Atronomy Blog

Allan Sandage Biography

2008-05-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T06:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T05:45:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T05:34:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-09T05:22:00.000-07:00

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?)

2008-03-28T05:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-13T05:49:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-09T06:57:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-29T05:49:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-29T05:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-28T05:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-14T05:28:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-06T05:55:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-01T05:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-25T05:48:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-18T05:47:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-18T05:40:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-10T19:11:00.001-08:00

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

2008-01-08T05:55:00.000-08:00

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.

2.8 APOD

2007-12-21T05:26:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-14T05:44:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-14T05:34:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-07T05:42:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-30T05:37:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-16T05:42:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-09T05:49:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-09T05:39:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-26T05:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-12T12:00:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-12T05:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-12T05:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-05T05:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-28T05:37:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-21T05:55:00.000-07:00

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)

2007-09-21T05:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-07T05:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-31T05:59:00.001-07:00

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.