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, November 12, 2021

2021 November

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: --

4 Nov

AEA

TBD

(A1/1735)

AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

TBD -- Great Courses video

Teams

 

2 Dec

AEA

TBD

(A1/1735)

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 DauvergneMusic: 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 ParisFrance. 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: NASAJPL-CaltechSWRIMSSS;
Animation: Koji KuramuraGerald 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 UtahUSA. 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 CanaveralFloridaUSA.

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 & LicenseJ. Rhoads (Arizona State U.) et al., WIYNAURANOIRLabNSF

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.NSFhtAlice 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.

NORTHROP GRUMMAN

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

C. CHANG

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

C. CHANG

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.”


Here’s a timeline of what has to go right (all times are approximate).

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.

ESO, DAVID SING

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

Register to Join Us!

Zoom Webinar Platform

 

July Night Sky Network Clubs & Events   https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/clubs-and-events.cfm  

 

4 Nov

AEA

TBD

(A1/1735)

AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

TBD -- Great Courses video

Teams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cancelled for now

 

Friday Night 7:30PM SBAS  Monthly General Meeting

in the Planetarium at El Camino College (16007 Crenshaw Bl. In Torrance)

 

 

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 

Full Image Details

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

 

8 Nov

LAAS General Mtg. 7:30pm Griffith Observatory (private)

 

 

 

No event in Nov

  

UCLA Meteorite Gallery Events

2 Dec

AEA Astronomy Club Meeting

 TBD -- Great Courses video

(Teams)

 

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. 

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

 

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

The Astronomical League

 e! Science News Astronomy & Space

NASA Gallery

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)

More...

 

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)

Orange County Astronomers

The Local Group Astronomy Club (Santa Clarita)

Ventura County Astronomical Society

The Astronomical Society of Greenbelt

National Capital Astronomers

Northern Virginia Astronomy Club

Colorado Springs Astronomical Society

Denver 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 

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