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, October 12, 2018

2018 October


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter October 2018

Contents

AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 7
General Calendar p. 11
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 11
    Observing p. 14
Useful Links p. 15
About the Club p. 16

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule:

4 Oct
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Pizza & Online or DVD Astronomy short lecture
(A1/1735)
AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45 am.  For 2018:  Jan. 4 in A1/1029 A/B, Feb. 1 & March 1 in A1/2906 and for the rest of 2018 (April-Dec), the meeting room is A1/1735. 
11 Oct 11:30am – JWST tour at NGC.  Max group size 20 – please RSVP to Mark Clayson.  “meet outside Building M8 (highlighted on the attached map) at the intersection of Space Park Drive and Mettler Drive. Parking is fine anywhere on campus as long as there is no marking like "security," "reserved," or "carpool" on the ground. Please ensure that every attendee is a US Citizen. We will probably only need 30-45 minutes.”



Oct. 17 club booth at the Oktoberfest in AGO mall 11-1

Club News:  

The club’s FY19 AEA budget request has been submitted, including software for our new laptop (Starry Night Pro Plus 7 & Maxim DL Pro Suite), a new portable GoTo MCT (Meade ETX-90), an Android tablet & Sky Safari 5 Pro app, SkyFi III wireless scope controller, another Mt. Wilson night, quarterly pizza parties, Astronomical League group membership & Observer’s Handbook.

The Hubble Optics 16-inch ultralight/portable Dobsonian has been ordered, and should be here by early November (long production & shipping lead time from China).  Along with a large array of accessories, including digital setting circle.  We’ve also got a new 15-inch laptop for the club, and will begin loading it up with software (Starry Night, software with our various scopes and cameras, etc.). 

We need volunteers to help with: 

·         Preparing poster board(s) for our club booths in Sept. & Oct. (see below)
·         Manning our Oct. 17  club booth at the Oktoberfest in the AGO mall
·         Populating our club Sharepoint site with material & links to the club’s Aerowiki & Aerolink materials
·         Arranging future club programs
·         Managing club equipment

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


VIDEO:  Lunations https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180912.html
Video Credit: Data: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ; Animation: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio;
Music: The Blue Danube (Johann Strauss II)
Explanation: Our Moon's appearance changes nightly. As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The featured video animates images taken by NASA's Moon-orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to show all 12 lunations that appear this year, 2018. A single lunation describes one full cycle of our Moon, including all of its phases. A full lunation takes about 29.5 days, just under a month (moon-th). As each lunation progresses, sunlight reflects from the Moon at different angles, and soilluminates different features differently. During all of this, of course, the Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth. What is less apparent night-to-night is that the Moon's apparent size changes slightly, and that a slight wobble called a libration occurs as the Moon progresses along its elliptical orbit.

Interactive VIDEO: Curiosity Vista from Vera Rubin Ridge https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180910.html
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Curiosity Mars Rover
Explanation: If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? If you were NASA's Curiosity rover, just last month you would have seen the view from Vera Rubin Ridge, an intriguing rock-strewn perch on the side of Mount Sharp. In the featured 360-degree panorama, you can spin around and take in the vista from all directions, in many browsers, just by pointing or tilting. In this virtual reality view, many instruments on the rover are labelled, including antennas, the robotic arm, and the radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). Dark sand and light rock cover the ground nearby in a mixture called lakebed mudstone. Towering Mount Sharp is only barely visible in the distance due to airborne dust from a planet-wide storm just winding down. Among its many discoveries, Curiosity has found that the raw ingredients for life are present on Mars. Next on Mars will be NASA's Insight, on target to land in late November, which is scheduled to deploy a seismometer to better study the interior of the red planet.

VIDEO:  Salt, Pepper, and Ice  https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180918.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Maroun Habib (Moophz)
Explanation: There's a "camera" comet now moving across the sky. Just a bit too dim to see with the unaided eye, Comet 21P / Giacobini-Zinner has developed a long tail that makes it a good sight for binoculars and sensitive cameras. The movement of the Comet 21P on the sky was captured last week in the featured time-lapse video compressing 90 minutes into about 2.5 seconds. What might seem odd is that the 21P's tail is not following the comet's movement. This is because comet tails always point away from the Sun, and the comet was not moving toward the Sun during the period photographed. Visible far in the background on the upper left is the Salt & Pepper star cluster, M37, while the bright red star V440 Auriga is visible just about the frame's center. This 2-km ball of dust-shedding ice passed its nearest to the Sun and Earth only last week and is now fading as it crosses into southern skies. Comet 21P should remain visible, however, and photogenic to stabilized cameras, for another month or so.

VIDEO: Real Time Perseid  https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180908.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Till Credner, AlltheSky.com
Explanation: Bright meteors and dark night skies made this year's Perseid meteor shower a great time for a weekend campout. And while packing away their equipment, skygazers at a campsite in the mountains of southern Germany found at least one more reason to linger under the stars, witnessing this brief but colorful flash with their own eyes. Presented as a 50 frame gif, the two second long video was captured during the morning twilight of August 12. In real time it shows the development of the typical green train of a bright Perseid meteor. A much fainter Perseid is just visible farther to the right. Plowing through Earth's atmosphere at 60 kilometers per second, Perseids are fast enough to excite the characteristic green emission of atomic oxygen at altitudes of 100 kilometers or so.


Aerosol Earth 
Model Visualization Credit: NASA Earth Observatory, GEOS FP, Joshua Stevens
Explanation: For August 23, 2018, the identification and distribution of aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere is shown in this dramatic, planet-wide visualization. Produced in real time, the Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS FP) model relies on a combination ofEarth-observing satellite and ground-based data to calculate the presence of types of aerosols, tiny solid particles and liquid droplets, as they circulate above the entire planet. This August 23rd model shows black carbon particles in red from combustion processes, like smoke from the fires in the United States and Canada, spreading across large stretches of North America and Africa. Sea salt aerosols are in blue, swirling above threatening typhoons near South Korea and Japan, and the hurricane looming near Hawaii. Dust shown in purple hues is blowing over African and Asian deserts. The location of cities and towns can be found from the concentrations of lights based on satellite image data of the Earth at night.


Rover 1A Hops on Asteroid Ryugu 
Image Credit & Copyright: ISAS, JAXA, Hayabusa2 Mission
Explanation: Two small robots have begun hopping around the surface of asteroid Ryugu. The rovers, each the size of a small frying pan, move around the low gravity of kilometer-sized 162173 Ryugu by hopping, staying aloft for about 15 minutes and typically landing again several meters away. On Saturday, Rover 1A returned an early picture of its new home world, on the left, during one of its first hops. On Friday, lander MINERVA-II-1 detached from its mothership Hayabusa2, dropped Rovers 1A and 1B, and then landed on Ryugu. Studying Ryugu could tell humanity not only about Ryugu's surface and interior, but about what materials were available in the early Solar System for the development of life. Two more hopping rovers are planned for release, and Hayabusa2 itself is scheduled to collect a surface sample from Ryugu and return it toEarth for detailed analysis before 2021.


Cosmic Collision Forges Galactic Ring 
Image Credit: X-ray: Chandra (NASA, CXC, INAF, A. Wolter et al.); Optical: Hubble (NASA, STScI)
Explanation: How could a galaxy become shaped like a ring? The rim of the blue galaxy pictured on the right is an immense ring-like structure 150,000 light years in diameter composed of newly formed, extremely bright, massive stars. That galaxy, AM 0644-741, is known as a ring galaxy and was caused by an immense galaxy collision. When galaxies collide, they pass through each other -- their individual stars rarely come into contact. The ring-like shape is the result of the gravitational disruption caused by an entire small intruder galaxy passing through a large one. When this happens, interstellar gas and dust become condensed, causing a wave of star formation to move out from the impact point like a ripple across the surface of a pond. The likely intruder galaxy is on the left of this combined image from Hubble (visible) and Chandra (X-ray) space telescopes. X-ray light is shown in pink and depicts places where energetic black holes or neutron stars, likely formed shortly after the galaxy collision, reside.


A Solar Filament Erupts 
Image Credit: NASA's GSFC, SDO AIA Team
Explanation: What's happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual -- it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space producing an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun's ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth'smagnetosphere, causing visible aurorae. Loops of plasma surrounding an active region can be seen above the erupting filament in the featured ultraviolet image. Although the Sun is now in a relatively inactive state of its 11-year cycle, unexpected holes have opened in the Sun's coronaallowing an excess of charged particles to stream into space. As before, these charged particles are creating auroras.


Ice Halos at Yellowknife 
Image Credit & Copyright: Stephen Bedingfield
Explanation: You've probably seen a circle around the Sun before. More common than rainbows, ice halos, like a 22 degree circular halo for example, can be easy to spot, especially if you can shade your eyes from direct sunlight. Still it's rare to see such a diverse range of ice halos, including sundogs, tangent, infralateral, and Parry arcs, all found in this snapshot from planet Earth. The picture was quickly taken in the late morning of September 4 from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. The beautiful patterns are generated as sunlight (or moonlight) is reflected and refracted in six-sided water ice crystals in Earth's atmosphere. Of course, atmospheric ice halos in the skies of other worlds are likely to be different.


Astronomy News:
(from https://www.sciencedaily.com )

A computer simulation of the hot gas between galaxies hinted at the location of the universe’s missing matter.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY/RENYUE CEN
·      KATIA MOSKVITCH
·      SCIENCE

ASTRONOMERS HAVE FOUND THE UNIVERSE'S MISSING MATTER

For decades, some of the atomic matter in the universe had not been located. Recent papers reveal where it’s been hiding.
ASTRONOMERS HAVE FINALLY found the last of the missing universe. It’s been hiding since the mid-1990s, when researchers decided to inventory all the “ordinary” matter in the cosmos—stars and planets and gas, anything made out of atomic parts. (This isn’t “dark matter,” which remains a wholly separate enigma.) They had a pretty good idea of how much should be out there, based on theoretical studies of how matter was created during the Big Bang. Studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover light from the Big Bang—would confirm these initial estimates

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
So they added up all the matter they could see—stars and gas clouds and the like, all the so-called baryons. They were able to account for only about 10 percent of what there should be. And when they considered that ordinary matter makes up only 15 percent of all matter in the universe—dark matter makes up the rest—they had only inventoried a mere 1.5 percent of all matter in the universe.
Now, in a series of three recent papers, astronomers have identified the final chunks of all the ordinary matter in the universe. (They are still deeply perplexed as to what makes up dark matter.) And despite the fact that it took so long to identify it all, researchers spotted it right where they had expected it to be all along: in extensive tendrils of hot gas that span the otherwise empty chasms between galaxies, more properly known as the warm-hot intergalactic medium, or WHIM.
Early indications that there might be extensive spans of effectively invisible gas between galaxies came from computer simulations done in 1998. “We wanted to see what was happening to all the gas in the universe,” said Jeremiah Ostriker, a cosmologist at Princeton University who constructed one of those simulations along with his colleague Renyue Cen. The two ran simulations of gas movements in the universe acted on by gravity, light, supernova explosions and all the forces that move matter in space. “We concluded that the gas will accumulate in filaments that should be detectable,” he said.
Except they weren’t — not yet.
“It was clear from the early days of cosmological simulations that many of the baryons would be in a hot, diffuse form — not in galaxies,” said Ian McCarthy, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University. Astronomers expected these hot baryons to conform to a cosmic superstructure, one made of invisible dark matter, that spanned the immense voids between galaxies. The gravitational force of the dark matter would pull gas toward it and heat the gas up to millions of degrees. Unfortunately, hot, diffuse gas is extremely difficult to find.

Anna de Graaff and her colleagues added together a million galaxy pairs.
COURTESY OF ANNA DE GRAAFF

To spot the hidden filaments, two independent teams of researchers searched for precise distortions in the CMB, the afterglow of the Big Bang. As that light from the early universe streams across the cosmos, it can be affected by the regions that it’s passing through. In particular, the electrons in hot, ionized gas (such as the WHIM) should interact with photons from the CMB in a way that imparts some additional energy to those photons. The CMB’s spectrum should get distorted.
Unfortunately the best maps of the CMB (provided by the Planck satellite) showed no such distortions. Either the gas wasn’t there, or the effect was too subtle to show up.
But the two teams of researchers were determined to make them visible. From increasingly detailed computer simulations of the universe, they knew that gas should stretch between massive galaxies like cobwebs across a windowsill. Planck wasn’t able to see the gas between any single pair of galaxies. So the researchers figured out a way to multiply the faint signal by a million.
First, the scientists looked through catalogs of known galaxies to find appropriate galaxy pairs — galaxies that were sufficiently massive, and that were at the right distance apart, to produce a relatively thick cobweb of gas between them. Then the astrophysicists went back to the Planck data, identified where each pair of galaxies was located, and then essentially cut out that region of the sky using digital scissors. With over a million clippings in hand (in the case of the study led by Anna de Graaff, a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh), they rotated each one and zoomed it in or out so that all the pairs of galaxies appeared to be in the same position. They then stacked a million galaxy pairs on top of one another. (A group led by Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, combined 260,000 pairs of galaxies.) At last, the individual threads — ghostly filaments of diffuse hot gas — suddenly became visible.
(A) Images of one million galaxy pairs were aligned and added together. (B) Astronomers mapped all the gas within the actual galaxies. (C) By subtracting the galaxies (B) from the initial image (A), researchers revealed filamentary gas hiding in intergalactic space.
ADAPTED BY QUANTA MAGAZINE

The technique has its pitfalls. The interpretation of the results, said Michael Shull, an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, requires assumptions about the temperature and spatial distribution of the hot gas. And because of the stacking of signals, “one always worries about ‘weak signals’ that are the result of combining large numbers of data,” he said. “As is sometimes found in opinion polls, one can get erroneous results when one has outliers or biases in the distribution that skew the statistics.”
In part because of these concerns, the cosmological community didn’t consider the case settled. What was needed was an independent way of measuring the hot gas. This summer, one arrived.

LIGHTHOUSE EFFECT

While the first two teams of researchers were stacking signals together, a third team followed a different approach. They observed a distant quasar — a bright beacon from billions of light-years away — and used it to detect gas in the seemingly empty intergalactic spaces through which the light traveled. It was like examining the beam of a faraway lighthouse in order to study the fog around it.
Usually when astronomers do this, they try to look for light that has been absorbed by atomic hydrogen, since it is the most abundant element in the universe. Unfortunately, this option was out. The WHIM is so hot that it ionizes hydrogen, stripping its single electron away. The result is a plasma of free protons and electrons that don’t absorb any light.
Fabrizio Nicastro used light from a quasar to track the missing gas.
COURTESY OF FABRIZIO NICASTRO

So the group decided to look for another element instead: oxygen. While there’s not nearly as much oxygen as hydrogen in the WHIM, atomic oxygen has eight electrons, as opposed to hydrogen’s one. The heat from the WHIM strips most of those electrons away, but not all. The team, led by Fabrizio Nicastro of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, tracked the light that was absorbed by oxygen that had lost all but two of its electrons. They found two pockets of hot intergalactic gas. The oxygen “provides a tracer of the much larger reservoir of hydrogen and helium gas,” said Shull, who is a member of Nicastro’s team. The researchers then extrapolated the amount of gas they found between Earth and this particular quasar to the universe as a whole. The result suggested that they had located the missing 30 percent.
The number also agrees nicely with the findings from the CMB studies. “The groups are looking at different pieces of the same puzzle and are coming up with the same answer, which is reassuring, given the differences in their methods,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin.
The next step, said Shull, is to observe more quasars with next-generation X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes with greater sensitivity. “The quasar we observed was the best and brightest lighthouse that we could find. Other ones will be fainter, and the observations will take longer,” he said. But for now, the takeaway is clear. “We conclude that the missing baryons have been found,” their team wrote.

 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 Oct
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
Pizza & Online or DVD Astronomy short lecture
(A1/1735)



5 Oct
Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic: TBA
Oct. 4 & 5 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2018

 

Mapping Disasters from Space


How we are using GPS and space-based radar to respond to earthquakes, volcanic unrest, floods, and fires.
Speaker:
Sue Owen
Location:
Thursday, Oct 4, 2018, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Oct 5, 2018, 7pm
Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium
1200 E California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions


15 Oct.
LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory

 


28 Oct

OCT

28


2018

PROF. JOHN WASSON

DISCOVERY, RECOVERY AND DISPOSITION OF THE 3-TON OLD WOMAN METEORITE, THE SECOND LARGEST METEORITE FOUND IN THE USA

Location: Geology 3656
Time: 2:30PM
The Old Woman meteorite was discovered by prospectors in the Old Woman Mountains NE of 29 Palms. They filed a placer mining claim. They tried to sell it to the Smithsonian but a visit to the site showed it was on BLM land and the Smithsonian/BLM claimed it. Numerous lawsuits followed; these were followed by letters to the Smithsonian from the entire California congressional delegation, who demanded that the meteorite be exhibited in California. The Smithsonian yielded and it has been in the one-room BLM museum in Barstow since 1980.


1 Nov
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
DVD Lecture?
(A1/1735)

Observing:

The following data are from the 2018 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2018 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 October:

  

Moon: Oct 2 last quarter, Oct 9 new, Oct 16 1st quarter, Oct 24 Full,                    
Planets: Venus visible at dusk thru the 7th.  Mars visible at dusk, sets after midnight.  Mercury is hidden in Sun’s glow all month.  Saturn visible at dusk, sets mid-evening. Jupiter visible at dusk, sets early evening.
Other Events:

 
29 Sept
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/


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

9 October Draconids Meteor Shower Peak The Draconids is a highly variable meteor shower. Most often a minor shower radiating out of Draco, it has occasionally seen outburst of up to 1000 meteors per hour.

15 Oct Saturn 1.8 deg S of Moon

18 Oct Mars 1.9 deg S of Moon

3, 10, 17, 24 Oct
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

20 Oct
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm

20 October Saturday International Observe the Moon Night See https://moon.nasa.gov/observe-the-moon/annual-event/overview/ for information on this event.

21 October Sunday Orionids Meteor Shower Peak Orionid meteors are debris from Halley’s Comet. Typically, the Orionids are seen at 20 meteors/hour but sometimes can peak at 50-70 meteors/hour.

24 Oct. Uranus at opposition

26 Oct. Venus at inferior conjunction

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, Walt Sturrock, 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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