Friday, March 28, 2008

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 :)

Friday, March 14, 2008

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.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

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

Sunday, March 9, 2008

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

Friday, March 7, 2008

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.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

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.