Johnson County Community College
Press Release

College Information and Publications
913-469-8500
Julie Haas, Associate Vice President, Marketing Communications, ext. 3120
Peggy Graham, Writer, ext. 3425
Tyler Cundith, Sports Information Director, ext. 3122

9/24/09
Story by Peggy Graham

JCCC hosts free night sky viewing

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — The Johnson County Community College science department presents Evening with the Stars at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 24, in the Craig Community Auditorium, room  233 of the General Education Building. The evening also includes a trip to the roof of the Classroom and Laboratory Building, weather permitting, to view the night sky through the 12- and 8-inch telescopes. The event is free and open to the public.

Jay Manifold of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City will speak on Asteroids, Global Catastrophic Risk and How to Save Civilization at 7 p.m.

The vast majority of asteroids never come closer to Earth than Earth's distance from the Sun, but there are at least several thousand that cross Earth's orbit. Asteroid size distribution is such that for every known asteroid of a given size, there are 200 that are around one-tenth that size; therefore there is an enormous and almost entirely undiscovered population of very small asteroids that regularly make close approaches to Earth. A meteoroid the size of a house would create an explosion closely resembling that of a nuclear bomb upon impact. There is evidence for numerous such events in human history, from the end of the last Ice Age to the 1990s. How great is the danger to humanity, and what can we do to mitigate it?

Viewable objects from the Paul Tebbe Observatory on the roof of the CLB include the moon, the ring nebula, the great cluster in Hercules and Jupiter and its moons.

For more information, contact William Koch, wkoch@jccc.edu, at ext. 3725 or Doug Patterson, dpatter@jccc.edu, at ext. 4268.

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