Reservations for the attendance at the TIMPA Dark Site can be made by emailing the TIMPA Director at

TIMPAdirector@tucsonastronomy.org

By Erich Karkoschka

Venus is slowly increasing its visibility at dusk, starting to get visible at 20 degrees altitude. At the summer solstice it passes by Pollux at 5 degrees distance.

Mars is also visible in the evening but setting much later than Venus. The distance between both planets decreases from 25 to 8 degrees during June. On July 12, Venus will pass Mars quite closely.

Jupiter and Saturn rise just before midnight and are transiting during dawn almost 45 degrees high. They remain separated by 20 degrees.

At the end of June, Mercury starts its morning apparition.

Vesta is still an easy binocular object in Leo during the early evening.

On July 10, there is an annular Solar Eclipse visible in eastern Canada moving over the North Pole. The next day, the thin crescent Moon will be visible at dusk just below Venus.

The messages from the TAAAA president have appeared in various forms over the years. They have appeared in the Desert Skies publications, in the TAAA Monthly Bulletin, and now appear in the revamped monthly Desert Skies TAAA Bulletin. For a period of TAAA history, the Notes were send as a stand alone message to members from 2018 to 2021. Those communications with summaries of the work of the TAAA board and important monthly accomplishments by the organization are listed below.

2021 April Notes

2021 March Notes

2021 February Notes

2021 January Notes

2020 December Notes

Just one day after the Earth passed its perihelion, the closest point to the Sun in its orbit,  the American Astronomical Society was having its annual meeting online, the United States Congress was validating the results of the 2020 national election, and Wendee and I were settling in for a civics lesson about the way the United States Government works.  The day did not turn out as we expected.

 Shortly before noon, as we watched our television set a news ticker appeared.  It announced that two buildings in the Library of Congress (LC), the James Madison, and quickly afterwards the Adams and Jefferson buildings, were being evacuated. That news sent an ugly chill through me.   The LC is one of the finest libraries in the entire world. It contains more than 170 million books, of which more than thirty are books I wrote entirely or those for which I penned the foreword.  It also includes all of the more than two hundred  “Star Trails” columns I wrote for Sky and Telescope magazine between 1988 and 2008, and dozens more I wrote for other magazines and journals.  Only the British library, with over 200 million books, is larger.  

This evacuation was quite personal for me.  A few minutes later, when the entire Capitol complex was stormed, it was personal for all of us.  All of us had reactions to this, but in addition to the feelings I had, I felt a major conern for the library.

How many books does it take to make a library? When I was a child in 1963, a teacher told me his answer: “two books.”  To me, a library– any library– is every bit as priceless as a dark sky.  The wisdom of the ages is contained in each library- from the LC to a child’s collection. I have never gone into a library without feeling better when I exited. The idea that this magnificent collection was threatened that day was terrifying.

I have read many books over my lifetime, from The Cat in the Hat to my boxed set of Lord of the the Rings.  One small treasure,  Jene Lyon’s Golden book Our Sun and the Worlds Around It, opened a door to a lifetime of stargazing.    (That gem, by the way, also lives in the LC).  What is more, I have never encountered a really bad book.  When an author places her or his thoughts on paper in a book, that book immortalizes those thoughts.

I hope that Capitol Hill and the Library of Congress are never threatened again.  They belong to we the people, and stand beautifully in Washington, D.C. to govern us, teach us, and encourage us to follow our dreams and reach for the stars.