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.