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)

Friday, February 6, 2015

2015 February

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter February 2015

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 6
General Calendar p.9
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 9
    Observing p. 11
Useful Links p. 12
About the Club p. 13

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

5 Feb
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
"Building Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Magellan Space Telescope"
Melissa Jolliff
A1/1735

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of 2015, the meeting room is A1/1735.  Jan. 8 is an exception (2nd Thursday) due to New Year’s Day).

Our Feb. 5 meeting will feature a description of a visit to the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory at the University of Arizona by Melissa Jolliff.  The laboratory produces very large optics for some of the largest telescopes on earth, and Melissa's presentation is entitled "Building Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Magellan Space Telescope."  Below are some related links
http://mirrorlab.as.arizona.edu/ 
Video of the casting:  http://abell.as.arizona.edu/~hill/GMT2/GMT2_Casting.mov 

To add context, Mark Clayson will also present a brief survey of the largest telescopes in the world. See the 2 figures in the astronomy news section of this newsletter.

Club News:  

From Jim Edwards:  Wanted to share an image I generated from just 4 individual 30 second pictures which have been registered, stacked, and stretched in contrast/brightness.  Not too shabby!  I'd like to experiment with the club's stellar H-alpha (and Oxygen?) filters, make a cool color image.

A reminder that for most of us, our club membership expired Dec. 31 (except those who joined in the last few months and likely paid also for 2015).  If you haven’t yet, we invite you to renew for 2015 at your earliest convenience & in time for the pizza lunch Jan. 8 (the first of our quarterly pizza parties of the year) -- we must have your $12 dues payment (& pizza order -- see the menu above) by Thursday, Jan. 8 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 Alan Olson at M1-107. 


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

(from Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)
Game/Simulation: Super Planet Crash http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150112.html
Game Credit & BY-NC-ND CC License: Stefano Meschiari (U. Texas at Austin) & the SAVE/Point Team
Explanation: Can you create a planetary system that lasts for 500 years? Super Planet Crash, the featured game, allows you to try. To create up to ten planets, just click anywhere near the central star. Planet types can be selected on the left in order of increasing mass: Earth, Super-Earth, Ice giant, Giant planet, Brown dwarf, or Dwarf star. Each planet is gravitationally attracted not only to the central Sun-like star, but to other planets. Points are awarded, with bonus factors applied for increasingly crowded and habitable systems. The game ends after 500 years or when a planet is gravitationally expelled. Many exoplanetary systems are being discovered in recent years, and Super Planet Crash demonstrates why some remain stable. As you might suspect after playing Super Planet Crash a few times, there is reason to believe that our own Solar System has lost planets during its formation.

Our Galaxy's Magnetic Field from Planck 
Image Credit & Copyright: ESA/Planck; Acknowledgement: M.-A. Miville-Deschênes, CNRS – IAS, U. Paris-XI
Explanation: What does the magnetic field of our Galaxy look like? It has long been known that a modest magnetic field pervades our Milky Way Galaxy because it is seen to align small dust grains that scatter background light. Only recently, however, has the Sun-orbiting Planck satellite made a high-resolution map of this field. Color coded, the 30-degree wide map confirms, among other things, that the Galaxy's interstellar magnetism is strongest in the central disk. The revolution of charged gas around the Galactic center creates this magnetism, and it is hypothesized that viewed from the top, the Milky Way's magnetic field would appear as a spiral swirling out from the center. What caused many of the details in this and similar Planck maps -- and how magnetism in general affected our Galaxy's evolution -- will likely remain topics of research for years to come.
Yellow Balls in W33 
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Explanation: Infrared wavelengths of 3.6, 8.0, and 24.0 microns observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope are mapped into visible colors red, green, and blue in this striking image. The cosmic cloud of gas and dust is W33, a massive starforming complex some 13,000 light-years distant, near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. So what are all those yellow balls? Citizen scientists of the web-based Milky Way Project found the features they called yellow balls as they scanned many Spitzer images and persistently asked that question of researchers. Now there is an answer. The yellow balls in Spitzer images are identified as an early stage of massive star formation. They appear yellow because they are overlapping regions of red and green, the assigned colors that correspond to dust and organic molecules known as PAHs at Spitzer wavelengths. Yellow balls represent the stage before newborn massive stars clear out cavities in their surrounding gas and dust and appear as green-rimmed bubbles with red centers in the Spitzer image. Of course, the astronomical crowdsourcing success story is only part of the Zooniverse. The Spitzer image spans 0.5 degrees or about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of W33.
Titan Seas Reflect Sunlight 
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, U. Arizona, U. Idaho
Explanation: Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding flash? The reason: a sunglint from liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that, when the angle is right, reflect sunlight as if they were mirrors. Pictured here in false-color, the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn imaged the cloud-covered Titan last summer in different bands of cloud-piercing infrared light. This specular reflection was so bright it saturated one of Cassini's infrared cameras. Although the sunglint was annoying -- it was also useful. The reflecting regions confirm that northern Titan houses a wide and complex array of seas with a geometry that indicatesperiods of significant evaporation. During its numerous passes of our Solar System's most mysterious moon, Cassini has revealed Titan to be a world with active weather -- including times when it rains a liquefied version of natural gas.

The Galactic Core in Infrared 
Credit: Hubble: NASA, ESA, & D. Q. Wang (U. Mass, Amherst); Spitzer: NASA, JPL, & S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech)
Explanation: What's happening at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy? To help find out, the orbiting Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have combined their efforts to survey the region in unprecedented detail in infrared light.Infrared light is particularly useful for probing the Milky Way's center because visible light is more greatly obscured by dust. The above image encompasses more than 2,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope's NICMOStaken in 2008. The image spans 300 by 115 light years with such high resolution that structures only 20 times the size of our own Solar System are discernable. Clouds of glowing gas and dark dust as well as three large star clusters are visible. Magnetic fields may be channeling plasma along the upper left near the Arches Cluster, while energetic stellar winds are carving pillars near the Quintuplet Cluster on the lower left. The massive Central Cluster of stars surrounding Sagittarius A* is visible on the lower right. Why several central, bright, massive stars appear to be unassociated with these star clusters is not yet understood.


Astronomy News:

The mouth of the beast

Published: Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 09:02 in Astronomy & Space

Related images

ESO
In 1976 several elongated comet-like objects were discovered on pictures taken with the UK Schmidt Telescope in Australia. Because of their appearance, they became known as cometary globules even though they have nothing in common with comets. They were all located in a huge patch of glowing gas called the Gum Nebula. They had dense, dark, dusty heads and long, faint tails, which were generally pointing away from the Vela supernova remnant located at the centre of the Gum Nebula. Although these objects are relatively close by, it took astronomers a long time to find them as they glow very dimly and are therefore hard to detect. The object shown in this new picture, CG4, which is also sometimes referred to as God's Hand, is one of these cometary globules. It is located about 1300 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Puppis (The Poop, or Stern).

 The head of CG4, which is the part visible on this image and resembles the head of the gigantic beast, has a diameter of 1.5 light-years. The tail of the globule -- which extends downwards and is not visible in the image -- is about eight light-years long. By astronomical standards this makes it a comparatively small cloud.

 The relatively small size is a general feature of cometary globules. All of the cometary globules found so far are isolated, relatively small clouds of neutral gas and dust within the Milky Way, which are surrounded by hot ionised material.

 The head part of CG4 is a thick cloud of gas and dust, which is only visible because it is illuminated by the light from nearby stars. The radiation emitted by these stars is gradually destroying the head of the globule and eroding away the tiny particles that scatter the starlight. However, the dusty cloud of CG4 still contains enough gas to make several Sun-sized stars and indeed, CG4 is actively forming new stars, perhaps triggered as radiation from the stars powering the Gum Nebula reached CG4.

 Why CG4 and other cometary globules have their distinct form is still a matter of debate among astronomers and two theories have developed. Cometary globules, and therefore also CG4, could originally have been spherical nebulae, which were disrupted and acquired their new, unusual form because of the effects of a nearby supernova explosion. Other astronomers suggest, that cometary globules are shaped by stellar winds and ionising radiation from hot, massive OB star. These effects could first lead to the bizarrely (but appropriately!) named formations known as elephant trunks and then eventually cometary globules.

 To find out more, astronomers need to find out the mass, density, temperature, and velocities of the material in the globules. These can be determined by the measurements of molecular spectral lines which are most easily accessible at millimetre wavelengths -- wavelengths at which telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) operate.

 This picture comes from the ESO Cosmic Gems programme, an outreach initiative to produce images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes, for the purposes of education and public outreach. The programme makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for science observations. All data collected may also be suitable for scientific purposes, and are made available to astronomers through ESO's science archive.

Source: ESO

A historical survey of the largest telescopes, and shown to scale:



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/ 

6 Feb
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic: Astronomers Without Borders: A Global Astronomy Community
Speaker: Mike Simmons, Astronomers Without Borders

9 Feb
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

February 12 & 13 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2015

No way back: Charting Irreversible Climate Change with Jason-3

As humans drive Earth's climate into a new regime, it is critical to keep our fingers on the pulse of the planet. Sea level rise is both a stark reminder of our impact on the climate and its impact on us. The oceans capture over 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, expanding as they warm. They also collect water from melting glaciers and ice sheets, making sea level rise a doubly important indicator of global warming. Without adaptation, a 2 meter rise would displace 187 million people worldwide. Sea level will continue to rise, but how fast? Like its predecessors, Jason-3 will serve as our eyes on sea level rise. Measuring global sea level once every 10 days, it will chart out the global rise of the oceans--a rise that is unlikely to subside or reverse for generations. But Jason-3 will be more than a sentinel of climate change. It will also measure the tilt of the ocean surface providing oceanographers with information about ocean currents, measure wind and waves helping forecasters predict marine weather, and even find local warm spots that can intensify hurricanes. In short, Jason-3 is going to be pretty cool.
Speaker:
Dr. Joshua Willis – Jason 3 Project Scientist
Locations:
Thursday, Feb 12, 2014, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Feb 13, 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.







5 Feb
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
"Building Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Magellan Space Telescope"
Melissa Jolliff
A1/1735

Observing:
The following data are from the 2014 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2014 Skygazer’s Almanac & monthly Sky at a Glance.

Current sun & moon rise/set/phase data for L.A.:  http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/usa/los-angeles

A weekly 5 minute video about what’s up in the night sky:  www.skyandtelescope.com/skyweek.

Sun, Moon & Planets for February:


Moon: Feb 3 full, Feb 12 last quarter, Feb 18 new, Feb 25 1st quarter                  
Planets: Venus & Mars are visible in the W briefly after sunset.  Mercury is visible in the SE just before sunrise. Jupiter is up all night until just before dawn.  Saturn is visible in the SE in the morning for a few hours before sunrise.
Other Events:

6 Feb Jupiter at opposition

6-20 Feb The zodiacal light is on good display for observers at mid-northern latitudes.  Look to the west about 80 minutes after sunset for a huge, tall pyramid of diffuse light; it slopes left along the ecliptic, with Venus and Mars at its base.

 
14 Feb
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/

21 Feb Mars 1.5deg S of Moon, Venus 0.5deg S of Mars, Uranus 0.3deg S of Moon, occultation

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

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

24 Feb Mercury greatest elongation W (27deg)

28 Feb
Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm


Internet Links:

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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