2013 September

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter September 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.8
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 8
    Observing p. 10
Useful Links p. 10
About the Club p. 11

Club News & Calendar.

Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

19 Sep 2013	Club Meeting	Using the Club’s 16-inch Dobsonian	Jason Fields	A1/2906
17 Oct 2013	Club Meeting	Professional Astrophotography	Wally Pacholka	A1/1735
21 Nov 2013	Club Meeting	A Tour of the new Aerospace E POD (A6) Telescope & Facility	Richard Rudy	A1/1735
19 Dec 2013	Club Meeting	Mars Exploration Concept	Matthew Eby	A1/1735

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

News:  

Note the change of rooms for our September 19 mtg. – A1/2906.  Presumably for Oct.-Jan., at least, we’ll be back in A1/1735.  Jason Fields is our club’s most accomplished observer, as evidenced by his incredible observing reports.  He’s spent several nights with the club’s 16-inch Dobsonian, and will share with us pointers (tutorial) on its use (Mt. Pinos, etc.), demonstrating with the telescope at the mtg.  And he’ll share some of his experiences, and possibly some teasers of other topics he could speak to at subsequent meetings.

Oct. 17:  Wally Pacholka is a local (Long Beach) but world-renowned professional astrophotographer who specializes in Milky Way shots that include spectacular scenes from national parks, etc.  He’s also a friend of Jason Fields’.  You can see some of his award-winning & commercial photos at http://astropics.com/  Wally will share some of his work, techniques, etc.

For our Nov. 21 mtg., Rick Rudy of the Remote Sensing Dept. will give us a tour of the new in-house-built telescope in the A6 E Pod.   See the Orbiter story on the new telescope here: http://pages.aero.org/orbiter/2013/08/12/in-house-telescope-provides-new-capabilities/

On Dec. 19, Matthew Eby will share his work on "... the exploration of Mars and a research project underway to develop and demonstrate an architecture for landing a small microprobe on Mars using a derivative of Aerospace’s small reentry spacecraft. "  See a story on his IRAD & balloon drop test at http://pages.aero.org/orbiter/pdf-archival-view-month/?d=2

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

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

Video: Noctilucent Clouds and Aurora Over Scotland http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130819.html
Video Credit: Maciej Winiarczyk; Music: Jolanta Galka-Kurkowska
Explanation: Why would the sky still glow after sunset? Besides stars and the band of our Milky Way galaxy, the sky might glow because it contains either noctilucent clouds or aurora. Rare individually, both are visible in the above time lapse movie taken over Caithness, Scotland, UK taken during a single night earlier this month. First noted in 1885, many noctilucent clouds are known to correlate with atmospheric meteor trails, although details and the origins of others remain a topic of research. These meandering bright filaments of sunlight-reflecting ice crystals are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. The above video captures not only a variety of noctilucent clouds, but also how their structure varies over minutes. Lower clouds typically appear dark or fast moving. About halfway through the video the clouds are joined by aurora. At times, low clouds, noctilucent clouds, and aurora are all visible simultaneously, each doing their own separate dance, and once -- see if you can find it -- even with the Big Dipper rotating across the background.

Video:  A Flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130827.html
Video Credit: NASA, ESA, F. Summers, Z. Levay, L. Frattare, B. Mobasher, A. Koekemoer and the HUDF Team (STScI)

Explanation: What would it look like to fly through the distant universe? To find out, a team of astronomers estimated the relative distances to over 5,000 galaxies in one of the most distant fields of galaxies ever imaged: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). Because it takes light a long time to cross the universe, most galaxies visible in the above video are seen when the universe was only a fraction of its current age, were still forming, and have unusual shapes when compared to modern galaxies. No mature looking spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way or the Andromeda galaxy yet exist. Toward the end of the video the virtual observer flies past the farthest galaxies in the HUDF field, recorded to have a redshift past 8. This early class of low luminosity galaxies likely contained energetic stars emitting light that transformed much of the remaining normal matter in the universe from a cold gas to a hot ionized plasma.

Video:  M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130905.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona

Explanation: The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star. The violent birth of the Crab was witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. Roughly 10 light-years across today, the nebula is still expanding at a rate of over 1,000 kilometers per second. Want to watch the Crab Nebula expand? Check out this video (vimeo) animation comparing an image of M1 taken in 1999 at the European Southern Observatory, with this one, taken in 2012 at the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center. Background stars were used to register the two images. The Crab Nebula lies about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

2013 September 6 

The Quiet Sagittarius A* 

Credit: X-ray - NASA / CXC / Q. Daniel Wang (UMASS) et al., IR - NASA/STScI

Explanation: Hot gas is hard to swallow. At least that seems to be true for the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Known as source Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's black hole is centered in this infrared (red and yellow hues) and X-ray (blue) composite. Based on data from an extensive campaign of observations by the orbiting Chandra X-ray telescope, the diffuse emission surrounding the black hole is seen in the close-up inset, the inset field spanning about 1/2 light-year across the galactic center some 26,000 light-years away. Astronomers have found that the X-ray emission originates in hot gas drawn from the winds of massive young stars in the region. The Chandra data indicate that only about 1% or less of the gas within the black hole's gravitational influence ever reaches the event horizon, losing enough heat and angular momentum to fall into the black hole, while the rest of the gas escapes in an outflow. The result explains why the Milky Way's black hole is so quiet, much fainter than might be expected in energetic X-rays. It likely holds for most supermassive black holes in galaxies in the nearby Universe.

2013 August 15 

The Magellanic Stream 
Credit: Science - NASA, ESA, A. Fox, P. Richter et al. 
Image - D. Nidever et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF, A. Mellinger, LAB Survey, Parkes, Westerbork, and Arecibo Obs.

Explanation: In an astronomical version of the search for the source of the Nile, astronomers now have strong evidence for the origin of the Magellanic Stream. This composite image shows the long ribbon of gas, discovered at radio wavelengths in the 1970s, in pinkish hues against an optical all-sky view across the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Both Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, dwarf satellite galaxies of the the Milky Way, are seen near the head of the stream at the right. Data from Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph were used to explore abundances of elements along sightlines to quasars that intersect the stream. The results indicate that most of the stream's material comes from the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Magellanic Stream is likely the result of gravitational tidal interactionsbetween the two dwarf galaxies some 2 billion years ago, the Small Magellanic Cloud losing more material in the encounter because of its lower mass.

2013 August 24 

Earth Waves at Saturn 
Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Cassini Project, Denizens of Earth

Explanation: This friendly photo collage is constructed from more than 1,400 images shared by denizens of planet Earth as part of the Cassini Mission's July 19th Wave at Saturn event. The base picture of Earth corresponds to the view from the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft on that date as its own cameras recorded images including planet Earth as a pale blue dot in the background. Of course, Saturn was 9.65 Astronomical Units away at the time, so it took light from all the waving Earth dwellers just over 80 minutes to travel there. Want to smile? Download and zoom in to the full-resolution (28MB jpg file) collage image available here.

Astronomy News:

UA astronomers take sharpest photos ever of the night sky

Published: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 - 17:22 in Astronomy & Space

Related images
(click to enlarge)

Yuri Beletsky, Las Campanas Observatory

Laird Close and Ya-Lin Wu; NASA, C.R. O'Dell and S.K. Wong

Laird Close/UA

Astronomers at the University of Arizona, the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy and the Carnegie Observatory have developed a new type of camera that allows scientists to take sharper images of the night sky than ever before. The team has been developing this technology for more than 20 years at observatories in Arizona, most recently at the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, and has now deployed the latest version of these cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope.

"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible," said UA astronomy professor Laird Close, the project's principal scientist. "We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across -- the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the moon."

The twofold improvement over past efforts rests on the fact that for the first time, a telescope with a large diameter primary mirror is being used for digital photography at its theoretical resolution limit in visible wavelengths -- light that the human eye can see.

"As we move towards shorter wavelengths, image sharpness improves," said Jared Males, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the UA's department of astronomy. "Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared -- or long wavelength -- light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum."

These images are also at least twice as sharp as what the Hubble Space Telescope can make, because with its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror. Until now, Hubble always produced the best visible light images, since even large ground-based telescope with complex adaptive optics imaging cameras could only make blurry images in visible light.

To overcome atmospheric turbulence, which plagues earth-based telescopes by causing the image to blur, Close's team developed a very powerful adaptive optics system that floats a thin (1/16th of an inch) curved glass mirror (2.8 feet across) on a magnetic field 30 feet above the telescope's primary mirror.

This so-called Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) can change its shape at 585 points on its surface 1,000 times each second, counteracting the blurring effects of the atmosphere.

"As a result, we can see the visible sky more clearly than ever before," Close said. "It's almost like having a telescope with a 21-foot mirror in space."

The new adaptive optics system, called MagAO for "Magellan Adaptive Optics," has already made some important scientific discoveries, published today in three scientific papers in the Astrophysical Journal. As the system was being tested and received what astronomers call "first light," the team pointed it to a famous and well-studied massive star that gives the Great Orion Nebula (Object M42) most of its UV light. The Orion Nebula, located just below Orion's Belt visible as smudge of light even with regular binoculars.

Considered young at about 1 million years old, this star, called Theta 1 Ori C, has been previously known to be in fact a binary star pair made up of two stars called C1 and C2. However, the separation between the two is so small -- about the average distance between Earth and Uranus -- that astronomers had never been able to resolve the famous pair in a direct telescope photo.

Once MagAO and its visible science camera called VisAO were pointed towards Theta Ori 1 C, the results were immediate.

"I have been imaging Theta 1 Ori C for more than 20 years and never could directly see that it was in fact two stars," Close said. "But as soon as we turned on the MagAO system it was beautifully split into two stars."

In another result, MagAO has shed light on another mystery: How do how planets form from disks of dust and gas affected by the strong ionizing light called stellar wind coming from a massive star like Theta 1 Ori C, which has about 44 times the mass of the sun?

The team used MagAO and VisAO to look for red light from ionized hydrogen gas to trace out how the strong UV radiation and stellar wind from Theta 1 Ori C affects the disks around its neighboring stars.

"Close to Theta 1 Ori C, there are two very young stars surrounded by disks of gas and dust," said Ya-Lin Wu, a graduate student and lead author on one of the publications. "Theta 1 Ori C pummels those disks with stellar wind and UV light. It looks like they are being bent backwards by a strong wind."

MagAO's photo revealed that the two stars and their protoplanetary disks are heavily distorted into teardrop shapes as the strong UV light and wind create shock fronts and drag gas downwind of the pair.

The distribution of gas and dust in young planetary systems is another unsolved problem in planet formation. The team used VisAO's simultaneous/spectral differential imager, or SDI, to estimate the mass of another intriguing object in the Orion Nebula: one of a few stars in Orion sporting a rare "silhouette disk." The SDI camera allowed the light from the star to be removed at a very high level -- offering, for the first time, a clear look at the inner regions of the silhouette.

"The disk lies in front of the bright Orion nebula, so we see the dark shadow cast as the dust in the disk absorbs background light from the nebula," said Kate Follette, a graduate student and lead author of one of the three papers published in the Astrophysical Journal. "Picture a moth flying across a bright movie screen: Its body will appear opaque, while the wings will be partially transparent. Our SDI instrument allows us to peer into the silhouette and trace how much dust is at each location in the disk based on how transparent or opaque it is."

"We were surprised to find that the amount of attenuated light from the nebula never reached an opaque point," she said. "It seems as though the outer parts of this disk have less dust than we would have expected."

"It is important to understand how dust is laid out in these objects because that dust and gas is what nature uses to build planets," Close explained. "Our new imaging capabilities revealed there is very little dust and gas in the outer part of the disk."

According to Close, the silhouette disk might have been close to the massive star Theta 1 Ori C at some point, which might have blown away its outer dust and gas.

"This tells us something about planet-forming disks in these dense, stellar nurseries," Close said. "There appears to be a limit to the formation of massive planets very far away from their parent stars. One possible explanation might be the presence of a massive star like Theta 1 Ori C stripping away the outer gas and dust."

Source: University of Arizona

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.

6 Sept

SBAS Monthly General Meeting at El Camino College planetarium. 7:30 PM Topic: “Adaptive Optics Speaker: Dr. Reed Riddle, California Institute of Technology http://www.sbastro.net/.

9 Sept

LAAS LAAS General Meeting.

Griffith Observatory Event Horizon Theater 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

Sept. 12 & 13  The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2013

Telexploration: How video game technologies can take NASA to the next level

How would you like to swim in the oceans of Europa? What would it feel like to climb Mount Olympus on Mars? Is it possible for all of us to experience these journeys together? The goal of the Telexploration project is to make us better explorers by building immersive environments that feel like we are really there. By drawing together technologies from sources as unlikely as the video game industry and advancing the state of the art in human-system interaction, we are working towards low-cost “holodecks” - not only for every NASA mission scientist, but for every person who longs to explore space with us. This presentation will describe our progress towards these ambitious goals as well as the challenges that are ahead.

Speaker:

Dr. Jeff Norris Planning & Execution Systems manager, Systems and Software Division Jet Propulsion Laboratory

	Locations:		Thursday, Sept 12, 2013, 7pm The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA › Directions Friday, Sept 13, 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.

19 Sep 2013

Club Meeting

Using the Club’s 16-inch Dobsonian

Jason Fields

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 September:

Moon: Sept 5 new, Sept 12 1^st quarter, Sept 19 full, Sept 27 last quarter               

Planets:  Mercury, Venus & Saturn are visible briefly after sunset in the West.  Mars & Jupiter are in the pre-dawn sky in the East.

Other Events:

7 Sept

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

7 Sept

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

14 Sept

Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

22 Sept Autumnal Equinox

28 Sept

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

Sky & Telescope Magazine -- Choosing Your Equipment

Orion Telescopes & Binoculars -- Buying Guides

Telescopes.com -- Telescopes 101

General

e! Science News Astronomy & Space

NASA Gallery

Astronomical Society of the Pacific (educational, amateur & professional)

Amateur Online Tools, Journals, Vendors, Societies, Databases

The Astronomy White Pages (U.S. & International Amateur Clubs & Societies)

American Astronomical Society (professional)

More...

Regional (Southern California, Washington, D.C. & Colorado)

Southern California & Beyond Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria

Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting

Los Angeles Astronomical Society (LAAS)

South Bay Astronomical Society (SBAS)

Orange County Astronomers

The Local Group Astronomy Club (Santa Clarita)

Ventura County Astronomical Society

The Astronomical Society of Greenbelt

National Capital Astronomers

Northern Virginia Astronomy Club

Colorado Springs Astronomical Society

Denver Astronomical Society

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, President & 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