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)

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter August 2013

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 1
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:

15 August 2013
Club Meeting
A Video lecture sample (TBD) from the club library (see https://aeropedia.aero.org/aeropedia/index.php/Astronomy_Club/Library)

A1/1735

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

News:  

[Mark Clayson]  I spent a very rainy week on staff at the national BSA jamboree in W. Virginia, so didn’t see many stars, though I was camping out with some 45,000 others (2nd largest “city” in the state, and a lot of great high adventure).  But Explore Scientific had a row of telescopes (including a 6-inch w. solar filter) set up for the astronomy merit badge (with an astronomy faculty member from U. VA) , and a trailer with their whole line of equipment on display.  Including the 5-inch Explore Scientific ED127 Refractor (carbon fiber) that is on our wish list in the FY14 AEA budget request (along with a Meade LX80 mount & tripod).  It was very nice.  I also did a 4 day driving tour of 4 neighboring states, and on the last night did get a beautiful clear sky in the mountains of  northern W. VA, and scanned the sky w. my mini binocs.  I didn’t make it to the nearby national radio astronomy observatory.

Equipment has been checked out, so we may get some other observing reports before long.


Astronomy Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month

(from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)
Video:  130 Years of Earth Surface Temperatures http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130731.html
Image Credit: GISS, NASA
Explanation: How has the surface temperature of Earth been changing? To help find out, Earth scientists collected temperature records from over 1000 weather stations around the globe since 1880, and combined them with modern satellite data. The above movie dramatizes the result showing 130 years of planet-wide temperature changes relative to the local average temperatures in the mid-1900s. In theabove global maps, red means warmer and blue means colder. On average, the display demonstrates that the temperature on Earth has increased by nearly one degree Celsius over the past 130 years, and many of the warmest years on record have occurred only recently. Global climate change is of more than passing interest -- it is linked to global weather severity and coastal sea water levels.

Video:  A Year of Sky on Earth http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130724.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Ken Murphy (MurphLab); Music Ariel (Moby)
Explanation: Each panel shows one day. With 360 movie panels, the sky over (almost) an entire year is shown in time lapse format as recorded by a video camera on the roof of the Exploratoriummuseum in San Francisco, California. The camera recorded an image every 10 seconds from before sunrise to after sunset and from mid-2009 to mid-2010. A time stamp showing the local time of day is provided on the lower right. The videos are arranged chronologically, with July 28 shown on the upper left, and January 1 located about about half way down. Although every day lasts 24 hours, daylight lasts longest in the northern hemisphere in June and the surrounding summer months, a fact which can be seen here as the bottom (and soon top) videos are the first to light up with dawn. The initial darkness in the middle depicts the delayed dawn and fewer daylight hours of winter. In the videos, darkness indicates night, blue depicts clear day, while gray portrays pervasive daytime cloud cover. Many videos show complex patterns of clouds moving across the camera's wide field as that day progresses. As the videos collectively end, sunset and then darkness descend first on the winter days just above the middle, and last on the mid-summer near the bottom.
NGC 2170: Still Life with Reflecting Dust 
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona
Explanation: In this beautiful celestial still life composed with a cosmic brush, dusty nebula NGC 2170 shines at the upper left. Reflecting the light of nearby hot stars, NGC 2170 is joined by other bluishreflection nebulae, a compact red emission region, and streamers of obscuring dust against a backdrop of stars. Like the common household items still life painters often choose for their subjects, the clouds of gas, dust, and hot stars pictured here are also commonly found in this setting - a massive, star-forming molecular cloud in the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros). The giant molecular cloud, Mon R2, is impressively close, estimated to be only 2,400 light-years or so away. At that distance, this canvas would be about 15 light-years across.


Hoag's Object: A Strange Ring Galaxy 
Image Credit: Credit: R. Lucas (STScI/AURA), Hubble Heritage Team, NASA
Explanation: Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Art Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag's Object formed remains unknown, although similar objects have now been identified and collectively labeled as a form of ring galaxy. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and the gravitational effect of a central bar that has since vanished. The above photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in July 2001 revealed unprecedented details of Hoag's Object. More recent observations in radio waves indicate thatHoag's Object has not accreted a smaller galaxy in the past billion years. Hoag's Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Snake (Serpens). Coincidentally, visible in the gap (at about one o'clock) is yet another ring galaxy that likely lies far in the distance.


Moon Over Andromeda 
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block and Tim Puckett
Explanation: The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (aka M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can't appreciate the galaxy's impressive extent in planet Earth's sky. This entertaining composite image compares theangular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (bottom).






Astronomy News:


http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gold-universe-colliding-neutron-stars-astronomers-20130717,0,5527820.story

Eureka! Gold in universe forged by dead, crashing neutron stars

By Amina Khan
July 17, 2013, 1:31 p.m.
Astronomers panning the heavens for glints of gamma-ray bursts have struck gold. No, really. They found gold -- so much of it, in fact, that they say they could potentially account for the universe's entire reserve of the precious metal prized by Earthlings for jewelry and industrial uses alike.
All the gold in the cosmos may have come from stellar cataclysms -- the collision of two neutron stars, which sends bursts of particles and radiation into the universe.
"We are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff," said Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, paraphrasing iconic astronomer Carl Sagan.
These neutron stars are the incredibly dense, deadened husks left from dramatic stellar explosions known as supernovas. Supernovas are what seeded a hydrogen-rich universe with heavier elements fused in the stars' cores, like carbon, oxygen or iron. But unlike carbon or iron, gold can’t be forged in the heart of a star, so its origin has remained something of a mystery.
Berger discovered an answer during his search for short gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray bursts are flashes of high-energy radiation that signal truly powerful explosions that can come from billions of light-years away. Some of them are long, lasting even a few minutes, and others are incredibly short – fractions of a second, making them very difficult to catch in the act.
Berger was looking for the short ones. And it was a flash in what's called GRB 130603B, picked up by NASA’s Swift satellite, that caught his attention. When his phone rang at 2 a.m., he and his team quickly moved to examine the short burst – which lasted two-tenths of a second  -- captured with the powerful Magellan/Baade telescope in Chile.
The burst appeared to be coming from the collision of two neutron stars -- each roughly the size of Austin and filled with 1.5 times the mass of the sun -- an impact that produced a black hole and the bright burst of gamma rays that they picked up.
But they also saw something else around the bright beacon: A strange glow of infrared radiation. This, the astrophysicists realized, was coming from  radioactive elements – like lead, thorium, uranium -- decaying and thus producing the infrared light.
Clearly, the explosion had been responsible for the creation of a whole menagerie of heavy elements. They estimated that an equivalent of 1% of the sun’s matter was being flung out from the collision in a tail, and about 10 parts per million of that tail was made of gold.
They could be seeing perhaps 10 times the moon’s mass in gold, Berger said. The gold out there could be worth around $10 octillion. (That’s $100 trillion squared.)
Combining their estimate of the amount of gold from the neutron star mashup with the estimated number of such explosions since the beginning of time, it could even be that all the gold in the universe came from such exotic collisions, the scientists said. Their paper has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
So while there is indeed gold in them thar stars, should amateur prospectors still panning for the yellow metal lift their eyes from the ground and search the skies instead?
Probably not. This exploding star system is 3.9 billion light-years away. In any case, if such a huge amount of gold ever landed on Earth, "the price would plummet," Berger pointed out.

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.

2 Aug
SBAS Monthly General Meeting at El Camino College planetarium. 7:30 PM
Topic: “Summer Skies: Perseids and Other Delights”
Speaker: Dr. Susan Stolovy, ECC
http://www.sbastro.net/.  

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

Aug. 15 & 16  The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2013

Curiosity’s First Year on Mars

Curiosity, the rover that successfully landed on Mars in early August, 2012, has been busy refining much of what we know about the red planet. Gale Crater has presented the rover with rich new environments to study, such as ancient streambeds and shifting sand dunes. With a suite of 10 science instruments, the science team has been working to reveal the answers to existing questions, and of course, generating new ones. This talk will revisit the successful landing and reveal some of the results from the last year of work on the surface of the Red Planet.
Speaker:
Dr. Ashwin R. Vasavada
Deputy Project Scientist, Mars Science Laboratory


Locations:
 Thursday, Aug 15, 2013, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Aug 16, 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.




15 Aug 2013
Club Meeting
A Video lecture sample (TBD) from the club library (see https://aeropedia.aero.org/aeropedia/index.php/Astronomy_Club/Library)

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 August:


Moon: Aug 6 new, Aug 14 1st quarter, Aug 21 full, Aug 28 last quarter                   
Planets:  Venus & Saturn are in the evening sky in the West. Mercury, Mars & Jupiter are in the pre-dawn sky in the East.


Other Events:

3 Aug
SBAS out-of-town observing – contact Greg Benecke http://www.sbastro.net/.  

3 Aug
LAAS Dark Sky Night : Lockwood Valley (Steve Kufeld Astronomical Site; LAAS members and their guests only)

6 August Southern Iota Aquarid Meteor Shower Peak
The Southern Iota Aquarids possess a duration extending from July 1-September 18. The August 6
maximum produces an hourly rate of 7-8 from a radiant position of RA=337°, DECL=-12°.

12 August Perseid Meteor Shower Peak
The most famous of all meteor showers. It never fails to provide an impressive display and, due to
its summertime appearance, it tends to provide the majority of meteors seen by non-astronomy
enthusiasts.

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

25 August Northern Iota Aquarid Meteor Shower Peak
The Northern Iota Aquarids occur during August 11- September 10. Maximum occurs on August
25, at which time 5-10 meteors per hour can be seen from RA=350°, DECL=0°.

26 Aug Neptune at Opposition

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


Internet Links:

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

Regional (Southern California, Washington, D.C. & Colorado)
Southern California & Beyond Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria
Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting



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 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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