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.