NGC 6992 in bicolor by LAS member Brian Kimball

Transcription

1 NGC 6992 in bicolor by LAS member Brian Kimball Comet Hartley by LAS member Gary Garzone (all publication rights reserved on club photos) Longmont Astronomy Society Newsletter October 2010

2 From the President: The next LAS meeting is this Thursday, October 21 st at the IHop Resturaunt, 2040 Ken Pratt Blvd, Longmont, CO. Please join us for dinner around 6, the regular meeting will begin about 7pm. This is an open forum meeting -- in other words no scheduled speaker. If you would like to make a short (10-15 minute) presentation, you are welcome to do so. There will be an update on the all sky camera project (it is finally now in place atop a NOAA tower on Niwot Ridge). Also I ll talk a bit about the Astronomical League conference at Bryce Canyon in late June and also about a proposal for a master imager program. Mike Fellows will present the monthly treasurer report. We ll also discuss the beginning astronomy class which will begin in late February. Last month's speaker: Last month's speaker: some additional information: Bill Tschumy's website ( ) contains the software program ( ) to draw the clusters, nebulae, etc in Galactic Coordinates. There is a handy app at that will do conversions for you, as well as a brief article in Wikipedia that explains it in another way in case you didn't get it the first time Bill had a nicer batch of pictures, so you may want to go through both. If you want to buy that Binocular Astronomy book hustle up! It's out of print and there are 2 new copies on Amazon for 25 bucks, then it goes up to bucks for the next ones. Would have been a pretty good investment! In the sky this month: Meteor Showers There were 5 fireball meteors spotted in the skies of Colorado last week. Data and paths at Showers: Orionids night of October 21 with a Full Moon. Leonids night of November 17 Moon sets around 4 a.m. Planets Mercury: behind the Sun Venus: inferior conjunction with the Sun on October 29, passing into the morning sky. Mars: very low in the southwest at sunset, lost in the peaks. Jupiter: still the champ of the evening sky, high in the south at sunset. Saturn: In conjunction with the Sun on October 1, it's moving to the morning sky now. Visible in a couple of weeks low on the eastern horizon. Comets: September 20, 2010 The brightest comet of the year starts to put on a good show in late September before

3 reaching its peak in October. (closest approach on October 20) When Comet 103P/Hartley glows at its brightest, it should be visible with naked eyes under a dark sky at fifth magnitude. Binoculars will do the job. Australian astronomer Malcolm Hartley discovered this comet in March It orbits the Sun once every 6.5 years, traveling from just outside the orbit of Jupiter to nearly Earth's distance from the Sun. This is the comet's fourth return to the inner solar system since it was discovered, and its best one yet. Comet 103P/Hartley should peak at 5th magnitude when it passes closest to Earth in October. A 5th-magnitude star is bright enough to see with naked eyes if you're out of the city, but a comet's light spreads out, making it harder to see. Still, you'll have a good chance to see it without optical aid from a dark-sky site. Binoculars will show the comet nicely, and a telescope will let you see details. You can start looking for the comet in late September when it lies in the constellation Cassiopeia and remains visible all night. It passes near the star Lambda (λ) Cassiopeiae the night of September 29. Search for Comet 103P/Hartley as it hangs high in the evening sky during October. The brightest comet of 2010 may be visible with naked eyes under a dark sky. Astronomy: Roen Kelly [View Larger Image] The comet heads to the southeast during October. On the night of October 8/9, it floats next to the famous Double Cluster in Perseus, a pair of adjacent bright star clusters that will form a beautiful backdrop for the comet. It then passes the bright star Capella in Auriga in mid-october. It comes closest to Earth October 20, about the time it will appear brightest in the sky. Unfortunately, a nearly Full Moon then brightens the sky, making the comet less conspicuous. Comet 103P/Hartley should show two tails emanating from a roughly circular glow, known as the "coma," which masks the comet's nucleus. The nucleus is a giant ball of ice

4 and dust that measures about a mile across. As sunlight hits the nucleus, the ice boils off and carries dust with it. This cloud of gas and dust forms the coma. Sunlight ionizes the ejected gas molecules, causing then to glow with a bluish color. The solar wind carries this ionized gas away from the comet, creating a straight, bluish gas tail. The ejected dust gets pushed away from the Sun more gently, so it forms a curving tail. The dust particles simply reflect sunlight, so the dust tail has a white to pale-yellow color. Although October marks the peak for Comet 103P/Hartley, the comet will continue to make news in November. NASA's EPOXI mission will fly past the comet and return stunning images of its nucleus. EPOXI comes closest to the comet November 4, and NASA should release fresh images soon thereafter. Interesting Stars/Galaxies Astronomy Magazine's Targets for for October 14-21, 2010 Double star Eta Cassiopeiae Galaxy pair M32 and NGC 205 Spiral galaxy NGC 7814 Astronomy Magazine's video on Autumn targets for large telescopes is at c=a&id=8581&utm_source=silverpopmailing&utm_medium= &utm_campaign=a SY_NEWS_Sub_101015_final&utm_content= Now, to find a large telescope. Maybe at a star party? Finally getting dark early, and the ISS is coming over starting the 24 th in the evening, pretty much every night. Look up the times at and watch your tax dollars at work. Club Calendar: Next meeting: November 18 at the IHOP. Food and fellowship at 6:30 or so, meeting at 7 o'clock. Fiske Planetarium: "Worlds in Collisions" by Dr. Phil Armitage has been moved from Oct. 14th & 15th to Oct. 28th and 29th CO Skies: Life after the space shuttle Start Time: Thursday, October 21, 2010, 7:30pm Many Faces of Hubble - Explore the construction and use of the Hubble Space Telescope in this show about people behind the scenes, and various careers in space. Start Time: Friday, October 22, 2010, 7:30pm Stars and Lasers - Explore the night sky as we learn about stars and planets. Learn what constellations are visible and the stories behind these characters in the stars. Then enjoy a

5 short laser show choreographed to popular music. Start Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 3:15pm The Dark Side of the Universe w/ Dr Erica Ellingson - With this multimedia presentation, Prof. Ellingson tells the story of how scientists have come to believe that most of the matter in the universe is in an unknown, invisible form, and that the universe is accelerating its expansion due to a mysterious "dark" energy. Start Time: Thursday / Friday, November 4, 2010, 7:30pm Internet Resources: From the October Scientific American: 3,767 supernovae have been discovered since more than twice as many as seen before that date. This was contained in an article about pair-instability type of supernovae that I ran across. Since a galaxy the size of the Milky Way has somewhere around 1/century, we're missing a few. I know I put this in here before, but you can get a map of every satellite in space at jtrack/3d/jtrack3d.html Click on the Jtrack3D on the left menu. You can rotate the Earth and tilt it (just try getting it back again...) Click on any satellite and you get the label. Take a look at the ring of synchronous satellites at 22,000 miles up all the cable tv, etc. Game: try to find the little dot that's the ISS! The Hubble... is the link for Lockheed Martin solar satellites. Some nice pictures of sunspots, etc with some information. Links to a lot more solar satellites. You can spend awhile looking at all of these. Make sure you click on that movie on the right and watch an active region going at it. On October 7, the new Moon transited the Sun in full view of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Watch the movie, see the pictures (nice eruption going on) at Current Space Missions: NASA's Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft is hurtling toward Comet Hartley 2 for a breathtaking 435-mile flyby on Nov. 4th. Mission scientists say all systems are go for a close encounter with one of the smallest yet most active comets they've seen. Stay tuned for the video and pictures in the next newsletter. A near Earth size Planet: A team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of a planet with 3 times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone." The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system outside our own. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.

6 The new planet, designated Gliese 581g, has a mass 3 to 4 times that of Earth and orbits its star in just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere. Gliese 581, located 20 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has two previously detected planets that lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone. The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet's surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the "terminator"). Movie of the Saturn aurorae at A new movie and images showing Saturn's shimmering aurora over a 2-day period are helping scientists understand what drives some of the solar system's most impressive light shows. The movie and images are part of a new study that, for the first time, extracts auroral information from the entire catalog of Saturn images taken by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This month s field trip: The editor recently returned from a family wedding in Big Bear, CA and took advantage of the occasion to visit the Big Bear Solar Observatory. The observatory was built by the

7 California Institute of Technology in The location of Big Bear was optimum for its clarity of sky. The Lake surface is about 6,750 feet above sea level. Its position out on the peninsula provides a cooling effect on the atmosphere surrounding the building and eliminates ground heat radiation waves that normally would cause heat wave aberrations. Management of the observatory was transferred to the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Funding comes from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the US Air Force and other agencies. The observatory is located on a earth berm. The observatory has been operating with a 65 cm vacuum reflector telescope, a 25 cm vacuum refractor, and a 20 cm full disc telescope. The 65 and 25 cm scopes study sunspots while the 20 cm full disc scope tracks the whole round of the sun from sun up to sun set. By late spring 2007 it was planned that the 65 cm, 25 cm and 20 cm scopes be replaced by a new 1.6 meter, open frame, clear aperture telescope. The 20 cm telescope will be replaced by a similar telescope in an additional small dome. The old dome has been replaced with a larger, more spherical, ventilated dome to contain the new 1.6 meter telescope from DFM Engineering.[ The new telescope saw first light in Our cousin is an elementary teacher in Big Bear and takes her class to the observatory every year on a field trip. She reported that the scientists are very friendly and really like to see the kids, but have a lot of trouble talking at the elementary level... You can see some of the images / videos at Upcoming Space Missions:

8 The recently approved MAVEN mission to Mars run by LASP in Boulder has been working on their website. Mission is a go for a late 2013 launch to the red planet, and you can follow the progress at Currently, what's there is an animation of the mission science, a list of the instrumentation and probe design, and a list of the 'to do's '. We'll have to keep an eye on that, and get somebody in a couple of years to go through the mission for a meeting. LASP was also awarded around 6 million for instruments to be carried aboard the SolarProbe Plus a mission to the Sun to study the solar wind at close range (inside the orbit of Mercury). The date on that one is a little vague, but you can go to and click on 'resources' to get some info on the mission design. Someone has created a YouTube video of the Sun in soft X-rays that's pretty cool and different. Off to the right in that page are links to more videos, also cool... This month s Wacky Idea: Project FeederWatch starts in mid-november, but you can join at any time. Get a poster of bird identification, some feeding information, and data entry materials at It's $15 well spent just picture sitting there at your window, snowed in, participating in science! (Actually, it's more like wading thru the snow, the wind blowing into your sleeve and up into your armpit, while you fill the feeders...) Anyway, it's fun and something to do during the winter! Who wants to stand in the snow and look at stars, anyway... Gary Garzone catches the GRS transiting

9 A color blindness test, using NGC 6888 pictures by Brian Kimball. (all publication rights reserved on club photos)