Category Archives: Meeting

RASC Regular Meeting June 10, 2019

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RASC Regular Meeting
TELUS World of Science – Zeidler Dome
FREE and open to the public.

7:00 PM Pre-meeting mix and mingle.
7:30 PM Guest Speaker

“From Aunt Effie’s Farm to the Moon: The Apollo Program in Context.”

Dr. Robert Smith 

In December 1903, Orville Wright, in the presence of a small group of people, piloted the Wright Brothers’ experimental airplane for a flight of around 12 seconds in length that had carried him roughly 120 feet. Brief though it was, this was the first successful flight by a heavy-than-air flying machine. A mere 66 years later, in Jul.y 1969, as part of the Apollo Program, humans were walking, in view of many hundreds of millions of people around the Earth, on the surface of the Moon. In this talk, Robert Smith will examine how and why this astonishingly rapid development came about, as well as discuss the overall significance and place of the Apollo Program in history.

 

RASC Regular Meeting May 13, 2019

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RASC Regular Meeting
TELUS World of Science – Zeidler Dome
FREE and open to the public.

7:00 PM Pre-meeting mix and mingle.
7:30 PM Guest Speaker

Photometry at Jasper Place High School        

Photometry is the study of variable stars.  These are stars that change in brightness for a variety of reasons including transiting exoplanets, star spots or intrinsic instability. At Jasper Place High School we have been observing variable stars and using a number of different tools to create light curves for some of them. Using Skynet, Muniwin, and AAVSO resources we took photos, identified variable stars and processed images of BL Cam. BL Cam is a rapidly pulsating variable star in the constellation Camelopardalis with a period of less than one hour. We already have plans for future projects to observe exoplanet transits! We can’t wait to share what we’ve learnt.

RASC Regular Meeting March 11, 2019

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RASC Regular Meeting
TELUS World of Science – Zeidler Dome
FREE and open to the public.

7:00 PM Pre-meeting mix and mingle.
7:30 PM Guest Speaker

Shedding Light on the Dark Matter of the Universe

Dr. Marie-Cécile Piro                         

Astronomical and cosmological observations strongly suggest that most of the matter in the Universe is non-luminous and made of an unknown substance called dark matter (DM). Even if its direct detection escaped to the scientific community in our time, DM is a fundamental concept that could explain how our Universe formed and helps to restore the mismatch between what we observed and what we predicted.  Over the last decade, dark matter detection techniques have been improving a lot pushing the sensitivity to unprecedented levels. After giving an introduction of the evidences of dark matter, the diverse experimental techniques to detect dark matter will be presented. The current and future stage of the international collaborations in the context of the global dark matter search will also be discussed.

RASC Regular Meeting January 14, 2019, History of the Hubble Space Telescope

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RASC Regular Meeting
TELUS World of Science – Zeidler Dome
FREE and open to the public.

Note: The regular meeting will begin after the annual general meeting concludes.

8:30 PM Guest Speaker

Dr. Chris Gainor

History of the Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched 28 years ago in 1990. After overcoming problems caused by a defective main mirror, Hubble has made discoveries that have revolutionized our view of the universe we live in. This talk will cover the history of HST based on a history book the speaker is writing for NASA.


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RASC Annual General Meeting, January 14, 2019

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RASC Annual General Meeting followed by Regular Meeting
TELUS World of Science – Zeidler Dome
FREE and open to the public. Note: The Annual General meeting is probably main of interest only to RASC members.

7:00 PM Pre-meeting mix and mingle.
7:30 PM Annual General Meeting

RASC Regular Meeting December 10, 2018, Unravelling Star Formation

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RASC Regular Meeting
TELUS World of Science – Zeidler Dome
FREE and open to the public.

7:00 PM Meet and Greet

7:30 PM Guest Speaker

Eric Koch

Unravelling Star Formation

Orion in Infrared. Imaged by the Herschel Space Observatory

Stars form in the coldest, densest collections of interstellar gas, called molecular clouds.  Observations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies show that molecular cloud mass is strongly related to the rate stars form. This relationship is rather surprising since it continues over a range of galaxy types and environments, suggesting that stars form through a common process. What controls that process, however, remains elusive. I will present recent observations of molecular clouds taken by new, state-of-the-art radio telescopes that are beginning to unravel the process of star formation. The quality of these observations is an enormous improvement from previous observations and has lead to an on-going revolution in our understanding of star formation.

 

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