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, September 4, 2015

2015 September

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter September  2015

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 4
General Calendar p.8
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 8
    Observing p. 10
Useful Links p. 12
About the Club p. 13

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:


3 September
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
"Fun (and Publishable!) Work Using Club Equipment" – Jim Edwards

A1/1026

1 October
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Pizza Party & Games/DVD?

A1/1026

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of (except Aug. 6) 2015, the meeting room is A1/1735. 

Club News:  

At our Sept. 3 club mtg., Jim Edwards gave a great presentation on amazing contributions he has made, & any of us can make, to the science of astronomy using the club equipment.  Including astrometry, photometry, and spectrometry.  Even his teen-age son has co-authored a paper with him, and there are great astronomy STEM projects.  His charts, including website resources, will shortly be available in the club archive online.  

Also at the meeting, our new Canon EOS 6D DSLR camera (& 24-105mm lens) were demonstrated.  I has all kinds of accessories & amazing capability for astrophotography and even photometry & spectroscopy when combined with some of our other gear.  It’s available for checkout.

Sept. 18 – 18 club members will have a half night of observing on the historic Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope.  They also will tour the new Aerospace facilities on Mt. Wilson before the guided Mt. Wilson tour.

Oct. 1 – Club quarterly pizza party, & fun & games or a DVD.  The menu (same as last time) will be sent out for you to make your order & RSVP in advance.

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


Full Moon, Full Earth 
Image Credit: NASA, NOAA/DSCOVR
Explanation: The Moon was new on July 16. Its familiar nearside facing the surface of planet Earth was in shadow. But on that date a million miles away, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) captured this view of an apparently Full Moon crossing in front of a Full Earth. In fact, seen from the spacecraft's position beyond the Moon's orbit and between Earth and Sun, the fully illuminated lunar hemisphere is the less familiar farside. Only known since the dawn of the space age, the farside is mostly devoid of dark lunar maria that sprawl across the Moon's perpetual Earth-facing hemisphere. Only the small dark spot of the farside's Mare Moscoviense (Sea of Moscow) is clear, at the upper left. Planet Earth's north pole is near 11 o'clock, with the North America visited by Hurricane Dolores near center. Slight color shifts are visible around the lunar edge, an artifact of the Moon's motion through the field caused by combining the camera's separate exposures taken in quick succession through different color filters. While monitoring the Earth and solar wind for space weather forcasts, about twice a year DSCOVR can capture similar images of Moon and Earth together as it crosses the orbital plane of the Moon.
Central Cygnus Skyscape 
Image Credit & Copyright: Paul C. Swift
Explanation: In cosmic brush strokes of glowing hydrogen gas, this beautiful skyscape unfolds across the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy and the center of the northern constellation Cygnus the Swan. The featured image spans about six degrees. Bright supergiant star Gamma Cygni (Sadr) to the upper left of the image center lies in the foreground of the complex gas and dust clouds and crowded star fields. Left of Gamma Cygni, shaped like two luminous wings divided by a long dark dust lane is IC 1318, whose popular name is understandably the Butterfly Nebula. The more compact, bright nebula at the lower right is NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula. Some distance estimates for Gamma Cygni place it at around 1,800 light-years while estimates for IC 1318 and NGC 6888 range from 2,000 to 5,000 light-years.
Giant Cluster Bends, Breaks Images 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Lee & H. Ford (Johns Hopkins U.)
Explanation: What are those strange blue objects? Many of the brightest blue images are of a single, unusual, beaded, blue, ring-like galaxy which just happens to line-up behind a giant cluster of galaxies. Cluster galaxies here typically appear yellow and -- together with the cluster's dark matter -- act as a gravitational lens. A gravitational lens can create several images of background galaxies, analogous to the many points of light one would see while looking through a wine glass at a distant street light. The distinctive shape of this background galaxy -- which is probably just forming -- has allowed astronomers to deduce that it has separate images at 4, 10, 11, and 12 o'clock, from the center of the cluster. A blue smudge near the cluster center is likely another image of the same background galaxy. In all, a recent analysis postulated that at least 33 images of 11 separate background galaxies are discernable.This spectacular photo of galaxy cluster CL0024+1654 from the Hubble Space Telescope was taken in November 2004.

Astronomy News:
(from http://esciencenews.com/topics/astronomy.space)

 

Hubble survey unlocks clues to star birth in neighboring galaxy

Published: Thursday, September 3, 2015 - 17:04 in Astronomy & Space

Related images
(click to enlarge)

Credits: NASA/ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, L.C. Johnson (Univ. of Washington), PHAT team, and R. Gendler

In a survey of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope images of 2,753 young, blue star clusters in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy (M31), astronomers have found that M31 and our own galaxy have a similar percentage of newborn stars based on mass. By nailing down what percentage of stars have a particular mass within a cluster, or the Initial Mass Function (IMF), scientists can better interpret the light from distant galaxies and understand the formation history of stars in our universe.
The intensive survey, assembled from 414 Hubble mosaic photographs of M31, was a unique collaboration between astronomers and "citizen scientists," volunteers who provided invaluable help in analyzing the mountain of data from Hubble.

 "Given the sheer volume of Hubble images, our study of the IMF would not have been possible without the help of citizen scientists," said Daniel Weisz of the University of Washington in Seattle. Weisz is lead author on a paper that appeared in the June 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
Measuring the IMF was the primary driver behind Hubble's ambitious panoramic survey of our neighboring galaxy, called the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. Nearly 8,000 images of 117 million stars in the galaxy's disk were obtained from viewing Andromeda in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths.

 Stars are born when a giant cloud of molecular hydrogen, dust and trace elements collapses. The cloud fragments into small knots of material that each precipitate hundreds of stars. The stars are not all created equally: their masses can range from 1/12th to a couple hundred times the mass of our sun.
Prior to Hubble's landmark survey of the star-filled disk of M31, astronomers only had IMF measurements made in the local stellar neighborhood within our own galaxy. But Hubble's bird's-eye view of M31 allowed astronomers to compare the IMF among a larger-than-ever sampling of star clusters that are all at approximately the same distance from Earth, 2.5 million light-years. The survey is diverse because the clusters are scattered across the galaxy; they vary in mass by factors of 10, and they range in age from 4 to 24 million years old.

 To the researchers' surprise, the IMF was very similar among all the clusters surveyed. Nature apparently cooks up stars like batches of cookies, with a consistent distribution from massive blue supergiant stars to small red dwarf stars. "It's hard to imagine that the IMF is so uniform across our neighboring galaxy given the complex physics of star formation," Weisz said.

 Curiously, the brightest and most massive stars in these clusters are 25 percent less abundant than predicted by previous research. Astronomers use the light from these brightest stars to weigh distant star clusters and galaxies and to measure how rapidly the clusters are forming stars. This result suggests that mass estimates using previous work were too low because they assumed that there were too few faint low-mass stars forming along with the bright massive stars.

 This evidence also implies that the early universe did not have as many heavy elements for making planets, because there would be fewer supernovae from massive stars to manufacture heavy elements for planet building. It is critical to know the star-formation rate in the early universe--about 10 billion years ago--because that was the time when most of the universe's stars formed.
The PHAT star cluster catalog, which forms the foundation of this study, was assembled with the help of 30,000 volunteers who sifted through the thousands of images taken by Hubble to search for star clusters.

 The Andromeda Project is one of the many citizen science efforts hosted by the Zooniverse organization. Over the course of 25 days, the citizen scientist volunteers submitted 1.82 million individual image classifications based on how concentrated the stars were, their shapes, and how well the stars stood out from the background, which roughly represents 24 months of constant human attention. Scientists used these classifications to identify a sample of 2,753 star clusters, increasing the number of known clusters by a factor of six in the PHAT survey region. "The efforts of these citizen scientists opens the door to a variety of new and interesting scientific investigations, including this new measurement of the IMF," Weisz said.

 The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington.

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

 

Scientists measure slow death of the Universe

Published: Monday, August 10, 2015 - 16:03 in Astronomy & Space

Related images
(click to enlarge)

Credit: ICRAR / GAMA.
Credit ICRAR / GAMA.
Credit: ICRAR / GAMA.

An international team of astronomers studying 200,000 galaxies has measured the energy generated within a large portion of space more precisely than ever before, discovering that it's only half what it was 2 billion years ago and fading - the Universe is slowly dying. Researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia used seven of the world's most powerful telescopes to observe galaxies at 21 different wavelengths from the far ultraviolet to the far infrared.

Initial observations were conducted using the Anglo-Australian Telescope in New South Wales and supporting observations were made by two orbiting space telescopes operated by NASA and another belonging to the European Space Agency.

The research is part of the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) project, the largest multi-wavelength survey ever put together.

 "We used as many space and ground-based telescopes we could get our hands on, to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible," says ICRAR Professor Simon Driver, who presented the findings at the International Astronomical Union's General Assembly in Honolulu.

 The survey data, released to astronomers around the world, includes 200,000 galaxies each measured at 21 wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the far infrared and will help scientists better understand how different types of galaxies form.

 Professor Driver, who heads up the GAMA team, says the study set out to map and model all of the energy generated within a set volume of space.

 All energy in the Universe was created in the Big Bang with some portion locked up as mass. Stars shine by converting this mass into energy as described by Einstein's famous equation E=MC2.
"While most of the energy sloshing around was created in the aftermath of the Big Bang, additional energy is constantly being released by stars as they fuse elements like hydrogen and helium together," Professor Driver says.

"This newly released energy is either absorbed by dust as it travels through the host galaxy, or escapes into intergalactic space and travels until it hits something such as another star, planet, or very occasionally a telescope mirror."

 The fact that the Universe is slowly fading has been known since the late 1990s but this work shows that it's happening across all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the infrared, representing the most comprehensive assessment of the energy output of the nearby Universe.

"The Universe is fated to decline from here on in, like an old age that lasts forever. The Universe has basically plonked itself down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze," Professor Driver says.

 The team of researchers hope to expand the work to map energy production over the entire history of the Universe. To do this, they will use a swathe of new facilities including the world's largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, due to be built in Australia and South Africa in the next decade.

Source: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research


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.  This year's Astronomy Lecture Series will take place at A Noise Within on March 30, April 13, April 27, and May 11. Click here for more information.
3 Sept
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
"Fun (and Publishable!) Work Using Club Equipment" – Jim Edwards

A1/1026









4 Sept
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Friday Night 7:30PM Monthly General Meeting
Topic:   “The Google Lunar X Prize”
Speaker: Nathan Wong
September 10 & 11   The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2015

The Birth of Planets Around the Sun and Other Stars

With thousands of planets now known around other stars, it's natural to wonder why so many planetary systems are quite different from our own. Some stars have several planets inside the location of Mercury's orbit, where our Solar system is basically empty. Other stars have planets more massive than our Jupiter, on looping, eccentric orbits. A few stars have "hot Jupiters" circling every few days on orbits so tight the starlight heats the planets' atmospheres beyond the point where iron vaporizes. Many stars have planets intermediate in size between our rocky Earth and icy Uranus -- sizes that are completely missing from the Solar system. Some planets orbit not one, but two stars, as part of binary star systems. So where did all this diversity come from? We know planets must form from the gas and dust orbiting young stars. We see the orbiting material with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and telescopes on the ground, but the dust makes the material opaque at optical and infrared wavelengths, so it's hard to know what's going on inside. In recent years our view has become clear enough to make out some features that might be caused by young planets orbiting within the material. I will discuss several of the new images, and a few of the 3-D computer models astronomers are using to try to learn how planets are born into such diversity.
Speaker:
Dr. Neal Turner

Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream (or archived after the event)
Locations:
Thursday, Sept. 10, 2015, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Sept. 11, 2015, 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.


14 Sept
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

1 October
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Pizza Party & Games/DVD?

A1/1026

Oct. 10-11, 9am-4pm.  NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, invites the public to our annual Open House on October 10-11, 2015. The event takes visitors on a “ride” through the wonders of space. Highlights include a life-size model of the Curiosity Mars rover; demonstrations from numerous space missions; JPL’s machine shop, where robotic spacecraft parts are built; and the Microdevices Lab, where engineers and scientists use tiny technology to revolutionize space exploration.

The event and parking are free. No tickets or formal RSVP required. We recommend coming early for the best parking and shortest lines.

Observing:
The following data are from the 2015 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2015 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

Sun, Moon & Planets for September:


Moon: Sept 5 last quarter, Sept 13 new, Sept 21 1st quarter, Sept 28 full             
Planets: Saturn is in the S & SW for a few hours after sunset.  Venus, Mars & Jupiter rise and are visible in the East briefly before sunrise.  Mercury is hidden in the Sun’s glare all month.
Other Events:

4 Sept  Mercury greatest elongation E (27 deg)

 

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/



SBAS out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Greg Benecke to coordinate a location. http://www.sbastro.net/.  
2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Sept
LAAS The Garvey Ranch Observatory is open to the public every Wednesday evening from 7:30 PM to 10 PM. Go into the dome to use the 8 Inch Refractor or observe through one of our telescopes on the lawn. Visit our workshop to learn how you can build your own telescope, grind your own mirror, or sign up for our free seasonal astronomy classes.

Call 213-673-7355 for further information.
Time: 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Location: Garvey Ranch Obs. , 781 Orange Ave., Monterey Park, CA 91755


19 Sept
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

23 Sept Vernal Equinox

Sept. 27   the total ("blood moon") phase of the lunar eclipse will last 72 minutes.  Greatest (mid) eclipse occurs at 02:47 UT, which translates to California, 8 time zones earlier, to 6:47pm + 1hr for daylight savings = 7:47pm Sept. 27, if my math is right.  So it should be total for 36 minutes before & after that, or 7:11pm to 8:23pm. 7:30-8:00pm would likely be the best viewing of the "blood moon."

In L.A. the moon will rise at sunset, ~6:45pm, about an hour before mid-eclipse, and the partial phase will already be underway.  The total phase will begin about a half hour later.  The earth rotates 15 deg./hour, so the moon will be low in the East (less than 15 deg elevation at mid-eclipse, several degrees higher at the end of totality, and several degrees lower at the start of totality).  Times are 3 hrs later for Eastern Daylight Time (where the moon will be higher).

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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