Allan Sandage Biography

Allan Rex Sandage was born on June 18, 1926 in Iowa City, Iowa to a business professor father and a Mormon mother. His maternal grandfather was the president of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints school, giving Sandage a religious nature that he retained his entire life despite his involvement with science. Sandage became a devoted stargazer and observer at an early age, keeping a four year record of sunspots throughout his high school years. He studied physics and philosophy at Miami University before enrolling in the U.S. Navy to serve as an electronics specialist during World War II. Later, he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1948 and a Ph. D from the California Institute of Technology in 1953.
As a student, Sandage worked at the Palomar Observatory under Edwin Hubble and Walter Baade. He began to become very interested in the origins of the universe, the evolution of stars, and the age of the universe. He became very talented in observational astronomy and was considered the preeminent observation cosmologist after Hubble’s unexpected death by heart attack in 1953. Sandage decided to continue Hubble’s work, despite the daunting tasks of collecting data and eliminating erroneous data. He used the normal color-magnitude diagram to determine the age of a star, with luminosity plotted against temperature. In 1958 he published his estimation of the Hubble Constant, which was about 75 kilometers/second/megaparsec. This is about the accepted value today and estimated the universe to be far older than Hubble had thought, about 7 to 13 billion years. However, after more research, Sandage published a new constant years later, of about 55 kilometers/second/megaparsec. This put the universe at an age of about 14 to 20 billion years old.
Sandage’s research into the Hubble constant, and his spectral studies of globular clusters, made him believe that the universe was not only expanding but also contracting in a cycle with a period of about 80 billion years. Sandage is credited for discovering quasars with his colleague Thomas Matthews in 1964, quasi-stellar radio sources believed to be created by black holes on the edge of the Universe. He is also credited for the discovery of jets erupted from the core of the M-82 galaxy. Furthermore, the standard candles known as Hubble-Sandage variables are named partially after him and partially after his mentor. Notable awards include the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the National Medal of Science.
Sandage wrote not only on Astronomy, but also on Religion. He fervently believed that science and religion did not have to exist separate from each other, and advocated the possibility of scientists believing in both.

Yeah that’s about all I got. There wasn’t much on this guy, sorry Percy…
Works Cited
"Allan Rex Sandage." Wikipedia. 23 May 2008 .
"Encyclopedia of World Biography." BookRags. 23 May 2008 .

4.7 APOD

This is a picture of two seperate ice halos. Ice halos are created by sunlight reflecing through ice crystals in the thin clouds high in the sky. It's kind of like rainbows, but with ice crystals rather than water droplets. The first halo, surrounding the sun, comes directly from the light of the sun and is created by hexagonal shaped ice crystals, but the halo surrounding the zenith of the sky comes from light reflecting through crystals with vertical faces. The picture was taken pointing straight up and encompasses about 180 degrees. It was taken by a Frenchman close to the Château de Chambord. How to look for sun halos: the halos are most easily seen when you shade the actual glare of the sun itself and instead look around the area surrounding the sun. The most common halos have a 22 degree radius, as the sun halo in our picture has.

4.6 APOD

This is a picture of the crescent moon (Helaal in Arabic. Normal full moon is Qmr) partly lit up by sunlight (Sun in Arabic is Shams). The rest of the moon is visible due to earthshine (Earth in Arabic is Aard), sunlight reflected off Earth onto the moon. You can see Mercury in the lower lefthand corner, unusual because the planet is usually hiding in the light of the sun and therefore very difficult to see. This arrangement will be visible for the next few days. The moon and planet are seperated by about 2 degrees. This APOD isn't very exciting, which is why I threw in all the Arabic. Except I can't remember how to say 'stars'. Sorry Percy, I'll look it up.

Observation Sunday Night 4/28 with Percy

Place: Pine View service road
Time: 8 30 to 10 30
One of the coolest things we observed all night was Saturn. It looked fake almost through the telescope, it was that cool. Two moons were very easily discernible, and while I think I saw two others (one very close to the top of the planet, and another very close to the bottom of the planet) it could have just been a trick of my eyes from staring into the thing for so long. We did try to record our observations on a little printout of the planet. We also looked at the Beehive Cluster, both through the telescope and through the binoculars. I almost liked looking at it through the binoculars better, because you can actually get the entire cluster in your field of view, whereas you have to scroll east or west for like ten minutes to see everything in the telescope because it's just that huge. We also took a look at the sombrero galaxy, as well as a galaxy we don't need to know for the Constellation quizzes (I think it was like M87?). We did some basic constellation identification as well. It was very interesting to watch Orion set, and Mars confused some of us at first because it looked like there was another first magnitude star right next to Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Other than that we pretty much just looked at assorted first magnitude stars, though we did do some other galaxy identification through the binoculars.

APOD 4.5

http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/FinalA.mov


Click that to see a movie of all the flights leaving and entering and flying over the USA over the period of a few days in March of 2005. The movie was put together by a complex algorithm by a computer. It's extremely interesting to watch, especially as you watch the clock in the lower right-hand corner and see how the number of flights diminishes by over ten thousand as the hour of the day goes into the wee hours, suggesting that the flights really are scheduled so as to be semi convenient to travelers. Lance pointed out to me that they try to schedule the international flights from like England to leave at the same time, and you can see how that could be true as all of a sudden towards the middle of the movie a bunch of flights seem to leave simultaneously from the area of Europe. It's cool how the major cities are these incredibly bright spots that never really diminish despite the hour of the day. Very cool. Gooo Aaron Koblin.

APOD 4.4

This is a picture of Cygnus without the stars, except for Deneb which is still in the picture towards the top,(hold your mouse over the picture to make the stars appear), taken with a special camera lens to show the hydrogen atoms. In fact, all the red is hydrogen gas. You can also see the Pelican, North America, and Butterfly nebulas in this picture. Nebulas, nebulae, whatever. That's about it. It's not very exciting but it's still a really pretty picture.

APOD 4.3

This is a picture of M63, otherwise known as the Sunflower Galaxy for its yellow center and spiral arms. If it doesn't ring a bell, don't feel bad because it's not something we were ever required to learn for the constellation quizzes. M63 is found in Canes Venatici, the "loyal" constellation according to APOD. It's called an "island universe" but the link provided doesn't really explain what that is so I have no idea. This galaxy, however, is actually about the size of our own Milky Way galaxy (100,000 light years. Have you ever noticed how dumb sounding the name of our galaxy is? Who the hell named it?). Astronomers believe that this galaxy has gone through "bursts" of intense star formation, and they think that the extended features result from gravitational interaction between this galaxy and other surrounding galaxies. M63 is a dominant member of the M101 galaxy group.

APOD 4.2

This is a less than traditional picture of Orion. You can see the three stars of Orion's Belt in the upper lefthand corner of the picture (They look blue in this particular photo). If you look to the left of the leftmost star (Altinak)you'll see the Flame Nebula (which looks much cooler in the other picture they have of the Flame Nebula, when you click the link). If you look hard directly below Altinak, you'll see the Horse Head Nebula. If you look reeeallly hard. I personally am not sure that I see it. M42 is also in this picture, to the right and down of the Horsehead. Personally I think it's the least exciting of the nebulae in Orion, but hey that's just me. The really bright star along the bottom of the picture and towards the right side is Rigel. Right near Rigel is the Witch Head Nebula. I have no idea how it got that name because even when you click the link to get the close up it doesn't look like a Witch's Head. However! It does look really cool, kind of wispy and kickbutt. The entire red swirly surrounding the picture is Barnard's Loop. Yaaay Barnard.

Observation Monday March 24th

Place: Venice Beach
Time: It was about 9 30 to 11 or so.
Tools: I didn't come prepared :( I could only observe with my naked eye.
But! The moon was extremely slight, a waning crescent, and Venice beach is far enough from the city lights that the star gazing was extremely good. I didn't actually plan to do this when I went to the beach so I didn't have a star chart or anything, but these were the constellations I recognized from memory (or, as it were, from their first magnitude stars...): Auriga I could find Capella but not the kids. Gemini I could see Castor and Pollux obviously but also the general human-body outline. Seeing Orion was wicked cool because instead of only seeing the seven or however many major stars that I can see from my light polluted home view, I could see many many higher magnitude stars in between the major stars, especially in the area between the belt and the "feet." Sirius and Procyon were easily identifiable as well, as was Taurus. The weird thing was that I thought I saw another redish star in Taurus besides just Aldebaren? I did see the Big Dipper as well as a strange constellation I didn't recognize much lower in the sky on keel with Orion and Taurus that had a shape akin to the little dipper. I'm looking at a star chart right now and I still can't identify what the hell it was. I think then the sky got into the Spring Constellations because after identifying all the Winter Constellations I didn't recognize anything else in the sky...

APOD 4.1 (Isn't that just exciting?)

I chose this picture, the Cat's Eye Nebula, in light of the test we just took and what we've been talking about for the past few weeks. I think we actually looked at a picture of it briefly in class. This is a planetary nebula, one of our favorite stages of a dying sun-like star. The Cat's Eye is three thousand light years from Earth and spans over half a light year. Astronomers believe that the distinct layers of the Cat's Eye were created by the shrugging off of several layers, rather than the singular envelope we're sort of used to (when we envision planetary nebulae, we usually think of rings and all). So that's all well and good, but we really don't know what creates the distinct pattern closer to the star that's actually dying, in the middle of the picture. This is a "remix" of traditional Hubble pictures to give a better sense of the light and dark regions of the nebula. Astronomers believe that this will be the ultimate stage of our sun, though hopefully our sun's planetary nebula will be even prettier cause well we're the best :)

3.10 APOD pic

Sooo I actually chose this one because a long time ago Percy convinced us that M104 was the M object in Casseopeia and ever since then I always wanted to know what M104 actually was. And now I know! Turns out that usually in pictures of M104 the dusty lanes around the bright region in the center aren't very well defined. In this picture, which is an archived Hubble picture, they did some funky redoing thign to it so that now you can see the dusty lanes even close to the center. Obviously it's a side on picture of the galaxy at the edge of the Virgo Galaxy cluster.

Planetary Nebulae

1. http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/planetary_nebulae.html that's from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. There's like 30 pictures on here, they're pretty chill.
2. http://www.astro.washington.edu/balick/WFPC2/ a guide to Hubble Telescope images of planetary nebula taken by Bruce Balik
3. http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/galindex.html Hubble heritage gallery. There are some good ones, but you have to scroll down for them.
4. http://www.kopernik.org/images/archive/plan-neb.htm kopernik gallery. Scroll to the bottom of the page after the descriptions of what they are, there are a bunch of red links with soem pretty good pictures.
5. http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~icke/html/VincentPN.html

Random observation

Okay, so I was driving home from the Miami regatta last night (or... this morning I guess) and I saw a falling star! It was 12 46 (or 1 46 on the new time), driving east on Bee Ridge road. It started about three fist lengths up (so about 21 degrees) and the meteor "fell" about a fist length. It was an orangish yellow, suprisingly fine and sharp.
It was exciting :D

3.9 APOD Comet over California

Guess what? Comet Holmes is still freaking in the sky! Who knew. It's fading, but apparently visible in the northern skies. On March 4th, it was in the same area as the red emission nebula the California Nebula. The cool thing I found about this picture is that the two objects appear to be about the sameish size, but Comet Holmes is only 25 light minutes away and 20 light seconds in diameter, whereas the California Nebula is about 100 light years long and 1500 light years away. The bright star is Xi Persei. The color of the California Nebula comes from hydrogen atoms recombining with "long lost" electrons that were originally ionized by UV star light.

Simon Newcomb Bio

Simon Newcomb was born in Wallace, Nova Scotia, Canada on March 12, 1835 to Emily Prince and John Newcomb. Though born in Canada, his parents were of New England descent and his father was a traveling school teacher. As such, Simon received little conventional education but learned much from his father. When Simon was sixteen, he became apprenticed to a quack doctor, Dr. Foshay, and after two years of that became aggravated and walked one hundred and twenty miles from Canada to Maine in order to join his father in New England.
Newcomb became a traveling school teacher like his father, and moved near Washington D.C., where he visited the Smithsonian Institution’s library with regularity. He decided to teach himself mathematics primarily through reading Newton’s Principia. Newcomb moved to the Cambridge in 1857, where he was employed as an astronomical computer at the Nautical Almanac Office.
The American Civil War in 1861 caused many teachers with Confederate sympathies to resign from the United States Navy, and as such Newcomb as invited to fill a vacancy at the Naval Observatory. He then began to essentially force the astronomers at the Naval Observatory organize the way they did right ascension and declination measurements of stars. Whereas before the astronomers tended to pick out random stars for random observations, Newcomb made them follow certain stars and keep meticulous observations throughout both the night and the day. While working for the Naval Observatory, Newcomb disproved the prevalent theory that the minor planets were fragments of a larger planet that had exploded or been shattered due to a collision.
Worried about Hansen’s table, in 1871 Newcomb traveled to Paris to obtain a longer list of observations about the position of the moon from the Paris observatory. He succeeded in obtaining observations from as far back as 1672 and left the city before serious rioting occurred. Newcomb used the observational information to deal with the problem of “fluctuation” between where the moon should be and where it was for the rest of his life and later led to investigations on the variations in the rate of rotation of the Earth.
Newcomb developed new tables and theories of motion of the Sun, the moon, and planets through the main use of Encke’s method, but used Hansen’s for Jupiter and Saturn with his apprentice, G.W. Hill. “Newcomb operators” are used to figure out perturbative action of one planet with an elliptical orbit on another. His measurement of the speed of light was used for a long time as the astronomical standard and he computed the mass of Jupiter from observations of Polhymnia, a calculation that has never been greatly improved on. He also reformed the theoretical and computational basis of American Ephemeris.
Newcomb once claimed that man would never be able to fly due to always having to come back down to the ground (gravity), but this was truly the only great failing of his uncanny foresight. He wrote several books on Astronomy and Mathematics, perhaps most importantly Astronomy for Everybody, which was published in 1902. He did write one science fiction novel, His Wisdom the Defender.
Newcomb died in Washington D.C. on July 11, 1909. President Taft attended his funeral in honor of the greatest American astronomer of his time.

Works Cited:
"Simon Newcomb." Wikipedia. 03 Mar. 2008 .
"Simon Newcomb." Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 9th vol. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981.

3.8 APOD

Look, it's our favorite 1995 Hubble Telescope picture of the Eagle Nebula (M16, Serpens) that we studied in class! :D I actually really like this picture, and enjoy the idea of the EGGs in the columns and that's why I chose this picture. And it's just gorgeous. Things like this make people actually interested in Astronomy because they're just amazingly beautiful and almost spiritual.
This is obviously a fake color photo taken of the Pillar of Creation and Fairy, the two features named in the Eagle Nebula.

3.7 APOD

This is a long exposure photo of the March 3rd 2007 lunar eclipse. The photographer left his camera shutter open while on a tripod. The large line that gets slimmer and red in the middle is the moon. The reddish hue is common to lunar eclipses. The other trails are just star trails. APOD put this up in honor of the Lunar Eclipse that we didn't get to see due to clouds. Stupid clouds. The rest of the articles just comment on how lunar eclipses are watched by completely casual sky gazers, and well everyone, and that the next lunar eclipse won't be until December 2010. Suckfest.

Star Formation Links

1. http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0607-first_stars_in_the_universe.htm News article/video about discovering the first stars in our universe.


2. http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/0508-space_tornado.htm News article/video about finding a space tornado that appears to be a part of star formation somehow.

3. http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Bima/StarForm.html NCSA's timeline and explanation of how stars are formed. Good pictures.

4. http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/iau221/ This is actually the best site I've found so far as far as information on how star formation actually happens.

5. http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/auto2/?id=800 Interesting because it's information we haven't really talked too much on, but not a lot of info.

6. http://www.aip.de/groups/starplan/ Weird pictures.

APOD 3.6

This is a picture of the moon's surface, of the features called the Bay of Rainbows and the Sea of Rains. These names, which historically come from the latin words for sea and ocean, are ironic seeing as these formations are created by lunar lava and the landscape of the moon is largely arid and dry. The moon maiden, or Cape Herclides is also shown in this picture. That's essentially it. Just the irony of the naming. Ayup.

APOD 3.5

I found this APOD interesting because we were just talking about this in the last chapter. A new 11 year cycle is beginning on the sun, so this is one of the first sunspots of this cycle apparently. The two dark lines are cooler filaments held up by the sun's magnetic field. We're just not getting out of solar minimum (in 2007), with the last solar maximum being in 2001. This picture of the sun is the same as we've been looking about - darker regions are cooler regions. This picture was taken based on hydrogen. I would say more, but this is all just basically EXACTLY what we studied last chapter. Cool beans. And! I guess there's an annular solar eclipse tomorrow! Which Percy didn't tell us about. All though, since it's basically 'only for penguins' I guess it doesn't really matter much for us :( Well, at least the penguins get to enjoy it. I wonder if they act differently when the sun is freaking out...

APOD 3.4

Ok I don't see the color in this so much but apparently astronomers are very excited about it because they put color on it with infrared and red and violet filters. I mean I see a slight random blue tinge to some of the craters but that's about it. Apparently the blue craters are the newer ones, but it doesn't describe why they're blue. This picture was shot but the Messenger spacecraft. Perseus says that it's because the chemical composition is different in the new craters, which I understand because it's a false color photo, I just don't get why the newer craters would have a different chemical make up than new craters. However apparently astronomers can't figure it out either so whatevs :D

Yeah I picked out this picture not for its relevance to astronomy but because it's really pretty and I want to go there. Let's take a field trip. This picture is of the Pic Du Midi observatory in the French Pyrenees. When you click the link that says Pic du Midi, it takes you to this really cool site where you can basically look around a semi tour thing that shows what the observatory looks like. It's actually pretty kickass, but kinda foggy and hard to see past the observatory deck and everything has like a foot of snow on it. The redish lights are manufactured lights from the La Montigie ski resort and from the urban parts of France and Spain. In the sky you can see Orion, Gemini, and a bright Mars (up at the top, not actually the normal orange color). The domes house amateur telescopes, a telescope used to help with the Apollo lunar landings, and the new sun watching CLIMSO (Christian Latouche IMageur SOlaire). The link they give you to CLIMSO is in French sooo yeah. Don't know much more than that.

3.2 APOD

This picture of Hurricane Ivan on the eve of its power (it was a category 5 hurricane in 2004) was taken by the International Space Station. Ivan destroyed 90% of the houses on Grenada. Ivan's winds were greater than 200kmph which ranked it category 5 on the Simpson-Saffir scale, the common scale for hurricane ferocity. Ivan as a name for a hurricane has now been retired from Atlantic Ocean use by the World Meteorological Organization. Woot woot.

3.1 APOD

This montage was taken by the New Horizons spacecraft (scheduled to meet up with Pluto in 2015), which has been taking pictures of the planets as it heads towards Pluto. The picture of Jupiter was taken in the infrared, and as such the "great red spot" looks like a great white spot. Aside from the Great Red, other swirly circles appear on the planet, other hurricane type storms. If you look closely at Io (which was digitally superimposed on the picture... yay photoshop) you can see the volcanoe Tvashtar (discovered by the Galileo in 2001) erupting a blue plume. Red lava is apparent on the surface of the moon as well.

Biography - Heinrich Olbers

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthaus Olbers was born in Arbergen, Germany on October 11 in 1758. He originally studied to become a doctor but built an observatory on the top floor of his home. Apparently blessed with the need for only four hours of sleep at night, he spent his days practicing medicine and his nights “relaxing” by studying the stars, comets, and asteroids.
Heinrich Olbers discovered a new way of calculating a cometary orbit. There were previous methods, but they were long and tedious and required many observations. Olbers basically figured out a way to expedite the process, by using observations from two different places on Earth. This method accurately predicted a comet with a seventy four year orbit (much like Halley’s comet) and was published under the title Ueber die leichteste und bequemste Methode die Bahn eines Cometen zu berechnen in 1797. Olbers discovered the asteroids Pallas and Vesta and suggested that the asteroid belt was actually the remains of a great planet that had been destroyed (the term ‘asteroid’ did not exist so the rocks were referred to as ‘minor planets’ and ‘planets’). He also discovered five comets (one of which now bears his name).
The Olbers paradox essentially states that if the universe is infinite and static (not expanding or contracting) with a uniform amount of stars populating it. The paradox was considered by earlier astronomers such as Kepler, Halley, and Cheseaux but is commonly attributed to Olbers. The paradox makes several important assumptions that basically define it: First, that brightness does not diminish with distance and so all stars should give off the same light regardless of distance (later found to be incorrect due to the inverse-square law); second, that no matter where you look in the sky your eye will see a star due to their numbers; and finally that give the first two assumptions, every point in the sky should be as bright as a star. So basically, the sky should be as bright during the night as it is during the day. So the paradox itself is the fact that the sky is dark at night. This was important because it meant that one of the assumptions was wrong. Astronomers of the 1950s and 60s decided that the paradox is also explained by the finite age of the galaxies, the finite speed of light, and the expansion of the universe (Olbers’ paradox has been used as evidence for the Big Bang theory). According to astrophysicist Paul Wesson in 1991, the reason for the night’s darkness has more to do with the age of the galaxies than with the expansion of the universe. The implications of Olbers’ paradox have interested astronomers for centuries.
Olbers assisted in the baptism of Napoleon II of France and died on March 2, 1840. Though he had contributed much to astronomy, he considered his greatest contribution to the scientific community to be helping another young astronomer gain renown.

Works Cited:
"Heinrich Olbers." Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981.
"Heinrich Wilhelm MatthäUs Olbers." Wikipedia. 10 Jan. 2008 .
"Science News: Vol. 139, No. 8, P. 125." JSTOR. 23 Feb. 1991. 10 Jan. 2008 .
"Wilhelm Olbers." NNDB. 10 Jan. 2008 .

Observation 1/3/08 - 1/4/08

Place: Cow Pasture at the end of Fruitville road
Temperature: 40 degrees or so
Time: 11 - 1
Weather: Slightly cloudy. Very cloudy at first, then it cleared up, clouds returned at the end
Stars: Sirius, Beetlejuice, Rigel
Constellations: Orion

We went specifically for a meteor shower. I saw 8 meteors. Two were bright - one was shorter and towards the west (I generally focused my sight around Mars and Orion, but this appeared out of the corner of my eye toward the Sarasota lights - a stray meteor?) and one was massive, originating in the Quadrens (spelling?) and shooting across the entire night sky (90 degrees?). Most were very small, not even as bright as a 1st or 2nd magnitude star. Length was shorter than the first digit of my thumb for some. I saw at least one other stray meteor near Orion, moving from east to west rather than North to South.