President Bernie Zelazny called the meeting to order at 7:30 PM in Room 300 Lawrence Hall on the Sul Ross Campus.  We began our meeting with a moment of silence in memory of the many people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies of the day before.  There were 16 people present.
       Bernie reported that NASA had shut down all facilities.  The flight crew in the International Space Station could see the smoke from the World Trade Center, but not from the Pentagon. 
       The minutes of the previous meeting were accepted as printed in the August Newsletter.
       Bernie read a letter from McDonald Observatory soliciting the participation of a BBAS representative in a meeting scheduled for November 10.  The meeting will consider participation by amateurs in the program under development at the new McDonald Visitors Center involving, among other things, reserving time on the 36" scope.
       Bernie reminded us that we need to consider a Nominating Committee for the nomination and election of officers and board members for next year.
       John Bell presented a program entitled Moon People - People Who Have Made a Big Hit on the Moon.

       Betty Grimm submitted the following treasurer's report:

       I reported that 4 of the 7 unshielded wallpacks on the Pete P. Gallego Center now have very good full cutoff (FCO) shields.  I understand that the remaining 3 wallpacks will also be fitted with FCO shields. 
       For some months, I have been in touch with Officer Dave Durant, Chief of the Alpine Branch of the Border Patrol, regarding lights at their large new facility to be built north of US 90, about 1/2 mile west of the Ramada Inn.  Dave has assured me that their lights will all be FCO fixtures.  At the ground breaking ceremony on September 11 - a subdued and abbreviated event in view of the tragedies in New York and Washington - I was able to speak with two representatives of the Army Corps of Engineers, who will be responsible for building the facility.  Those representatives also assured me that the lights would be FCO.  They have also been in touch with McDonald Observatory.
       As Bernie reported, the two bright floodlights at the Highland Concrete Plant still need to be reaimed.  I spoke with one of the owners, who told me the lights had been adjusted.  But the lights are still aimed too high above the horizontal, and one still shines in the eyes of westbound drivers on US 90.  I will see what I can do.

       Geologist Jack Murphy is in hot pursuit of remnants of a fireball spotted in the Western skies in August.  Murphy heads a team of meteor hunters at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science that is chasing reports of a white ball described as up to 40 times brighter than the moon.  Data from an acoustic tracking system at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest the meteor weighed about a ton and plummeted toward Earth on August 17 at 11.25 miles a second.
       "This is by far the largest and brightest we've ever had come down in Colorado," said Murphy, the museum's curator of geology.  Witnesses from Idaho to New Mexico said the fireball appeared to drop straight down rather than in a long arc, making Murphy suspect it was made of iron rather than stone.  An iron meteorite has not been found in Colorado for more than three
decades.  Now the search is on.

       In a risky flyby, NASA's ailing spacecraft Deep Space 1 successfully navigated past a comet, giving researchers the best look ever inside the glowing core of icy dust and gas.  Whizzing just 1,300 miles from Comet Borrelly's rocky, icy core on Sept. 22, DS1 captured the best-resolution pictures to date of any comet's nucleus.  Onboard instruments also measured the composition of gases swirling around the nucleus and revealed new information about how those gases interact with the solar wind.  Before the encounter, mission planners weren't certain that DS1 would survive its rendezvous with Borrelly since the spacecraft was designed for a technology-testing mission, long ago completed with great success, and not for a comet flyby. 
       DS 1 has taken pictures of Comet Borrelly's nucleus - the highest resolution view ever seen of a comet, 45 meters per pixel.  The bowling-pin-shaped body is about 8 km long and features a rocky, rough terrain with dark and somewhat lighter patches.  You can find images at the NASA homepage: http://www.nasa.gov
       In November 1999, when DS1 was flying blind after losing its navigation camera, Marc Rayman and his engineering team despaired of seeing their craft make its date with Comet Borrelly nearly two years later.  But on the night of September 22nd the struggling spacecraft swept just 1,350 miles from the comet's icy heart. "I have to tell you that the encounter didn't go as anticipated," Rayman deadpanned at a press conference today. "In fact, it went perfectly."
       The results are the most detailed images yet of a cometary nucleus, surpassing views of Halley's Comet taken 15 years ago by the spacecraft.  Borrelly's jumbled surface displays a surprising range of light and dark markings, which in reality are dark and extremely black.  Cosmochemists believe the nucleus is likely coated with a patchy veneer of carbon- and organic-rich slag. "These pictures have told us that comet nuclei are far more complex than we ever imagined," says Laurence Soderblom, who heads DS1's camera team.  Another team member likened the nucleus to "a Dove Bar the size of Mount Everest." 
       Images from the spacecraft (and from the Hubble Space Telescope as well) reveal that this interplanetary iceberg sports a narrow, Sunward-pointing jet of vaporized ice and dust that looks like it was shot from a trio of side-by-side cannons. And, in fact, one cometary model suggests that over time such ice-fueled jets should eat their way down into the nucleus, hollowing out "wells" from which gas and dust escape.
        Known officially as 19P (for "periodic"), Borrelly circles the Sun every 6.8 years and is thought to have formed in a different part of the primordial solar nebula and thus have a different composition than Halley, which has a 76-year orbit.  "We've only scratched the surface," notes project scientist Robert M. Nelson. Luckily, the nucleus passed directly through the entrance slit of the craft's infrared spectrometer, and these observations may show what coats the icy surface.

       Naming the features on the moon began after the invention of the telescope.  Galileo himself, the first person to use a telescope for astronomical observations, named some features on the moon in the early 1600s.
       A Dutch astronomer, van Langren, named a large number of lunar features in the 1600s.  By timing the beginning of eclipses, and the disappearance of features, the longitude of different locations on the earth could be determined.  A Dutch Catholic, van Langren named large craters after Catholic royalty, smaller ones after scientists.  Van Langren named a crater on the eastern edge of the moon Langrenus, after himself.  Of the 325 names van Langren bestowed on lunar features, 168 survive; but all have been moved except for four, including Langrenus.
       The Italian Jesuit, Riccioli, after the time of Galileo, was noted for discovering Mizar, the first double star identified.  By Riccioli's time, the church had compromised in its opposition to the Copernican theory.  The church still believed the earth was stationary, but the planets were thought to revolve around the sun, which revolved around the earth.  Turning his attention to the moon, Riccioli said the prominent crater Tycho should be called umbilicus humana.  He cast Galileo into the Mare Procelarum, near the edge of the moon, and also named a crater after himself.
       After many years - generations, even - the International Astronomical Union formed a committee to straighten out the nomenclature of lunar features.  And then came the Space Age, with the Russians' first photographs of the back side of the moon.  By international agreement, features on the moon may be named after deceased astronomers, explorers, and scientists,  including 9 American and 9 Russian astronauts.
       John projected a large moon photograph and pointed out several craters:  Tycho, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Caroline Herschel (discoverer of many comets in the 1700s), Ptolemy, Newton, Giordano Bruno (on the back side of the moon), Einstein, Hubble.  John also showed pictures or portraits of several of the people honored by having craters named after them.  If you are interested in learning more about the moon, John recommends this book by Antonir Rukl, Atlas of the Moon, Kalmbach Books (Astronomy Magazine), 1996. 
       We were treated to another of John's famous exams, this one a Moon People Quiz involving people for whom lunar features have been named.  For example, who do you associate with the following?  "Eureka, Eureka - but where are my clothes?"  "Those planets make beautiful harmony."  "That fuzzy thing can't be a comet." "Lost a nose but gained an island." You could find some of the answers in some of John's earlier presentations, or in this short list:  Atlas, Archimedes, Messier, Hercules, Kepler, Hubble, and Tycho.
       Very few craters have been named after women.  Maria Mitchell has a tiny crater near Aristotle.  Mitchell, an early member of the Vassar faculty, calculated the orbit of a comet in the 1800s - a feat then considered beyond the capability of a woman.  The largest woman's crater is named after St. Catherine of Alexandria, who annoyed the authorities and was beheaded.
       There is no crater named after Henrietta Leavitt, who worked out the period-luminosity relationship for the Cepheid variables.  Leavitt's work paved the way for determining the distances to many galaxies.  Nor does Cecilia Paine-Gaposchkin have a crater, even though she was the first female full professor at Harvard, and Head of the Astronomy Department.  Paine-Gaposchkin's work has led to a greater understanding of the chemical nature of the stars. 

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