APOD 2.5

12/01/2010 Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express

Phobos is the larger of Mars's two moons. It is irregularly shaped, loaded with craters and resembles a potato. My theory is that a Russian astronaut from the ISS dropped his lunch during a spacewalk and it ended up orbiting Mars. It's unfortunate that the thick layer of dust covering Phobos precludes us from landing a probe on it, but if a human could ever reach Phobos, it would be a barrel of monkeys to wade through 3 feet of galactic dust on a giant potato. It took me a while to figure out why Phobos rises twice on certain parts of the planet. Near the equator, Phobos orbits so fast that it traverses the sky twice before a Martian day has elapsed. Closer to the poles, Phobos is not visible at all because it's beneath the horizon.

APOD 2.3

11/09/2010 NGC 4452: An Extremely Thin Galaxy

At first I thought this was a picture of a frisbee in space, but it turned out to be a view of galaxy NGC 4452 from the plane of the galaxy itself, which is even cooler! It is located in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, which is the closest to the to the Milky Way. It is a lenticular galaxy, which is a disc galaxy that's used up most of its interstellar matter. It is roughly as thick as the Milky Way. The picture is almost perfectly edge-on with this galaxy. This would probably greatly surprise the average person who doesn't know much about astronomy, because they think it's all just stars and bright spots of light, whereas there are actually lots of interesting shapes like this line segment or molecular dust clouds.

APOD 2.2

10/30/2010 Ghost of the Cepheus Flame

This picture is very frightening. The molecular dust cloud kind of looks like a seahorse. The constellation Cepheus contains several star forming regions. The Cepheus Flare is a star forming region of low and intermediate mass. The main nebula is the Ghost Nebula, whose brown color is caused by the stars behind it. The double stars are the beginnings of a binary star. It's fitting that they used a picture of the ghost nebula on the day before Halloween.

APOD 2.4

The 11/14/2010 picture is an artist's representation of the concept of the multiverse. Obviously one cannot take a picture of an alternate universe, as with most astronomical phenomena, so the picture is really just a chance for the artist to doodle some circles and neat colors and call it a multiverse. Essentially, the multiverse is the collection of universes. Many scientists don't even agree that there are other universes, but they are hypothesized to explain where matter goes when it falls into a black hole, for example. It is very tantalizing to ponder what life is like for parallel analogues of myself in other universes. For instance, while I chose to eat a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for lunch today, my parallel twin might have eaten a Caesar salad. Scientists are pondering other, less important issues pertaining to the multiverse, but there is virtually no way to empirically test them.

Observation 10/31/2010

Tonight at about 8:50, Sam Blumenstein and I saw a streak of light in the sky that might have been a meteorite. It was in the West, crossing the constellation Sagittarius and heading toward the horizon. It lasted for about 2 seconds, so it was extremely fortuitous that we happened to be looking in that direction. To say that we celebrated is an understatement.

APOD 2.1

10/25/10 Water Ice Detected Beneath Moon's Surface
This image shows the relative H2O content of the Moon, with blue areas containing ice below the surface and red areas dry. The thought of having people live for short intervals on the Moon is quite provocative, and having native supplies of water there would certainly make it easier. I don't understand why the scientists crashed LCROSS, a perfectly good satellite just to see if Cabeus crater contained any water, but perhaps they just had absolutely no use for the satellite anymore.

APOD 1.8

10/18/2010 It Came From The Sun

This image shows a powerful solar prominence. A prominence is a general term for a projection from the Sun, usually in the shape of a loop. The largest one recorded was 28 times the diameter of the Earth, and had a mass on the order of 10^11 tonnes! That's a lot of sandbags. I can't believe an object that seems so wispy contains so much matter. Prominences are held to the Sun by its magnetic field, and can be quiescent (long) or eruptive (short). I never knew about the solar cycle, a period of about 11 years between spurts of increased solar activity.

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei

­ Galileo Galilei was an Italian scientist who played an instrumental role not only in the development of astronomy, but of modern science in general. He was born in Pisa in 1564 to Vincenzo Galilei, but at age 8 his family moved to Florence. He had three illegitimate children with Marina Gamba. He attended the University of Pisa and taught at the University of Padua. He died in 1642 and was buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce.

Galileo invented the horse-driven pump, the sector, the pendulum clock, and the thermoscope, a precursor to the modern thermometer.  However, his most important contribution was improving Hans Lippershey’s telescope. Lippershey is credited with inventing the telescope by lining up two convex lenses, but it only had a magnification of 3x. Galileo studied Lippershey’s schematic and built one with 30x magnification, which he sold to sailors and merchants. The telescope dramatically increased the empirical potential of astronomy; with it, the observer can see much more of the sky, but it also links the observation to an apparatus, which is much more consistent and trustworthy than the human brain.

Armed with the telescope, Galileo made numerous keen observations of the skies. For centuries, people had tried to explain away the spots on the Moon in a misguided attempt to preserve celestial perfection. Galileo observed that the amount of shading in these lunar spots varied with its angle to the Sun as if they were indentations. He thus discovered that the lunar surface has mountains and valleys, upending the expectation that celestial bodies had to be flawless. Galileo also proposed the concept of librations, which are slight movements of the Moon relative to the Earth that allow us to see it from different angles.

Galileo was the first person to definitively observe sunspots. Prior attempts dismissed the spots as a transit of Mercury. The major obstacle to overcome was being able to observe the sun without eye damage, which Galileo circumvented by observing the Sun through a telescope. He shared his observations of sunspots in 1911 but had a long feud with Christoph Scheiner over the explanation of the black spots. Scheiner claimed that there were objects with orbits very close to the Sun that were only visible at inferior conjunction. The debate was settled by David Fabricius, who showed that they were sunspots, not orbiting bodies.

Galileo was the first person to observe Jupiter’s four largest moons. He initially noticed what looked like 3 fixed stars in a line next to Jupiter, but after multiple sessions, it became clear that there were actually 4 objects and they were orbiting Jupiter. This discovery gave credence to the Copernican, heliocentric view: since Jupiter’s moons are not orbiting the Earth, Earth cannot be the center of all celestial motion.

Galileo was the first to observe the rings of Saturn. At first, he thought he was observing a tri-star formation, with two ancillary stars on either side of Saturn. However, he later observed that the lateral stars disappeared, a stymying realization. Not until 1858 did James Maxwell publish a mathematical analysis of these “stars” and show that they were rings made of many minuscule particles.

Galileo’s importance to the field of astronomy is inestimable. Modifying the telescope gave him the superior accuracy necessary to observe the rough lunar surface, sunspots, Jupiter’s moons, and Saturn’s rings.

Works Cited

1. "Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642)." World of Earth Science. Ed. K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 243-245. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 1 Oct. 2010.

2. "Galileo Galilei." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 11 Oct. 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei>.

3. Hightower, Paul. Galileo: Astronomer and Physicist. Springfield, NJ, USA: Enslow, 1997. Print.

4. "Science." The Galileo Project. Web. 11 Oct. 2010. <http://galileo.rice.edu/science.html>.

Observation 10/14

Last night, 10/14/2010, I saw the first quarter moon while driving home. It was actually slight before first quarter, so that a little less than half of the moon was illuminated.

APOD 1.7

10/13/2010 Science Museum Hubble

It makes me lugubrious (good word) that the Hubble is going to be de-orbited into the ocean! I realize it's prohibitively expensive to bring it down in a space shuttle, but that doesn't mitigate my disappointment that one of man's greatest scientific achievements is going to be condemned to a watery grave. However, the scale model on display in the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti is the next best thing. I find it humorous that there's a 1 in 700 chance of human fatality if the Hubble experiences an uncontrolled re-entry. My favorite Hubble image is the captivating "Pillars of Creation" which shows part of the Eagle Nebula.

APOD 1.6

10/05/2010- Horsehead and Orion Nebulas
This image shows the Horsehead and Orion Nebulas of the constellation Orion. Horsehead is at the lower left and Orion is at the upper right. The way nebulas manage to look wispy and solid while actually consisting of gases like hydrogen and helium amazes me. Stars are often formed in these gaseous formations. The Horsehead Nebula is 1500 light years away and lies below the star Alnitak of Orion's Belt. The nebula is supposed to resemble a horse's head, but I think it looks more like a scorpion's stinger. I'm not in charge of naming astronomical objects, so I'll get off my high horse. Perhaps Williamina Fleming, the discoverer, thought the latter would have been redundant with the constellation Scorpius. However, it's better than the Running Man nebula, which doesn't look anything like a running man. My favorite parts of this picture are the Flame Nebula and the Orion Nebula itself, which kind of looks like a white blood cell. Extending the tendril from the Flame Nebula up and right to the Orion Nebula, it almost looks like the fuse leading to a bomb. There are all kinds of neat likenesses in this image!

I noticed the author's wry sense of humor in this APOD. He linked "Horsehead" to a set of instructions for drawing a horse's head. You can't blame him for horsing around.

Stargaze 10/03/10

We had a stargaze at Turtle Beach from 7:30 to 9:00 on Sunday 10/03. I watched Venus set on the beach, which was a gradual process, as Venus became less visible the more of Earth's atmosphere its light had to pass through. I saw Jupiter through the telescope in the SSE at amizuth ~60 degrees, and four of its moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) were in an almost perfect straight line. Polaris was visible, but most of the circumpolar stars were obscured by the city lights. I saw M-7 through the telescope, and was able to see about 30 stars, although it actually contains 80 stars brighter than magnitude 10. We saw the Hubble Space Telescope pass overhead for about a minute in the SW!

APOD 1.5

The picture for 09/27/10 shows Saturn in false-color with 3 hues of infrared light. This picture was synthesized from images taken by the Cassini space probe, which is currently on Titan. I find it astonishing that the aurora on Saturn's north pole takes the form of a hexagon, because it seems like most astronomical phenomena favor the curvaceous, highly symmetrical circles and ellipses. An aurora is an emission caused when solar particles follow a planet's magnetic field lines and bombard the atmosphere. Having just discussed wavelengths of light in class, it's fascinating how they "converted" an infrared image to one that we mere humans can process as different colors of visible light.

Stargaze 09/30/10

Last night from 8:00 to 9:30 we had a stargaze on Blackburn Point Road. I saw Venus in crescent from through the telescope, as well as Jupiter and 3 of its moons. The closest one was between Jupiter and the horizon, while the other 2 were farther out and closer to the zenith. We identified the constellations Scorpius, Sagitarrius, Corona Borealis, Corona Australis, Aquila, Ophiuchus, Hercules, and Delphinus, and the stars Antares, Polaris,
Arcturus (by following the arc of the Big Dipper), Vega, Deneb, and Altair. We used red lights to examine a star chart, however I didn't find it very useful, to be honest. Through the binoculars, I saw the center of the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Coathanger Cluster. Last and most importantly, we saw a shooting star in the north descending from about 80 to 50 degrees azimuth!!!

Galileo Galilei Sources

1. "Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642)." World of Earth Science. Ed. K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 243-245. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 1 Oct. 2010.

2. Hightower, Paul. Galileo: Astronomer and Physicist. Springfield, NJ, USA: Enslow, 1997. Print.

APOD 1.4

09/24/2010 Equinox and the Harvest Moon

I have never seen the moon shining as brightly as it is in this photo, which captures the recent harvest moon over a defunct church in Hungary. The harvest moon is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox, and it got its name because before electricity was invented, it shone from dusk till dawn, giving farmers the light needed to tend to their harvest past sunset. It would be interesting to live in such a time, just to see what it's like to notice such astronomical phenomena on my own and have them play a significant role in life, rather than having to check a calender and try to go out and see it, only to get home too late and find that I'd missed it :( For the first time in 20 years, autumn began on the night of a full moon, which is pretty amazing. I also find it amazing that Uranus AND Jupiter both reached opposition only a few days earlier. This is a month of considerable "gravity" for the astronomical community.

APOD 1.3

The picture from 09/14/10 depicts an extraordinary spiral from LL Pegasi. It is related to a binary star in a olanetary nebula, which results from a late-life star whose outer layers have been repulsed and ionized by ultraviolet radiation. The abstract on the spiral referred to it as a series of semi-concentric circles, but it really is for all intents and purposes a spiral. A new layer of the spiral is formed about every 800 years, which actually seems like a fairly short time in astronomical terms. The spiral itself consists of one of the stars losing material. They say the spiral might glow because of light reflected from nearby stars, which sounds reasonable to me.

Observation 09/16/10

At about 9:30, I went outside at home and saw the waxing gibbous moon in the South at an azimuth of about 60 degrees. I went outside again at about 10:30 and the moon had moved west and the azimuth decreased (due mainly to the Earth's rotation). Finally, I looked shortly after 11:00 and sure enough, the moon was even lower and farther west. This was the first time I had ever observed the Moon's apparent movement for myself, which was fascinating!

Observation 09/10/10

On Friday, I saw the waxing cresent moon in the southwest at approximately 8:15 PM. I also saw the planet Venus roughly 6 degrees to the right (to the North?) of the moon.

APOD 1.1

The 09/01/2010 picture shows the Earth and Moon as viewed from the MESSENGER space probe. Although the emergency slingshot maneuvers from science fiction like Sunshine and Star Trek may be without the grasp of modern science, space probes like the MESSENGER do make extensive of gravity and the planets to complete their voyages. MESSENGER's main purpose was to search for vulcanoids between Mercury and the Sun, but along the way, it captured this humbling picture of Earth and the Moon. The star far to the right of the pair is delta Scorpii, and some of the bright objects at the top are not stars but cosmic ray strikes. I expected the Earth and the Moon to be much farther apart because the distance between them is 60 terran radii. Perhaps their perceived proximity is due to the light reflecting off of them making them seem larger, or the Moon may simply have been almost between Earth and MESSENGER.

APOD 1.2

The 9/8/10 picture shows the NGC 4911 galaxy within the Coma Cluster. The Coma Cluster contains over 1000 galaxies, so densely packed that they sometimes collide and form bigger, elliptical galaxies. I thought it was fascinating how the neighbor galaxy NGC 4911A exerts a gravitational pull on NGC 4911, which distorts the spiral of dust surround it. The clouds of hydrogen indicate that stars are still forming in the galaxy. If NGC 4911 becomes an elliptical galaxy, the motion of the stars will become more radial rather than rotational. It's also mind-boggling that, according to the Wikipedia article on galaxy formation, galaxies form as a result of miniscule quantum fluctuations in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Gigantic, complex collections of stars come from events of subatomic magnitude.