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)

Monday, January 14, 2013

2013 January


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter January  2013

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:
17 Jan 2013
Semi-annual pizza party
Slideshow, Amateur PV Observatory, Townhall & Election results

A1/1735

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are on 3rd Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of 2013, the meeting room is A1/1735.

News:  

The Jan. 17 club mtg., in addition to the pizza party & slideshow of select NASA Astronomy Pictures (& videos?) of the Day & club activities, will also include a short presentation on a proposed cooperative amateur observatory in Palos Verdes.  There will be a vote on a bylaw amendment to expand club membership to include any non-employees, including former employees.  And discussion of ideas for presentations, activities & acquisitions for 2013. 

Pizza & drink are free for members, $5 for others -- must RSVP to Mark Clayson (mark.clayson@aero.org, x60708) by Jan. 14 w. preferences – see menu below). 
Menu options for Jan. 17 lunch (give 1st & 2nd choices when you RSVP by Jan. 14 – we’ll have to share pizzas & pitchers of drink so you may not get your first choice – hopefully at least your 2nd):

Pizzas:
The Works Pizza
Three Cheese Pizza
Barbecued Chicken Pizza
Margherita Pizza with Fresh Basil, Tomato and Mozzarella
Grilled Vegetable Pizza

Drinks:
Bottled or canned juice, water or soda
Pitcher of water

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 $12 dues payment (& pizza order -- see the menu above) 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 ($12 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)
Time-Lapse: A Total Solar Eclipse  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121210.html  (preview of the 2017 eclipse across the U.S.)
Video Credit & Copyright: Colin Legg
Explanation: Have you ever experienced a total eclipse of the Sun? The above time-lapse movie depicts such an eclipse in dramatic detail as visible from Australia last month. As the video begins, a slight dimming of the Sun and the surrounding Earth is barely perceptible. Suddenly, as the Moon moves to cover nearly the entire Sun, darkness sweeps in from the left -- the fully blocked part of the Sun. At totality, only the bright solar corona extends past the edges of the Moon, and darkness surrounds you. Distant horizons are still bright, though, as they are not in the darkest part of the shadow. At mid-totality the darkness dips to the horizon below the eclipsed Sun, created by the shadow cone -- a corridor of shadow that traces back to the Moon. As the total solar eclipse ends -- usually after a few minutes -- the process reverses and Moon's shadow moves off to the other side. Solar eclipses can frequently be experienced at gatherings organized along the narrow eclipse path as well as specialized cruises and plane flights.


2012 December 25

Yosemite Winter Night
Image Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (AstroPics.com, TWAN)
Explanation: In this evocative night skyscape a starry band of the Milky Way climbs over Yosemite Valley, Sierra Nevada Range, planet Earth. Jupiter is the brightest celestial beacon on the wintry scene, though. Standing nearly opposite the Sun in the constellation Taurus, the wandering planet joins yellowish Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster. Below, Orion always comes up sideways over a fence of mountains. And from there the twin stars of Gemini rise just across the Milky Way. As this peaceful winter night began, they followed Auriga the charioteer, its alpha star Capella near the top of the frame.
2012 December 21

Orion over El Castillo
Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America, TWAN)
Credits: D. Flores and B. Pichardo (Inst. Astronomia UNAM), P. Sánchez and R. Nafate (INAH)
Explanation: Welcome to the December solstice, a day the world does not end ... even according to the Mayan Calendar. To celebrate, consider this dramatic picture of Orion rising over El Castillo, the central pyramid at Chichén Itzá, one of the great Mayan centers on the Yucatán peninsula. Also known as the Temple of Kukulkan it stands 30 meters tall and 55 meters wide at the base. Built up as a series of square terraces by the pre-Columbian civilization between the 9th and 12th century, the structure can be used as a calendar and is noted for astronomical alignments. In fact, the Mayans were accomplished astronomers and mathematicians, accurately using the cyclic motions of the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets to measure time and construct calendars. Peering through clouds in this night skyscape, stars in the modern constellation Orion the Hunter represented a turtle in the Mayan sky. Tak sáamal.
2012 December 7

Earth at Night
Image Credit : NASA, NOAA NGDC, Suomi-NPP, Earth Observatory,
Data and Processing: Chris Elvidge and Robert Simmon
Explanation: This remarkably complete view of Earth at night is a composite of cloud-free, nighttime images. The images were collected during April and October 2012 by the Suomi-NPP satellite from polar orbit about 824 kilometers (512 miles) above the surface using its Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). VIIRS offers greatly improved resolution and sensitivity compared to past global nightlight detecting instrumentation on DMSP satellites. It also has advantages compared to cameras on the International Space Station. While the space station passes over the same point on Earth every two or three days, Suomi-NPP passes over the same point twice a day at about 1:30am and 1:30pm local time. Easy to recognize here, city lights identify major population centers, tracking the effects of human activity and influence across the globe. That makes nighttime images of our fair planet among the most interesting and important views from space.
2012 December 27

Curiosity Rover at Rocknest on Mars
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, MAHLI
Explanation: What's in this smooth soil on Mars? In late October, NASA's robotic Curiosity rover stopped near a place dubbed Rocknest as it continues to explore Gale Crater on Mars. Rocknest is the group of stones seen near the top left of the above image -- just to the left of Curiosity's mast. Of particular interest was the unusually smooth patch of soil named Wind Drift seen to the left of Curiosity, which was likely created by the Martian wind blowing fine particles into Rocknest's wake. The above image shows part of Mt. Sharp in the background to upper right, and, oddly, almost the entire rover itself, digitally reconstructed from 55 frames while digitally removing an extended arm. Curiosity scooped several sand samples from Wind Drift into its Chemistry and Mineralogy Experiment (CheMin) and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory for a detailed analysis. Preliminary data from the soil indicates a small amount of one-carbon organic material the origin of which it presently unknown. Although the organic signal might be just contaminants from Earth, the exciting possibility that it could be from Mars itself will remain a focus of future exploration and research.

Astronomy News:

Ancient Maya Predicted 1991 Solar Eclipse

Miriam Kramer, SPACE.com Staff Writer
Date: 08 January 2013 Time: 02:46 PM ET
LONG BEACH, Calif. — The Maya, best known these days for the doomsday they never foretold, may have accurately predicted astronomical phenomena centuries ahead of time, scientists find. 

 A new book, "Astronomy in the Maya Codices" (American Philosophical Society, 2011), which was awarded the Osterbrock Book Prize for historical astronomy here at the American Astronomical Society conference Monday (Jan. 7), details a series of impressive observations made by Mayan astronomers  pre-16th century.

 Anthropologist husband-wife team, Harvey and Victoria Bricker have devoted their lives to understanding the pre-Columbian Maya and how they understood the world around them. The Brickers conducted most of their work by translating complex hieroglyphics to see what Mayan scribes felt was most important to record on parchment.
By decoding early Mayan hieroglyphics from four different codices housed in Madrid, Paris, Mexico and Dresden, the Brickers tracked how the night sky would have looked to the Mayans when they were alive.

 "We're dealing with real data," Harvey Bricker said. "They're not just squiggles."

 The Brickers translated the dates cited in the Mayan calendar to correspond with our calendar and then used modern knowledge of planetary orbits and cycles to line up the Maya's data with ours. It was surprisingly accurate. [Image Gallery: Amazing Mayan Calendar Carvings]

 In fact, the Brickers found the astronomical calendar dated to the 11th or 12th century accurately predicted a solar eclipse  to within a day in 1991, centuries after the Mayan civilization had ended. The 1991 eclipse occurred on July 11.  [and it crossed the Mayan lands.  110 members of the AEA Astronomy & Travel Clubs viewed it from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico]
First Light  Cameras Open Their Eyes
Sky & Telescope January 2013, p. 15

Four of the newest, largest eyes in astronomy opened to the sky in August and September.  Their creators hope that the gigantic images they produce will help answer some equally large questions about the universe’s fate, the largest-scale cosmic structures, and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. 

Three of the cameras – the Dark Energy Camera on the 4-meter Blanco Telescope on Cerro Tololo, Chile; the Hyper Suprime-Cam on the 8.2-m Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea; and the One Degree Imager on the 3.5-m WIYN telescope on Arizona’s Kitt Peak – are among the largest digital cameras ever made. 

A typical major observatory telescope might have a handful of CCDs tiling its focal plane, but the Dark Energy Camera and One Degree Imager each have more than 60 CCDs in their arrays, and the Hyper Suprime-Cam has 116.  As a result, these cameras are behemoths.  The largest, Hyper Suprime-Cam, stands 3 meters (10 feet) high and weighs 3 tons. 

Each camera contains hundreds of millions of pixels, making the images some of the largest ever taken.  The cameras were designed for efficient sky surveys covering very wide fields with each exposure. 

The Dark Energy Camera, for example, will survey about an eighth of the sky (5,000 square degrees) over five years.  It will measure the universe’s large-scale structure in 3-D, detect far-away super-novae, record the effects of the large-scale sound waves that rippled through the very early universe, and detect dark matter’s distorting effect on the shapes of faraway galaxies.  Each of these measurements will help astronomers constrain the properties of dark matter and dark energy. 

The fourth new eye is the Large Monolithic Imager on the newly opened Discovery Channel Telescope (S&T February 2012, page 28).  Unlike the other three, which depend on vast CCD arrays, the LMI is one of the largest single CCDs in astronomy, with 36 megapixels covering a field of view nearly 13 arcminutes on a side.  The single chip is sensitive to light across the optical spectrum and will enable the study of large faint objects. 

These imagers pave the way for the next generation of astronomical cameras and surveys.  The most ambitious planned is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), an 8.4-meter scope to be built in Chile.  Using a camera the size of a small car, it will image half the celestial sphere to magnitude 24 in six filters every three or four days for at least 10 years.

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.

4 Jan
SBAS Monthly General Meeting at El Camino College planetarium. 7:30 PM
Topic: Remote Imaging
Speaker: Tom Bash   http://www.sbastro.net/.  

17 Jan 2013
AEA Astronomy Club Semi-annual pizza party, Election & PV Observatory


A1/1735


Jan. 17 & 18 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2013

Probing the Dark Sector with Euclid

The past decade has seen the emergence of the so-called "concordance model" of cosmology. In this model, the Universe started about 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang and is now dominated by dark matter and dark energy. Together this poorly understood "dark sector" makes up about 95% of the Universe, but the nature of these phenomena remains elusive. Weak gravitational lensing, whereby the observed shapes of background galaxies are slightly distorted by foreground dark matter has proven to be one of the most useful ways to measure dark matter and dark energy. I'll explain the basics of weak lensing and outline some key weak lensing results. Finally, I'll discuss The European Space Agency's Euclid mission. NASA has recently agreed to partner on this ambitious mission to measure the dark sector in the 2020s.

Speaker:
 Dr. Jason Rhodes, JPL Research Scientist

Locations:
 Thursday, Jan. 17, 2012, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Jan. 18, 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.

No mtg.  in Jan.
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM


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: Jan 5  last quarter, Jan 11 new, Jan 18 1st quarter, Jan 27 full                                 

Planets:  Mars is visible before setting briefly just after sunset. Jupiter rises before sunset and is visible most of the night. Venus & Saturn are visible in the pre-dawn sky. 
Other Events:

3 Jan. Quadrantid meteors peak

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

10 Jan. Venus is 3 deg. South of the Moon

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

19 Jan
Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

21 Jan Jupiter is within 1 deg. Of the moon

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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