Starry Night - Saturday
Walla Walla Community College Main Parking Lot
500 N Tausick Way, Walla Walla, WA 99362, USA
Washington
46.08060269999999
-118.27709700000003
Description
Join Whitman astronomy professor and director of the Clise Planetarium Andrea Dobson for an evening of meteor showers as we watch the Perseid meteor shower at the Braden Ranch.
One of the brightest meteor showers of the year, it occurs when the Earth in its orbit intersects tiny bits of rock about the size of sand grains left behind along the orbit of a comet. In this case the comet is named Swift-Tuttle.
Because Earth is running into a cloud of particles, the meteors all seem to come from roughly the same location in the sky, a point called the radiant. The radiant for this shower is in the constellation Perseus, which, in the middle of the night in August, is high in the northeast for observers in North America.
Dobson is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Astronomy, director of the Clise Planetarium, and a 1982 Whitman aluma. She earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy at New Mexico State University in 1987 amd joined the Whitman faculty in 1989. Since 2012 she has been leading the renovation of a 30-inch telescope housed in an observatory on one of the Whitman farms.
Bus
transportation between the Walla Walla Community College main parking
lot and the Braden Ranch observatory will be provided. Be sure to bring a
chair and a headlamp. After a presentation from Andrea, we will spend a
few hours observing the meteor showers!
This listing has no upcoming events
Start:
2016-08-13T19:30:00-07:00
End:
2016-08-13T23:55:00-07:00
Category
Other
Tickets
Children under 18 + bus fee
10.0
USD
34
Adult + bus fee
20.0
USD
34