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)

Sunday, February 9, 2020

2020 February


AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter  February 2020

Contents

AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 1
Astronomy News p. 8
General Calendar p. 10
    Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 10
    Observing p. 16
Useful Links p. 18
About the Club p. 19

Club News & Calendar.

Club Calendar

Club Meeting Schedule: --
6 Feb.
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
 TBD -- Great Courses video?
(A1/1735)
5 March
AEA
TBD
(A1/1735)
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
"Overview and Status of the Giant Magellan Telescope,” Breann Sitarsky of GMT Corp. & Aerospace casual (works on the design and specification of the telescope and its subsystems)
A1/2906
AEA Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st  Thursdays at 11:45 am.  For 2020:  March 1 & April 2 in A1/2906 and for the rest of 2020 (Jan., Feb., May-Dec), the meeting room is A1/1735. 

Club News:  

We are now taking reservations for our annual night at Mt. Wilson -- this year observing with the 60-inch telescope.  And possibly tours of the Aerospace MAFIOT facility, and a Mt. Wilson docent tour.

We need volunteers to help with: 

·         Assembling our new 16-inch Hubble Optics Dobs
·         Installing our new software on our tablet & laptop
·         Populating our club Sharepoint site with material & links to the club’s Aerowiki & Aerolink materials – Kaly Rangarajan has volunteered to help with this
·         Arranging future club programs
·         Managing club equipment & library (Kelly Gov volunteered to help with the library)

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


VIDEO:  M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab Nebula https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200119.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Detlef Hartmann
Explanation: Are your eyes good enough to see the Crab Nebula expand? The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star. The violent birth of the Crab was witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. Roughly 10 light-years across today, the nebula is still expanding at a rate of over 1,000 kilometers per second. Over the past decade, its expansion has been documented in this stunning time-lapse movie. In each year from 2008 to 2017, an image was produced with the same telescope and camera from a remote observatory in Austria. Combined in the time-lapse movie, the 10 images represent 32 hours of total integration time. The sharp, processed frames even reveal the dynamic energetic emission within the incredible expanding Crab. The Crab Nebula lies about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. 

Betelgeuse Imagined
Illustration Credit: ESO, L. Calcada
Explanation: Why is Betelgeuse fading? No one knows. Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and most recognized stars in the night sky, is only half as bright as it used to be only five months ago. Such variability is likely just normal behavior for this famously variable supergiant, but the recent dimming has rekindled discussion on how long it may be before Betelgeuse does go supernova. Known for its red color, Betelgeuse is one of the few stars to be resolved by modern telescopes, although only barely. The featured artist's illustration imagines how Betelgeuse might look up close. Betelgeuse is thought to have a complex and tumultuous surface that frequently throws impressive flares. Were it to replace the Sun (not recommended), its surface would extend out near the orbit of Jupiter, while gas plumes would bubble out past Neptune. Since Betelgeuse is about 700 light years away, its eventual supernova will not endanger life on Earth even though its brightness may rival that of a full Moon. Astronomers -- both amateur and professional -- will surely continue to monitor Betelgeuse as this new decade unfolds.


Iridescent Clouds over Sweden
Image Credit & Copyright: Goran Strand
Explanation: Why would these clouds multi-colored? A relatively rare phenomenon in clouds known as iridescence can bring up unusual colors vividly or even a whole spectrum of colors simultaneously. These polar stratospheric clouds clouds, also known as nacreous and mother-of-pearl clouds, are formed of small water droplets of nearly uniform size. When the Sun is in the right position and, typically, hidden from direct view, these thin clouds can be seen significantly diffracting sunlight in a nearly coherent manner, with different colors being deflected by different amounts. Therefore, different colors will come to the observer from slightly different directions. Many clouds start with uniform regions that could show iridescence but quickly become too thick, too mixed, or too angularly far from the Sun to exhibit striking colors. The featured image and an accompanying video were taken late last year over Ostersund, Sweden. 


Evidence of an Active Volcano on Venus
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, ESA, Venus Express: VIRTIS, USRA, LPI
Explanation: Are volcanoes still active on Venus? More volcanoes are known on Venus than Earth, but when Venusian volcanoes last erupted is not directly known. Evidence bolstering very recent volcanism on Venus has recently been uncovered, though, right here on Earth. Lab results showed that images of surface lava would become dim in the infrared in only months in the dense Venusian atmosphere, a dimming not seen in ESA's Venus Express images. Venus Express entered orbit around Venus in 2006 and remained in contact with Earth until 2014. Therefore, the infrared glow (shown in false-color red) recorded by Venus Express for Idunn Mons and featured here on a NASA Magellan image indicates that this volcano erupted very recently -- and is still active today. Understanding the volcanics of Venus might lead to insight about the volcanics on Earth, as well as elsewhere in our Solar System.


Milky Way over Yellowstone
Image Credit & Copyright: Lori Jacobs
Explanation: The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake. The pool of vivid blue water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Steam rises off the spring, heated by a magma chamber deep underneath known as the Yellowstone hotspot. The steam blurs the image of Jupiter, making it seem unusually large. Unrelated and far in the distance, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy rises high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars. The featured picture is a 3-image panorama taken last August. If the Yellowstone hotspot causes another supervolcanic eruption as it did 640,000 years ago, a large part of North America would be affected.


Goldilocks Zones and Stars
Infographic Credit: NASA ESA, Z. Levy (STScI)
Explanation: The Goldilocks zone is the habitable zone around a star where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of orbiting planets. This intriguing infographic includes relative sizes of those zones for yellow G stars like the Sun, along with orange K dwarf stars and red M dwarf stars, both cooler and fainter than the Sun. M stars (top) have small, close-in Goldilocks zones. They are also seen to live long (100 billion years or so) and are very abundant, making up about 73 percent of the stars in the Milky Way. Still, they have very active magnetic fields and may produce too much radiation harmful to life, with an estimated X-ray irradiance 400 times the quiet Sun. Sun-like G stars (bottom) have large Goldilocks zones and are relatively calm, with low amounts of harmful radiation. But they only account for 6 percent of Milky Way stars and are much shorter lived. In the search for habitable planets, K dwarf stars could be just right, though. Not too rare they have 40 billion year lifetimes, much longer than the Sun. With a relatively wide habitable zone they produce only modest amounts of harmful radiation. These Goldilocks stars account for about 13 percent of the stars of the Milky Way.


Into the Shadow
Image Credit & Copyright: Laszlo Francsics
Explanation: On January 21, 2019 moonwatchers on planet Earth saw a total lunar eclipse. In 35 frames this composite image follows the Moon that night as it crossed into Earth's dark umbral shadow. Taken 3 minutes apart, they almost melt together in a continuous screen that captures the dark colors within the shadow itself and the northern curve of the shadow's edge. Sunlight scattered by the atmosphere into the shadow causes the lunar surface to appear reddened during totality (left), but close to the umbra's edge, the limb of the eclipsed Moon shows a remarkable blue hue. The blue eclipsed moonlight originates as rays of sunlight pass through layers high in Earth's upper stratosphere, colored by ozone that scatters red light and transmits blue. The Moon's next crossing into Earth's umbral shadow, will be on May 26, 2021.
Astronomy News:

The wobbling orbit of a pulsar proves Einstein right, yet again

New observations of ‘frame dragging’ help reveal details of the final days of a pair of stars




A white dwarf (illustrated, center) twists spacetime as it spins, forcing the orbit (pink) of a neighboring pulsar (illustrated with radio jets) to wobble.
MARK MYERS/ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DISCOVERY (OZGRAV)
By Christopher Crockett
Chalk up yet another win for Einstein.
A twist in the fabric of spacetime — predicted by the physicist’s theory of general relativity (SN: 10/7/15) — is causing the orbit of one stellar corpse to teeter around another stellar corpse, researchers report. And the relativistic corkscrew is helping astronomers reconstruct the final days of these two long-dead stars.
According to general relativity, any spinning mass drags spacetime around with it, like a hand mixer in molasses. One way to see this “frame dragging” is to keep a careful eye on anything circling the spinning object on a tilted orbit — the spacetime maelstrom will make the orbit wobble, or precess.
For the last 20 years, researchers have been using radio telescopes to track the motion of a pulsar, the dense remains of a massive star that went supernova, as it orbits a spinning white dwarf, the core of a lighter star that died less violently. The pulsar, dubbed PSR J1141–6545, emits a steady beat of radio waves as it spins, and by recording the arrival times of those pulses, researchers can tell when the pulsar is moving toward and away from Earth.


This finding isn’t the first time that researchers have observed frame dragging. Satellites in Earth’s orbit have captured the relatively puny effect around our planet (SN: 11/24/15). And astronomers also have observed fluctuations in the frequency of X-ray light coming from a black hole, where frame dragging should be quite intense, suggesting that gas may be precessing around it (SN: 12/17/15).
The new observation “is much more direct than mine,” says Adam Ingram, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford who studied the black hole. “I can only infer that something is precessing in black hole systems, whereas the precision radio observations presented here leave little room for ambiguity.”
The pulsar precession helps researchers piece together the final moments in the lives of both stars. Relativistic wobbling occurs only if the orbit of the pulsar and the spin of the white dwarf are misaligned, something which is usually smoothed over by an exchange of mass between the dying stars. “This immediately tells us that the orbit was tilted due to the supernova explosion that produced the pulsar,” Venkatraman Krishnan says.
Normally, the supernova would go off and then the progenitor of the white dwarf would dump gas on the pulsar after the explosion, aligning spin to orbit. But in this case, the opposite happened: The pulsar’s progenitor dumped gas on the white dwarf and then the supernova occurred.


 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 2020 Astronomy Lecture Series Season

Monday evenings:  February 24, March 23, April 13 and May 18.

AT THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, ART COLLECTIONS, AND BOTANICAL GARDENS
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
2020 Season


All Lectures are in Rothenberg Auditorium. The simulcast room adjacent to the Auditorium will also accommodate overflow attendance. Directions can be found here.
The lectures are free. Because seating is limited, however, reservations are required for each lecture through Eventbrite (links below). Additionally, the lectures will be streamed live through Livestream and simultaneously on our Facebook CarnegieAstro page. For information, please call 626-304-0250.
Doors open at 6:45 p.m. Each Lecture will be preceded by a brief musical performance by students from The Colburn School starting at 7:00 p.m. Lectures start at 7:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be  available.

Monday, February 24, 2020
Astronomy in 2020:  The Great Debates Today
Dr. John Mulchaey
Director, Carnegie Observatories

One hundred years ago, Carnegie Observatories’ founder George Ellery Hale convened The Great Debate, in which leading astronomers of the day argued whether spiral nebulae were inside the Milky Way or beyond it.  The latter was confirmed by Carnegie astronomer Edwin Hubble, using his observations at Mt. Wilson to discover the Universe as we now know it to be. Today, astronomy is enmeshed in many “great debates,” including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the expansion rate of the Universe, and the formation of planetary systems.  Dr. Mulchaey will discuss current controversies in these areas, and will describe how research in the coming decade may finally resolve some of astronomy’s biggest mysteries.
Tickets will be available starting January 24th at Eventbrite.
Can't make it to the event? Watch it live online.

Monday, March 23, 2020
Sky Full of Fireflies: Time-Domain Astronomy in the 2020s
Dr. K. Decker French
Hubble Fellow, Carnegie Observatories

The sky is full of cosmic explosions and stars torn apart by black holes, which are only the faintest flashes of starlight by the time they reach the Earth. Astronomy in the 2020s will be revolutionized by new sensitive surveys to map these exciting transient and time-varying phenomenon. Dr. French will lead us through the new astrophysics that can be uncovered with time-sensitive observations in the next decade.
Tickets will be available starting February 25th at Eventbrite.
Can't make it to the event? Watch it live online.

Monday, April 13, 2020
Building Astronomical Instrumentation for the Next Generation
Dr. Solange V. Ramirez
Carnegie Astronomer and SDSS-V Project Manager





















For the past 20 years, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — a collaboration among astronomers worldwide — has been working to gather spectral and photometric data covering one third of the sky and analyzing millions of individual objects. The making of every telescope and its instrumentation requires extraordinary creativity, innovation, and expertise, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has pioneered the development of novel equipment designed to address many crucial astronomical questions; the resulting information is providing a rich legacy for future research. In this lecture, Dr. Ramirez will describe how SDSS-V, the latest phase of this massive project, is designing and building the instrumentation that will reveal information about the universe in unprecedented detail.
Tickets will be available starting March 24th at Eventbrite.
Can't make it to the event? Watch it live online.

Monday, May 18, 2020
Hubble's Troublesome Constant
Dr. Chris Burns
Research Associate, Carnegie Observatories

Nearly 100 years ago, Carnegie astronomer Edwin Hubble made two truly revolutionary discoveries. First, that our Milky Way was only one of many galaxies in a vast universe; and second, that the farther these galaxies were from us, the faster they appeared to be moving away. The ratio between these speeds and distances, which we now call the Hubble Constant, is a fundamental quantity that sets the scale for the size and age of the entire cosmos. For decades, its precise value has been a source of contention among astronomers. Even today, with the most powerful telescopes at our disposal, tension between different groups remains. Dr. Burns will cover the history of Hubble’s troublesome Constant and how we are trying to pin it down.
Tickets will be available starting April 14th at Eventbrite.
Can't make it to the event? Watch it live online.
6 Feb.
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
An Astronomy Lecture from the Great Courses
(A1/1735)








7 Feb.

Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting
in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)
Topic: “Planet Finding 101” Speaker: Michael Harrison


CalTech Astro: Astronomy on Tap Series
·         7:30PM Monday, February 20
Astronomy on Tap
·         7:00PM Friday, February 28
Lecture/Stargazing
TBA
For directions, weather updates, and more information, please visit: http://outreach.astro.caltech.edu



Feb. 6 & 7 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2020


Beyond the Pale Blue Dot: Seeing Distant Planets


On the 30th anniversary of the "Pale Blue Dot" image taken by NASA’s Voyager mission, we’ll look at the impact of that image and other distant views of Earth. We'll then turn to the quest to photograph another Earth — an exoplanet orbiting another star — as its own pale blue dot. Join us for a discussion about perspective: the value of what a single pixel can tell us and what it can make us feel.
Host:
Preston Dyches
Speaker(s):
Rich Terrile, astronomer and Voyager imaging team member, NASA-JPL
Rob Zellem, exoplanetary astronomer, NASA-JPL

Location:
Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, 7pm
The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

Friday, Feb. 7, 2020, 7pm
Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium
1200 E California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA
› Directions

› Click here to watch the event live on Ustream
* Only the Thursday lectures are streamed live.
* Only the Thursday lectures are streamed live.
LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory (private)



Feb. 9

UCLA Meteorite Gallery

DR. ASHLEY DAVIES

POWER AND FURY: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE STUDY OF VOLCANISM ON IO

Location: Geology Building - Slichter Room 3656
Time: 2:30PM
Volcanoes helped transform the surfaces of the Earth, the other terrestrial planets, and the Moon. However, the biggest volcanic eruptions in the Solar System are taking place not on Earth, but on the Jovian moon Io. This wonder of the Solar System is a fascinating volcanic laboratory where powerful volcanic eruptions result from tidal heating, a process that also affects ice-covered Jovian moon Europa. Yet despite multiple spacecraft visits and spectacular new observations of Io with large Earth-based telescopes, some of the biggest questions about Io's extraordinary volcanoes remain unanswered. Getting the answers requires an understanding of the difficulties of remote sensing of volcanic activity; a new, innovative approach to instrument design; and ultimately a return to Io. Dr. Ashley Davies is a Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – California Institute of Technology. He received a Doctorate in volcanology from Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, in 1988. He was a member of the Galileo NIMS Team; is a Co-Investigator on the Europa Clipper Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE); has written over 100 papers on observing and understanding volcanic processes; and is the author of "Volcanism on Io – A comparison with Earth", published by Cambridge University Press.

5 March
AEA
TBD
(A1/1735)
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting
"Overview and Status of the Giant Magellan Telescope,” Breann Sitarsky of GMT Corp. & Aerospace casual (works on the design and specification of the telescope and its subsystems)
A1/2906
Observing:

The following data are from the 2020 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s 2020 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 February:



Moon: Feb 2 1st quarter, Feb 9 Full, Feb 15 last quarter, Feb 23 new                   
Planets: Venus high at dusk, sets mid-evening.  Mars rises around 4am.  Mercury low in the west-southwest at dusk through the 17th.  Saturn very low at dawn starting on the 7th. Jupiter low at dawn.
Other Events:


1 Feb.
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties  for more information.


5, 12, 19, 26 Feb.
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

10 Feb. Mercury greatest elongation E. (18deg)

15 Feb.
SBAS In-town observing session – contact Greg Benecke to coordinate a location. http://www.sbastro.net/.  

18 Feb. Mars 0.8deg S of Moon

19 Feb. Jupiter 0.9deg N of Moon

20 Feb. Saturn 1.7deg N of Moon

22 Feb.
LAAS Private dark sky  Star Party


22 Feb.
SBAS out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Greg Benecke to coordinate a location. http://www.sbastro.net/.  


29 Feb.
LAAS Public  Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties  for more information.

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, Kelly Gov club Secretary (& librarian), or Alan Olson, Resource Committee Chairman (over equipment, and club Treasurer).

Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club President



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