Our next SMAS club meeting is next Friday, March 29th at 7:00 p.m. at Bozeman High School. We’ll be welcoming Solar System Ambassador Sherre Boothman who will give a presentation on the Apollo Mission 50th Anniversary.
We’ll be meeting in the Bozeman High School Bridger Charter Academy wing, room C-6. Free and open to the public.
Have you seen the blue of Neptune? If not, finding it this week gets a bit easier thanks to Mars and the Astro League. See the attached diagram, for more info visit the Astro League website – while you are there check out the observing clubs – which is included in you SMAS dues.
There are several comets that should be visible with telescopes over the next several weeks. As the comets come in closer one should be visible with binoculars in December – and depending on how it interacts with the inner solar system, might become visible to the naked eye.
“I loved it,” Hunter said. “My dream is to be an astronaut.”
“I’m going to go to the Alabama Space Camp when I’m 11. My mom promised me.”
Hunter and other fourth-graders at Bozeman’s Meadowlark Elementary School had a visit Thursday from Lynn Powers of the Southwest Montana Astronomical Society.
She brought a clear plastic disk containing moon rocks and moon dust, on loan from the Johnson Space Center, as well as her own heavy chunk of a meteorite.
“It feels like iron,” Hunter said.
Powers, who works as a librarian at the Bridger Charter Academy at Bozeman High School, is as passionate about space stuff as the kids.
She explained things like how moon craters are formed when asteroids slam into the moon at 30,000 mph, and the differences between simple and complex craters.
Most of the moon rock samples are dark but one, anorthosite, looked light.
“We found anorthosite on the moon, and it’s found in Montana,” Powers said.
She has shown the moon rocks to students at Anderson, Sacajawea and Meadowlark schools, as well as 4-H kids. Saturday she was traveling to the Little Bighorn.
Powers said she has been working on a NASA grant to update curriculum for middle school students. She is happy to share moon rocks with kids.
She got hooked on space as a child, when her dad would wake up his kids early in the morning to watch U.S. space capsules making their fiery descents across the sky and they’d hear the sonic boom. In first grade she wrote a paper about the Mercury astronauts. Then a couple years ago she was thrilled when her hero, Jim Lovell, came to speak at Bozeman High.
“It’s just so cool,” Powers said.
