of course, I have to first mention once again that it will be during the dark of the moon (relatively). Second, I need to repeat some (don't worry, I will attempt to be short with this) of the same information that I put in last December's newsletter when I was raving about the Geminid Meteor Shower. Basically, the meteor showers consist of particles that are, for the most part microscopic. The largest ones, the ones that look like they are going to bounce the Earth off of its orbit are really no larger than a small pebble. These little crumbs are left around out solar system by those famously sloppy eaters, the comets. You can always tell where a comet has wandered because it leaves a trail of these crumbs along its path. Now comets do not always follow the exact same path, so there are a number of these sloppy pathways through our neighborhood of the solar system were in the Summer of 1862 and again in December of 1992 (I don't really remember that first time, but I do the second). Some of the experts who have been keeping records of the showers have noticed that the intensity of the showers seem to follow a pattern and that pattern is apparently related to which pathway spaceship Earth flys through on a given year. The more spectacular displays seem to occur when we travel through the path generated when Swift-Tuttle visited in 1862. The (as yet, unverified) computer models for the Swift-Tuttle crumb paths seem to show that this year, we will be moving through the 1862 pathway. I will stop here, though there is lots more (they are considering, for example, the gravitational effect of the planet Jupiter on these pathways, but this article is too long already), and I will assume the this will be a spectacular year. By the way, the dates for the peak are sort of iffy also. The peak should be on 13 or 14 August, but you can see the early parts of the shower as early as 3 August and the ending flight could be as late as 17 August. The intensity could be, at the peak night, of as few as 100 meteors per hour, or, if it is a good shower, as many as several thousand per hour. I know that I said that I was going to cut this short, but I think that I do need to say that there is a reason that you have to stay up past midnight to see this shower (and most other showers). Remember when I said that the meteors our space-time continuum (I have always wanted to use that phrase, but never had the opportunity. It is not really appropriate here, but I thought that I would throw it in to make this rambling seem more high-brow). The particular comet that left this trail of cracker crumbs is (was) 109P, but its friends call it Swift-Tuttle. Two of its visits to will appear to originate from one spot in the sky? That spot is referred to as the radiant of the shower. Early in the evening, that point is near, or below the horizon in the northeast. The meteors coming from that point will scream across the sky from one side to the other. You will probably only see a few of the larger ones. Later in the night, that radiant point is higher in the sky, so the meteors will appear to be coming directly at you. For that reason you can see even the little sand-speck sized meteors aimed directly at you. © 2004 SunTree Travel Club - Site updated Summer 2008 |
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Two Planned Events During August on Organ, NM