Come join us as a visitor or a member at FWAS' monthly General Meeting, where we gather to meet new people in the hobby, experience a presentation by an expert on an astronomy-related topic, learn about upcoming celestial events and get to know a constellation, hear about the club's public outreach efforts, and discuss current club business.  For members who wish to join online, an invitation with a link to the interactive Zoom call will be sent out via email one week prior to the meeting.

Non-members wishing to attend online via YouTube, please follow this link:
https://www.youtube.com/@FortWorthAstronomicalSociety/streams

For our main presentation at the September 15th monthly gathering of the Fort Worth Astronomical Society, we present Dr. Shane Byrne, Co-Investigator with the HiRISE and CaSSIS cameras onboard two missions currently orbiting Mars.

Today’s Martian ice is highly active with frosty flows moving through gullies, avalanches tumbling from the polar ice cliffs, and strange behavior from sublimating dry ice.  Stacked ice layers in the polar caps record climate cycles driven by shifts in Mars's orbit, stretching back millions of years.  The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera is the most powerful camera to be sent to another planet, with a remarkable resolution of up to 1 foot per pixel.  The CaSSIS is a high resolution (15 feet/pixel) color stereo camera onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, used for the building of accurate elevation models of the planet's surface.  In his presentation, Exploring an Icy Mars with High Resolution Imaging, Dr. Byrne will discuss the over twenty years of high-resolution imaging from orbit that has transformed what we know about ice on Mars and what it tells us about the planet's climate.