Monthly Meeting (Continued)

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  • Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus
  • The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times
  • The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

He also did important work in optics (1604, 1611), discovered two new regular polyhedra (1619), gave the first mathematical treatment of close packing of equal spheres (leading to an explanation of the shape of the cells of a honeycomb, 1611), gave the first proof of how logarithms worked (1624), and devised a method of finding the volumes of solids of revolution that (with hindsight!) can be seen as contributing to the development of calculus (1615, 1616). Moreover, he calculated the most exact astronomical tables hitherto known, whose continued accuracy did much to establish the truth of heliocentric astronomy.

Next month's meeting presentation is not pinned down yet, but it's guaranteed to be interesting!

Observing Reports (Continued)

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I am quite new at this, and may not have properly identified all the features, but I'm pretty sure I got the Syrtis Major, Libya and Sytris Minor right. At any rate it was a lot of fun and quite exciting for the first time through the process..

Terry Tuggle--I arrived at Fort Griffin about 8:45pm and Tom Moore and former member Ron Muir was already there. Ron brought his new 22 inch GOTO computer Dob, (Second light, - there is an image on my website). It was also second light on Tom's 20 inch Sky Designs Dob (built by none other than FWAS member Danny Author) which he picked up at TSP from former FWAS member Bill Henderson. Friday was about an 8 out of 10, with a steady south wind about ten miles mph. The seeing was steady and the dark lane through the Milky Way was very pronounced and light from the central bulge could be seen below and above. It was too windy to use high magnification on Mars, but the dust storm washed any detail anyway. We pretty much made a night of it, tuning in at about 5:00am.

On Saturday night Craig Lindsey showed up and a member from the Dallas club came in also. The air was about 10% dryer on Saturday night and would have been a solid 9 out of 10, except for the fact that the wind was gusting 10 to 15 mph. We saw the central star in M-57 in Ron's 22 inch at about 600x, and Ron was knocking down 16.5 mag galaxies all night long.

Tom and I were kind of beat after Friday night and turned in about 2:30am, but Ron and Craig kept on going and found out Sunday morning that they had ob

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