Greetings to all of our club members, visitors, and guests!
We welcome you to the regular meetings of the North Houston Astronomy Club on the 4th Friday of every month.
The Kingwood campus is located on the west side of I 69 (US Highway 59), north side of Kingwood Drive, and NW of the Kingwood Medical Center.
Click below here to see the Map and Driving Directions!
(Parking permits are not required after 6 PM!)
Lone Star-Kingwood Campus
See the following Campus Map
All Members, Guests, and Visitors park at the Parking Lot C across the Sortes-McClellan Road. The CLA building we both the novice and general meetings gather is building 4 as shown on this map. Click on the image above to get a pdf file with more information about the campus layout.
Physical Address
20000 Kingwood Dr.
Kingwood, TX 77339
24 May 2019
Our gathering begins with the Novice Meeting:
Place: Lone Star College-Kingwood Campus
Location: Classroom Building A (CLA) – (2nd Floor – Room CLA221)
The Astronomy Classroom
Time: (6:30 – 7:15) PM
Speaker: Rusty Hill
(NHAC Senior Volunteer & Club Member)
Presentation
Using Stellarium!
Snapshot image for the night sky as a visual demonstration of the applications using Stellarium.
Our longtime senior club member for the North Houston Astronomy Club, Rusty Hill will present us with a general overview of the famous free – war program Stellarium. Stellarium is known as an Open Source freeware program available to all Astronomers around the world as the best and well-known planetarium program that can simulate the night sky at any location in the world, any location in the solar system. Stellarium was first released in 2001 for anyone using Linux, Windows, or Mac computers as a basic program displaying stars, constellations, the planets, and some DSOs. In 2019 the latest version shows astronomical timetables, trajectory paths for celestial objects, simulating eclipses, a greater number of Deep Sky Object catalogs, location of exoplanets, pulsars, etc.. For anyone starting in Astronomy with very little money this freeware program is an excellent start to studying the night sky on cloudy nights as a tool for telescopes in locating or preparing for celestial events in the near and far future.
Learn more from the following Reference:
Stellarium – Online Planetarium
Instructions of Stellarium
(Dated to Version 0.15.0 – 1 (c) 2016)
The gathering concludes with the General Meeting:
Place: Lone Star College-Kingwood Campus
Location: Classroom Building A (CLA) – (1st Floor – Room CLA112)
The Teaching Teacher Auditorium
Time: (7:30 – 10:00) PM
Speaker: Professor Bill Leech
(Physics & Astronomy Instructor)
Presentation
The Sun, Our Star Part II
The Sun observed by NASA GOES – 1`7 satellites in different wavelengths showing different structural properties at the different depths within the Sun’s body.
This is part II of the original talk presented by Bill at the April Meeting.
The Sun is a firey – ball of hot plasma that surrounds a thermonuclear, fusion reactor. Professor Bill Leech of the Lone Star College-Kingwood Campus is an instructor in Physics & Astronomy at the campus and will perform his talk as two-part series about the Sun! You learn more about this star the gravitational anchor and center of our solar system for which our planet receives its glow of electromagnetic radiation (light) that provides one of the essential ingredients to life. Bill will go through the history of our understanding of the Sun and will take you on a scientific journey from its center to the solar wind and out to the boundaries of the Heliosphere. Came and enjoy a night of learning and exploration about our closest Star!
Learn more from the following References
Space Weather Prediction Center
SOHO (The Great Solar Observer)