08/07/2020 – Ephemeris – An online astronomy meeting and star party tonight

This is Ephemeris for Friday, August 7th. Today the Sun will be up for 14 hours and 23 minutes, setting at 8:59, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:37. The Moon, half way from full to last quarter, will rise at 11:16 this evening.

The Grand Traverse Astronomical Society will host a virtual meeting tonight at 9 pm followed by a virtual star party at 10 pm. It is via the Zoom app a link can be found on the society’s website gtastro.org. It will be hosted by Dr. Jerry Dobek, astronomy professor at Northwestern Michigan College. During a virtual star party the images are produced real time or near real time using a telescope mounted CCD camera. That is if it’s clear. Images of dimmer objects like star clusters or nebulae, what we call DSOs or deep sky objects may take exposures of several seconds or minutes to build up an image. But have the advantage of being in color. We are quite color blind at low light levels.

The event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.