PCC Astronomy Club

Hey guys! There will be a club meeting today from 12-1 PM in room R122. Make sure to show up for a fun game and treats! We'll also be talking about our events for this semester. See you guys there!😄

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑❤️

What you need to know about the supermoon lunar eclipse It almost sounds like something from a comic strip: A total supermoon lunar eclipse, also known as a blood moon.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10203595046869988&id=730071059

Free Events all Weekend at Griffith Observatoy to Celebrate the Hubble Telescope’s 25th Anniversary This weekend at the Griffith Observatory come celebrate the quarter century anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope with a series of free events.

Here are some pics from our trip to the Mt Wilson Observatory last week! Big thank you to Tim Thompson for your continued support and education of our club! :D

Hey Astronomers!
Since PCC has no school this Tuesday it is the perfect time to come to one of our weekly TV taping fundraisers!
We'll be watching the Comedy Central show "" hosted by Chris Hardwick and it's 3:00-5:30PM!
We'll also be attending one on Wednesday for the TV Land sitcom "The Exes" from 4:00-9:30PM!
Sign yourself up here & bring some friends along too:
http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0b4ea8af2da1f49-tvtaping1

TV Taping Fundraisers for March 31st - April1st! Hey Astronomers! TV Tapings are one of the easiest ways to fundraise money for our club so we would like to attend as many as we can before the semester is over. We will list all of the available tapings for each week for you to look at so be sure to sign up for at least 1 if numerous are available!…

Hey Astronomers!

For those of you who signed the waivers on Thursday, tomorrow we are meeting in front of the Science Center in the circular area. We'll be outside and in between the IMAX and the entrance to the Center at 11am.

For everybody else, here's a time lapse video to help you with the weekend. Hope you don't mind dubstep!

Ancients: A Celestial Timelapse Of The Darkest Skies On Earth | Video Photographer Nicholas Buer (, facebook.com/NicholasBuerPhotography) created this timelapse in the high desert region of Chile known as San Pedro de Atacama, a place revered by astronomers for having some of Earths cleanest, darkest skies

Reminder: There will not be a meeting for tomorrow 10/23, but we will be collecting funds at the usual meeting room, R109 at noon. Please help raise money for our November camping trip, it's $20 and we will be issuing refunds as soon as the schools budget allows.

Hey there astronomers! For those of you who weren't able to stay up all night to watch the lunar eclipse yesterday morning, here is a 1-minute long time-lapse video of the October 8 "blood moon!" Brought to you by the Griffith Observatory :)

Five and a half hour lunar eclipse compressed into one minute - from Total Lunar Eclipse October... Total Lunar Eclipse October 8, 2014 by Griffith Observatory TV on Livestream - Livestream.com

Hey astronomers! Here are some pictures from our private tour of JPL today with the Planetary Society 😄🚀🌍⭐️🌒🌌

Here's a pretty cool event happening on Friday!

Cal Poly Pomona
Physics and Astronomy Seminar

Ryan Smith
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
** Note special day and location: Friday, April 18 in Building 4 - Room 1-314 **

Fast and Small: Ultrafast Spectroscopies of Nanoscale Materials

As the size of solid state devices trends toward the single-atom limit, quantum confinement gives rise to many exciting challenges that arise at the intersection of solid state electronics and modern optics. Short pulses of laser light (shorter than 10-12 seconds) are ideally suited for studying and controlling processes in low-dimensional materials. I will discuss my work using optical techniques in infrared pump-probe and THz time-domain spectroscopy revealing ultrafast carrier dynamics in materials such as semiconductor quantum wells, quantum dots, and graphene. Within these different systems, we will explore themes of fundamental processes such as electron-hole pair excitation, carrier transport, recombination, and Coulomb-induced nonlinearities, and will relate these processes to applications such as photovoltaic energy and nanoscale devices.
Dr. Ryan Smith is a postdoctoral researcher in the Materials Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He uses short-pulsed lasers to study extremely fast fundamental processes in solid state nanomaterials, leading to the development of technologies such as solar cells and high-performance computation.

3:50 p.m. Refreshments
4:00 p.m. Seminar
Building 4 - Room 1-314

Tomorrow @ 12:15 PM, R109

We want to thank Warren Skidmore for coming to PCC today and talking to us about The Thirty Meter Telescope. Here are a few blurry pictures from today

For those of you who haven't seen this yet.

http://youtu.be/ZlfIVEy_YOA

Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory. The discovery, made by Kuo and his col...

Griffith Observatory Star Party on Saturday!

Hey guys! Here are some pictures of our club members at Jackson elementary volunteering for Kids Reading To Succeed. We had a lot of fun!

Hi astronomers! We're back! First meeting tomorrow at 12 PM, R 109. We have some space ice cream to give out to a lucky few, so don't miss it!

Official Trailer from Comic-Con | COSMOS | FOX BROADCASTING Check out the trailer for COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey, a 13-part docu-series debuting in 2014 on FOX! Subscribe now for more COSMOS clips: http://fox.tv/Subs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E831oDXzKwo #!

Neil deGrasse Tyson Funks the Universe - Music Video I mixed Neil Degrasse Tyson's audio from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast into a funky rap about the universe. The music is by Wax Tailor, which you can find...

More information on todays asteroid flyby: http://1.usa.gov/Zyn2kj

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIwDjVFJxd8&feature=player_embedded

Performance of "Some Galaxies": Maria Ferrante and Alice Martelli at TEDxCERN Maria Ferrante's extraordinary voice was discovered when she sang in a voice class at University. She began studying with some of the greatest singers Franco...

https://plus.google.com/photos/111561867069676392668/albums/5844185289414422033/5844185294339963698?authkey=CO7Fo7O36K-GEg&sqi=101996609942925099701&sqsi=e14b81ac-ad1b-4b74-a941-f670b14bd211

Photos - Google+

The Sphinx Observatory – Science at the Top of the World ... Kuriositas - "It may look like the hideaway of a super villain from a Bond movie but this is the Sphinx Observatory, dedicated to research which must take place out at an altitude of 3000-3500 meters.

It is situated in Jungfraujoch, Switzerland. At an astonishing 3.571 meters above sea level, the Sphinx observatory in the Swiss Alps is the highest-altitude built structure in Europe.

The Sphinx peak begins from the Jungfraujoch on the Valais side of the Great Aletsch Glacier. Fortunately, for those not built like a mountain goat, there is an elevator to its summit. ..."

http://www.kuriositas.com/2012/03/sphinx-observatory-science-at-top-of.html

http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1028/1193550766_48c27f611e_o.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

Space Oddity A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. With thanks to Emm Gryner, Ji...

NASA | SDO: Three Years of Sun in Three Minutes In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken covera...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoxiK7K28PU

Grasshopper 250m Test | Ring of Fire 3 SpaceX's Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet), hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safel...

NASA-backed fusion engine could cut Mars trip down to 30 days • The Register NASA, and plenty of private individuals, want to put mankind on Mars. Now a team at the University of Washington being funded by the space agency is about to start building a fusion engine that could get humans there in just 30 days and make other forms of space travel obsolete.

Contrary to popular belief, meteor showers are not rare. It’s just that most of the time we don’t look up! So mark these dates on your calendar and make sure you don’t miss any more this year.

Meteor Showers Viewing Tips:

To answer the most common question: Yes, you can see these meteor showers from ANYWHERE in the sky, provided it’s clear and dark, away from all the city lights.

- The best times to view meteors or typically predawn and late evening. Partially because this is when it is darkest, but also because this is when Earth turns into the path of meteoroids as they enter the atmosphere.

- Meteors are visible with the naked eye and you don’t need any equipment to view them. Just spread a blanket on the ground and look up!

A blow for dark flow

It was in 2008 when a group led by Alexander Kaschlinsky of NASA’s Goddard Space Center stumbled upon what he called “dark flow”’; an unexplained streaming of hundreds of clusters of galaxies towards a region at the edge of the visible universe.

This observation happened while studying how galaxy clusters affect the photons of the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB). What he saw was a change in the frequency of the CMB photons, creating a Doppler effect, which is a characteristic of motion. The observations showed that clusters of galaxies move towards a region in the sky between the constellations Vela and Centaurus.

No one knew what would cause the flow, though some suggested a mass lying outside our observable universe, making space-time behaving almost like a tilted table. But such proposals were against the standard model of cosmology, which says that the universe is increasingly uniform on larger scales. Thus, such a wanted mass was unlikely to form. An exciting suggestion stated that other universes could be pulling on matter in ours. However other groups studying the WMAP data did not detect the motion in question.

A new relevant paper has come out. Remember the recent CMB high-resolution map put together by Planck’s spacecraft data(http://on.fb.me/ZdjpK7)? A latest search from 175 scientists based on that data says that their analysis found no evidence of galaxy clusters streaming towards that region in space. “If there is no dark flow, there is no need for exotic explanations for it, such as other universes”, says Planck team member Elena Pierpaoli at the University of Southern California.

However, you need not to get disappointed yet. Fernando Atrio-Barandela of the University of Salamanca in Spain (a member of the Planck team) begs to differ. He withheld his name from his colleagues’ paper because he says they overestimated uncertainties in their measurements, hence making a subtle signal of dark flow look like mere noise.

Kaschlinsky and Atrio-Barandela are running their own analysis with the new Planck data and will have results in a few months.

The paper from the Planck team: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5090

Atrio-Barandela’s paper on the statistical significance of the flow: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6614

-CHD

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23340-blow-for-dark-flow-in-plancks-new-view-of-the-cosmos.html

Image: The colored dots are clusters within one of four distance ranges, with redder colors indicating greater distance. Colored ellipses show the direction of bulk motion for the clusters of the corresponding color (Credit: NASA/Goddard/A. Kashlinsky, et al.).