Events - Event View

This is the regular monthly meeting of the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers, held in the Radnorshire Room at the Radnor Community Building.  The meeting is open to DVAA members and the public.  We start with a short business meeting focusing on announcements and upcoming events, followed by a featured presentation.  We gather beginning at 7pm; the program and the livestream begin at 7:30pm.

The meeting will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel beginning at 7:30pm.   

Gary Trapuzzano will present the Observing Report  “Mars and the Moon.”

Jeremy Carlo of Villanova University will present: "Celestial Timekeeping."

 "Nowadays we keep track of time using manmade devices, and our international time standards are based on highly accurate atomic clocks around the world.  But historically, going all the way back to ancient times, the regular motions of the heavens were used to track time.  We'll talk about the fundamentals of celestial mechanics and how the motions of objects in the solar system can be used to track the passage of time.   We'll delve into the details of what a "day" and a "year" are; it's not quite as simple as school science books make it sound!  We'll learn why we have leap days and leap seconds, why we don't have eclipses every month, how gyroscopes work and why the North Star won't always be the North Star and Orion won't always be a winter constellation, and even learn why all this is relevant to historical studies of climate change! "