AEA Astronomy Club
Newsletter November 2021
Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 2
Astronomy News p. 10
General Calendar p. 19
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 19
Observing p. 21
Useful
Links p. 22
About the Club p.
23
Club News &
Calendar.
Club Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
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AEA Astronomy Club Meeting |
TBD -- Great Courses video |
Teams
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AEA Astronomy Club Meeting |
TBD -- Great Courses video |
Teams |
AEA
Astronomy Club meetings are now on 1st Thursdays at 11:30 am. Virtual meetings on Teams until further
notice. When live meetings resume, our
preferred room has been A1/1735, when we can reserve it.
Club
News:
A report from Sam on the club observing night on the Mt. Wilson 100”
Oct. 30:
“It was
great! The tour was interesting and we had a beautiful sunset. It was cloudy at
first, but we got some good observing time in. We were able to look at Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the blue snowball nebula, a couple of galaxies, and
some globular clusters. I’m working on gathering all the pictures that were
taken.”
Contact
Jason Fields if interested in joining him for an observing night with his 20”
Dobs.
We need volunteers to help with:
·
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, Sam has a fair chunk of the equipment)
Astronomy Video(s)
& Picture(s) of the Month
(generally from
Astronomy Picture of the Day, APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html)
VIDEO: Jupiter Rotates https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211026.html
Video Credit & Copyright: JL Dauvergne; Music: Oro Aqua (Benoit Reeves)
Explanation: Observe the graceful
twirl of our Solar System's largest planet. Many interesting features of Jupiter's enigmatic atmosphere, including dark belts and light zones, can be followed in detail. A careful
inspection will reveal that different cloud layers rotate at
slightly different speeds.
The famous Great Red Spot is not visible at first -- but soon rotates into
view. Other smaller storm systems occasionally appear. As large as Jupiter is,
it rotates in only 10 hours. Our small Earth, by comparison, takes 24 hours to
complete a spin cycle. The featured high-resolution time-lapse video was captured over five nights
earlier this month by a mid-sized telescope on an apartment balcony in Paris, France. Since hydrogen and helium gas are colorless, and those
elements compose most of Jupiter's expansive atmosphere, what trace elements create the
observed colors of Jupiter's clouds remains a topic of research.
VIDEO: Juno Flyby of Ganymede and Jupiter https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211011.html
Video Credit: Images: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SWRI, MSSS;
Animation: Koji Kuramura, Gerald
Eichstädt, Mike Stetson; Music: Vangelis
Explanation: What would it be like to fly over
the largest
moon in the Solar
System? In June, the robotic Juno spacecraft flew
past Jupiter's
huge moon Ganymede and
took images that have been digitally constructed into a detailed flyby. As
the featured video begins,
Juno swoops over the two-toned surface of the 2,000-km wide moon, revealing an
icy alien landscape filled with grooves and craters. The grooves are likely
caused by shifting surface plates, while the craters are caused by violent impacts. Continuing
on in its orbit, Juno then performed its 34th close pass over
Jupiter's clouds. The digitally-constructed
video shows numerous swirling clouds in the
north, colorful planet-circling zones
and bands across the middle -- featuring several white-oval clouds from
the String of
Pearls, and finally more swirling clouds
in the south. Next September, Juno is scheduled to
make a close pass over another of Jupiter's large moons: Europa.
A Rorschach Aurora
Image Credit & Copyright: Göran Strand
Explanation: If you see this as a monster's face, don't
panic. It's
only pareidolia, often experienced as the tendency to see faces in
patterns of light and shadow. In fact, the startling visual scene is actually a
180 degree panorama of Northern
Lights, digitally mirrored like inkblots on a folded piece of paper.
Frames used to construct it were captured on a September night from the middle
of a waterfall-crossing suspension bridge in Jamtland, Sweden. With geomagnetic
storms triggered by recent
solar activity, auroral displays could be very active at planet
Earth's high latitudes in the coming days. But if you see a monster's face
in your
own neighborhood tomorrow night, it might just be Halloween.
Road to the Galactic Center
Image Credit & Copyright: Michael
Abramyan
Explanation: Does the road to our galaxy's center go
through Monument
Valley? It doesn't have to, but if your road does -- take a picture.
In this case, the road is US
Route 163 and iconic buttes on the Navajo National Reservation populate
the horizon. The band of Milky
Way Galaxy stretches down from the sky and appears to be
a continuation of
the road on Earth.
Filaments of dust darken the Milky Way,
in contrast to billions of bright stars and several colorful glowing gas clouds
including the Lagoon and Trifid nebulas.
The featured picture is a composite of images taken with the same camera and
from the same location -- Forest Gump Point in Utah, USA. The
foreground was taken just after sunset in early September during the blue hour,
while the background is a mosaic of four exposures captured a few hours later.
Lucy Launches to Eight Asteroids
Image Credit & Copyright: John Kraus
Explanation: Why would this mission go out as far as
Jupiter -- but then not visit Jupiter? Lucy's
plan is to follow different leads about the origin of our Solar System than
can be found at Jupiter -- where Juno now orbits.
Jupiter is such a massive planet that its gravity captures numerous
asteroids that orbit the Sun ahead
of it -- and behind. These trojan
asteroids formed all over our Solar System and some may have
been trapped there
for billions of years. Flying by these trojan asteroids enables
studying them as fossils that likely hold unique
clues about our early Solar
System. Lucy,
named after a famous
fossil skeleton which was named after a famous song, is scheduled to
visit eight asteroids from 2025 to 2033. Pictured, Lucy's launch was captured
with reflection last week aboard a powerful Atlas V rocket
from Cape
Canaveral, Florida, USA.
Palomar 6: Globular Star Cluster
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, R. Cohen
Explanation: Where did this big ball of stars come
from? Palomar
6 is one of about 200 globular clusters
of stars that survive in our
Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our
Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's
disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years
old, so old that it is close to -- and so constrains --
the age of the entire
universe. Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar
6 lies about 25,000 light years away,
but not very far from our galaxy's center.
At that distance, this
sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans
about 15 light-years. After much study including
images from Hubble, a leading
origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created -- and survives
today -- in the central
bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center,
not in the distant galactic
halo where most other globular clusters are
now found.
The Einstein Cross Gravitational Lens
Image Credit & License: J. Rhoads (Arizona State U.) et
al., WIYN, AURA, NOIRLab, NSF
Explanation: Most galaxies have a single nucleus --
does this galaxy have four? The strange answer leads astronomers to
conclude that the nucleus of the surrounding galaxy is not even visible
in this
image. The central cloverleaf is
rather light emitted from a background quasar.
The gravitational field
of the visible foreground galaxy breaks light from
this distant quasar into
four distinct images. The quasar must
be properly
aligned behind the center of a massive galaxy for a mirage like this to
be evident. The general effect is known as gravitational lensing,
and this specific case is known as the Einstein Cross.
Stranger still, the images of the Einstein Cross vary
in relative brightness, enhanced occasionally by the additional gravitational
microlensing effect of specific stars in the foreground galaxy.
Sunrise at the South Pole
Image Credit & Copyright: Martin
Wolf (U. Wisconsin), IceCube Neutrino Obs., NSF; ht: Alice Allen
Explanation: Sunrise at the South Pole is different.
Usually a welcome sight,
it follows months of darkness -- and begins months of sunshine. At Earth's poles,
it can take
weeks for the Sun to rise, in contrast with hours at any mid-latitude location. Sunrise at a pole is caused by
the tilt of
the Earth as it orbits the Sun, not by
the rotation of the Earth.
Although at a pole, an airless Earth would first see first Sun at an equinox, the lensing
effect of the Earth's
atmosphere and the size of the solar disk causes the top
of the Sun to appear about two-weeks early. Pictured two weeks ago, the Sun
peeks above the horizon of a vast frozen landscape at Earth's
South Pole. The true South
Pole is just a few meters to the left of the communications tower.
This polar sunrise capture was particularly photogenic as the Sun appeared
capped by a green flash.
The Moona Lisa
Image Credit & Copyright: Gianni Sarcone and Marcella Giulia Pace
Explanation: Only natural colors of
the Moon in planet Earth's sky appear in this creative visual presentation.
Arranged as
pixels in a framed image, the lunar disks were photographed at
different times. Their varying hues are ultimately due to reflected sunlight
affected by changing atmospheric conditions and the alignment geometry
of Moon, Earth, and Sun. Here, the darkest lunar disks are the colors of earthshine.
A description of earthshine, in terms of sunlight reflected by Earth's oceans
illuminating the Moon's dark surface, was written over 500 years ago by Leonardo
da Vinci. But stand farther back from your monitor or just shift your gaze to
the smaller versions of the image. You might also see one of da Vinci's most
famous works
of art.
Astronomy
News:
From
ScienceNews.org
Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror. The 18 hexagonal mirror segments are made of lightweight yet tough beryllium and coated with a thin layer of gold to boost reflectivity.
DESIREE STOVER/NASA
The James Webb Space
Telescope has been a long time coming. When it launches later this year, the
observatory will be the largest and most complex telescope ever sent into
orbit. Scientists have been drafting and redrafting their dreams and plans for
this unique tool since 1989.
The mission was originally scheduled to launch between 2007 and
2011, but a series of budget and technical issues pushed its start date back
more than a decade. Remarkably, the core design of the telescope hasn’t changed
much. But the science that it can dig into has. In the years of waiting for
Webb to be ready, big scientific questions have emerged. When Webb was an early
glimmer in astronomers’ eyes, cosmological revolutions like the discoveries of
dark energy and planets orbiting stars outside our solar system hadn’t yet
happened.
“It’s
been over 25 years,” says cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the
University of Chicago. “But I think it was really worth the wait.”
An
audacious plan
Webb has a distinctive design. Most space telescopes house a
single lens or mirror within a tube that blocks sunlight from swamping the dim
lights of the cosmos. But Webb’s massive 6.5-meter-wide mirror and its scientific
instruments are exposed to the vacuum of space. A multilayered shield the size
of a tennis court will block light from the sun, Earth and moon.
For the awkward shape to fit on a rocket, Webb will launch
folded up, then unfurl itself in space (see below, What could go wrong?).
“They call this the origami satellite,” says astronomer Scott
Friedman of the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, in Baltimore.
Friedman is in charge of Webb’s postlaunch choreography. “Webb is different
from any other telescope that’s flown.”
A novel design
Once all is unfolded, the James Webb Space Telescope’s sun
shield will span the length of a tennis court to protect the main and secondary
mirrors from the sun, moon and Earth’s light and heat. The solar panels, exposed
to the sun, will convert light to electricity to power the instruments. Webb’s
antenna will keep it communicating with scientists on Earth, sending data from
the scientific instruments. The stabilization flap keeps the machine from
veering off course.
Its basic design hasn’t changed in more than 25 years. The
telescope was first proposed in September 1989 at a workshop held at STScI,
which also runs the Hubble Space Telescope.
At the time, Hubble was less than a year from launching, and was
expected to function for only 15 years. Thirty-one years after its launch, the
telescope is still going strong, despite a series of computer
glitches and gyroscope failures (SN Online: 10/10/18).
The institute director at the time, Riccardo Giacconi, was
concerned that the next major mission would take longer than 15 years to get
off the ground. So he and others proposed that NASA investigate a possible successor to Hubble: a
space telescope with a 10-meter-wide primary mirror that was sensitive to light
in infrared wavelengths to complement Hubble’s range of ultraviolet, visible
and near-infrared.
Infrared light has a longer wavelength than light that is
visible to human eyes. But it’s perfect for a telescope to look back in time.
Because light travels at a fixed speed, looking at distant objects in the
universe means seeing them as they looked in the past. The universe is
expanding, so that light is stretched before it reaches our telescopes. For the
most distant objects in the universe — the first galaxies to clump together, or
the first stars to burn in those galaxies — light that was originally emitted
in shorter wavelengths is stretched all the way to the infrared.
Giacconi and his collaborators dreamed of a telescope that would
detect that stretched light from the earliest galaxies. When Hubble started
sharing its views of the early universe, the dream solidified into a science
plan. The galaxies Hubble saw at great distances “looked different from what
people were expecting,” says astronomer Massimo Stiavelli, a leader of the
James Webb Space Telescope project who has been at STScI since 1995. “People
started thinking that there is interesting science here.”
In 1995, STScI and NASA commissioned a report to design Hubble’s
successor. The report, led by astronomer Alan Dressler of the Carnegie
Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., suggested an infrared space observatory with
a 4-meter-wide mirror.
The bigger a telescope’s mirror, the more light it can collect,
and the farther it can see. Four meters wasn’t that much larger than Hubble’s
2.4-meter-wide mirror, but anything bigger would be difficult to launch.
Dressler briefed then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin in late
1995. In January 1996 at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting,
Goldin challenged the scientists to be more ambitious. He called out Dressler
by name, saying, “Why do you ask for such a modest thing? Why not go after six
or seven meters?” (Still nowhere near Giacconi’s pie-in-the-sky 10-meter wish.)
The speech received a standing ovation.
Six meters was a larger mirror than had ever flown in space, and
larger than would fit in available launch vehicles. Scientists would have to
design a telescope mirror that could fold, then deploy once it reached space.
The telescope would also need to cool itself passively by
radiating heat into space. It needed a sun shield — a big one. The origami
telescope was born. It was dubbed James Webb in 2002 for NASA’s administrator
from 1961 to 1968, who fought to support research to boost understanding of the
universe in the increasingly human-focused space program. (In response to a May
petition to change the name, NASA investigated allegations that James Webb
persecuted gay and lesbian people during his government career. The agency
announced on September 27 that it found no evidence warranting a name change.)
Mixed views
Webb will observe the universe in wavelengths that are mostly
longer than what humans can see (0.38 to 0.7 micrometers) and what the Hubble
Space Telescope can observe, yet shorter than most of the Spitzer Space
Telescope’s range. This infrared view lets telescopes observe farther and see
through dust clouds.
Electromagnetic
spectrum
SOURCE: NASA, J.
OLMSTED/STSCI
Goldin’s motto at NASA was “Faster, better, cheaper.” Bigger was
better for Webb, but it sure wasn’t faster — or cheaper. By late 2010, the
project was
more than $1.4 billion over its $5.1 billion budget (SN: 4/9/11, p. 22).
And it was going to take another five years to be ready. Today, the cost is
estimated at almost $10 billion.
The telescope survived a near-cancellation by Congress, and its
timeline was reset for an October 2018 launch. But in 2017, the launch was
pushed to June 2019. Two more delays in 2018 pushed the takeoff to May 2020,
then to March 2021. Some of those delays were because assembling and testing
the spacecraft took longer than NASA expected.
Other slowdowns were because of human errors, like using the
wrong cleaning solvent, which damaged valves in the propulsion system. Recent
shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic pushed the launch back a few more
months.
“I don’t think we ever imagined it would be this long,” says
University of Chicago’s Freedman, who worked on the Dressler report. But
there’s one silver lining: Science marched on.
The
age conflict
The first science goal listed
in the Dressler report was “the detailed study of the birth and
evolution of normal galaxies such as the Milky Way.” That is still the dream,
partly because it’s such an ambitious goal, Stiavelli says.
“We wanted a science rationale that would resist the test of
time,” he says. “We didn’t want to build a mission that would do something that
gets done in some other way before you’re done.”
Webb will peek at galaxies and stars as they were just 400
million years after the Big Bang, which astronomers think is the epoch when the
first tiny galaxies began making the universe transparent to light by stripping
electrons from cosmic hydrogen.
But in the 1990s, astronomers had a problem: There didn’t seem
to be enough time in the universe to make galaxies much earlier than the ones
astronomers had already seen. The standard cosmology at the time suggested the
universe was 8 billion or 9 billion years old, but there were stars in the
Milky Way that seemed to be about 14 billion years old.
“There was this age conflict that reared its head,” Freedman
says. “You can’t have a universe that’s younger than the oldest stars. The way
people put it was, ‘You can’t be older than your grandmother!’”
Getting there
Webb will orbit the sun from a stable point in space called L2,
1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The telescope will spend its first month
after launch getting to this point and unfolding its sun shield and mirrors.
The sun shield will face Earth and the sun at all times, keeping their light
and heat away from the telescope’s sensitive instruments. Once at L2, the
telescope will spend another five months turning on and testing its scientific
instruments before collecting data.
Webb
travels to L2
SOURCE: ESA
In 1998, two teams of cosmologists showed that the universe is
expanding at an ever-increasing rate. A mysterious substance dubbed dark energy
may be pushing the universe to expand faster and faster. That accelerated
expansion means the universe is older than astronomers previously thought — the
current estimate is about 13.8 billion years old.
“That resolved the age conflict,” Freedman says. “The discovery
of dark energy changed everything.” And it expanded Webb’s to-do list.
Dark
energy
Top of the list is getting to the bottom of a mismatch in cosmic
measurements. Since at least 2014, different methods for measuring the
universe’s rate of expansion — called the Hubble constant — have been giving
different answers. Freedman calls the issue “the most important problem in
cosmology today.”
The question, Freedman says, is whether the mismatch is real. A
real mismatch could indicate something profound about the nature of dark energy
and the history of the universe. But the discrepancy could just be due to
measurement errors.
Webb can help settle the debate. One common way to determine the
Hubble constant is by measuring the distances and speeds of far-off galaxies.
Measuring cosmic distances is difficult, but astronomers can estimate them
using objects of known brightness, called standard candles. If you know the
object’s actual brightness, you can calculate its distance based on how bright
it seems from Earth.
Studies using supernovas and variable stars called Cepheids as
candles have found an expansion rate of 74.0 kilometers per second for
approximately every 3 million light-years, or megaparsec, of distance between
objects. But using red giant stars, Freedman and colleagues have gotten a
smaller answer: 69.8 km/s/Mpc.
Other studies have measured the Hubble constant by looking at
the dim glow of light emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, called the
cosmic microwave background. Calculations based on that glow give a smaller
rate still: 67.4 km/s/Mpc. Although these numbers may seem close, the fact that
they disagree at all could alter our understanding of the contents of the
universe and how it evolves over time. The discrepancy has been called a crisis
in cosmology (SN: 9/14/19, p. 22).
In
its first year, Webb will observe some of the same galaxies
used in the supernova studies, using three different objects as candles:
Cepheids, red giants and peculiar stars called carbon stars.
The telescope will also try to measure the Hubble constant using
a distant gravitationally lensed galaxy. Comparing those measurements with each
other and with similar ones from Hubble will show if earlier measurements were
just wrong, or if the tension between measurements is real, Freedman says.
Without these new observations, “we were just going to argue
about the same things forever,” she says. “We just need better data. And [Webb]
is poised to deliver it.”
What could go wrong?
For the James Webb Space Telescope, getting into space is just
step one. The telescope must complete a complicated series of unfolding steps
before it can observe the cosmos. The entire sequence, including getting the
science instruments ready, will take about six months.
“A lot has to go right, that’s for sure,” says astronomer Scott
Friedman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is in
charge of this timeline. Webb will be heading to a point in space called L2,
which is too far from Earth for astronauts to visit and make repairs. “There’s
every reason to believe things will go very well,” Friedman says. “But we won’t
know until we get there.”
Exoplanets
Perhaps the biggest change for Webb science has been the rise of
the field of exoplanet explorations.
“When this was proposed, exoplanets were scarcely a thing,” says
STScI’s Friedman. “And now, of course, it’s one of the hottest topics in all of
science, especially all of astronomy.”
The Dressler report’s second major goal for Hubble’s successor
was “the detection of Earthlike planets around other stars and the search for
evidence of life on them.” But back in 1995, only a handful of planets orbiting
other sunlike stars were even known, and all of them were scorching-hot gas
giants — nothing like Earth at all.
Since then, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets
orbiting distant stars. Scientists now estimate that, on average, there is at
least one planet for every star we see in the sky. And some of the planets are
small and rocky, with the right temperatures to support liquid water, and maybe
life.
Most of the known planets were discovered as they crossed, or
transited, in front of their parent stars, blocking a little bit of the parent
star’s light. Astronomers soon realized that, if those planets have
atmospheres, a sensitive telescope could effectively sniff the air by examining
the starlight that filters through the atmosphere.
The infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, which launched in 2003,
and Hubble have started this work. But Spitzer ran out of coolant in 2009,
keeping it too warm to measure important molecules in exoplanet atmospheres.
And Hubble is not sensitive to some of the most interesting wavelengths of
light — the ones that could reveal alien life-forms.
That’s where Webb is going to shine. If Hubble is peeking through
a crack in a door, Webb will throw the door wide open, says exoplanet scientist
Nikole Lewis of Cornell University. Crucially, Webb, unlike Hubble, will be
particularly sensitive to several carbon-bearing molecules in exoplanet
atmospheres that might be signs of life.
“Hubble can’t tell us anything really about carbon, carbon
monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane,” she says.
If Webb had launched in 2007, it could have missed this whole
field. Even though the first transiting exoplanet was discovered in 1999, their
numbers were low for the next decade.
Lewis remembers thinking, when she started grad school in 2007,
that she could make a computer model of all the transiting exoplanets. “Because
there were literally only 25,” she says.
Transit advantages
Webb will measure the composition of exoplanet atmospheres by
looking at the light from the planet’s host star as the planet crosses in front
of the star. Atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, such as sodium (Na) and
potassium (K), absorb certain wavelengths of the starlight, leaving a unique
fingerprint in the spectrum of light that reaches Webb’s detectors.
Between 2009 and 2018, NASA’s Kepler space telescope raked in
transiting planets by the thousands. But those planets were too dim and distant
for Webb to probe their atmospheres.
So the down-to-the-wire delays of the last few years have
actually been good for exoplanet research, Lewis says. “The launch delays were
one of the best things that’s happened for exoplanet science with Webb,” she
says. “Full stop.”
That’s mainly thanks to NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite, or TESS, which launched in April 2018. TESS’ job is to
find planets orbiting the brightest, nearest stars, which will give Webb the
best shot at detecting interesting molecules in planetary atmospheres.
If it had launched in 2018, Webb would have had to wait a few
years for TESS to pick out the best targets. Now, it can get started on those
worlds right away. Webb’s first year of observations will include probing
several known exoplanets that have been hailed as possible places to find life.
Scientists will survey planets orbiting small, cool stars called M dwarfs to
make sure such planets even have atmospheres, a question that has been hotly
debated.
If a sign of life does show up on any of these planets, that
result will be fiercely debated, too, Lewis says. “There will be a huge
kerfuffle in the literature when that comes up.” It will be hard to compare
planets orbiting M dwarfs with Earth, because these planets and their stars are
so different from ours. Still, “let’s look and see what we find,” she says.
A
limited lifetime
With its components assembled, tested and folded at Northrop
Grumman’s facilities in California, Webb is on its way by boat through the
Panama Canal, ready to launch in an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. The
most recent launch date is set for December 18.
For the scientists who have been working on Webb for decades,
this is a nostalgic moment.
“You start to relate to the folks who built the pyramids,”
Stiavelli says.
Other scientists, who grew up in a world where Webb was always
on the horizon, are already thinking about the next big thing.
“I’m pretty sure, barring epic disaster, that [Webb] will carry
my career through the next decade,” Lewis says. “But I have to think about what
I’ll do in the next decade”
after that.
Unlike Hubble, which has lasted decades thanks to fixes by astronauts and
upgrade missions, Webb has a strictly limited lifetime. Orbiting the sun at a
gravitationally fixed point called L2, Webb will be too far from Earth to
repair, and will need to burn small amounts of fuel to stay in position. The
fuel will last for at least five years, and hopefully as much as 10. But when
the fuel runs out, Webb is finished. The telescope operators will move it into
retirement in an out-of-the-way orbit around the sun, and bid it farewell.
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 Zoom Digital Series
Zoom Webinar Platform
July Night Sky Network
Clubs & Events
https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/clubs-and-events.cfm
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AEA Astronomy Club Meeting |
TBD -- Great Courses video |
Teams
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Cancelled
for now |
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Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS Monthly General Meeting in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw
Bl. In Torrance) |
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Nov
11 The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2021
November 2021 - Rising
Tides: First Year in Space for NASA’s Earth Flagship
In this illustration, the Sentinel-6
Michael Freilich spacecraft, the world's latest sea-level satellite, orbits
Earth with its deployable solar panels extended.
Credit:
NASA
Rising
Tides: First Year in Space for NASA’s Earth Flagship
November 11
Time: 7
p.m. PDT (10 p.m. EDT; 0300 UTC)
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will
continue a decades-long effort to measure global ocean height from space, which
started in the early 1990s. Tune in to hear what we’ve learned from the newest
sea-level monitoring satellite.
Speaker(s):
Josh Willis, Lead NASA Scientist for Sentinel-6, NASA/JPL
Host:
Nikki Wyrick, Public Services Office, NASA/JPL
Co-Host:
Jocelyn Argueta, Public Outreach Specialist, NASA/JPL
Webcast:
Click
here to watch the event live on YouTube
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8 Nov |
LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory
(private) |
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No event in Nov |
UCLA Meteorite Gallery Events |
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2 Dec |
AEA Astronomy Club Meeting |
TBD -- Great Courses video |
(Teams) |
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Observing:
The
following data are from the 2021 Observer’s Handbook, and Sky & Telescope’s
2021 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 November:
Moon: Oct 6 new, Oct 13 1st
quarter, Oct 20 Full, Oct 28 last quarter
Planets:
Venus
shines brightly at dusk all month. Mars emerges at dawn on
the 23rd. Jupiter and Saturn transit at dusk and set late at night. Mercury
is visible at dawn to the 11th.
Other
Events:
LAAS Event Calendar (incl.
various other virtual events):
https://www.laas.org/laas-bulletin/#calendar
|
Cancelled |
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. Time: 7:30
PM - 10:00 PM Location: Garvey
Ranch Obs. , 781 Orange Ave., Monterey Park, CA 91755 |
3 November Taurids
Meteor Shower Peak These relatively slow-moving meteors, associated with
Comet Encke, usually have a Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of 5.
|
6 Nov |
LAAS Private dark
sky Star Party |
16 November Leonid
Meteor Shower Peak The nearly full moon during this year’s shower will
limit visibility of the meteors.
|
23 Nov |
SBAS In-town
observing session – In Town Dark Sky Observing Session at
Ridgecrest Middle School– 28915 NortbBay Rd. RPV, Weather Permitting: Please
contact Ken Munson to confirm that the gate will be opened. http://www.sbastro.net/. Only if we get
permission to use the school grounds again and CDC guidelines are reduced |
|
2 & 30 Nov |
SBAS
out-of-town Dark Sky observing – contact Ken Munson to coordinate a location.
http://www.sbastro.net/. |
|
Cancelled |
LAAS Public
Star Party: Griffith Observatory Grounds 2-10pm See http://www.griffithobservatory.org/programs/publictelescopes.html#starparties for more information. |
|
4 Dec |
LAAS Private dark
sky Star Party |
Internet
Links:
Telescope, Binocular & Accessory Buying
Guides
Sky & Telescope Magazine -- Choosing Your Equipment
Orion Telescopes & Binoculars -- Buying
Guides
Telescopes.com -- Telescopes 101
General
Getting Started in Astronomy & Observing
e! Science News Astronomy & Space
Astronomical Society of the Pacific (educational, amateur &
professional)
Amateur Online Tools, Journals, Vendors, Societies, Databases
The Astronomy White Pages (U.S. & International
Amateur Clubs & Societies)
American Astronomical Society
(professional)
Regional
(Southern California, Washington, D.C. & Colorado)
Southern California & Beyond
Amateur Astronomy Organizations, Observatories & Planetaria
Mt. Wilson Observatory description, history, visiting
Los Angeles Astronomical Society (LAAS)
South Bay Astronomical Society
(SBAS)
The Local Group Astronomy Club
(Santa Clarita)
Ventura County Astronomical
Society
The
Astronomical Society of Greenbelt
Northern
Virginia Astronomy Club
Colorado
Springs Astronomical Society
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 Kaly Rengarajan, 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: Jason Fields, President & Program Committee Chairman, Sam
Andrews, VP, Kelly Gov club Secretary (& librarian), or Kaly Rangarajan,
(Treasurer).
Mark Clayson,
AEA Astronomy Club Newsletter Editor
