The January 2016 edition of the Huachuca Astronomy Club newsletter, Nightfall, is now available for download. Submissions for next month’s issue can be sent to , our Nightfall editor.

The Huachuca Astronomy Club will hold their January meeting in the Community Room of the Student Union Building, Cochise College Sierra Vista campus on January 15, 2016 at 7 PM.  Our speaker will be Danielle Adams, a PhD student at the University of Arizona. The meeting is FREE and open to the public.

Danielle is a PhD student and 2015-2016 NASA Space Grant fellow at the University of Arizona’s School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the School of Anthropology. Fluent in Arabic, she is translating 1200-year-old Arabic astronomical texts that have never before been accessible to English-speaking scholars. She lived in the Middle East for 3 years and has been an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer for more than 30 years. She has spoken on related topics at international conferences around the world.Continue reading→

The December 2015 edition of the Huachuca Astronomy Club newsletter, Nightfall, is now available for download. Submissions for next month’s issue can be sent to , our Nightfall editor.

The November 2015 edition of the Huachuca Astronomy Club newsletter, Nightfall, is now available for download. Submissions for next month’s issue can be sent to , our Nightfall editor.

The October edition of the Huachuca Astronomy Club newsletter, Nightfall, is now available for download. Submissions for next months issue can be sent to , our Nightfall editor.

“Adventures of a Vatican Astronomer”

The Huachuca Astronomy Club is proud to present a talk by Br. Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory on Friday November 27, 2015 at 7 PM in the community room of the Student Union Building at Cochise College, Sierra Vista campus.

This talk is FREE and open to the public.

(Talk synopsis): No scientist is a Spock-like android; a scientist’s work is as intuitive, and just as full of human foibles, as a painting, a symphony, or a prayer. But most of us don’t have the opportunity (or training) to reflect on the human dimensions of our work. Br. Guy Consolmagno does; he is both a Jesuit brother and a planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory, splitting his time between the meteorite collection in Rome (which he curates) and the Vatican telescope in Arizona. Thanks to his Vatican connections, his work has sent him around the world several times to dozens of countries and every continent (including a meteorite hunting expedition to Antarctica). In this talk he will share some of those adventures, and reflect on the larger meaning of our common experience as scientists… not only what we do, but why we do it.

Br. Guy Consolmagno has been an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory since 1993. He is President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation and curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Castel Gandolfo, one of the largest in the world. His research explores the connections between meteorites and asteroids, and the origin and evolution of small bodies in the solar system. He has coauthored five astronomy books including “Turn Left at Orion” which has become one of the most recommended books for beginners currently in print. He was honored by the IAU for his contributions to the study of meteorites and asteroids with the naming of asteroid 4597 Consolmagno in 2000.

We will be celebrating International Astronomy day at Kartchner Caverns on Saturday, October 17 beginning at 12 PM. Continue reading→

We are pleased to announce a talk by famed comet hunter and author David Levy at the October meeting of the Huachuca Astronomy Club. Our October meeting will be held in the Cochise College library (Library Commons) on the Sierra Vista Campus on Friday, October 30, 2015 at 7PM. The meeting is FREE and open to the public.

Dr. David Levy is the discoverer (or co-discoverer) of 22 comets and 53 asteroids and is the author of 34 books. He was catapulted to international fame with the discovery of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 (D/1993 F2), the comet that broke apart and collided with Jupiter in July 1994, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. Among his many books are The Quest for Comets, a biography of Pluto-discoverer Clyde Tombaugh in 2006, and his tribute to Gene Shoemaker in Shoemaker by Levy. He has provided periodic articles for Sky and Telescope magazine as well as Parade Magazine, Sky News and, Astronomy Magazine. The asteroid 3673 Levy was named in his honor. David was awarded the C.A. Chant Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada in 1980 and was recipient of the 1990 G. Bruce Blair Medal. In 1993 he won the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In 2007, Levy received the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Edgar Wilson Award for the discovery of comets

David’s talk is entitled Sixty years of observing:  The observing records go public.

We will treat David and Wendee to dinner at Outback at 5PM before the meeting. Members that would like to join us for dinner should RSVP to Ted Forte by email:

HAC member Ted Forte has been selected as an OSIRIS-REx Ambassador.  The mission of this ambassador program is to provide communities with knowledgeable volunteers to provide mission updates and information to the public about the asteroid sample return mission that is being managed from right here in Tucson.  Ted is already a Solar System Ambassador, a volunteer program administered by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA. The OSIRIS-REx Ambassador program is managed out of the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona.    OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program; it will travel to a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu and bring a small sample back to Earth for study. The mission is scheduled for launch in late 2016. The spacecraft should reach its asteroid target in 2018 and return a sample to Earth in 2023.

The OSIRIS-REx Science Processing and Operations Center is at the University of Arizona.  Overall mission management is being provided by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.  The spacecraft is being built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, CO.

Ted can be reached at and is available to schedule talks at your school, civic organization, or youth group.