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)

Thursday, December 13, 2012

2012 December


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter December  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. 9
Useful Links p. 10
About the Club p. 10

Club News & Calendar.

Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:
20-Dec-2012
Beyond Next Generation Access To Space
Scott Martinelli and Jay Penn
Aerospace
A1/1029A/B
17 Jan 2013
Semi-annual pizza party +?


A1/1735


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 Dec. 20 club mtg. will also include a short presentation on a proposed cooperative amateur observatory in Palos Verdes & discussion of a bylaw amendment to expand club membership to include any non-employees, including former employees.

Just a reminder that for most of us, our club membership expires Dec. 31 (except those who joined in the last few months and likely paid also for 2012).  We invite you to renew for 2013 at your earliest convenience & in time for the pizza lunch Jan. 17 (the first of 2 for the year) -- we must have your payment (& pizza order -- see the newsletter for menu) by Monday Jan. 14 to get member credit.  See the club website for the many other benefits of membership.

Please submit the renewal form (available on Aerolink at https://aerolink.aero.org/cs/llisapi.dll?func=ll&objId=13659520&objAction=browse&viewType=1, or attached) with your payment (check made out to AEA Astronomy Club) to Jim Johansen at M1-013.  

New Regular Mtg. Room.  A heads up that we have secured a new, and hopefully steady, meeting room for all of 2013 (beginning Jan. 17):  A1/1735.  It is a large room w. large conference table seating 13, and chairs for 25 more on the sides.  It is located near the NE corner of the bldg.:  from the main lobby, turn right immediately after the credit union entrance (thru the badge reader), and at the end of that hall turn left, then right again, and it's on the right.  If accessing from the door at the NE corner of A1 (near the bridge to LAAFB), turn left after entering & go thru the 2 sets of doors straight ahead.

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

Video(s)
Our Story in One Minute http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121114.html
Explanation: Could you tell the story of human existence in a minute? This thrilling video culls together multiple teasing snippets in an attempt to do just that. And sets it to music. Briefly depicted, from start to finish, is an artistic animation of the Big Bang, a trip across the early universe, the formation of the Earth and Moon, the emergence of multi-celled life and plants, the rise of reptiles and dinosaurs, a devastating meteor strike, the rise of mammals and humans, and finally the rise of modern civilization. The minute movie ends with a flyover of the modern skyscraper and a human standing atop a snow covered mountain. The above video is the latest from the Symphony of Science project.

Superstorm Sandy From Formation to Landfall   http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121107.html
Explanation: It was the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.......


2012 December 1

Northern Mercury
Credit: NASA / JHU Applied Physics Lab / Carnegie Inst. Washington
Explanation: Innermost planet Mercury would probably not be a good location for an interplanetary winter olympics. But new results based on data from the Mercury orbiting MESSENGER spacecraft indicate that it does have substantial water ice in permanently shadowed regions within craters near its north pole. The possibility of ice on Mercury has been entertained for years, inspired by the discovery of radar bright, hence highly reflective, regions near the north pole. Highlighted in yellow in this map based on projected MESSENGER images, radar bright regions are seen to correspond with floors and walls of north polar impact craters. Farther from the pole the regions are concentrated on the north facing crater walls. MESSENGER's neutron spectroscopy and thermal models for the craters indicate material in these regions has a hydrogen content consistent with nearly pure water ice and is trapped in an area with temperatures that remain below 100 kelvins (-280 deg.F, -173 deg.C). In circumstances similar to permanent shadows in craters of the Moon, debris from comet impacts is thought to be the source of ice on Mercury.


2012 November 25

Dark Sand Cascades on Mars
Image Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA
Explanation: They might look like trees on Mars, but they're not. Groups of dark brown streaks have been photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on melting pinkish sand dunes covered with light frost. The above image was taken in 2008 April near the North Pole of Mars. At that time, dark sand on the interior of Martian sand dunes became more and more visible as the spring Sun melted the lighter carbon dioxide ice. When occurring near the top of a dune, dark sand may cascade down the dune leaving dark surface streaks -- streaks that might appear at first to be trees standing in front of the lighter regions, but cast no shadows. Objects about 25 centimeters across are resolved on this image spanning about one kilometer. Close ups of some parts of this image show billowing plumes indicating that the sand slides were occurring even when the image was being taken.


2012 December 4

In the Center of Saturn's North Polar Vortex
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Explanation: What's happening at the north pole of Saturn? A vortex of strange and complex swirling clouds. The center of this vortex was imaged in unprecedented detail last week by the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. These clouds lie at the center of the unusual hexagonal cloud system that surrounds the north pole of Saturn. The sun rose on Saturn's north pole just a few years ago, with Cassini taking only infrared images of the shadowed region previously. The above image is raw and unprocessed and is being prepared for release in 2013. Several similar images of the region have recently been condensed into a movie. Planetary scientists are sure to continue to study this most unusual cloud formation for quite some time.


2012 November 10

Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 660
Image Credit: Gemini Observatory, AURA, Travis Rector (Univ. Alaska Anchorage)
Explanation: NGC 660 is featured in this cosmic snapshot, a sharp composite of broad and narrow band filter image data from the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea. Over 20 million light-years away and swimming within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, NGC 660's peculiar appearance marks it as a polar ring galaxy. A rare galaxy type, polar ring galaxies have a substantial population of stars, gas, and dust orbiting in rings nearly perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disk. The bizarre-looking configuration could have been caused by the chance capture of material from a passing galaxy by a disk galaxy, with the captured debris eventually strung out in a rotating ring. The violent gravitational interaction would account for the myriad pinkish star forming regions scattered along NGC 660's ring. The polar ring component can also be used to explore the shape of the galaxy's otherwise unseen dark matter halo by calculating the dark matter's gravitational influence on the rotation of the ring and disk. Broader than the disk, NGC 660's ring spans over 50,000 light-years.

Astronomy News:

Herschel and Keck take census of the invisible Universe

Published: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - 14:33 in 
Astronomy & Space

Hubble images: NASA, ESA; ESA: C. Carreau and C. Casey, University of Hawai'i; COSMOS field: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/HerMES Key Programme

By combining the observing powers of ESA's Herschel space observatory and the ground-based Keck telescopes, astronomers have characterised hundreds of previously unseen starburst galaxies, revealing extraordinary high star-formation rates across the history of the Universe. Starburst galaxies give birth to hundreds of solar masses' worth of stars each year in short-lived but intense events.

 By comparison, our own Milky Way Galaxy on average produces the equivalent of only one Sun-like star per year.

 Starburst galaxies generate so much starlight that they should outshine our Galaxy hundreds to thousands of times over, but the enormous quantities of gas fuelling them also contain vast amounts of dust as a result of the frantic star formation.

 The dust absorbs much of the visible light, meaning that many of them look quite insignificant in that part of the spectrum.

 However, the dust is warmed by the surrounding hot stars and re-emits the energy at far-infrared wavelengths.
Using ESA's infrared Herschel space observatory, astronomers measured the temperature and brightness of thousands of dusty galaxies. From these, their star-formation rate could be then calculated.

 "Starburst galaxies are the brightest galaxies in the Universe and contribute significantly to cosmic star formation, so it's important to study them in detail and understand their properties," says Dr Caitlin Casey of the University of Hawai'i, lead author of the papers discussing the results in the Astrophysical Journal.

 "Some of the galaxies found in this new survey have star-formation rates equivalent to the birth of several thousand solar-mass stars per year, constituting some of the brightest infrared galaxies yet discovered."
To provide context to the observations and understand how star formation has changed over the Universe's 13.7 billion year history, the distances to the galaxies were also needed.

 With Herschel signposting the way, Dr Casey's team used spectrometers on the twin 10-metre W.M. Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i, and obtained the redshifts of 767 of the starburst galaxies.

 Redshifts provide astronomers with a measure of how long the light from each galaxy has travelled across the Universe, which, in turn, indicates when in cosmic history the light from each galaxy was emitted.

 For most of the galaxies it was found that the light has been travelling towards us for 10 billion years or less.
About 5% of the galaxies are at even greater redshifts: their light was emitted when the Universe was only 1-3 billion years old.

 "The Herschel data tell us how fiercely and prolifically these galaxies are producing stars," says Seb Oliver from University of Sussex, UK, and Principal Investigator for the HerMES Key Programme, within which the data have been collected.

 "Combining this information with the distances provided by the Keck data, we can uncover the contribution of the starburst galaxies to the total amount of stars produced across the history of the Universe."

 How such large numbers of starburst galaxies formed during the first few billions of years of the Universe's existence poses a vital problem for galaxy formation and evolution studies.

 One leading theory proposes that a collision between two young galaxies could have sparked an intense short-lived phase of star formation.

 Another theory speculates that, when the Universe was young, individual galaxies had much more gas available to them to feed from, enabling higher rates of star formation without the need of collisions.

 "It's a hotly debated topic that requires details on the shape and rotation of the galaxies before it can be resolved," adds Dr Casey.

 "Before Herschel, the largest similar survey of distant starbursts involved only 73 galaxies -- we've improved on that by over a factor of ten in this combined survey with Keck to determine the characteristics of this important galaxy population," adds Göran Pilbratt, ESA's Herschel project scientist.

Source: European Space Agency (ESA)



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 Dec
SBAS Monthly General Meeting at El Camino College planetarium. 7:30 PM
Topic: Stars and Stellar Evolution
Speaker: Tim Thompson, JPL, retired   http://www.sbastro.net/.  

Dec. 6 & 7 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2012

GRAIL Unwraps the Moon

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory lunar mission has completed its primary period of scientific observations and obtained unprecedented results on the global gravitational field of the Moon. The interior structure of our nearest neighbor has been revealed and models are becoming available to describe the Moon from the crust to the core. Since the Moon shows only one side to Earth, measuring its gravity field at the nearside and far side required the utilization of a pair of mirror-identical spacecraft with radio links between. The links provided precision measurements of how the distance between them changed as they flew over features of varying densities.
Speaker:
 GRAIL Team

Locations:
 Thursday, Dec 6, 2012, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Dec 7, 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.

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


19-Dec-2012
Beyond Next Generation Access To Space
Scott Martinelli and Jay Penn
Aerospace
A1/1029A/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 December:


Moon: Dec 6 last quarter, Dec 13 new, Dec 20 1st quarter, Dec 28 full                               

Planets:  Mars is visible just after sunset. Jupiter rises just after sunset. Venus, Mercury & Saturn are visible in the pre-dawn sky. 
Other Events:

3 Dec Jupiter at opposition

4 Dec Mercury at greatest elongation W (21 deg.) & earliest end of twilight

7 Dec Earliest sunset

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

11 Dec Venus 1.6 deg N of Moon

12 December Asteroid Toutatis Near-Earth Flyby
Look in the constellation Pisces as this potentially hazardous asteroid makes a close pass by the
earth. At magnitude 9 or 10 it may be a bit difficult to spot in light polluted skies but it may well be
possible. It’ll be moving at about 6 arcsecs/minute so it should show appreciable movement while
you watch. To generate ephemeris predicts for where to point your telescope, go to
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

13 December Geminid Meteor Shower Peak
This meteor shower gets the name "Geminids" because it appears to radiate from the
constellation Gemini. An observer in the Northern Hemisphere can start seeing Geminid
meteors as early as December 6, when one meteor every hour or so could be visible. During
the next week, rates increase until a peak of 50-80 meteors per hour is attained on the night
of December 13/14. The last Geminids are seen on December 18, when an observer might
see a rate of one every hour or so.

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

21 Dec Winter solstice

22 Dec
Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

22 December Ursid Meteor Shower Peak
The point from where the Ursid meteors appear to come from is located within the
constellation Ursa Minor, also known as the "Little Dipper". This meteor shower is active
during the period spanning December 17 to 25, but it peaks on December 22/23. At
maximum, rates can normally reach 10 per hour. The meteor shower is produced by the
periodic comet 8P/Tuttle and can occasionally experience short-lived outbursts of up to 100
meteors per hour.

27 Dec Double shadow transit on Jupiter

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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