The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image (see description on the right, below)

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image
(10,000 galaxies in an area 1% of the apparent size of the moon -- see description on the right, below)

Sunday, August 12, 2012

2012 August


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter, August 2012

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 6
General Calendar p. 7
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 7
    Observing p. 8
Useful Links p. 9
About the Club p. 10

Club News & Calendar.

Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:
16-Aug-12
100-Year Low Earth Debris Population Model
Alan Jenkin (& Marlon Sorge)
Aerospace
A1/2143
20-Sep-12
Star Trackers
Art Okawauchi
Aerospace
A3/1607A/B
18-Oct-12
High/Wide Dynamic Range CMOS Imagers
Blake Jacquot (and Hung Ngo)
Aerospace
A1/1029A/B
15-Nov-12
Upper Atmospheric Disturbances Using RAIDS and Ground-Based Measurements
Rebecca Bishop & Andrew Christensen
Aerospace
A1/1029A/B
19-Dec-12
Beyond Next Generation Access To Space
Scott Martinelli and Jay Penn
Aerospace
A1/1029A/B


AEA Astronomy Club meetings are on 3rd Thursdays at 11:45am.  For 2012, April-May we meet in A1/1026; June-July & Oct.-Dec. in A1/1029A/B; Aug. in A1/2143 and Sept. in A3/1607A/B.

News:  

A generous benefactor has just donated a new Meade LightBridge 16-inch (0.4m) truss Dobsonian telescope to the club!  We’ve got aperture!  F/4.5, fl 1.8m, limiting mag. 15.5.  $2,000 retail.  Combined with our soon-to-arrive astronomical video camera, it should yield an effective visual aperture of over 1.2m (or >0.75m for the 10-inch)! 

Specs & video (showing a 12-inch version): http://www.telescopes.com/telescopes/dobsonian-telescopes/meadelightbridgedeluxe16inchtrusstubedobsoniantelescope.cfm
One review of the Meade LightBridge 16-Inch Truss - Tube Dobsonian Telescope – Deluxe [at the above website – other reviews have additional excellent suggestions.  See also http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=2693]:

“Surprisingly the tube assembly is a bit lighter, though more bulky, than my 10 inch LX200. Recommend for the experienced amateur in order to find things, though the FOV is so large, it's not hard to star hop. For pure scientific power the LX series ACF is far superior, but for sheer joyful visual astronomy with basically zero set up, you can't go wrong with nearly half meter aperture! Get a 2" meade 5000 series super or ultra wide (26 to 34mm ideal) [eyepiece --] the view is worth every cent. The primary fan is a critical feature, thermal soak is an issue with any large primary. The fan brings the mirror to thermal equilibrium quickly, and it's neat to watch before your eyes the thermal induced astigmatism just go away in about 15 min.”

Astronomy Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month
(from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)

Video(s)

 Nocturnal: Scenes from the Southern Night http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120806.html
Have you ever seen the night sky change?  The above award winning video shows several of the possible changes in dramatic fashion with a time lapse video. Visible are sunset-illuminated clouds moving, stars of vivid colors rising, the long tail of a Comet Lovejoy rising, bright satellites crossing, a meteor exploding, a distant lightning storm approaching, skyscapes including the Magellanic Clouds rotating, and a fisheye sky rotating while the foreground becomes illuminated by moonlight. Frequently featuring an artistic human sculpture in the foreground and the southern sky in the background, the video closes with a time lapse clip of a total lunar eclipse. If you can identify any more of the sky events depicted -- or any of the landscapes shown -- please illuminate them with a comment.

Lightning Captured at 7,207 Images per Second http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120723.html

Simulation: A Disk Galaxy Forms http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120717.html


Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA released an image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which was taken during the descent of the Mars Science Laboratory with the Curiosity rover and shows the deployed parachute and the spacecraft as it prepares to land.  The image was taken while MRO was 211 miles (340 kilometers) away from the parachuting rover. Curiosity and its rocket-propelled backpack, contained within the conical-shaped back shell, had yet to be deployed. At the time, Curiosity was about two miles (three kilometers) above the Martian surface.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

About two hours after landing on Mars and beaming back its first image, NASA's Curiosity rover transmitted a higher-resolution image of its new Martian home, Gale Crater. Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., received the image, taken by one of the vehicle's lower-fidelity, black-and-white Hazard Avoidance Cameras - or Hazcams. Other cameras aboard Curiosity, with color capability and much higher resolution, are expected to be sent back to Earth over the next several days.

"In the image, we are looking to the northwest. What you see on the horizon is the rim of Gale Crater. In the foreground, you can see a gravel field. The question is, where does this gravel come from? It is the first of what will be many scientific questions to come from our new home on Mars."

Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 a.m. EDT, Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles (about five kilometers) tall inside Gale Crater, 96 miles (nearly 155 kilometers) in diameter. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region has ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life.

For more information on the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .


Ash and Lightning Above an Icelandic Volcano
Image Credit & Copyright: Sigurður Stefnisson
Explanation: Why did the picturesque 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland create so much ash? Although the large ash plume was not unparalleled in its abundance, its location was particularly noticeable because it drifted across such well-populated areas. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland began erupting on 2010 March 20, with a second eruption starting under the center of a small glacier on 2010 April 14. Neither eruption was unusually powerful. The second eruption, however, melted a large amount of glacial ice which then cooled and fragmented lava into gritty glass particles that were carried up with the rising volcanic plume. Pictured above during the second eruption, lightning bolts illuminate ash pouring out of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.


Orion Nebula: The Hubble View
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (STScI/ESA) et al.
Explanation: Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula. Also known as M42, the nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars are born partly because it is the nearest large star-forming region, but also because the nebula's energetic stars have blown away obscuring gas and dust clouds that would otherwise block our view - providing an intimate look at a range of ongoing stages of starbirth and evolution. This detailed image of the Orion Nebula is the sharpest ever, constructed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the European Southern Observatory's La Silla 2.2 meter telescope. The mosaic contains a billion pixels at full resolution and reveals about 3,000 stars.



A Hole in Mars
Image Credit: NASA, JPL, U. Arizona
Explanation: What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars' Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars. The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on the image right. Analysis of this and follow-up images revealed the opening to be about 35 meters across, while the interior shadow angle indicates that the underlying cavern is roughly 20 meters deep. Why there is a circular crater surrounding this hole remains a topic of speculation, as is the full extent of the underlying cavern. Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life. These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.

Astronomy News:
(from e! Science News Astronomy & Space)

Fingering the culprit that polluted the Solar System

Published: Thursday, August 2, 2012 - 14:11 in Astronomy & Space

For decades it has been thought that a shock wave from a supernova explosion triggered the formation of our Solar System. According to this theory, the shock wave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of dust and gas, and the newly polluted cloud collapsed to form the Sun and its surrounding planets. New work from Carnegie's Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides the first fully three-dimensional (3-D) models for how this process could have happened. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

 Traces of the supernova's pollution can be found in meteorites in the form of short-lived radioactive isotopes, or SLRIs. SLRIs -- versions of elements with the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons -- found in primitive meteorites decay on time scales of millions of years and turn into different, so-called daughter, elements. A million years may sound like a long time, but it is actually considered short when compared to other radioactive isotopes studied by geochemists and cosmochemists, which have half-lives measured in billions of years.

 When scientists find the daughter elements distributed in telltale patterns in primitive meteorites, this means that the parent SLRIs had to be created just before the meteorites themselves were formed. This presents a timing problem, as the SLRIs must be formed in a supernova, injected into the presolar cloud, and trapped inside the meteoritic precursors, all in less than a million years.

 The telltale patterns prove that the relevant daughter elements were not the ones that were injected. This is because the abundances of these daughters in different mineral phases in the meteorite are correlated with the abundances of a stable isotope of the parent element. Different elements have different chemical behaviors during the formation of these first solids, and the fact that the daughter elements correlate with the parent elements means that those daughters had to be derived from the decay of unstable parent elements after those solids were crystallized.

 One of these SLRIs, iron-60, is only created in significant amounts by nuclear reactions in massive stars. The iron-60 must have come from a supernova, or from a giant star called an AGB star. Boss and Keiser's previous modeling showed that it was likely that a supernova triggered our Solar System's formation, as AGB star shocks are too thick to inject the iron-60 into the cloud. Supernova shocks are hundreds of times thinner, leading to more efficient injection.

 Now Boss and Keiser have extended those models to 3-D, so they can see the shock wave striking the gas cloud, compressing it and forming a parabolic shock front that envelopes the cloud, creating finger-like indentations in the cloud's surface. The fingers inject the SLRI pollution from the supernova. Less than 0.1 million years later, the cloud collapses and forms the core of the protostar that became the Sun and its surrounding planets. The 3-D models show that only one or two fingers are likely to have caused the SLRI pollution found in primitive meteorites.

 "The evidence leads us to believe that a supernova was indeed the culprit," said Boss. However, more detective work needs to be done: Boss and Keiser still need to find the combination of cloud and shock wave parameters that will line up perfectly with observations of exploding supernovae.

Source: Carnegie Institution



General Calendar:

Colloquia, Lectures, Seminars, Meetings, Open Houses & Tours:

Colloquia:  Carnegie (Tues. 4pm), UCLA, Caltech (Wed. 4pm), IPAC (Wed. 12:15pm) & other Pasadena (daily 12-4pm):  http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/seminars/ 

Carnegie astronomy lectures – only 4 per year in the Spring www.obs.carnegiescience.edu.    Visit www.huntington.org for directions.  For more information about the Carnegie Observatories or this lecture series, please contact Reed Haynie.

3 Aug
SBAS Monthly General Meeting at El Camino College planetarium. 7:30 PM
Topic: “Dark Energy and Dark Matter” Dr. Michael Harrison:.  http://www.sbastro.net/.  

13 Aug
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

16 Aug
AEA Astronomy Club       100-Year Low Earth Debris Population Model
Alan Jenkin (& Marlon Sorge)
Aerospace
A1/2143

August 16 & 17 The von Kármán Lecture Series:

The Voyager Mission to the Outer Planets and Interstellar Space

The Voyager mission legacy cannot be understated. The twin spacecraft gave us remarkable views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, unlike anything we had seen before, and paved the way for further exploration; the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft were direct descendants of the Voyager probes. Approaching their thirty-fifth anniversary, the Voyager twins continue to send us data from the farthest reaches of our solar system, at once enforcing and rewriting theories about this previously unexplored region. As they travel ever further, escaping all but our Sun’s constant but waning gravitational tug, the mission planners look forward to the next 10 – 15 years to hopefully witness the first spacecraft enter true, interstellar space.
Speaker:
 Dr. Alan Cummings
Member of the Professional Staff, Senior Scientist, Caltech

Locations:
 Thursday, Aug 16, 2012, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Aug 17, 2012, 7pm
The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College
1570 East Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions
Webcast:
 For the webcast on Thursday at 7 p.m. PST, click here Video Icon
If you don't have RealPlayer, you can download the free RealPlayer 8 Basic.


Observing:
The following data are from the 2012 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2012 Skygazer’s Almanac & monthly Sky at a Glance.

A weekly 5 minute video about what’s up in the night sky:  www.skyandtelescope.com/skyweek.

Sun, Moon & Planets for August:


Moon: Aug 1 full, Aug 9 last quarter, Aug 17 new, Aug 23 1st quarter, Aug 30 full                           

Planets:  Mercury is visible Aug. 10 to 31. Venus and Jupiter are visible in the pre-dawn sky.  Mars and Saturn are evening planets. 
Other Events:

6/7 Aug  Southern Iota Aquarid Meteor Shower Peak (6-7/hr)

11 Aug
SBAS Star Party (weather permitting): RPV at Ridgecrest Middle School 28915 North Bay Rd.

11-12 Aug The Perseid meteor shower peaks after midnight.

13 Aug Daytime occultation of Venus by the moon.  In L.A., begins about 1:40pm, ends about 2:48pm.

13/14 Aug Northern Delta Aquarid Meteor Shower Peak (10/hr)

14-22 Aug Mercury is more than 10 deg above the eastern horizon a half hour before sunrise.

18 Aug
LAAS Dark Sky Night : Lockwood Valley (Steve Kufeld Astronomical Site; LAAS members and their guests only)
18 Aug
SBAS out-of-town observing – contact Greg Benecke http://www.sbastro.net/.  

18/19 Kappa Cygnid Meteor Shower Peak (6/hr)

25 Aug
Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

25/26 Aug Northern Iota Aquarid Meteor Shower Peak (5-10/hr)

Internet Links:
Link(s) of the Month

A weekly 5 minute video about what’s up in the night sky:  www.skyandtelescope.com/skyweek.

General
Regional (esp. Southern California)
Mt. Wilson Institute (www.mtwilson.edu/), including status for visits & roads



About the Club

Club Websites:  Internal (Aerospace): https://aeropedia.aero.org/aeropedia/index.php/Astronomy_Club  It is updated to reflect this newsletter, in addition to a listing of past club mtg. presentations, astronomy news, photos & events from prior newsletters, club equipment, membership & constitution.  We have linked some presentation materials from past mtgs.  Our club newsletters are also being posted to an external blog, “An Astronomical View” http://astronomicalview.blogspot.com/. 
 
Membership.  For information, current dues & application, contact Jim Johansen, or see the club website where a form is also available.  Benefits will include use of club telescope(s) & library/software, discounts on Sky & Telescope magazine and Observer’s Handbook, field trips, great programs, having a say in club activities, acquisitions & elections, etc.

Committee Suggestions & Volunteers.  Feel free to contact:  Paul Rousseau, Program Committee Chairman (& club VP), TBD, Activities Committee Chairman (& club Secretary), or Jim Johansen, Resource Committee Chairman (over equipment & library, and club Treasurer).

Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club President

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