7 May 2026 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the
UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
Although parking is free for this event at the UNC-Asheville Reuter Center, you must register your vehicle with a “Visitor 5pm – 6am” permit type at this link. Once registration is complete, visitors will not need to print or display a permit; the system utilizes camera-based License Plate Recognition technology. All vehicles must park front-end in, so that the license plate is visible.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
Mercury: A Speedy, Elusive, and Mysterious Planet
– presented by
Bernard Arghiere,
a Past Astronomy Club of Asheville President and a Lifelong Sky Observer
Of all the “naked-eye” planets, Mercury is surely the one that most naked-eyes have not seen! It never orbits far from our Sun in the sky, making it challenging to observe. You always need to plan ahead to wittingly locate it in our twilight skies.
This presentation will discuss locating Mercury in our skies, its rare but wonderful transits across our Sun’s disk, and its unique planetary statistics. Furthermore, Mr. Arghiere will describe the special connection of Uranus and Neptune to solving a problem with Mercury’s orbit, as well as summarize the 3 exploratory missions to Mercury.