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, May 13, 2014

2014 May

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter May 2014

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 5
General Calendar p.7
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 7
    Observing p. 9
Useful Links p. 11
About the Club p. 12

Club News & Calendar.

Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

15 May 2014
Club Meeting
Cancelled
----
A1/1735
19 June 2014
Club Meeting
 "Zooming into the center of our Galaxy: Of Black Holes and Gas Clouds".
Leo Meyer, UCLA
A1/1735
17 July 2014
Club Meeting
Helioseismology
Edward Rhodes, USC
A1/1735
21 Aug 2014
Club Meeting
A Tour of the new Aerospace E POD (A6) Telescope & Facility
Richard Rudy
Gather in A6 Lobby then to          E Pod

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are on 3rd Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of 2014 except May, the meeting room is A1/1735.

News:  

Our scheduled 15 May club mtg. is cancelled.  This is because of the delay again of the A6 EPod tour, and the 2 backup presentations also having last-minute cancellations.  And a work mtg. (division level) conflict for myself.

The A6 E Pod telescope completion has continued to suffer schedule delays, and so once again our tour is being put off to Aug 21, when 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/

The May 8 presentation, “Mass Extinctions as Lognormal Processes,” by Dr. Claudio Maccone, was videorecorded, and has been posted to the club’s Aerolink archive folder (or at least the 2nd part (1Gb) – the 1st part is having trouble uploading – 2Gb in HiDef – if we can’t upload, it will be available by USB drive transfer).  https://aerolink.aero.org/cs/llisapi.dll?func=ll&objId=22795199&objAction=browse&viewType=1  An interesting treatment of the later factors in the Drake Equation.

The RTMC Astronomy Expo at Camp Oakes, Big Bear, will be May 22-26.  See www.rtmcastronomyexpo.org for more information and registration.

Our own Jim Edwards submitted the following report on May 5:

“Just an FYI, Mark, that I was up on my roofdeck the other night with my 10" Meade that I haven't dragged up there for at least a year.

“Although I failed that particular evening, I have subsequently been able to get my EQ6 goto mount to talk to my planetarium s/w, Starry Night 6, (such that I can easily align and slew to desired objects) as well as to play nice with the club's mighty ATIK imager and associated s/w.  Lol, I finally figured out how to use the polar scope on the mount, d'oh!  And I successfully mounted my $10 green laser to the scope such that I have it, a Telrad, and a 50x finder scope all aligned to make closing in on targets easier.

“Unfortunately, the weather has not been cooperating--- its been windy and hazy the past few night, this despite the ClearSky website saying conditions should be good (they weren't!).  Regardless, I'm having some fun and that's the main thing(?!).  When I get some decent images (or even not-so-decent images), I'll of course share them with the club.

Best,
Jim Edwards
310.480.3519



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


VIDEO:  Read the whole article on Space.com A dive through data of 1774 planets in 1081 star systems. From planets whose orbits take hundreds or thousands of years, to those that take hours or days.
VIDEO: Time Lapse of a Total Lunar Eclipse http://us-mg205.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.partner=sbc&.rand=b5dn5454c9jog
Video Credit: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona
Explanation: Why would a bright full Moon suddenly become dark? Because it entered the shadow of the Earth. Almost two weeks ago this exact event happened as the Moon underwent a total lunar eclipse. That eclipse, visible from the half of the Earth then facing the Moon, was captured in numerous spectacular photographs and is depicted in the above time lapse video covering about an hour. The above video, recorded from Mt. Lemmon Sky Center in Arizona, USA, keeps the Earth shadow centered and shows the Moon moving through it from west to east. The temporarily good alignment between Earth, Moon, and Sun will show itself againtomorrow -- precisely half a moon-th (month) later -- when part of the Earth will pass through part of the new Moon's shadow.
VIDEO:  Two Rings for Asteroid Chariklo http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140409.html
Video Illustration Credit: Lucie Maquet, Observatoire de Paris, LESIA
Explanation: Asteroids can have rings. In a surprising discovery announced two weeks ago, the distant asteroid 10199 Chariklo was found to have at least two orbiting rings. Chariklo's diameter of about 250 kilometers makes it the largest of the measured centaur asteroids, but now the smallest known object to have rings. The centaur-class minor planet orbits the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. The above video gives an artist's illustration of how the rings were discovered. As Chariklo passed in 2013 in front of a faint star, unexpected but symmetric dips in the brightness of the star revealed the rings. Planetary astronomers are now runningcomputer simulations designed to investigate how Chariklo's unexpected ring system might have formed, how it survives, and given the asteroid's low mass and close passes of other small asteroids and the planet Uranus, how long it may last.

That Night over Half Dome 
Image Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo (Deep Sky Colors)
Explanation: Captured one night last May this eight frame mosaic starts on the left, down Northside Drive through Yosemite National Park. It ends thousands of light-years away though, as the arc of the Milky Way tracks toward the center of our galaxy on the right, far beyond the park's rugged skyline. That night was still moonless when the storm clouds retreated, so the rocky faces of the surrounding mountains are lit by campfires and artifical lights. Yosemite Falls is at the left. The granite face of Half Dome juts above the far horizon, near the center of the view. The remarkable flash above it is a bright meteor. Part of the annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower the colorful streak is moving up, its trail pointing directly back to the shower's radiant, low in Aquarius. This year's Eta Aquarids should peak in the moonless early morning hours of May 6 as the Earth sweeps through dust from the tail of Comet Halley.

The El Gordo Massive Galaxy Cluster 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (UC Davis) et al.
Explanation: It is bigger than a bread box. In fact, it is much bigger than all bread boxes put together. Galaxy cluster ACT-CL J0102-4915 is one of the largest and most massive objects known. Dubbed "El Gordo", the seven billion light years (z = 0.87) distant galaxy cluster spans about seven million light years and holds the mass of a million billion Suns. The above image of El Gordo is a composite of a visible light image from the Hubble Space Telescope, an X-ray image from the Chandra Observatory showing the hot gas in pink, and a computer generated map showing the most probable distribution of dark matter in blue, computed from gravitational lens distortions of background galaxies. Almost all of the bright spots are galaxies. The blue dark matter distribution indicates that the cluster is in the middle stages of a collision between two large galaxy clusters. A careful inspection of the image will reveal a nearly vertical galaxy that appears unusually long. That galaxy is actually far in the background and has its image stretched by the gravitational lens action of the massive cluster.
Saturn in Blue and Gold 
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Explanation: Why is Saturn partly blue? The above picture of Saturn approximates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The above picture was taken in 2006 March by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Here Saturn's majestic rings appear directly only as a thin vertical line. The rings show their complex structure in the dark shadows they create on the image left. Saturn's fountain moonEnceladus, only about 500 kilometers across, is seen as the bump in the plane of the rings. The northern hemisphere of Saturn can appear partly blue for the same reason that Earth's skies can appear blue -- molecules in the cloudless portions of both planet's atmospheres are better at scattering blue light than red. When looking deep into Saturn's clouds, however, the natural gold hue of Saturn's clouds becomes dominant. It is not known whysouthern Saturn does not show the same blue hue -- one hypothesis holds that clouds are higher there. It is also not known why Saturn's clouds are colored gold.

Astronomy News:

BOSS quasars track the expanding universe -- most precise measurement yet

Published: Monday, April 7, 2014 - 15:16 in Astronomy & Space

 

Illustration by Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Andreu Font-Ribera, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, Berkeley Lab.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in intergalactic gas at high redshifts, tracing the structure of the young universe. BOSS charts the history of the universe's expansion in order to illuminate the nature of dark energy, and new measures of large-scale structure have yielded the most precise measurement of expansion since galaxies first formed. The latest quasar results combine two separate analytical techniques. A new kind of analysis, led by physicist Andreu Font-Ribera of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and his team, was published late last year. Analysis using a tested approach, but with far more data than before, has just been published by Timothée Delubac, of EPFL Switzerland and France's Centre de Saclay, and his team. The two analyses together establish the expansion rate at 68 kilometers per second per million light years at redshift 2.34, with an unprecedented accuracy of 2.2 percent.
"This means if we look back to the universe when it was less than a quarter of its present age, we'd see that a pair of galaxies separated by a million light years would be drifting apart at a velocity of 68 kilometers a second as the universe expands," says Font-Ribera, a postdoctoral fellow in Berkeley Lab's Physics Division. "The uncertainty is plus or minus only a kilometer and a half per second." Font-Ribera presented the findings at the April 2014 meeting of the American Physical Society in Savannah, GA.
BOSS employs both galaxies and distant quasars to measure baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), a signature imprint in the way matter is distributed, resulting from conditions in the early universe. While also present in the distribution of invisible dark matter, the imprint is evident in the distribution of ordinary matter, including galaxies, quasars, and intergalactic hydrogen.
"Three years ago BOSS used 14,000 quasars to demonstrate we could make the biggest 3D maps of the universe," says Berkeley Lab's David Schlegel, principal investigator of BOSS. "Two years ago, with 48,000 quasars, we first detected baryon acoustic oscillations in these maps. Now, with more than 150,000 quasars, we've made extremely precise measures of BAO."
The BAO imprint corresponds to an excess of about five percent in the clustering of matter at a separation known as the BAO scale. Recent experiments including BOSS and the Planck satellite study of the cosmic microwave background put the BAO scale, as measured in today's universe, at very close to 450 million light years -- a "standard ruler" for measuring expansion.
BAO directly descends from pressure waves (sound waves) moving through the early universe, when particles of light and matter were inextricably entangled; 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe had cooled enough for light to go free. The cosmic microwave background radiation preserves a record of the early acoustic density peaks; these were the seeds of the subsequent BAO imprint on the distribution of matter.
Quasars extend the standard ruler
Previous work from BOSS used the spectra of over a million galaxies to measure the BAO scale with a remarkable one percent accuracy. But beyond redshift 0.7 (roughly six billion light years distant), galaxies become fainter and more difficult to see. For much higher redshifts like those in the present studies, averaging 2.34, BOSS pioneered the "Lyman-alpha forest" method of using spectra from distant quasars to calculate the density of intergalactic hydrogen.
As the light from a distant quasar passes through intervening hydrogen gas, patches of greater density absorb more light. The absorption lines of neutral hydrogen in the spectrum (Lyman-alpha lines) pinpoint each dense patch by how much they are redshifted. There are so many lines in such a spectrum, in fact, that it resembles a forest -- the Lyman-alpha forest.
With enough good quasar spectra, close enough together, the position of the gas clouds can be mapped in three dimensions -- both along the line of sight for each quasar and transversely among dense patches revealed by other quasar spectra. From these maps the BAO signal is extracted.
Although introduced by BOSS only a few years ago, this method of using Lyman-alpha forest data, called autocorrelation, by now seems almost traditional. The just-published autocorrelation results by Delubac and his colleagues employ the spectra of almost 140,000 carefully selected BOSS quasars.
Font-Ribera and his colleagues determine BAO using even more BOSS quasars in a different way. Quasars are young galaxies powered by massive black holes, extremely bright, extremely distant, and thus highly redshifted. Instead of comparing spectra to other spectra, Font-Ribera's team correlated quasars themselves to the spectra of other quasars, a method called cross-correlation.
"Quasars are massive galaxies, and we expect them to be in the denser parts of the universe, where the density of the intergalactic gas should also be higher," says Font-Ribera. "Therefore we expect to find more of the absorbing gas than average when we look near quasars." The question was whether the correlation would be good enough to see the BAO imprint.
Indeed the BAO imprint in cross-correlation was strong. Delubac and his team combined their autocorrelation results with the cross-correlation results of Font-Ribera and his team, and they converged on narrow constraints for the BAO scale. Autocorrelation and cross-correlation also converged in the precision of their measures of the universe's expansion rate, called the Hubble parameter. At redshift 2.34, the combined measure was equivalent to 68 plus or minus 1.5 kilometers per second per million light years.
"It's the most precise measurement of the Hubble parameter at any redshift, even better than the measurement we have from the local universe at redshift zero," says Font-Ribera. "These results allow us to study the geometry of the universe when it was only a fourth its current age. Combined with other cosmological experiments, we can learn about dark energy and put tight constraints on the curvature of the universe -- it's very flat!"
David Schlegel remarks that when BOSS was first getting underway, the cross-correlation technique had been suggested, but "some of us were afraid it wouldn't work. We were wrong. Our precision measures are even better than we optimistically hoped for."

Source: DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory



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.

Monday, May 5th 2014
The Biggest Eyes on Earth: Building the Giant Magellan Telescope
Dr. Wendy Freedman
Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director,
The Carnegie Observatories
High in Chile’s Atacama Desert, construction of the largest telescope ever created is underway: the Giant Magellan Telescope, ten times more powerful than the Hubble Telescope. Dr. Freedman, head of the international GMT consortium, will discuss the complex teamwork involved in building this extraordinary instrument, and how the GMT will increase our understanding of dark matter and dark energy, the evolution of galaxies, the exciting field of exoplanets, and more. The GMT caps more than a century of leadership by the Carnegie Observatories in telescope technologies and contributions to our knowledge of the universe.

Monday, May 19th 2014

Seeing the Invisible:  What is Dark Matter?
Dr. Andrew Benson
George Ellery Hale Distinguished Scholar in Theoretical Astrophysics,
The Carnegie Observatories

Astronomy tells us that most of our universe is made from so-called “dark matter” – an invisible substance that holds together galaxies and clusters of galaxies. But how can we study something that we can’t see? Dr. Benson will describe the many ingenious ways that astronomers have found – and continue to find – to understand the nature of dark matter, including looking at how light from distant galaxies is deflected by gravitational lensing, and searching for the smallest galaxies in the universe.


2 May
7:30PM
SBAS Monthly General Meeting
Topic: TBD
Speaker: Steve Matousek, JPL

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


15 May 2014
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Cancelled
-----
A1/1735

May 22 & 23  The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2014
Putting the 'P' in 'JPL'--The Past, Present, and Future of Propulsion at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
From modest beginnings in the era of early liquid rockets through state-of-the-art propulsion systems flown on 21st century spacecraft, propulsion technologies have advanced dramatically through the decades. JPL propulsion engineer Todd J. Barber will highlight over three quarters of a century of propulsion experience at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and will also look at the future of propulsion as it applies to solar system exploration.
Speaker:
Todd Barber
Cassini Propulsion Lead Engineer

Locations:
 Thursday, May 22, 2014, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, May 23, 2014, 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.




Observing:
The following data are from the 2014 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2014 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 May:


Moon: May 7 1st quarter, May 14 full, May 21 last quarter, May 28 new, 
              
Planets:  Mercury is visible shortly after sunset.  Venus is visible just before dawn.  Jupiter is up from sunset to nearly midnight.  Saturn is up all night, and Mars from sunset to early morning.

Other Events:

3 May
Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

5 May Eta Aquarids 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.

5-11 May Astronomy Week
The next Astronomy Day this year is May 10, 2014 and on October 4, 2014.

10 May Saturn at Opposition

13, 17, 20, 27 May Double shadow transits on Jupiter

14 May Saturn 0.6 deg N. of Moon

15 May Venus Passes 1.3 Degrees S. of Uranus

22-26 May RTMC & Starlight Festival
The Big Bear Lake region is hosting two major astronomy events during the long
Memorial Day weekend in 2014. The RTMC Astronomy Expo, held in the area
since 1975, welcomes the first Starlight Festival to Big Bear Lake’s Village area.
These two events serve different audiences.

Beginning to advanced amateur astronomers attend the Astronomy Expo from
Thursday to Monday to
 observe from the dark sky of YMCA Camp Oakes,
 see new developments in amateur telescope making,
 check out commercial telescopes and equipment brought by vendors for
observers,
 listen to presentations covering observing, telescopes, and getting started
in astronomy,
 check out the Saturday swap meet, and
 socialize and observe with friends

On Saturday and Sunday, weekend visitors to Big Bear, of all ages, will learn more
about astronomy and outdoor sciences at the Astronomy Outreach
Network’s Starlight Festival at Big Bear Lake’s Village as they visit
 sidewalk astronomers,
 exhibits by the Big Bear Solar Observatory, US National Forest Service,
and others,
 commercial exhibits of science instruments, games, and activities, and
 attend presentations on the current state of astronomy and space science

Come join the fun and learn about the universe your way.

 
24 May

SBAS Saturday Night In Town Dark Sky Observing Session at Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 North Bay Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please contact Greg Benecke to confirm that the gate will be opened! http://www.sbastro.net/

25 May Mercury at Greatest Eastern Elongation & Venus 2 deg S. of Moon

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

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, membership in The Astronomical League, 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 
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