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General Meeting Topic
The Cosmic Origins of Carbon and Nitrogen
General Meeting Speaker
Dr. Reggie Dufour, Rice University
Novice Meeting Topic
All About Telescopes, and the Telescope Loaner Program
Novice Meeting Speaker
David Haviland and Allen Wilkerson, respectively

*** Weather Update ***

As of 16:40 on Feb. 7, the weather service is not issuing any warnings for tonight, so the meeting is going to proceed as scheduled. Houston temperature is supposed to be increasing from 37 to 39 between 18:00 and 24:00hrs. While a freeze is not expected, please use caution on overpasses and use you best judgement. Be Safe!

Carbon and nitrogen are two of the elements crucial for life. Originally thought only to come from exploding massive stars, there is now evidence that intermediate mass stars like the sun eject significant amounts of these elements at the end of their lives (via planetary nebulae). Dr. Dufour will talk about these new concepts and a Hubble Space Telescope program to better evaluate the contributions of C & N from stars producing planetary nebulae.


View Houston Astronomical Society in a larger map

Interview by Clayton Jeter

I met Jim Burr, owner of JMI this year at the 2013 Okie Tex Star Party. He set up his beautiful 14 1/2” Reverse Binocular scope for everyone on the two fields to drop by and take a peek through. The last time I observed though a Reverse Binocular was in 1987. The binocular was a 10” handcrafted instrument by Lee Cain, then… our very own HAS president. If you’ve never observed with one, then you’re in for a total surprise and a wonderful treat. Visually they can’t be beat. Your brain is taking on twice the information via photons.

NGC 891

by Bill Pellerin, editor of the HAS GuideStar

Object: NGC 891
Class: Galaxy
Constellation: Andromeda
Magnitude: 10.8
R.A.: 2 h 22 m 33.4 s
Dec: 42 deg 20 min 57 sec
Size/Spectral: 13.5 arc min x 2.5 arc min
Distance: 27.3Mly
Optics needed: Telescope

Why this is interesting:

In September of 1994 I spent a week at the Mount Wilson Observatory. One of the projects we did was to image a few objects in the sky and one of the objects was NGC 891. At the time I recall thinking that I had never seen a galaxy more beautiful than this one. You may think the same after you’ve seen it. It’s a beautiful edge-on galaxy with a dark dust lane splitting the disk into two halves.

You’ll find this galaxy just under 3.5 degrees east of Almach (Gamma Andromedae), a magnitude 2 star. The galaxy is identified on page 2 of the Pocket Sky Atlas.