Halifax Centre's monthly meeting is Saturday, March 6, 2021 at 1 PM Atlantic (12 PM Eastern). Our agenda includes Paul Gray’s monthly photo montage, Paul Heath's latest poem in Food for the Soul, Dave Chapman's What’s Up in the March Skies? and Judy Black’s News from the Board. plus two special guests.
Did you manage to find all the targets? We'll go over everything you need to know to apply for your pin and observing certificate! Who doesn't love a pin and certificate?
Do you want to share the program with your friends, or go over targets at another time? Easy peasy. We'll talk about how to redo the program using the recordings of all our sessions.
It's Apollo day! Finally, we get the chance to find both the first and last Apollo landing sites. Bring your questions about the Moon landings! We encourage you to share any annular eclipse photos you may have gotten from this morning as well.
Next week there will be a partial solar eclipse! In some places it'll even be an annular eclipse. We'll be spending this session talking about eclipses. How come they don't happen every new Moon? How come only some places can see them? Why are Earth's solar eclipses so special? And finally, how can we observe the eclipse next week?
Today's targets will be more morning observations, and include the Apollo 16 landing site! Apollo 16 was the second Apollo mission to land in the highlands (all the others landed in the seas), and discovered some really cool stuff about mountain formation on the Moon. In honour of this mission, we'll talk about lunar geology.
We have some niche topics today, including how to use math and your own photos of the Moon to measure the depth of craters. We'll also talk about lunar libration and how to observe some unique objects on the edge of the Moon by looking at the right time!
We have a whopping 19 targets to cover this session, so we will spend lots of time focusing on how to find them! These include some optional lunar mission targets, like Luna 2 and Apollo 15, the Apollo mission with the first use of the LRV (so astronauts could do donuts on the Moon, instead of in abandoned parking lots).