President Bernie Zelazny called the meeting to order at 7:30 PM in Room 300 Lawrence Hall on the Sul Ross Campus. There were 11 people present. Bernie reported a major dust storm in progress on Mars. Closer to home, Brenda Bell reported driving through dust and rain coming back from El Paso.
       The minutes of the previous meeting were accepted as printed in the June Newsletter. Bernie complimented John Bell on his latest astronomy column in the Alpine Observer. John's well written columns have offered good information for interested readers, and have also given the BBAS some good exposure.
       Bernie reported observing some very bright white strobe flashes at night on many of the windmills near McCamey. Jim Walker said that new strobes were supposed to be white at night for their first month of service, and would then be changed to flashing red at night.
       For our program, John Bell showed a videotape on Exploring Our Solar Origins followed by a discussion.

       Betty Grimm submitted the following treasurer's report:

       Bernie reported seeing a very bright light at the Highland Concrete Plant just outside the city on US 90 East.  This light is directly in the eyes of drivers travelling west on the highway.  Another light is aimed to the northeast.  I spoke with one of the owners who was very cooperative.  I believe both of these new lights will soon be readjusted to 20 deg above the horizontal, as the Alpine lighting ordinance specifies.
       Several unshielded wallpacks were recently installed on the Pete P. Gallego Building, the new multipurpose building on the Sul Ross Campus. More than a year ago I had a lengthy conversation with the director of the physical plant about the kinds of lights to be installed on and around that building.  I was assured that all such lights would be full cutoff fixtures.  When I called the director after observing the new unshielded wallpacks,  he said they were supposed to be FCO fixtures, and he would call the contractor. The contractor, however, refused to change the lights. I wrote Pete Gallego, pointing out that it would be unfortunate if the Pete P. Gallego Building were to remain in violation of HB916 - the state lighting law, which Pete sponsored and successfully carried through the legislature in 1999 - and also in violation of our Alpine ordinance. Pete sent a copy of my letter at once to Dr. Vic Morgan, SR President, and a cover letter of his own expressing the hope that the situation would be remedied. I believe the lights will be replaced. [At this writing, the lights have been turned on, all 7 of them, and they are bright. Have a look.]
       When the new acorn lights were installed as part of the Main Street Program a couple of years ago, several of the new lights were installed within 6 to 30 feet of existing streetlights (pole to pole distance).  Most of those nearby streetlights were 400-watt drop lens cobra-heads. Shortly after I gave a list of those redundant street lights to City Manager Bill Lewis, 5 of the cobras were removed. Eliminating those very bright lights reduces glare, reduces uplight, and saves the city more than $1,000.00 a year. Your tax dollars at work!
       The new Ft. Davis Post Office is now under construction. It might be very helpful if some of our members living nearby would speak to the on-site construction superintendent about their lighting.  There has been a lighting order in effect in Jeff Davis County for many years, so we can hope that we will see better lighting installed in Ft. Davis than we have seen at the Alpine Post Office.

       Before showing a videotape from the Learning Channel, John asked us to look at the presentation critically, with respect to its possible use in the schools.
       The Sun has been very dependable in the past, but its future will be violent. Perhaps in a billion years or so, it will get much hotter, very likely boiling away the earth's oceans, eventually expanding to engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, and possibly Mars.
       The Hubble Space Telescope has given us new insights into the history and evolution of stars. From its orbit 380 miles above the earth, the HST can see about 10 billion years into the past, into the fairly early days of our solar system. We can observe regions of active star formation, such as the area dubbed the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula.
       New stars and perhaps solar systems are forming out of disks of gas and dust. As in our own solar system, the heavier elements remain near the center, and the lighter elements are driven outward.
       Is our solar system unique? The answer is no, at least in several important respects. For example, there is a disk of gas and dust around the star Beta Pictoris that has many of the characteristics of the disk of material around our own sun that gave rise to our own solar system. Today, we can observe similar processes in the Orion Nebula.
       Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, astronomers at California State University at San Francisco, have found strong evidence of large planets orbiting distant stars. An orbiting planet tugs at its star, causing the image of the star to wobble slightly. If the orbit of a planet lies roughly in our line of sight, then it will tug its star alternately toward and away from the earth, causing predictable shifts in the spectrum of the starlight.  [At this writing, more than 50 planets have been "discovered" outside our solar system. However, no such planet has been directly observed visually or photographed.]
       In our own solar system, the inner planets are rocky, made of heavier elements. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the Asteroids, are much heavier (in the sense of being more dense) than the outer planets, the gas giants. With the exception of Venus, all of the other planets rotate in the same direction, west to east. It is unclear why Venus should rotate in the opposite direction.
       Mercury, about the size of our moon, is a barren, pock-marked planet that is too small to have an atmosphere. Venus, similar in size to the earth, has a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, and sulfuric and hydrochloric acid. The Russian Venera probe and the American Magellan probe barely survived the 800-deg F temperature long enough to send a little data back to the earth. Rugged mountains and valleys indicate a violent past. 
       Mars and the Earth are thought to have been more similar about 4 billion years ago. Mars is substantially smaller than the earth, and has lost much of its water and atmosphere in the last few billion years. Today, Mars s not a hospitable place - but we'll go there one day nevertheless.
       The Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, may be the material left over from a potential planet that never developed. Ceres, the largest asteroid, is about 600 miles in diameter, and the smallest ones are no more than small boulders.
       Jupiter, the largest planet and the first of the gas giants, has no solid surface. All we can see is the upper atmosphere, with its cloud bands, and the Great Red Spot, a rotating, hurricane-like storm that has been active for 300 years or so. 
       Uranus, discovered in 1781, is the first planet discovered since ancient times. The axis of Uranus is tilted more that 90 deg out of the plane of the solar system. The planet has several thin rings in the plane of its equator. The tilt of its axis and rings suggests that Uranus may have suffered a massive blow from a large body at some time in the past.
       Neptune, the outermost of the gas giants, shows little surface detail. This planet has the highest winds measured so far in the solar system, 1,000 miles per hour. Triton, one of Neptune's moons, is the coldest body in the solar system.
       Pluto, the outermost planet, was not discovered until 1930. Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farm boy turned astronomer, was hired by Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, AZ, specifically to look for the outermost planet. His diligence and skill finally paid off with the discovery of our last planet. [Before his death a few years ago, Clyde Tombaugh was a frequent visitor and speaker at the Texas Star Party. There is an excellent biography entitled Clyde Tombaugh: Discoverer of Planet Pluto, by David H. Levy, University of Arizona Press, 1991.]
       Pluto doesn't fit well with the other planets. It seems unreasonable to find another solid planet, rocky or icy, beyond the gas giants. Some astronomers have argued that Pluto more properly belongs to the Kuiper Belt, or perhaps the Oort Cloud, a spherical shell of icy bodies that may become comets when they are somehow deflected into the inner solar system. Planet or not, the last word on Pluto has not been said.
       Although the video is somewhat dated, as all such presentations must soon become, we thought the program was fundamentally well done. Anyone showing the video could easily offer some current information updating, for example, the search for extrasolar planets.

       End of minutes.

       On the 4th of July, Earth reached its greatest distance from the Sun, the aphelion of our orbit. But don't expect any sudden relief from the heat.  Indeed, our planet is actually warmer when we're farther from the Sun than at any other time of year.
       The varying temperatures of our seasons are caused by the 23 1/2 degree tilt of the earth's axis with respect to our orbit.  But there are complications. It happens that there is more land in the northern hemisphere and more water in the southern hemisphere. The northern land masses absorb more heat than do the southern oceans, so summers are warmer when the northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun - even though the earth is about a million miles farther from the sun at that time.  Be glad that our northern summer doesn't occur at perihelion!

       Around 6:19 p.m. EDT on the evening of July 23, a brilliant meteor shot through the skies above the northeastern United States.  Reports of a daytime fireball stretch from North Carolina all the way to Buffalo, New York, and Bobcaygeon, Ontario (see the map and other information at http://www.skypub.com). The meteoroid apparently entered the Earth's atmosphere above North Carolina and traveled north-northwest to the Canadian border. One observer in Virginia, described the object as "much brighter than any daytime full moon . . . [like] a sparkler lit in daytime."
       Near Williamsport, Pennsylvania, windows were rattled by a loud crashing noise, described by many as a deafening thunderclap.  Some thought the bolide was a falling airplane and county emergency services received over 300 calls to 911 switchboards from concerned citizens. An Emergency Management Coordinator for Lycoming County, described a burnt patch of a cornfield in Salladasburg, Pennsylvania, near Williamsport. Several cornstalks were blown over and leaves appeared curled from heat.  However, no meteorite was found. Sky & Telescope will be following this story as more information becomes available.

       You may remember that we had a good display of meteors at our Perseid watch a while back. Some of the meteors we saw were bright enough to light up the ground and cast shadows, and some of their trails lasted for 5 minutes or more. The best time to watch this year will be the predawn hours of August 12, even though the peak occurs later during daylight.  Unfortunately, the 3rd-quarter moon rises just after midnight and will wash out all but the brighter meteors. But it's worth a look if you have a decent viewing site near by.
       The following is edited from Mark Davis and Cathy Hall, North American Meteor Network (see their website at http://web.infoave.net~meteorobs/) The Perseids are fast meteors, at about 59 km per second, and often leave trains behind them. There are many bright Perseids, so even from a less than perfect sky location, an observer will see a respectable number of meteors. For the best effect though, try to get out into the country, away from the light pollution of streetlights.
       The Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the first known information on these meteors coming from the far east. In early Europe, the Perseids came to be known as the "tears of St. Lawrence." Mark Littmann has a wonderful article on the history of the Perseids on the Sky and Telescope website http://www.skypub.com.
       Because the orbit of the Perseid meteoroid particles is tilted so much in relation to the plane of our own solar system, the Perseids have stayed fairly similar in characteristics since ancient times, and have not been changed much by the influence of our large planets such as Jupiter. It was Schiaparelli, the astronomer most noted for observing so-called "canali" on Mars, who discovered that the Perseid meteors were related to Comet 1862 III, also known as 109/P Swift-Tuttle. This was the first proven association between a comet and a meteor shower.
       The parent comet itself, 109/P Swift-Tuttle, was discovered in July of 1862 by both Lewis Swift of Marathon, New York and Horace Tuttle of Harvard Observatory, Massachusetts. It was about magnitude 7.5 at discovery and brightened to about magnitude 2 by early September, which is about the same brightness as the stars in the Big Dipper. It sported a tail of between 25 and 30 degrees long, and was quite impressive! By length comparison, the pointer stars of the Big Dipper are about 5 degrees apart. The comet comes around to our part of the solar system about every 120 years and was seen most recently in the mid 1990's. In November of 1992, it brightened to about magnitude 5.0.

If we have not yet received your dues, then please use the convenient envelope addressed to our treasurer that is included with this copy of your Newsletter.

Betty Lou Grimm, Treasurer
Big Bend Astronomical Society, Inc
1001 N 2nd Street, Apt F-22
Alpine, TX 79830