AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter May 2013
Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 5
General Calendar p.6
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 6
Observing p. 8
Useful Links p. 9
About the Club p. 10
Club News & Calendar.
Calendar
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 5
General Calendar p.6
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 6
Observing p. 8
Useful Links p. 9
About the Club p. 10
Club News & Calendar.
Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
16 May 2013
|
Club Meeting
|
Cassini Update
|
Dave
Doody, JPL
|
A1/1735
|
20 June 2013
|
Club Meeting & Pizza
Party
|
The Chemical Makeup of Exosolar Planets
|
Dr.
Steven Naftilan,
|
A1/1735
|
AEA Astronomy Club meetings are on 3rd Thursdays at 11:45am. For all of 2013, the meeting room is A1/1735.
News:
Equipment. We’ve received the smartphone eyepiece
bracket for photography, as well as a light shroud for the 16-inch truss
Dobsonian. The Meade ETX-90 and
rechargeable battery pack are still on backorder but expected shortly.
The 45th annual RTMC Astronomy Expo will take place from
Thursday, May 23 through Monday, May 27, 2013. It will be held at YMCA Camp Oakes,
five miles southeast of Big Bear City ,
California Lake Williams Road Riverside in the San
Bernardino
Field Trip.
There have been few responses so far on the survey of interests in
candidate club field trips for the year.
Unless additional responses come in, we will probably table it for now.
Ideas include: Mt.
Palomar tour & star party/camping,
JPL tour (or open house in June), Griffith Observatory, Calif.
Science Museum
(incl. Endeavor, IMAX,...), the Columbia
Memorial Space
Center in Downey
Membership Renewals.
Some still need to renew their club membership. See the club website for the many 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 Alan Olson at M1-107.
Astronomy
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month
Three years of Solar Dynamics Observatory images are compressed into this short video.
Explanation: What happens if you wring out a wet towel while floating in space? The water shouldn't fall toward the floor because while orbiting the Earth, free falling objects will appear to float. But will the water fly out from the towel, or what? The answer may surprise you. To find out and to further exhibit how strange being in orbit can be, Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield did just this experiment last week in the microgravity of the Earth orbiting International Space Station. As demonstrated in the above video, although a few drops do go flying off, most of the water sticks together and forms a unusual-looking cylindrical sheath in and around the towel. The self-sticking surface tension of water is well known on Earth, for example being used to create artistic water cascades and, more generally, raindrops.
The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared
from Hubble
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STSci/AURA)
Explanation: While drifting through the cosmos, a
magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly
named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and
complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the above gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch. The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33
and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few
million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STSci/AURA)
Humanity Explores the Solar System
Illustration Credit & License: Olaf Frohn (The Planetary Society)
Explanation: What spacecraft is humanity
currently using to explore our Solar System? Presently, every inner planet has at least one robotic explorer, while several others are monitoring our Sun, some are mapping Earth's Moon, a few are chasing asteroids and comets, one is orbiting Saturn, and several are even heading out into deep space. The above illustration gives more details, with the inner Solar System depicted on the upper right and the
outer Solar System on the lower left. Given the present armada, our current epoch might become known as the time when humanity first probed
its own star system. Sometimes widely separated
spacecraft act together as an InterPlanetary Network to determine the direction of
distant explosions by noting when each probe detects high energy photons. Future spacecraft milestones, as indicated along the
bottom of the graphic, include Dawn reaching Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, and New Horizons reaching Pluto, both in 2015. Illustration Credit & License: Olaf Frohn (The Planetary Society)
Astronomy News:
VLA gives deep, detailed image of distant
universe
Published:
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - 12:04
in Astronomy & Space
Staring at a small patch of
sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large
Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources
that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They
found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from
galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores and the remaining 37 percent
comes from galaxies that are rapidly forming stars. "The sensitivity and
resolution of the VLA, following its decade-long upgrade, made it possible to
identify the specific objects responsible for nearly all of the radio
background emission coming from beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy," said Jim
Condon, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "Before we had
this capability, we could not detect the numerous faint sources that produce
much of the background emission," he added.Previous studies had measured the amount of radio emission coming from the distant Universe, but had not been capable of attributing all the radio waves to specific objects. In earlier observations, emission from two or more faint objects often was blurred or blended into what appeared to be a single, stronger source of radio waves.
"Advancing technology has revealed more and more of the Universe to us over the past few decades, and our study shows individual objects that account for about 96 percent of the background radio emission coming from the distant Universe," Condon said. "The VLA now is a million times more sensitive than the radio telescopes that made landmark surveys of the sky in the 1960s," he added.
"What radio astronomers have accomplished over the past few decades is analogous to advancing from the early Greek maps of the world that showed only the Mediterranean basin to the maps of today that show the whole world in exquisite detail," Condon said.
[Read more details at: http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/04/30/vla.gives.deep.detailed.image.distant.universe]
Source: National
Radio Astronomy Observatory
Looking for life by the light of dying stars
Published:
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - 11:03 in Astronomy & Space
Because it has no source of
energy, a dead star -- known as a white dwarf -- will eventually cool down and
fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still
support habitable planets, …[a] "simulated spectrum" demonstrates
that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to be launched by NASA in 2018,
will be capable of detecting oxygen and water in the atmosphere of an
Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf after only a few hours of observation
time -- much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like
star.Faint light, clear signals
"In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs," said Prof. Loeb. Prof. Maoz agrees, noting that if "all the conditions are right, we'll be able to detect signs of life" on planets orbiting white dwarf stars using the much-anticipated JWST.
An abundance of heavy elements already observed on the surface of white dwarfs suggest rocky planets orbit a significant fraction of them. The researchers estimate that a survey of 500 of the closest white dwarfs could spot one or more habitable planets.
The unique characteristics of white dwarfs could make these planets easier to spot than planets orbiting normal stars, the researchers have shown. Their atmospheres can be detected and analyzed when a star dims as an orbiting planet crosses in front of it. As the background starlight shines through the planet's atmosphere, elements in the atmosphere will absorb some of the starlight, leaving chemical clues of their presence -- clues that can then be detected from the JWST.
When an Earth-like planet orbits a normal star, "the difficulty lies in the extreme faintness of the signal, which is hidden in the glare of the 'parent' star," Prof. Maoz says. "The novelty of our idea is that, if the parent star is a white dwarf, whose size is comparable to that of an Earth-sized planet, that glare is greatly reduced, and we can now realistically contemplate seeing the oxygen biomarker."
In order to estimate the kind of data that the JWST will be able to see, the researchers created a "synthetic spectrum," which replicates that of an inhabited planet similar to Earth orbiting a white dwarf. They demonstrated that the telescope should be able to pick up signs of oxygen and water, if they exist on the planet.
A critical sign of life
The presence of oxygen biomarkers would be the most critical signal of the presence of life on extraterrestrial planets. Earth's atmosphere, for example, is 21 percent oxygen, and this is entirely produced by our planet's plant life as a result of photosynthesis. Without the existence of plants, an atmosphere would be entirely devoid of oxygen.
The JWST will be ideal for hunting out signs of life on extraterrestrial planets because it is designed to look into the infrared region of the light spectrum, where such biomarkers are prominent. In addition, as a space-based telescope, it will be able to analyze the atmospheres of Earth-like planets outside our solar system without weeding out the similar signatures of Earth's own atmosphere.
Source: American
Friends of Tel Aviv University
[Critical
question: Aren’t white dwarves typically
the remains of novae (after red giant phase) that can fry life on nearby
planets, and blow away much of their atmosphere? Would there be any (or sufficient) biomarkers
left to detect? If the planets are
farther away, aren’t they likely beyond the “Goldilocks Zone” of habitability?]
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.
This year April 8 & 22, May 6 & 20. Visit
www.huntington.org for directions. For more information about the Carnegie
Observatories or this lecture series, please contact Reed Haynie.
|
Monday, May 6th 2013
The
Elements and Astronomy
Dr. Jeff Rich
Postdoctoral Associate,
Carnegie Observatories
Postdoctoral Associate,
Carnegie Observatories
The star stuff we are made of has an
interesting history. Astronomy has contributed to fundamental knowledge about
the elements that make up our everyday life while using the same elements to
understand the properties of the cosmos. This talk discusses the connection
between the elements and Astronomy past, present and future.
Monday, May 20th 2013
Stars and the Atomic Age
Dr. Ian Roederer
Carnegie Fellow,
Carnegie Observatories
Carnegie Fellow,
Carnegie Observatories
The course of human history may have unfolded
quite differently if not for a small impurity in one of the rarest elements on
Earth. Dr. Roederer will revisit the story of how stardust from ancient
supernovae became the key ingredient in the nuclear arms race.
3 May
|
SBAS Monthly General Meeting at El Camino
College planetarium. 7:30 PM
Topic: “Spectroscopy of White Dwarfs
Speaker: Dr. Stephen
Naftilan, Claremont College
|
Radar Imaging of Near Earth Asteroids
Radar
is a very powerful astronomical technique for studying the physical properties
and refining the orbits of near-Earth asteroids. The world’s only two radar
telescopes for imaging asteroids are at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and Goldstone,
California. These telescopes can image near-Earth asteroids with resolutions as
fine as several meters, which greatly exceeds the finest resolution available
from any ground- or space-based optical telescope (even the Hubble Space
Telescope). Radar images reveal an object’s size, shape, rotation state, and
features on its surface such as craters, ridges, and even large boulders, and
have discovered that 1/6 of near-Earth asteroids larger than 200 meters in
diameter are double systems that revolve around each other, like miniature
versions of the Earth and Moon, and that 10% of near-Earth asteroids look like
gigantic peanuts, while others resemble muffins and potatoes!
Speaker:
|
Dr. Lance Benner,
Research Scientist Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
Locations:
|
Thursday, May 9,
2013, 7pm The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA › Directions Friday, May 10, 2013, 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. |
13 May
|
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
|
Griffith
Observatory
Event Horizon Theater 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM |
16 May 2013
|
Club Meeting
|
Cassini Update
|
Dave
Doody, JPL
|
A1/1735
|
Observing:
The following
data are from the 2013 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2013 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 March:
Moon: May 2 last quarter, May 10 new, May
18 1st quarter, May 25 full
Planets: Jupiter, Mercury
& Venus are close and visible in the West for about an hour after
sunset. Saturn is
visible all night. Mars is
too near the sun to be visible.
Other
Events:
4 May
|
SBAS Star Party (weather permitting): RPV at
Ridgecrest Middle School 28915 North Bay Rd.
|
5-6
May Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower Peak
The
Eta Aquarid meteor shower is the first of two showers that occur each year as a
result of Earth
passing
through dust released by Halley's Comet, with the second being the Orionids.
The point
from
where the Eta Aquarid meteors appear to radiate is located within the
constellation Aquarius.
Sadly,
this location is a bit of a detriment to observers, because this area of this
sky only rises an
hour
or so before morning twilight begins. observers in the Northern Hemisphere are
likely to see
about 10 meteors every hour, while Southern Hemisphere observers
will see about 30 per hour.
11 May
|
SBAS
out-of-town observing – contact Greg Benecke http://www.sbastro.net/.
|
11 May
|
LAAS Dark Sky Night : Lockwood Valley (Steve Kufeld Astronomical Site; LAAS members and their guests
only)
|
18 May
|
Public Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds
2-10pm
|
25 May
Mercury 1.4 deg N of Venus
27 May Mercury 2 deg N of Jupiter
28 May Venus 1.0 deg N of Jupiter
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.
Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying Guides
General
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 Alan Olson, or see the club website (or Aerolink folder) where a form is also available (go to the membership link/folder & look at the bottom). 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: Mark Clayson, Program Committee Chairman (& acting club VP), TBD, Activities Committee Chairman (& club Secretary), or Alan Olson, Resource Committee Chairman (over equipment & library, and club Treasurer).
Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club President
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