Meetings
Join us this December 14th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
Our topic for this evening will be an overview of astronomy in light-polluted areas using video-assisted observing or for public outreach. There will also be a Christmas Social during the extended meeting break to allow members and guests to mingle over coffee and treats.
The Hamilton Amateur Astronomers 2019 Celestial Events Calendar is ready and it’s a beauty!
It will be available for purchase at this Friday’s meeting. The cost is only $15 or 2 calendars for $25.
Inside there is lots of information on sights to see in the upcoming year and an abundance of beautiful images all created by members of the HAA. From starry landscapes to the rugged surface of the Moon to the nebula and galaxies of deep space, it’s all there!
The calendar makes a beautiful gift and all the proceeds go back into the club to help with activities like the telescope loaner program, public observing programs and our monthly lecture series. So be sure to pick up your copy on Friday as they won’t last long!
Join us this November 9th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
An entertaining and educational ramble through the sky and the past, we will touch on a loose constellation of objects and ideas, from far flung galaxies to the newest earthbound telescopes that study them. In the end, we will tie them all together with a thread that connects them to each other and to the HAA.
This talk is suitable for all ages and all levels of expertise, including beginners.
General Meeting for October 12th 2018.
Our guest speaker will be Paul Delaney. Paul has been a guest of the club several times and his talks are always informative and educational. This time around, Paul will be speaking about variable stars and binary star systems.
Stars have social lives too!
Stellar evolution has generated (almost) all the elements in the universe with the notable exceptions of hydrogen and helium. This process has allowed for planet formation and the existence of life. Yet despite their pivotal place in the grand scheme of the universe, we talk very little about stars let alone their habit of forming in multiple associations and clusters. This talk will focus on the 101 of star formation and reveal the social habits of stars especially in regards binary star systems.
Join us this September 14th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
Since the earliest days of humanity, mankind has been fascinated with the heavens above. For millions of years, the only tool available for our species to view the universe was built into our body – the most complex and incredible optical tool known to man – the human eye. Since the dawn of the telescope 400 years ago, astronomy has been dominated by ever larger optics. Binoculars, refractors, dobsonians, mountaintop observatories and orbiting space telescopes. Yet we often forget there’s an entire universe waiting to be seen at any moment, simply by looking up. Philosophers, scientists, religious leaders and mythologists discovered countless sights in the cosmos and collected thousands of years of scientific knowledge, tradition and mythology with nothing more than the naked eye. From dust sized particles whizzing through the atmosphere to galaxies millions of light years away, join Kevin on a journey across the cosmos undertaken with nothing more than your own two eyes.
Join us this June 8th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
PixInsight, has become a popular image processing software package in recent years, especially for deep-sky astrophotography. Ron Brecher has used PixInsight for all of his deep sky processing since 2009. In this demonstration, Ron will show you how you can reveal the hidden treasures in your deep-sky images with just a few processing steps: crop bad edges, correct gradients, balance the colour, supress the noise, “stretch” the histogram and adjust colour, brightness and contrast. He will also take a few side trips to talk about using masks, deconvolution and sharpening, and managing noise in your images.
Join us this May 11th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
This talk is for people who are just getting into astrophotography. It will cover various equipment setups, camera sensors and settings and the purpose of lights, darks and flats. The talk will also cover how to choose targets that match your capabilities and your equipment. This is not a talk about image processing however I will touch briefly on image stacking. Please note that although astrophotography can be accomplished with video, Digital SLR or CMOS/CCD specialized cameras, this talk will only cover the use of a Digital SLR camera.
Astrophotography is a hobby within hobbies. To succeed, you need to have at least some experience with cameras and lenses, telescopes and mounts, image processing and a reasonable amount of knowledge regarding the night sky. Even if you can satisfy all of these prerequisites, your learning curve will still be very steep. Hopefully, this talk will help you get started on the path to becoming an Astrophotographer.
Join us this April 13th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
For millennia, people (including our First Nations) have used the sky as a clock, calendar, and compass. Astronomy thus became deeply rooted in their spirituality, mythology, and culture. This profusely-illustrated, non-technical presentation will describe the astronomy of civilizations ranging from the Polynesians who navigated the vast Pacific Ocean, the builders of Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and the Chinese, Indian, and Islamic astronomers who preserved and developed astronomy through Europe’s “Dark Ages”, leading to the Copernican Revolution and our present conception of the universe.
Join us this March 9th 2018 at 7:30pm – Admission is free and everyone is welcome!
Following up Jim Wamsley’s introduction to telescopes in Part 1, John Gauvreau now guides you through what a beginner can expect from their very first views through that scope. From planets to galaxies, small scopes and large, find out what you can really see out under the night sky and how best to see it. Bernie Venasse will then speak about note-taking: why should I bother? and what do I record?
Due to a snowfall weather alert for the GTA, tonights event has been cancelled.
February 9th 2018, Hamilton Amateur Astronomers General Meeting
As light pollution impacts the abilities of amateur astronomers to view with their telescopes anything faint in cities or the suburbs, they are forced to drive greater distances to reach dark sites. But what if it was possible to observe faint deep sky objects from the heart of the city or suburb light domes. This presentation will show how astro-video technologies can take you beyond the ordinary eyepiece views in light-polluted skies.