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.

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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.