AEA Astronomy Club
Newsletter
October 2023
Contents
AEA Astronomy Club News & Calendar p.1
Video(s) & Picture(s) of the Month p. 3
Astronomy News p. 14
General Calendar p. 23
Colloquia, lectures, mtgs. p. 23
Observing p. 24
Useful
Links p. 26
About the Club p.
27
Club News &
Calendar.
Club Calendar
Club Meeting Schedule:
--
7 Sept AEA
Astronomy Club Meeting TBD – Great
Courses video Teams
5 Oct 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:
.
Annular solar eclipse Oct. 14
(% of disk area eclipsed – 0.90 is annular:
Albuquerque 0.90, Houston 0.85, Colorado
Springs 0.81, Los Angeles 0.70)
The club’s Meade LX-200 10”
telescope & accessories need a new home – contact Alex Ellis.
Congratulations and thanks to our new Vice President, Alexandra Gruson!
2023 AEA Astronomy
Club Dues
• The new Treasurer, Eric Belle,
will be sending out a request for 2023 Dues, it is recognized that this request
is being sent out 3 months late
• We will attempt to set up an
electronic method of dues payment; once the proposed method has been approved
by the officers, an email will be sent out to the membership along with a
request to pay 2023 Dues.
·
To be counted on the club roster for group
membership in the Astronomical League, you need to renew.
2024
Eclipse -- An update from the
2024 solar eclipse committee (Mark Clayson, Marilee Wheaton, Judy Kerner,Mai
Lee, Melissa Jolliff, Nahum Melamed):
6 months ahead of the eclipse,
Marilee & Mark have noted that lowest airfares from L.A. to San Antonio
have begun to rise from earlier research – lower priced fares have been
taken. Here is the status of room
reservations in our block of rooms as of Oct. 2 (all with sofabeds also) at the
2 adjacent properties:
Property
1:
Studio
king suites 13 of 30
2 bedroom
suites 2 of 5
Property
2:
Double
queens 2 of 10
King
rooms 4 of 5
Marilee Wheaton has the link
& phone to make reservations. It is within
an hour drive of Kerrville and Fredericksburg – two options on centerline for
observing. If you would like more
information about the hotels & available rooms, the link and phone to
reserve a room as well as preliminary travel & car rental research and
observing plans, contact Marilee Wheaton at Marilee.wheaton@aero.org , 310-874-5480.
We are still
pursuing options for reserving an observing site – leaning now towards
Fredericksburg rather than Kerrville, as the latter has been adopted by NASA
for one of their 3 sites. Looking at
schools, parks, commercial & private properties. There are designated public viewing sites,
but we’d like to find a private one to avoid crowds and parking issues. We do have a new club member working remotely
from San Antonio – Alexandra Olano – who has offered to check out sites for us.
It is expected that all
people making reservations be members of the club in 2024. And, as with Mt. Wilson observing trips, we ask
that all family members/friends accompanying them also join the club for 2024,
as they will also be receiving benefits of the club (arrangements, equipment, photos,
expertise, and possibly eclipse glasses and T-shirt). Violations are subject to cancellation of
room reservations, if membership is not finalized by Dec. 31, 2023.
Also, please let Marilee
know of your anticipated travel plan – driving or flying. We need to know who’s driving and may be able
to take some of our club equipment for observing and photographing the
eclipse.
Contact Jason Fields if interested in joining him for an observing
night with his 20” Dobs – per recent emails.
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)
From Jay Landis:
While I was taking data for the Tulip Nebula, the other part of
the night I was taking data on the Wizard nebula. This nebula is
approximately 8,500 light years away in the constellation Cepheus. The total
integration time for the data for this target was 61 hours 51 minutes through
six different filters. I used red, green, and blue for natural color
stars. I used narrowband filters (6nm bandpass) for the primary nebula
data. The filters were H-alpha (656nm), Sulphur-II (672nm), and
Oxygen-III (501nm). The color palette used was SHO or SII for red, Ha for
green, and OIII for blue.
Enjoy the wonder.
Clear skies to everyone
VIDEO: A Ring of Fire Sunrise
Solar Eclipse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfpqSj7cCs&t=118s
Video Credit: Colin Legg & Geoff Sims; Music: Peter Nanasi
Explanation: What's rising above the horizon behind those clouds? It's
the Sun. Most sunrises don't look like
this, though, because most sunrises don't include the Moon. In the early
morning of 2013 May 10, however, from Western Australia, the Moon was
between the Earth and the rising Sun. At
times, it would be hard for the uninformed to
understand what was happening. In an annular
eclipse, the Moon is too far from the Earth to
block the entire Sun, and at most leaves a ring of fire where
sunlight pours out around every edge of the Moon. The featured time-lapse
video also recorded the eclipse through the high refraction of
the Earth's atmosphere just
above the horizon, making the unusual rising Sun and Moon appear
also flattened. As
the video continues, the Sun continues to rise, while the Sun and Moon begin to
separate. The next
annular solar eclipse will occur in less than three weeks. On
Saturday, October 14, a ring
of fire will be visible through clear skies from a thin swath crossing
both North
and South America.
VIDEO: HESS Telescopes Explore the High-Energy Sky https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230906.html
Video Credit & Copyright: Jeff
Dai (TWAN), H.E.S.S.
Collaboration;
Music: Ibaotu
catalog number 1044988 (Used with permission)
Explanation: They may look like modern mechanical dinosaurs, but they
are enormous swiveling eyes that watch the sky. The High
Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Observatory is composed
of four 12-meter reflecting-mirror telescopes surrounding a larger telescope housing
a 28-meter mirror. They are designed to detect strange flickers of blue light
-- Cherenkov
radiation --emitted when charged particles move
slightly faster than the speed of light in
air. This light is emitted when a gamma ray from
a distant source strikes a molecule in Earth's atmosphere and
starts a charged-particle
shower. H.E.S.S. is
sensitive to some of the highest energy photons (TeV)
crossing the universe. Operating since 2003 in Namibia,
H.E.S.S. has searched for dark
matter and has discovered
over 50 sources emitting high energy radiation including supernova remnants and
the centers
of galaxies that contain supermassive black holes.
Pictured in June, H.E.S.S.
telescopes swivel and stare in time-lapse sequences shot
in front of our Milky
Way Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds --
as the occasional Earth-orbiting satellite zips by.
HH 211: Jets from a Forming Star
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Webb; Processing: Tom
Ray (DIAS Dublin)
Explanation: Do stars always
create jets as they form? No one is sure. As a gas cloud gravitationally
contracts, it forms a disk that
can spin too fast to continue contracting into a protostar.
Theorists hypothesize that
this spin can be reduced by expelling jets. This speculation coincides with
known Herbig-Haro
(HH) objects, young stellar objects seen to emit jets -- sometimes
in spectacular
fashion. Pictured is
Herbig-Haro 211, a young star in formation recently
imaged by the Webb
Space Telescope (JWST) in infrared light and
in great
detail. Along with the two narrow beams of
particles, red shock waves can
be seen as the outflows impact existing interstellar
gas. The jets of HH
221 will likely change shape as they brighten and fade over the
next 100,000 years, as research into the details of star formation continues.
The Red Sprite and the Tree Credit & Copyright: Maxime Villaeys
Explanation: The sprite and tree could hardly be more different. To
start, the red sprite is
an unusual form of lightning, while the tree is a common
plant. The sprite is far
away -- high in Earth's
atmosphere, while the tree is nearby --
only about a football field away. The sprite is fast -- electrons streaming
up and down at near light's
speed, while the tree is slow -- wood anchored to the ground.
The sprite is
bright -- lighting up the sky, while the tree is dim -- shining mostly by
reflected light. The sprite was
fleeting -- lasting only a small fraction of a second, while the tree
is durable -- living now for many years. Both however, when
captured together, appear oddly similar in this featured composite
image captured early this month in France as a thunderstorm
passed over mountains of the Atlantic Pyrenees.
Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 Fragments
Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU / APL), M. Mutchler and Z. Levay
(STScI)
Explanation: Periodic comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann
3 has broken up at least twice. A cosmic souffle of
ice and dust left over from the early solar system, this comet was first seen
to split into several large pieces during the close-in part of
its orbit in 1995. However, in
the 2006 passage, it disintegrated into dozens of fragments that
stretched several degrees across the sky. Since comets are
relatively fragile, stresses from heat, gravity and outgassing, for example,
could be responsible for their tendency to break up in
such a spectacular fashion when they near the hot
Sun. The Hubble Space Telescope recorded,
in 2006, the featured sharp view of prolific Fragment B,
itself trailing a multitude of smaller pieces, each with its own cometary coma
and tail. The picture spans over 3,000 kilometers at the comet's distance of 32
million kilometers from planet Earth.
The Large Cloud of Magellan
Image Credit & Copyright: Chris Willocks /
Telescope.Live
Explanation: The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and
his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first
circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy
cloud-like objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as
the Clouds
of Magellan, now understood to be satellite galaxies of our much
larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. About 160,000 light-years distant in the
constellation Dorado, the Large Magellanic Cloud is
seen in this sharp
galaxy portrait. Spanning about 15,000 light-years or so, it is the
most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and
is the home of the closest
supernova in modern times, SN 1987A.
The prominent patch above center is 30 Doradus, also known as the
magnificent Tarantula
Nebula, a giant star-forming region about 1,000 light-years across.
NGC 4632: Galaxy with a Hidden Polar Ring
Credit: Jayanne
English (U.
Manitoba), Nathan
Deg (Queen's
University) & WALLABY
Survey, IDIA/Vislab, CSIRO/ASKAP, NAOJ/Subaru Telescope; Text: Jayanne English (U.
Manitoba)
Explanation: Galaxy NGC 4632 hides a secret from optical telescopes. It
is surrounded by a ring of cool hydrogen gas
orbiting at 90 degrees to its spiral disk. Such polar ring galaxies have
previously been discovered using starlight. However, NGC 4632 is among the
first in which a radio telescope survey
revealed a polar ring. The featured
composite image combines this gas ring, observed with the
highly sensitive ASKAP
telescope, with optical data from the Subaru telescope. Using virtual
reality, astronomers separated out the gas in the main disk of the
galaxy from the ring, and the subtle color gradient traces its orbital motion.
Why do polar
rings exist? They could be material pulled from
one galaxy as it gravitationally
interacts with a companion. Or hydrogen gas flows along
the filaments
of the cosmic web and accretes into a ring around a galaxy,
some of which gravitationally contracts into stars.
NGC 7331 and Beyond
Image Credit & Copyright: Ian Gorenstein
Explanation: Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is
often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way.
About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC
7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the
brighter galaxies not included
in Charles Messier's famous 18th
century catalog. Since the galaxy's disk is inclined to
our line-of-sight, long telescopic exposures often result in images that evokes
a strong sense of depth. The effect is further enhanced in this sharp image by
galaxies that lie beyond the gorgeous island
universe. The most prominent background galaxies are about one tenth
the apparent
size of NGC 7331 and so lie roughly ten times farther away.
Their close alignment on the sky with NGC 7331 occurs just by chance. Lingering
above the plane of the Milky Way, this striking visual grouping of galaxies is
known to some as the Deer
Lick Group.
Back from Bennu
Image Credit: NASA/Keegan
Barber
Explanation: Back
from asteroid 101955 Bennu, a 110-pound, 31-inch wide sample return
capsule rests in a desert
on planet Earth in this photo, taken at the Department of
Defense Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City last
Sunday, September 24. Dropped off by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft, the
capsule looks charred from the extreme temperatures experienced during its
blistering descent through Earth's dense atmosphere. OSIRIS-Rex began its
home-ward journey from Bennu in May of 2021. Delivered to NASA’s Johnson Space
Center in Houston on September 25, the capsule's canister is expected to
contain an uncontaminated sample of about a half pound (250 grams) of Bennu's loosely packed
regolith. Working in a new laboratory designed for the OSIRIS-REx
mission, scientists and engineers will complete the canister
disassembly process, and plan to unveil the sample of the
near-Earth asteroid in a broadcast event on October 11.
Tagging Bennu
Image Credit: OSIRIS-REx, University of Arizona, NASA, Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio
Explanation: The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched
asteroid 101955 Bennu on
October 20, 2020, after a careful approach to
the small, near-Earth asteroid's boulder-strewn surface. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go
(TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM)
appears to crush some of the rocks in this close-up recorded by the
spacecraft's SamCam. The image was snapped just after surface contact some 321
million kilometers from planet Earth. One second later, the spacecraft fired
nitrogen gas from a bottle to blow a substantial amount of Bennu's regolith into
the sampling head, collecting the loose
surface material. And now, nearly three years later, on Sunday,
September 24, that sample of asteroid Bennu is scheduled to arrive
on planet Earth. The sample return capsule will be dropped
off by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft as it makes a close flyby of
Earth. Twenty minutes after the drop-off, the spacecraft will fire its
thrusters to divert past Earth and continue on to orbit near-Earth asteroid
99942 Apophis.
STEVE and Milky Way Cross over Rural Road
Image Credit & Copyright: Theresa Clarke
Explanation: Not every road ends in a STEVE. A week ago, a sky
enthusiast's journey began with a goal: to photograph an aurora over Lake Huron. Driving through
rural Ontario, Canada, the
forecasted sky show started unexpectedly
early, causing the photographer to stop before arriving at the
scenic Great
Lake. Aurora images were taken toward the north -- but over land,
not sea. While waiting for a second round of auroras, a peculiar band of
light was noticed to the west. Slowly, the photographer and friends realized
that this western band was likely an unusual type of aurora: a Strong Thermal Emission
Velocity Enhancement (STEVE). Moreover, this STEVE was
putting on quite a show: appearing intertwined with the central band of our Milky
Way Galaxy while intersecting the horizon just near the end of
the country road. After capturing this cosmic X on
camera, the photographer paused to appreciate the unexpected
awesomeness of finding extraordinary beauty in an ordinary
setting.
Astronomy
News:
(generally from ScienceDaily.com or ScienceNews.org)
Book Reviews: “‘Simulating the Cosmos’ and ‘The Universe in a
Box’ Review: Big Picture” (the Wall Street Journal)
JWST’s hunt
for distant galaxies keeps turning up surprises
Galaxies
in the early universe are bigger, brighter and more mature than expected
Scientists at the University of Texas at
Austin search for distant galaxies in the first deep field image taken by the
James Webb Space Telescope, released in July 2022.
NOLAN ZUNK/UNIV. OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
When Brant Robertson saw a new measurement of the distance to a
familiar galaxy, he laughed out loud.
For more than a decade, the galaxy had been a contender for the
most distant ever observed. In 2012, Robertson and colleagues used data from
the Hubble Space Telescope to show that the galaxy’s light had shone across the
universe from about 13.3 billion years ago — less than 400 million years into
the universe’s existence.
Not everyone believed it. “We got a lot of flak,” recalls
Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It
seemed too implausible that it was at such a great distance.” It felt like he
was going around claiming to have seen the Loch Ness monster.
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