AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter September
2012
Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 3
Astronomy News p. 7
General Calendar p. 9
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 9
Observing p. 12
Useful Links p. 13
About the Club p. 13
Club News & Calendar.
Calendar
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 3
Astronomy News p. 7
General Calendar p. 9
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 9
Observing p. 12
Useful Links p. 13
About the Club p. 13
Club News & Calendar.
Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
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:
The
Mallincam Extreme astronomical video eyepiece camera has arrived and is ready
for use. I believe Jason Fields has
assembled and had first light with the new 16-inch Dobsonian, and we are
anxious to hear his report (I believe he’s on travel now).
From Jim
Edwards:
Hey Mark...
Well, I'm gone but hopefully not (fully) forgotten! ;-)
On this sizzlingly hot day I decided that I needed to break out the Coronado again and see what Big Sol is up to, causing all this trouble. As you can see from the (tuned) image, he's very active today! I've also included a couple of shots of the equipment setup for the uninitiated. Please feel free to share any/all/none of this with the club as you see fit.
Well, I'm gone but hopefully not (fully) forgotten! ;-)
On this sizzlingly hot day I decided that I needed to break out the Coronado again and see what Big Sol is up to, causing all this trouble. As you can see from the (tuned) image, he's very active today! I've also included a couple of shots of the equipment setup for the uninitiated. Please feel free to share any/all/none of this with the club as you see fit.
Btw, I am loving the motorized mini-equatorial mount that I got thru Orion. Its just like the one that I had borrowed (for several years) from a friend and which you've seen in the past. It works very well and is very affordable. You should consider getting one of these for the club to go with the solar scope.
Best to you all there, pass on my regards.
Jim
From Paul
Rousseau:
I joined
Alan and his family at the Griffith Observatory star party on Saturday night. I
brought my new camera and Alan brought his 8-inch Dobsonian telescope. Before
sunset, there was some excitement due to a helicopter rescue of someone at
Griffith Park. The exciting items in the sky that we enjoyed were the Moon and
Saturn. In the first photo, you can see the Moon above the observatory. In the
second photo, if you look carefully, you can see Mars, Saturn and Spica. You
can find a few more photos that I captured yesterday in this Flickr set:
Astronomy
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month
(from Astronomy Picture of
the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html) Video(s)
A Flight Through the Universe: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120813.html
Mars in the
DNA: The Molecule that Defines You: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120821.html
Spiral Galaxy NGC 4038 in Collision
Image Credit: Data Collection: Hubble Legacy Archive; Processing: Danny Lee Russell
Explanation: This galaxy is having a bad
millennium. In fact, the past 100 million years haven't been so good, and
probably the next billion or so will be quite tumultuous. Visible on the upper
left, NGC 4038 used to be a normal spiral galaxy, minding its own business,
until NGC 4039, toward its right, crashed into it. The evolving wreckage, known
famously as the Antennae, is pictured above. As gravity restructures each galaxy, clouds of gas slam into each other,
bright blue knots of stars form, massive stars form and explode, and brown filaments of dust are strewn about. Eventually the two galaxies will converge into one larger spiral galaxy. Such collisions are not unusual, and even our own Milky Way Galaxy has undergone several in the past and is predicted to collide with our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years. The frames that compose this image were taken by the orbiting Hubble
Space Telescope by professional astronomers to better understand galaxy collisions. These frames -- and many other
deep space images from Hubble -- have since been made public, allowing an interested amateur to download and process them into this visually stunning
composite. Image Credit: Data Collection: Hubble Legacy Archive; Processing: Danny Lee Russell
Astronomy News:
(from AIAA
Daily Launch & NASA JPL News)
WISE
Reveals New Type Of Galaxy, More Supermassive Black Holes.
The CBS Evening
News (8/29, story 11, 0:25, Pelley) reported, "NASA scientists today
showed off their latest discovery. It's a type of galaxy they've never seen
before. They call it a 'hot DOG.' It pumps out as much light as 100 trillion
suns and there are thousands of these galaxies. They're very far away, about
ten billion light years, which means they formed when the universe was in its
infancy."
Reuters (8/30, Klotz) notes
the new hot DOGs, also called hot, dust-obscured galaxies, objects were found
using the WISE telescope and could represent a missing stage in galaxy
evolution. Scientists are unsure whether the early universe was special or hot
DOGs can form today. WISE project scientist Peter Eisenhardt of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory said, "There is either just a weird set of
circumstances that rarely comes up, or a common set of circumstances that comes
up for only a very short period of time." Meanwhile, the article also
notes WISE has found millions of supermassive black holes during its two years
of observations in space.
According to the Wired (8/30, Mann)
"Wired Science" blog, astronomer Daniel Stern said during the press
conference announcing the results, "This is a jackpot of black holes, two
to three times more than have been found by any other survey."
SPACE (8/30, Moskowitz)
reports that although WISE is no longer making any observations,
"scientists anticipate many more discoveries are still to come from its
observations." Universe Today (8/30, Atkinson) also
covered the story.
NASA's WISE Survey
Uncovers Millions of Black Holes
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-265&cid=release_2012-265
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies.
Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These powerful galaxies, which burn brightly with infrared light, are nicknamed hot DOGs.
"WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We've found an asteroid dancing ahead of Earth in its orbit, the coldest star-like orbs known and now, supermassive black holes and galaxies hiding behind cloaks of dust."
WISE scanned the whole sky twice in infrared light, completing its survey in early 2011. Like night-vision goggles probing the dark, the telescope captured millions of images of the sky. All the data from the mission have been released publicly, allowing astronomers to dig in and make new discoveries.
The latest findings are helping astronomers better understand how galaxies and the behemoth black holes at their centers grow and evolve together. For example, the giant black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, has 4 million times the mass of our sun and has gone through periodic feeding frenzies where material falls towards the black hole, heats up and irradiates its surroundings. Bigger central black holes, up to a billion times the mass of our sun, may even shut down star formation in galaxies.
In one study, astronomers used WISE to identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive black holes across the full sky, stretching back to distances more than 10 billion light-years away. About two-thirds of these objects never had been detected before because dust blocks their visible light. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light.
"We've got the black holes cornered," said Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the WISE black hole study and project scientist for another NASA black-hole mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). "WISE is finding them across the full sky, while NuSTAR is giving us an entirely new look at their high-energy X-ray light and learning what makes them tick."
In two other WISE papers, researchers report finding what are among the brightest galaxies known, one of the main goals of the mission. So far, they have identified about 1,000 candidates.
These extreme objects can pour out more than 100 trillion times as much light as our sun. They are so dusty, however, that they appear only in the longest wavelengths of infrared light captured by WISE. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope followed up on the discoveries in more detail and helped show that, in addition to hosting supermassive black holes feverishly snacking on gas and dust, these DOGs are busy churning out new stars.
"These dusty, cataclysmically forming galaxies are so rare WISE had to scan the entire sky to find them," said Peter Eisenhardt, lead author of the paper on the first of these bright, dusty galaxies, and project scientist for WISE at JPL. "We are also seeing evidence that these record setters may have formed their black holes before the bulk of their stars. The 'eggs' may have come before the 'chickens.'"
More than 100 of these objects, located about 10 billion light-years away, have been confirmed using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the Gemini Observatory in Chile, Palomar's 200-inch Hale telescope near San Diego, and the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory near Tucson, Ariz.
The WISE observations, combined with data at even longer infrared wavelengths from Caltech's Submillimeter Observatory atop Mauna Kea, revealed that these extreme galaxies are more than twice as hot as other infrared-bright galaxies. One theory is their dust is being heated by an extremely powerful burst of activity from the supermassive black hole.
"We may be seeing a new, rare phase in the evolution of galaxies," said Jingwen Wu of JPL, lead author of the study on the submillimeter observations. All three papers are being published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The three technical journal articles, including PDFs, can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0811, http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5517 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5518 .
JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing and archiving take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-265&cid=release_2012-265
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies.
Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These powerful galaxies, which burn brightly with infrared light, are nicknamed hot DOGs.
"WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We've found an asteroid dancing ahead of Earth in its orbit, the coldest star-like orbs known and now, supermassive black holes and galaxies hiding behind cloaks of dust."
WISE scanned the whole sky twice in infrared light, completing its survey in early 2011. Like night-vision goggles probing the dark, the telescope captured millions of images of the sky. All the data from the mission have been released publicly, allowing astronomers to dig in and make new discoveries.
The latest findings are helping astronomers better understand how galaxies and the behemoth black holes at their centers grow and evolve together. For example, the giant black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, has 4 million times the mass of our sun and has gone through periodic feeding frenzies where material falls towards the black hole, heats up and irradiates its surroundings. Bigger central black holes, up to a billion times the mass of our sun, may even shut down star formation in galaxies.
In one study, astronomers used WISE to identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive black holes across the full sky, stretching back to distances more than 10 billion light-years away. About two-thirds of these objects never had been detected before because dust blocks their visible light. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light.
"We've got the black holes cornered," said Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the WISE black hole study and project scientist for another NASA black-hole mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). "WISE is finding them across the full sky, while NuSTAR is giving us an entirely new look at their high-energy X-ray light and learning what makes them tick."
In two other WISE papers, researchers report finding what are among the brightest galaxies known, one of the main goals of the mission. So far, they have identified about 1,000 candidates.
These extreme objects can pour out more than 100 trillion times as much light as our sun. They are so dusty, however, that they appear only in the longest wavelengths of infrared light captured by WISE. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope followed up on the discoveries in more detail and helped show that, in addition to hosting supermassive black holes feverishly snacking on gas and dust, these DOGs are busy churning out new stars.
"These dusty, cataclysmically forming galaxies are so rare WISE had to scan the entire sky to find them," said Peter Eisenhardt, lead author of the paper on the first of these bright, dusty galaxies, and project scientist for WISE at JPL. "We are also seeing evidence that these record setters may have formed their black holes before the bulk of their stars. The 'eggs' may have come before the 'chickens.'"
More than 100 of these objects, located about 10 billion light-years away, have been confirmed using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the Gemini Observatory in Chile, Palomar's 200-inch Hale telescope near San Diego, and the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory near Tucson, Ariz.
The WISE observations, combined with data at even longer infrared wavelengths from Caltech's Submillimeter Observatory atop Mauna Kea, revealed that these extreme galaxies are more than twice as hot as other infrared-bright galaxies. One theory is their dust is being heated by an extremely powerful burst of activity from the supermassive black hole.
"We may be seeing a new, rare phase in the evolution of galaxies," said Jingwen Wu of JPL, lead author of the study on the submillimeter observations. All three papers are being published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The three technical journal articles, including PDFs, can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0811, http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5517 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5518 .
JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing and archiving take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .
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.
|
7 Sept
|
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/.
|
10 Sept
|
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
|
Griffith
Observatory
Event Horizon Theater 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM |
Sep. 4 The von Kármán Lecture Series: Voyager Celebrates 35 Years in Space
The
twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft continue exploring where nothing from Earth has
flown before. They each are more than 100 times as far as the distance between
the Earth and the Sun. Both are now in the heliosheath – the outermost layer of
the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the presence of interstellar
gas. The Voyagers will explore the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain… and
beyond.
Speakers:
|
Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager
Project Scientist Cosmic Ray Subsystem Principal Investigator Panel: Stamatios (Tom) M. Krimigis, Principal Investigator Low-Energy Charged Particles Norman F. Ness, Principal Investigator Magnetometer John D. Richardson, Principal Investigator Plasma Science Donald A. Gurnett, Principal Investigator Plasma Wave Subsystem |
Location:
|
Tuesday, Sep. 4,
2012, 7pm Click here to add the date to your online
calendarThe von Kármán Auditorium at JPL 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA › Directions |
Webcast:
|
We offer two options to
view the live streaming of our webcast on Thursday: › 1) Ustream with real-time web chat to take public questions. › 2) Flash Player with open captioning If you don't have Flash Player, you can download for free here. |
Sep. 13 & 14 The Challenge of Mars Exploration
Mars
is an enigmatic planet, and studying it is no easy task. All told, Mars
missions have failed more often than they have succeeded, but the information
gathered by those that have outwitted, out-engineered and out-lucked the planet
has shown it to be an intriguing place where water likely existed in liquid form
on the surface, and where one can imagine the possibility of all manner of
bacteria living just below the surface. The remarkable success of the Mars
Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, gave impetus to the development of
an even more capable spacecraft: The Mars Science Laboratory. If successful,
this new spacecraft may open the door for a future mission with the potential
to detect whether or not life may have ever existed on Mars.
Speaker:
|
Richard Cook Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Project Manager, JPL |
Locations:
|
Thursday, Sept
13, 2012, 7pm The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA › Directions Friday, Sept 14, 2012, 7pm The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College 1570 East Colorado Blvd. Pasadena, CA › Directions |
Webcast:
|
We offer two options to
view the live streaming of our webcast on Thursday: › 1) Ustream with real-time web chat to take public questions. › 2) Flash Player with open captioning If you don't have Flash Player, you can download for free here. |
20 Sept
|
AEA Astronomy Club Mtg. Star
Trackers
|
Art Okawauchi
|
Aerospace
|
A3/1607A/B
|
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: Sept 1 full, Sept 8 last quarter, Sept
15 new, Sept 22 1st quarter, Sept 30 full
Other
Events:
1-2 September
Alpha Aurigids Meteor Shower
The annual
maximum ZHR may be as high as 9, but outbursts of over 30 occurred in 1935 and
1986.
7-8 September
Gamma Aquarids Meteor Shower
This shower is
active during September 1-14, with maximum occurring on September 7.
Its highest rates of activity only reach 1-4 meteors per hour.
8 Sept
|
SBAS Star Party (weather permitting): RPV at
Ridgecrest Middle School 28915 North Bay Rd.
|
11-20 September
Southern Piscids Meteor Shower
This weak and
diffuse annual shower is active during the period of August 12 to October 7.
The
peak intensity
of about 5 per hour extends from about September 11 until about September 20.
12-13 September
Eta Draconids Meteor Shower
No trace of
this meteor shower can be found in the major lists of visual radiants. It seems
to have
been discovered
by the Radio Meteor Project in the 1960s. Whether this stream produces a
strictly
telescopic
shower is not currently known. The radiant is not well placed in the sky, as it
crosses the
zenith during
daylight hours. The best time for observations is during the early evening
hours
following
sunset---a period usually ignored by observers due to generally low meteor
activity.
15
Sept
|
LAAS Dark Sky Night : Lockwood Valley (Steve Kufeld Astronomical Site; LAAS members and their guests
only)
|
15
Sept
|
SBAS
out-of-town observing – contact Greg Benecke http://www.sbastro.net/.
|
22
Sept
|
Public Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds
2-10pm
|
23-24 September
Gamma Piscids Meteor Shower
Another meteor
shower that was first discovered by the Radio Meteor Project in the 1960s. In
the
1970s visual
observation of this shower was made. It has been observed several times since
then.
The hourly rate is typically given at 4.
Internet Links:
Link(s) of the Month
Link(s) of the Month
A weekly 5 minute video about what’s up in the night sky: www.skyandtelescope.com/skyweek.
General
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/.
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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