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.