Each year in Mora there is a cross country ski race called the Vasaloppet and it is occasionally used as an olympic qualifier, so for our small community, it is a very big deal. This year is the 39th anniversary and ECMAC has offered to provide some celestial ambiance for the "friendship tour", a short 2K welcome event at 7:00PM on Friday the 11th of February. We will set up at the downtown library park and hope to show people great views of the first quarter moon and anything else we can pull in with the street lights around us.
Here's hoping we have decent temperatures and clear skies!
January 25th Meeting on Celestial Targets is a Bullseye!
With another fun-filled educational eperience under our belts, the ECMAC bi-monthly meeting covered a very interesting topic: Objects for Observation, presented by club president Jim Williams. Eleven different categories of celestial phenomena suitable for different levels of observation were presented. These covered everything from naked-eye astronomy incorporating meteor Showers, auroral displays, the Moon, planets, and stars, to telescopic and binocular observation of double stars, open clusters, globular clusters, planetary nebulae, diffuse nebulae, supernova remnants, and galaxies. Each subject was briefly discussed and some great questions were asked! We look forward to getting more "in-depth" with each of these individual topics later on.
Also discussed, was the amazing photo shown below of the partial solar eclipse with a transiting International Space Station present as well. This was truly a remarkable accomplishment by French astrophotographer Thierry Legault.
Come join us at our next bi-monthly meeting onTuesday, March 22nd at 7:00PM.