2.8 APOD

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0712/Mountains_spitzer_f.jpg
For picture go there ^^
This picture (W5) is close to constellation Casseopeia, picture taken in the infrared part of the spectrum by the most important infrared telescope: the Spitzer Space Telescope. The 'Mountain' was created by solar winds and hot radiation from a nearby star. The 'Mountains of Creation' are 10 times as large as the Pillars of Creation, captured by the Hubble Telescope. But the Pillars of Creation are prettier. Much, much prettier. W5 is a part of a 'complex region' called the Heart and Soul Nebula. The Heart and Soul Nebluae are basically just big red blobs. Not as pretty. This picture is 70 ly long.

Observation at SCC

Day: December 7th
Place: SCC
Time: 7-9
Temperature: 60 ish degrees
We spent the earlier part of the night identifying constellations. The Summer Triangle was still vaguely in the sky to the West, but it fell as the night went on. We identified Polaris in order to get our bearings. We found Pisces by the circlet and momentarily confused Beetlejuice with Mars until Percy pointed out our mistake, which is what got us into the conversation of Orion's first magnitude stars. When Hannah came we re-identified the constellations we were familiar with, this time without help from Percy. One of the first things we looked at was the comet in Perseus. It was basically a big fuzz spot. I don't know that it could even be called white per say, it was just... fuzz. Once we had identified it in the binoculars, it was easy to see it without. We also looked at Subaru and the... hypeides? Spelling? The sister clusters. Due to Matt's request we looked at Uranus in the telescope, which was basically a blue dot and not overly exciting. Once Mars had risen over the treeline, we looked at it in the telescope and saw dark spots of continent sized formations on the planet. We also looked at M31 in Andromeda. The moon wasn't up.

2.7 Mars Rover runs to Hibernate

With the northern winter phase of Mars fast approaching, scientists are trying to get the Mars Rover Spirit to a place called "home plate" in order to wait out the winter. Unfortunately for the Mars Rover, the soft sand of Mars keeps slowing the journey and scientists are uncertain as to whether Rover will make it in time. Once there, the Rover will tilt towards the sun in the hopes of increasing the efficiency of its energy absorbing solar panels. The picture shows a map of the Rover's journeys since landing in July of 2004.

2.6 APOD SOHO Solar Cycle

This is a picture of the sun's solar cycle (which takes 11 years) taken by the SOHO satellite currently orbiting the sun. A solar cycle is created by the sun's magnetic field. When the cycle is at the solar maximum, sunspots, coronal mass ejections, and flare phenomenons are at their highest whereas when the cycle is at the solar minimum, these occurances are less frequent. We are currently at a solar minimum (the last one was in 1996) and the solar maximum was in 2001. It's neat how you can actually see all the activity in the picture of 2001 whereas the pictures of 1996 and 2007 actually look dormant.

2.5 APOD Iridescent Cloud Over Colorado

Looking like a three tiered rainbow, an iridescent cloud sits over Boulder, Colorado. This is a pretty rare event, but an iridescent cloud can show a whole spectrum of colors simultaneously. These clouds show colors when the clouds are relatively thin and the droplet sizes are about the same size. The light diffracts throw them, much like a rainbow. However, this only works if the sun is in exactly the right spot and mostly hidden by thick clouds. Sometimes iridescent clouds will start to form but then the cloud gets too thick or too far away from the sun. You can see why this would only occur rarely. One of the links (clouds) brings you to a page with a poem about clouds by William Wordsworth. Yay clouds.

2.4 APOD

For picture go to : http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0711/cr_auger_big.jpg
For centuries astronomers have wondered where cosmic rays (energetic particles that begin in space and impinge on Earth's atmosphere and now the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina may have an answer. Auger suggests that 12 out of 15 ultra highhigh energy cosmic rays come from the direction of nearby active galactic nuclei (a compact region at the center of an active galaxy). These galactic centers emit large amounts of light and are probably feuled by a blackhole. The Auger Observatory believes that the highest energy rays are protons because any higher energy raywould be deflected by the Milky Way Galaxy's magnetic field and we wouldn't be able to figure out which direction the ray was coming from. The APOD picutre is of a ray striking Earth's atmosphere, with an active galaxy (Centaurus A) in the background as the galaxy from which the ray might have come.

2.3 APOD

This is a movie of an X-Class Flare Region (X-Class fares are the biggest ones) on the sun, and of a flare erupting there over a period of four hours. These violent flares can affect satellites and astronauts. This particular flare reached over ten million degrees Celsius and was probably caused by violently unstable magnetic reconnection events above the Sun (magnetic field lines interact and splice into one another, according to Wikipedia). The movie was capture by the TRACE (Transistion Region and Coronal Explorer) satellite, which is orbiting the Sun the study the connection between magnetic lines and plasma events on the Sun.

2.2 APOD Three Nebulae in a Narrow Band

These are three Nebula found in Sagittarius, two of them the Nebula we have to remember for the constellation quiz - M8 (the Lagoon Nebula) and M20 (the Trifid). The Nebula in the upper right hand corner is NGC 6559 (who didn't make Messier's list. Poor baby.). This is a false color photo, with a color scheme apparently made common by the HUbble Telescope. The color scheme works for land based telescopes because it allows the astronomer to ignore urban light pollution. M8 is 30 light years LONG and about 5000 light years away. It's actually very pretty with the false color palete, a pretty blue, and is a star forming region.

APOD 2.1

This is the APOD of October 20, 2007. It was taken in Fort Davis, Texas, on an almost moonless night. This is obviously a picture of the Milky Way, but taken so as to seem like it's just an extension of the dirt road. The picture is composited and one of the links actually leads to a photo gallery of composited pictures that deal with astronomical events (it's actually pretty cool. One of the pictures looks like a guy is about to walk into a nebula or exploding star or something). The APOD goes on to talk abotu the origins of the name Milky Way and the name galaxy (which apparently derives from the Greek word for milk. Cool beans.) One link shows alternate names for the M.W. like Silver Road, Bird's Path, and so on. The appearance of the Milky Way itself is due to innumerable stars and dark galactic clouds. Yay Galileo.

Biography - James Gregory

James Gregory (more correctly spelled Gregorie) was born in Drumoak, Scotland in 1638. In his early years, he was taught by his mother, Janet Anderson, whose brother, Alexander Anderson, was a student of François Viète, a French mathematician and astronomer. After his father’s death, Gregorie was sent by his older brother David to Aberdeen in order to attend grammar school. Gregorie later attended Marischal College.
Gregorie moved to London in 1662, where he befriended Robert Moray of the Royal Society and published Optica Promota. In Optica Promota, Gregorie proves a reflective sine law that, unbeknownst to him due to his rural location when he worked on the book, Descartes had already proven (known as Descartes law of sines). In fact, though Gregorie puts forth many ideas about lunar, solar, and stellar parallax and other astronomical ideas and applications, many of these had already been promoted by other current astronomers. Gregorie simply wasn’t aware of the current knowledge at the time the book was written. He did, however, describe a method for the use of Venus’s transit in order to measure the distance of the Earth to the Sun (or the Astronomical Unit). Edmund Halley, the English astronomer, would later promote Gregorie’s method and it would become the basis of the first effective measurement of the Astronomical Unit.
Gregorie’s most important contribution to astronomy in the Optica Promota was his design for a new telescope, located in the Epilogue. Gregorie believed that a telescope that utilized both mirrors and lenses, rather than one or the other, would correct several defects in the current design of telescopes. In his new design, the “catadioptrical” telescope, a parabolic mirror reflects parallel incident rays to a primary focus. The light is then reflected back through a hole in the center of the first mirror by a small concave elliptical mirror to a secondary focus, and from there through a plano-convex lens to the eye. Gregorie used the available books in Aberdeen on optics and astronomy to create this telescope, including Kepler’s Paralipomena. Gregorie was unable to actually create the telescope, but in 1663 Robert Hooke created a six foot telescope of Gregorie’s design. However, Isaac Newton, with whom Gregorie would later correspond, objected that Gregorie dialed to polish the conical mirrors correctly and in about 1668 Newton reveals an improved design to Gregorie’s original telescope. Gregorie actually wanted to build an observatory at St. Andrews, where he taught, and teach the “new” science, but the students had rebelled against the faculty and administration would not permit Gregorie to do so.
Some of Gregorie’s most important additions to scientific knowledge actually came in the form of mathematics. Gregorie began to embrace his mathematics side in Italy, where he moved in late 1663, to study under Evangelista Torricelli’s pupil Stefano degli Angeli. Gregorie published Vera circuli et hyperbolae quadratura in 1667 and Geometrioe pars universalis in 1668. Gregorie determined that quadrature of the circle (making a square with a straight edge and a compass that had the same area as a circle) was impossible. Additionally, he proposed that the areas of a circle and hyperbola could be obtained in the form of infinite convergent series. He was also one of the first modern mathematicians to think about transcendental numbers, such as pi and e. Furthermore, his work provided the basis for the Taylor series, a way to make sine, cosine, and logarithmic functions be able to be described in polynomial terms.
James Gregorie died in 1675 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was showing his students Jupiter’s satellites through a telescope when a stroke blinded him. He died a few days later.

Works Cited

"James Gregory (Astronomer and Mathematician)." Wikipedia. 09 Oct. 2007 .

"James Gregory." Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 6th vol. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981.

Group Observation at Suncoast Community Church

From 7:40-9:00 I observed with the group and Mr. Percy at the church. It took a while to get the telescope set up, but when it was, we first observed Jupiter and its four moons. The first three moons appear closer to Jupiter, orbiting it in almost even rings around the moon (or at least that's what it looked like), but the fourth moon, Callipto, was much farther away from the planet. When we put a higher intensity eyepiece into the telescope, we could more easily percieve the two dark bands on the planet. With my binoculars (7x35 mag, or 580 at 1000 ft), I could see a few moons outside Jupiter but with difficulty - if I hadn't know they were there, I would have assumed that the moons were just fuzzy dots because I couldn't stay still. Mr. Percy used a green laser to point out Constellations and we could easily see: Scorpius, the teapot/Sagittarius, Cepheus, Andromeda, the Square Pegasus, Hercules, the constellations Altair, Cygnus, Lyra and more importantly their stars for the Summer Triangle. The constellations are much bigger than I thought, and you can actually see all of them in a field as opposed to at my house, where there are too many trees to see clearly.
Through the telescope we also observed Epsilon lyrae, Albiero (beta Cygnie, where we looked for the different colors of the stars - the fainter one was blue, the brighter one more yellow-white). Through my binoculars I could also see M31, a galaxy and a satellite galaxy next to it. I didn't realize you could see so much more with the binoculars, but I saw nebulas and galaxies with them.

It was pretty rockin' awesome.

APOD 1.7

This picture is of the shells around galaxy NGC 474, near the constellation Pisces. Astronomers aren't certain if the shells are tidal tails or density waves. Tidal tails happen when a galaxy enters another galaxy's gravity and one gets slung around the other, causing the gravity to rip some stars and planets out of a galaxy's gravity and giving it a tail like appearance. Density waves, on the other hand, look more like shells around the galaxy and happen when one galaxy merges or attacks or crashes into or whatever another galaxy. Either way, the shells are probably caused by galaxy on galaxy contact. Whatever the reason, this picture supports the idea that large galaxies have halos created by interactions with smaller galaxies. This suggests the origins of the halo around our own Milky Way galaxy.

1.6 APOD

The APOD of October 2, 2007 shows an analemma that features a total solar eclipse. An analemma is when a photographer goes outside everyday at exactly the same time and takes a picture of the sun (this is the result - a figure 8 pattern). This particular picture features a solar eclipse and as such is called a Tutulemma (because of the Turkish word for eclipse). One of the links is "great planning" which takes you to a picture on wikipedia of a train that crashed out of the two story station.
... Wow. Astronomers have a weird sense of humor.
The sun's apaprent shift is caused by the rotation of the Earth and by the tilt of Earth's axis. The solar eclipse in this picture is from March 29 of 2006. The base image is from that date, in Turkey.
(I wanna go to a water park in Turkey to watch a total solar eclipse...)

1.5 APOD

This APOD of September 22, 2007
is actually a drawn prediction of what the world will look like in about 250 million years. They're dubbing the continent "Pangea Ultima" (remember from history class that the original continent that all of our current continents broke from is called Pangea). This is kind of confusing, but apparently the continents once formed a super continent called Rodinia about 1100 million years ago, the continents split up, and then 600 million years ago came back together and formed Pangea, and then split up into our present day continents. The reason for the shift in continents is plate tectonics - the earth is made of up plates that constantly shift and move and bump into each other and cause volcanoes, mountain ridges, earthquakes, and other geographic things.
Pangea was actually different from the projection of Pangea Ultima, because Pangea had Australia and Antarctica actually as a part of the continent, whereas in Pangea Ultima they're still seperate from everything else. This drawing was created by the PALEAOMAP Project. Notice the new mountain range and the disappearance of our dear Atlantic Ocean.

Moon Observation 9/25-9/27

I live on Bee Ridge Rd and every morning to get to school I drive West to get to the highway. On 9/25 (the day before full moon), the moon sat low in the sky and was massive, probably three or four times its normal size and a very orangish-greenish-yellow (it reminded me of the color of sulfur). It was so large that you could very clearly see dark spots on the center, where I assume craters and mountains and whatnot must be. The next day, 9/26 (the day of the full moon) I observed the moon during the same time (give or take a few minutes) driving the same route. This time the moon (though very bright) was its normal white color, but about a forth of the size of the previous day and up higher in the sky (about twice as high as before).
Then, on 9/27, I observed the moon from my friend's doorstep in Lake Sarasota at about 8:15. It was large and sulfur in color once more. I came back out to her doorstep at about 9:00 and the moon was higher in the sky, smaller, and white once more.

What the hey???

APOD #4, week of 9/17-9/21

APOD of September 20, 2007
This picture, taken in Cygnus (Swan, one of Ptolomy's 48 constellations)/The Northern Cross, shows the bright star (a white supergiant) Deneb (Arabic for "Tail) of the summer triangle in a bright blue color, surrounded by a red nebula. This nebula is actually along the plane of the Milky Way itself, and one of the links is a panorama of the Milky Way. You can see the North American Nebula and Pelican Nebula in the top left, close to each other. The North American actually looks like America, but the Pelican is kind of a stretch (you can see the beak but the body is just kind of a blob. Yes, that's a scientific word for you: blob.) One of the links has the same picture, but with other stars and nebulae labeled. Deneb is actually a part of two asterisms - the Summer Triangle that we're familiar with, and also the Northern Cross (a link shows a picture of the area, when you scroll your mouse over it shows the Northern Cross).

APOD #3, for the week of 9/10-9/14 (I was absent, sorry it's so late)

APOD for September 12, 2007
This picture is of a triple rainbow, reflected by a calm lake and therefore producing an image of six rainbows. While it's more common to see a double rainbow, even that is rare and the triple rainbow is hard to explain. The normal rainbow is created by internal reflection and refraction by the air around the rain drops as they fall, and the second rainbow is caused by multiple internal reflections. According to one of the links, the third rainbow (a reflection bow), which appears at such a different angle than the other two which seem almost parrallel, is caused by the light reflecting from the lake and then being refracted and reflected by the rain. The picture was taken in Sandessjøen, Norway after heavy rain storms.

Iridium Flare Observation 9/6/07

Observation place: Near Bee Ridge and Cattleman (my house)
Time: About 8:55 at night
Observation: The flare originally looked like just a faint star, hard to see, until you realized that it was moving. It got steadily brighter, lasting about 15 seconds or so, and passed just to the right of the North star, going South to North. During its peak it was easily the brightest thing in the northern sky, much brighter than Jupiter when I turned southward and looked at the star in order to compare. The flare happened almost due north, and just above the tree line.

APOD entry 1.2

The APOD picture I chose was of the Victoria crater (September 4th), a potentially traversable crater on the Martian surface. The picture was taken after dangerous dust storms (dangerous because dust blocks sunlight from the Opportunity rover's solar battery panels) and the trip into the Victoria crater has been much anticipated since July. It's lucky that the picture happened at all seeing as the rovers have lived three years past their anticipated three month expiration date, and the rovers have been searching for a way into Victoria crater for months. Victoria crater is the largest crater the rovers have found, and NASA hopes the rover will be able to go inside of the crater itself. NASA plans to keep the rover in this area in case the dust storms resurge (it will be in more view of the sun here) and in case we can find a way in. NASA hopes that the crater's walls will hold evidence about what the Martian surface was like before the impact that created the crater happened.

APOD of August 30

I looked at the picture from August 30th, of the lunar eclipse from August 28th. The picture interested me justbecause it's beautiful and because I couldn't see the eclipse nearly as clearly when I watched it. The many links provide information about where the eclipse was visible from, what times it would be visible, what a lunar eclipse was, a page of different pictures of the same eclipse from around the world (some of which included a turquoise color on the moon, which I hadn't seen before), a few pictures from previous APODs describing the sunset and the silluohette around the Earth, and even an... odd future story of the year 2105? One link even led to a story of an Astronomer who hoped that the Eclipse would allow her to watch Helion meteors impact the moon due to the lighting (I guess Helion meteors are extremely difficult to observe due to the fact that they come from the direction of the sun). It didn't mention if the Astronomer Cooke had succeeded in viewing the impacts or not.