Free and Open to the Public 

Telus World of Science – Zeidler Dome

7:00 PM – Pre Meeting Mix & Mingle

7:30 PM – Meeting

Please note, the November meeting is the third Monday of the month due to Remembrance Day 

2020 RASC Calendars will be on sale at this meeting

Featured Speaker:

Dr Warren Finlay

“van Gogh, Turbulence and Star Formation: Are They Connected?”

Warren Finlay is a Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Aerosol Mechanics at the University of Alberta. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Aerosol Science and Technology and is the recipient of numerous international awards for his research, as well as a lifetime designation as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.  As part of his duties as a professor at the University of Alberta he instructs a senior undergraduate course entitled “Busting Myths with Analysis”. His talk will touch on material from this course in which he examines the myth that van Gogh’s Starry Night painting captures turbulence like that occurring in star forming giant molecular clouds. As an amateur astronomer, he is the author of the book “Concise Catalog of Deep Sky Objects”, and is a Simon Newcomb award winner. He is also a passionate visual observer and is an award winning nightscape photographer.

 

Free and open to the public

Telus World of Science – Zeidler Dome

7:00 PM Pre meeting Mix & Mingle

7:30PM  Meeting

Please note the October meeting is the Third Monday of the month. 

2020 RASC Calendars will be on sale at this meeting

Featured Speaker:

Dr. Martin Connors

“How to die on the way to Mars“

“Space is Radioactive!” were words spoken by a junior researcher at the dawn of the Space Age. The Van Allen radiation belts had just been discovered, now over sixty years ago. How can a “vacuum” be radioactive? Magnetic fields trap high energy particles, shielding us from them while making a radioactive zone near our planet. When we venture beyond this protective shield, we take risks of a solar radiation storm, and a steady, known hazard from galactic cosmic rays. To make matters worse, mass must always be reduced in spacecraft, yet it is the best protection against radiation. This talk will look at the science behind radiation hazards, which is a bit different from that in the comic books. The sad conclusion is that we are likely to see people die in space unless this hazard is taken seriously.

Free and open to the public

Telus World of Science – Zeidler Dome

7:00 PM Pre meeting mix and mingle

7:30 PM Meeting

Summer: We hardly knew you edition.

With presentations from

Alister Ling

Bruce McCurdy

Steven Kovick

and others.

Plus our usual features

 

 

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
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
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

Globular Clusters and their Weird Binary Stars

Dr. Craig Heinke                       

Globular clusters are old, dense conglomerations of stars, which are also unique physical laboratories.  The denser globular clusters have stars packed so tightly together that stars occasionally collide with each other.  More often, binary stars (pairs of stars orbiting around each other) have their orbits disrupted by other stars, leading to the replacement of one star in the binary with the intruder star and the formation of unusual binaries.   Binaries including extremely dense dead stars, like neutron stars or black holes, can produce X-ray binaries, where the dense star steals mass from its companion. As the matter spirals down from the companion to the dead star, it heats up to millions of degrees and emits X-rays, permitting us to study these exotic systems.  I will discuss what we learn from studying these unusual objects in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays and gamma-rays to optical, infrared, and radio waves.

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

Members’ Night

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

7:00 PM Pre-meeting mix and mingle.
7:30 PM Member Presentations