OCA meeting to talk about how smallest galaxies form, saw the less than interesting movie "The Principle", and still trying to resolve solar scope focusing problems

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,
 First, a couple of announcements.  For those of you in Orange County, the
 OCA General meeting is tomorrow, Friday, and a professor from UCI will be
 talking about:  How do the smallest galaxies form?  It should be great.  See
 some of you there.

 Second, I saw an interesting cosmology documentary at the movie theater
 today titled "The Principle".  I was a little worried about it initially
because the author/producers are advocates of geocentrism, which says the
earth is at

Free moons course at futurelearn and trying to capture plane in front of moon

Well, still not ready to follow up on getting a picture of Lovejoy.  I did make some progress on taking solar hydrogen alpha pictures though.  I found by reading the telescope manual (drats, yes I went back and did it) that there was a few extra millimeters of play in the draw tube assembly.  I retrieved those 3-4 mm, but it still wasn't enough to get

Answer to Quiz and trying to capture a triple transit of Jupiter

Well, there was a big response for last week's quiz.  I guess most of you passed.  Maybe the quiz was too easy.  Should we have included some astrophysics too?  Anyway, my general comment about the responses is that it seems most of you weren't observing the stars late at night, but instead were watching the late night comedians on TV.  Yeah, just keep your day jobs, if you still have one.

My solar observing yesterday was successful for focusing the eyepiece and we could see a sun spot.  Resident Astronomer Peggy then informed me that there were

Free online cosmology course and photo to quiz your own understanding

This is just a quick and perhaps late reminder to check out the triple moon transit tonight, Friday about 8 PM PST onward, on Jupiter.  This does not happen very often and should be great (unless the Santa Ana's really pick up).

Also having just completed the

Lick Observatory and photographing geostationary satellites

Yesterday I removed the ham satellite antenna from the mount and put the hydrogen alpha scope  back on.  I had high hopes of seeing the sun, but life events interfered.  It seems the gardeners wanted to use the parking lot for a staging area for raking and blowing and such.  So, after hours of delay, I decided to wait for night and make another attempt at catching some geostationary satellites.  While waiting I got an email from a long time OC Astronomer.  Bob sent a fantastic web list of photos of old and abandoned astronomical observatories.  Thank you Bob.  See the web page post below.  One of the abandoned sites is