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 9, 2016

2016 August

AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter August 2016

Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 4
Astronomy News p. 9
General Calendar p. 11
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 11
    Observing p. 13
Useful Links p. 15
About the Club p. 15

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:
4 Aug
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

Great Eclipse of 1991 Corporate Colloquium Video
(A1/1735)

AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45am.  For all of 2016, the meeting room is A1/1735. 


Club News:  

2017 (Aug. 21) Solar Eclipse Expedition.  A kickoff mtg. was held for those interested, with the following agenda.  Charts will be posted to the club’s website (see the 2017 Eclipse link at the top of the home page).  A link to the video of the 1991 Eclipse Corporate Colloquium will also be posted there.

•       Committee Introductions (site selection, travel, photo)
•       2017 Eclipse site selection, circumstances, climatology – Mark Clayson
•       Lodging
•       Rexburg, Idaho Falls – Marilee Wheaton
•       Jackson, Pocatello – Bob Frueholz
•       RV’s/camping – Judy Kerner
•       West Yellowstone – Bob Frueholz
•       Travel (flights & rentals, carpooling/shuttles) – Marilee Wheaton
•       Photo Pool
•       Eclipse phenomenology & night observing – Mark Clayson
•       Preliminary equipment & plans, incl. star party -- David Taylor
•       Invitation to Eclipse 1991 corporate colloquium video showing at astronomy club mtg. Thurs. Aug. 4, 11:45am, A1/1735


We have reserved viewing sites in & near Rexburg, Idaho, within a few miles of eclipse centerline (losing only 1 second of totality).  Rexburg is 25 miles north of Idaho Falls, and about an hour and a half from both West Yellowstone & Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  The in-town site is on the campus of BYU-Idaho, and the other a gun club 9 miles west of town.  Additionally, in case of local cloud cover that morning, state road 33 running thru & east & west of Rexburg provides over 50 miles of flexibility in each direction, following closely the eclipse centerline and losing no more than several seconds of totality.


Sept. 1 Mt. Wilson Night preparations are on track for the tours of the Aerospace facility & Mt. Wilson, and observing on the 60-inch telescope as well as the club’s 10-inch Meade SCT.  There is a waiting list for those not in the group limit of 25.

From: Leslie Wickman [mailto:leslie.wickman@gmail.com] 

I wonder if this might be of interest to *your* members:

http://www.mountain-skies.org/events.html

~Leslie


From Jim Edwards:  Hey Mark, I wanted to let you know that I used the new Etalon in a 2x stacked configuration on the Coronado last week.  As expected, it really cut down the brightness of the image... almost to the point of uselessness from a visual point of view.  I expect it would work better (visually) if I had employed a dark cloth to cover my head etc when viewing... the bright daylight  that leaks in around the eyepiece really shrinks one's pupil to be insensitive to dim images.  I'm going to try that next.

I was successful in capturing a number of images using the clubs ATIK imager.  My computer's software is screwed up right now, however, such that I can't view the resultant FITS files to send the best of these to you yet.  I thought computers were supposed to make our jobs easier?!  I'm still trying to fix this frustrating problem, its surprisingly onerous in its resistance to being corrected, grrrr.  So stand by for those...


Imaged today [7/25/16].  Single stack on the H-alpha Coronado solar scope.  Tried to use the 5x PowerMate but couldn't get it to focus.  Will work on that again tomorrow (?).

If there were sunspots to be seen, Sam, this scope would most certainly see them beautifully. However, the sun has been feakishly tame for the past many years, far beyond anything expected due to anticipated, historical calm/active solar cycles. There have been exceedingly few sunspots for the past 5-10 years, "nobody" knows why nor what it means with regard to future behavior.  A real mystery!

Eureka!  Pop the champagne bottles!  After several hours each day for the better part of the past two weeks, I've finally gotten my EQ6 telescope mount to "talk" with my laptop such that I am, once again, back in business to do astronomical work.

Its a complicated system with several drivers, cables, converters, programs, and configuration combinations, new computers, new operating systems, etc but I finally got things to work again... oy vey!

Of course, in hindsight, the solution should have been more obvious... despite what I ordered, the RS-232 DB9 extension cable I received is apparently NOT a straight thru wiring but the standard "mirror" wiring... grrrr!  For most applications, the hardware is supposed to be able to figure this out automatically and compensate "on the fly" but the hardware and software of my observatory system is old and of very limited distribution such that it is apparently not capable of this.

I will, of course, be documenting what I learned such that, next time, I hopefully won't have to go thru the terrible ordeal again.  But, naturally, by then something else will be the culprit...

So, of course, now that I have this figured out, the clouds are starting to come back in at night, this after it being largely clear for the past week or more.  This is more typical "Edwards luck".

At least now I'm able to proceed once things do clear up again.  I've reconfigured my scope for high magnification so as to do some planetary work while Mars and Saturn are well placed... unfortunately, because it is summer, the planetary ecliptic is low on the horizon at night such that they never get above about 40-45 degrees altitude but, hey, I'll have to deal with the undesireably large air mass and the turbulence it induces.  Hopefully I'll be able to include the new 5x Power Mate into the image train and get some real magnification... using "lucky imaging" techniques and stacking, I'm hoping to generate some good images with improved detail visible.

Challenges relating to re-collimation and alignment of the imager with the eyepiece, as well as the guide scope and its own imager, is yet to be done and frought with its own hazards.  So, I'm still not entirely out of the woods yet.

Wheeeeeee!  Quite the journey.  Remind me... this is fun, right?   Good times all.       :-\






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

The Swirling Core of the Crab Nebula 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA - Acknowledgment: J. Hester (ASU), M. Weisskopf (NASA / MSFC)
Explanation: At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it's actually the rightmost of two bright stars, just below a central swirl in this stunning Hubble snapshot of the nebula's core. Some three light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, cavities and swirling filaments bathed in an eerie blue light. The blue glow is visible radiation given off by electrons spiraling in a strong magnetic field at nearly the speed of light. Like a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the emission from the nebula, driving a shock wave through surrounding material and accelerating the spiraling electrons. With more mass than the Sun and the density of an atomic nucleus, the spinning pulsar is the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded. The Crab Nebula is the expanding remnant of the star's outer layers. The supernova explosion was witnessed on planet Earth in the year 1054.
Falcon 9: Launch and Landing 
Image Credit & Copyright: Michael Seeley
Explanation: Shortly after midnight on July 18 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, planet Earth. About 9 minutes later, the rocket's first stage returned to the spaceport. This single time exposure captures the rocket's launch arc and landing streak from Jetty Park only a few miles away. Along a climbing, curving trajectory the launch is traced by the initial burn of the first stage, ending near the top of the bright arc before stage separation. Due to perspective the next bright burn appears above the top of the launch arc in the photo, the returning first stage descending closer to the Cape. The final landing burn creates a long streak as the first stage slows and comes to rest at Landing Zone 1. Yesterday the Dragon cargo spacecraft delivered to orbit by the rocket's second stage was attached to the International Space Station.
M2-9: Wings of a Butterfly Nebula 
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA - Processing: Judy Schmidt
Explanation: Are stars better appreciated for their art after they die? Actually, stars usually create their most artistic displays as they die. In the case of low-mass stars like our Sun and M2-9 pictured above, the stars transform themselves from normal stars to white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous envelopes. The expended gas frequently forms an impressive display called a planetary nebula that fades gradually over thousands of years. M2-9, a butterfly planetary nebula 2100light-years away shown in representative colors, has wings that tell a strange but incomplete tale. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto. The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance. Much remains unknown about the physical processes that cause planetary nebulae.


Deep Magellanic Clouds Image Indicates Collisions 
Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN) & David Martinez-Delgado (U. Heidelberg)
Explanation: Did the two most famous satellite galaxies of our Milky Way Galaxy once collide? No one knows for sure, but a detailed inspection of deep images like that featured here give an indication that they have. Pictured, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is on the top left and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is on the bottom right. The surrounding field is monochrome color-inverted to highlight faint filaments, shown in gray. Perhaps surprisingly, the featured research-grade image was compiled with small telescopes to cover the large angular field -- nearly 40 degrees across. Much of the faint nebulosity is Galactic Cirrus clouds of thin dust in our own Galaxy, but a faint stream of stars does appear to be extending from the SMC toward the LMC. Also, stars surrounding the LMC appear asymmetrically distributed, indicating in simulations that they could well have been pulled off gravitationally in one or more collisions. Both the LMC and the SMC are visible to the unaided eye in southern skies. Future telescopic observations and computer simulations are sure to continue in a continuing effort to better understand the history of our Milky Way and its surroundings.
Dark Dunes on Mars (Horizontally Compressed) 
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS
Explanation: How does wind affect sand on Mars? To help find out if it differs significantly from Earth, the robotic Curiosity rover on Mars was directed to investigate the dark Namib Dune in the Bagnold Dune Field in Gale Crater. Namib is the first active sand dune investigated up close outside of planet Earth. Wind-created ripples on Earth-bound sand dunes appear similar to ripples on Mars, with one exception. The larger peaks visible on dark Namib dune, averaging about 3 meters apart, are of a type seen only underwater on Earth. They appear to arise on Mars because of the way the thin Martian wind drags dark sand particles. The featured image was taken last December and is horizontally compressed to show context. In the distance, a normal dusty Martian landscape slopes up in light orange, while a rock-strewn landscape is visible on the far right. Curiosity unexpectedly went into safe mode in early July, but it was brought out last week and has now resumed exploring the once lake-filled interior of Gale Crater for further signs that it was once habitable by microbial life.





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

Black hole makes material wobble around it

This artist's impression depicts the accretion disc surrounding a black hole, in which the inner region of the disc precesses.
Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

The European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has proved the existence of a "gravitational vortex" around a black hole. The discovery, aided by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, solves a mystery that has eluded astronomers for more than 30 years, and will allow them to map the behavior of matter very close to black holes. It could also open the door to future investigations of Albert Einstein's general relativity.
Matter falling into a black hole heats up as it plunges to its doom. Before it passes into the black hole and is lost from view forever, it can reach millions of degrees. At that temperature it shines X-rays into space.
In the 1980s, pioneering astronomers using early X-ray telescopes discovered that the X-rays coming from stellar-mass black holes in our galaxy flicker. The changes follow a set pattern. When the flickering begins, the dimming and re-brightening can take 10 seconds to complete. As the days, weeks and then months progress, the period shortens until the oscillation takes place 10 times every second. Then, the flickering suddenly stops altogether.
The phenomenon was dubbed the Quasi Periodic Oscillation (QPO). "It was immediately recognized to be something fascinating because it is coming from something very close to a black hole," said Adam Ingram, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who began working to understand QPOs for his doctoral thesis in 2009.
During the 1990s, astronomers had begun to suspect that the QPOs were associated with a gravitational effect predicted by Einstein's general relativity: that a spinning object will create a kind of gravitational vortex.
"It is a bit like twisting a spoon in honey. Imagine that the honey is space and anything embedded in the honey will be "dragged" around by the twisting spoon," explained Ingram. "In reality, this means that anything orbiting a spinning object will have its motion affected." In the case of an inclined orbit, it will "precess." This means that the whole orbit will change orientation around the central object. The time for the orbit to return to its initial condition is known as a precession cycle.
In 2004, NASA launched Gravity Probe B to measure this so-called Lense-Thirring effect around Earth. After painstaking analysis, scientists confirmed that the spacecraft would turn through a complete precession cycle once every 33 million years.
Around a black hole, however, the effect would be much more noticeable because of the stronger gravitational field. The precession cycle would take just a matter of seconds or less to complete. This is so close to the periods of the QPOs that astronomers began to suspect a link.
Ingram began working on the problem by looking at what happened in the flat disc of matter surrounding a black hole. Known as an accretion disc, it is the place where material gradually spirals inwards towards the black hole. Scientists had already suggested that, close to the black hole, the flat accretion disc puffs up into a hot plasma, in which electrons are stripped from their host atoms. Termed the hot inner flow, it shrinks in size over weeks and months as it is eaten by the black hole. Together with colleagues, Ingram published a paper in 2009 suggesting that the QPO is driven by the Lense-Thirring precession of this hot flow. This is because the smaller the inner flow becomes, the closer to the black hole it would approach and so the faster its Lense-Thirring precession cycle would be. The question was: how to prove it?
"We have spent a lot of time trying to find smoking gun evidence for this behavior," said Ingram.
The answer is that the inner flow is releasing high-energy radiation that strikes the matter in the surrounding accretion disc, making the iron atoms in the disc shine like a fluorescent light tube. The iron releases X-rays of a single wavelength -- referred to as "a spectral line."
Because the accretion disc is rotating, the iron line has its wavelength distorted by the Doppler effect. Line emission from the approaching side of the disc is squashed -- blue shifted -- and line emission from the receding disc material is stretched -- red shifted. If the inner flow really is precessing, it will sometimes shine on the approaching disc material and sometimes on the receding material, making the line wobble back and forth over the course of a precession cycle.
Seeing this wobbling is where XMM-Newton came in. Ingram and colleagues from Amsterdam, Cambridge, Southampton and Tokyo applied for a long-duration observation that would allow them to watch the QPO repeatedly. They chose black hole H 1743-322, which was exhibiting a four-second QPO at the time. They watched it for 260,000 seconds with XMM-Newton. They also observed it for 70,000 seconds with NASA's NuSTAR X-ray observatory.
"The high-energy capability of NuSTAR was very important," Ingram said. "NuSTAR confirmed the wobbling of the iron line, and additionally saw a feature in the spectrum called a 'reflection hump' that added evidence for precession."
After a rigorous analysis process of adding all the observational data together, they saw that the iron line was wobbling in accordance with the predictions of general relativity. "We are directly measuring the motion of matter in a strong gravitational field near to a black hole," says Ingram.
This is the first time that the Lense-Thirring effect has been measured in a strong gravitational field. The technique will allow astronomers to map matter in the inner regions of accretion discs around black holes. It also hints at a powerful new tool with which to test general relativity.
Einstein's theory is largely untested in such strong gravitational fields. So if astronomers can understand the physics of the matter that is flowing into the black hole, they can use it to test the predictions of general relativity as never before -- but only if the movement of the matter in the accretion disc can be completely understood.
"If you can get to the bottom of the astrophysics, then you can really test the general relativity," says Ingram. A deviation from the predictions of general relativity would be welcomed by a lot of astronomers and physicists. It would be a concrete signal that a deeper theory of gravity exists.
Larger X-ray telescopes in the future could help in the search because they are more powerful and could more efficiently collect X-rays. This would allow astronomers to investigate the QPO phenomenon in more detail. But for now, astronomers can be content with having seen Einstein's gravity at play around a black hole.
"This is a major breakthrough since the study combines information about the timing and energy of X-ray photons to settle the 30-year debate around the origin of QPOs. The photon-collecting capability of XMM-Newton was instrumental in this work," said Norbert Schartel, ESA Project Scientist for XMM-Newton.
More information
The results reported in this article are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, was launched in December 1999. The largest scientific satellite to have been built in Europe, it is also one of the most sensitive X-ray observatories ever flown. More than 170 wafer-thin, cylindrical mirrors direct incoming radiation into three high-throughput X-ray telescopes. XMM-Newton's orbit takes it almost a third of the way to the moon, allowing for long, uninterrupted views of celestial objects.
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information about NuSTAR, visit
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.  . Click here for more information.
4 Aug
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

Great Eclipse of 1991 Corporate Colloquium Video
(A1/1735)



5 Aug
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:      Astronomy Update: The AAS Meeting of June 2016
Speaker: Dr. Steven Morris, Harbor College





8 Aug
LAAS LAAS General Meeting.
Griffith Observatory
Event Horizon Theater
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
August 11 & 12 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2016
The Rosetta Mission: Comet C-G up Close
Rosetta has been one of the most difficult space missions ever attempted. After 10 years of flight it caught up with a comet speeding at 55,000 km/h and dropped a lander on its surface. Then the mother craft orbited the comet for another year and a half coming as close as 6 km from the surface. In September of 2016 this very mother ship, not designed for landing, will touch down onto the comet to end the mission. The lecture will not only describe this upcoming landing but will tell you what we have learned from Rosetta about comets and the formation of the solar system.
Speaker:
Dr. Bonnie Buratti, US Rosetta Project Scientist, JPL
Mr. Artur Chmielewski, US Rosetta Project Manager, JPL

Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream (or archived after the event)
Locations:
Thursday, Aug 11, 2016, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Aug 12, 2016, 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.


28 August

2:30 PM
UCLA Meteorite Gallery Lecture Series “Comets – Icy Visitors from the Outer Solar System and Their Possible Role in the Origin of Life” Alan Rubin, Researcher at the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences Department, UCLA 4863 Slichter Hall, 595 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles

Observing:

The following data are from the 2016 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2016 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 August:

  

Moon: Aug 2 new, Aug 10 1st quarter, Aug 18 full, Aug 24 last quarter                 
Planets: Saturn & Mars are up from sunset until about midnight.   Jupiter, Mercury & Venus are visible briefly after sunset in the west.
Other Events:


3,10,17,24,31 Aug
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

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

12/13 August Perseid Meteor Shower Peak Expect to see 50-80 meteors per hour, although the moon will interfere with observing during the first half of the night.

 
20 Aug
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/


27 Aug
SBAS out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Greg Benecke to coordinate a location. http://www.sbastro.net/.  
26 Aug
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party


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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