Category: Meeting

Title:

Amateur Observations of Jupiter’s Clouds, Hazes, and Composition

Summary:

Jupiter displays multiple colorful cloud types, with regional variations that change over time. For more than a century amateurs have observed and tracked these features, first visually, and now with sophisticated color cameras. These observations have provided the basis for understanding the circulation and wind patterns of the atmosphere, along with periodic regional and global upheavals. Amateurs now peer into the near-infrared (NIR), including the 889 nm methane band, and near ultraviolet (NUV) revealing details of upper-level hazes. Use of other methane filters can probe different cloud levels below the hazes. My recent work has added another twist: the ability to detect not just cloud height, but ammonia concentration. The question arises: How can amateurs contribute objective measurements of Jupiter’s clouds and their changes? By applying calibration to existing and new filter bands that are readily available from optical companies, amateurs can make quantitative measures of color, cloud height, and ammonia distribution. This talk provides background on Jupiter’s cloud layers, then describes these low-cost, accessible observing techniques, some of the results they’ve generated, and how they relate to and support professional planetary research.

Bio

Steven Hill is an amateur astronomer living in Denver where he enjoys the 300 sunny days and clear nights per year we get here in Colorado. Light pollution in the city of Denver led him to focus on bright objects like the planets. He recently retired from his day job at NOAA working on space weather observations. Steve has a Ph.D. in astrophysics, which helps him in all his space-related pursuits. With this background he likes to push the boundaries of what can be accomplished with his backyard telescope equipment. These factors all came together, leading him to investigate ammonia on Jupiter.

Location

The meeting will be at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 803 Third Avenue, Longmont, CO 80501. 

The next Longmont Astronomical Society’s club meeting will be on Thursday, April 24, 2025, starting at 7:00 pm. No speaker is scheduled so we’ll have open forum member presentations. LAS members are invited to give a 5 to 10 minute presentation on an astronomy related topic. 

Tell everyone about:

• An observing or imaging project that you are doing
• Good things and bad things about some equipment you have purchased
• Talk about an image you have taken – what is in it, equipment used, how you processed it
• Interesting techniques you have learned about
• Just about anything astronomy related that interests you will probably interest others as well

You may present in-person or via Zoom. Not mandatory but it would be helpful if you email Vern that you are interested in presenting and the topic before the meeting.

The meeting will be at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 803 Third Avenue, Longmont, CO 80501. If you cannot attend the in-person meeting, it will be available on Zoom. Video of the meeting will be available on the LAS member portal website https://members.longmontastro.org on Friday after the presentation.

Dr. Marc Buie, SWRI in Boulder will give a presentation about the Lucy Mission. The Lucy mission is a NASA space probe launched on October 16, 2021, designed to explore a group of asteroids known as the Trojan asteroids, which share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun. Over its planned 12-year mission, Lucy will conduct flybys of several asteroids to gather data about the early solar system and the formation of planets.

Marc William Buie is an American astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets who works at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the Space Science Department.[ Formerly he worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and was the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission Scientist for the B612 Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid impact events.

The meeting will be at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 803 Third Avenue, Longmont, CO 80501. If you cannot attend the in-person meeting, it will be available on Zoom. Marc will present in person. Video of the meeting will be available on the LAS member portal website https://members.longmontastro.org a couple days after the presentation

The next Longmont Astronomical Society’s club meeting will be on Thursday, February 20, 2025, starting at 7:00 pm.

Longtime LAS member, Mike Hotka, will give a presentation about a recent Astronomical League Observing Program he just completed.

Mike will talk about some of the activities he performed while completing the Astronomy Before The Telescope Observing Program. More information about what is behind this talk can be found on the League’s website at: https://www.astroleague.org/astronomy-before-the-telescope-observing-certificate/

Details of the Zoom connection for this meeting will be forthcoming.

Hope to see everyone there.