Beginning in August, we will start having our monthly indoor meetings at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens.  All members should have received a letter from club Pres Harry Bearman with all the details--but for those of you who didn't get it (or didn't read it!), here is a summary of the plan. 

As shown at right, the Botanic Gardens are just around the corner from our old location at the Museum.  We will now be doing the meetings on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, the first of which will be Tuesday, 8/20 at 7:00pm. 

We will be in one of the meeting rooms in the Botanic Garden Center, which is attached to the Conservatory.  As the map shows, use the northern entrance to the Botanic Gardens and you will be in the parking lot right in front of the building.

This is a very nice facility and we look forward to a successful transition. 

Nasa Notes ... Jim Timmons

MORE X-RAYS WITHOUT YOUR HMO'S APPROVAL (Chandra):  NASA has extended the contract for operational and science support of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.  Chandra was launched in July, 1999 after an eleven month delay. This contract with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory will provide continued mission operations and data analysis thru August 31, 2003. Chandra travels in an elliptical orbit of 6,000 to 86,400 miles in order to make its x-ray measurements beyond the Van Allen belts. This 64 hour orbit allows for 55 hours of uninterrupted observation. Chandra is 20 to 50 times more sensitive and eight times greater resolution that previous x-ray telescopes.

A QUANTUM LEAP? (atom research):  A research team at Rice University, with a grant from the Biological and Physical Research Program at NASA and JPL has manipulated super cold atoms into bundles. Unlike other waves in water, light, or atoms (which spread out as they travel) these "soliton" waves keep their shape without spreading. Future applications for atom-wave solitions could be for advanced lasers. The first observation of a soliton wave was recorded in 1834 at a Scottish canal.

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those sunspots littering the sun's surface.

Harry's Constellation School was again a success--including an opening pass by the International Space Station and a meteor track as Harry was pointing out one of the constellations.  About a dozen scopes were also set up for an evening's observing, with many pairs of binoculars around for casual sky-surfing.  The sky was beautiful, with the Milky Way showing clearly as soon as the sun was down.  Scorpius and Saggitarius were in full form as evening settled in, showing off open and globular clusters by the dozes.

This was really a great evening for friends and families to come out to the observatory to see what us scope-heads are doing when we go out observing. 

More photos on page 6! Let's do this again and make it even bigger and better!