mac may 2011 magazine

General notes May presents some wonderful observing opportunities this year. Starting off with the naked eye, There are two showers this month. The first shower is the Eta Aquarids which peaks on the morning of the 6th. The predictions for this shower vary between 40 and 85. These are typically fast, bright meteors and are of a similar speed to the Perseids. Some will leave persistent trains. However it is not a well placed shower for us. The radiant only rises at 04:00, however on a positive note, there will be no lunar interference.

The second shower this month is a minor one. They are the Eta Lyrids, peaking on the 9th with a ZHR of 3. There will be some lunar interference with first quarter moon in the night sky.

Telescope Targets Many of March's and April's targets are still available for viewing. See those month's picks for these targets.

We'll add a couple of globular clusters to our hunt this month. M3 in Cane Venatici is one of the brightest globulars in the sky (along with M13 and Omega Centauri). To find M3, use the end star of the big dipper's handle (Alkaid) and the very bright star Arcturus.

About halfway between these 2 stars and slightly to the west is a dimmer star called Beta Comae. Place Beta Comea at the edge of your finder's FOV (moving to the east), at this point, M3 should be at the opposite edge of the finderscope field. Centre M3 and enjoy the view!

Don't be afraid to increase the power on this one and see how many individual stars you can pick out. The good news is that M3 should be bright enough to be seen even from moderately light polluted locations, the bad news is that Beta Comea will be invisible to hop from. I've managed to find M3 by using Alkaid and Arcturus and scanning the area halfway between them with the scope at low power (albeit somewhat challenging).

M3 contains as many a 500,000 stars packed into an area of space approximately 200 Light-years in diameter. It is located approximately 40,000 light-years from us and it's age is estimated at 10 - 15 billion years old.

M53 is another globular cluster which is located in the constellation Coma Berenices. Using Arcturus and a much dimmer star just to the west (Muphrid) as our distance measure go approximately twice this distance and slightly north to M53. M53 will take somewhat darker skies to locate than M3.

M53 contains approximately 100,000 stars spanning about 300 light-years across. It is located approximately 65,000 light-years from us.

Also in Coma Berenices is a fairly bright galaxy, M64 (The Blackeye Galaxy). Just north (up from) of M53 is M64 (about the same distance as the distance between Arcturus and Muphrid. Distance estimates to this Spiral Galaxy range from 10 - 40 million light-years. The size estimates for this one range from 25,000 to 100,000 light-years in diameter. You will need dark skies to hunt this one down.

Planets Saturn is visible as an evening object during the month and rises during daylight hours throughout the month. With the planet’s ring plane starting to open up, this is not a good time to try and observe the rings in their full glory. It is however a good time to try and observe the smaller satellites and details on the planet’s surface with the rings out of the picture.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune are all in the morning sky this month and are not observable this month. General notes Check ou t www .heav en s -above.com for the latest passes of the International Space Station and satellites, details of Space Shuttle launches and passes and for details of Iridium Flare activity. Clear skies and good hunting!

By Kevin Daly http://members.aol.com/kdaly10475/index.html

Above: The M3 cluster is one of the largest and brightest, and is made up of around 500,000 stars. It is located at a distance of about 33,900 light-years away from Earth.

www.midlandsastronomy.com

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Issue 24- May, 2011

Latest Astronomy and Space News

Kids Astronomy

Quizzes and Games

Monthly Sky Guide

Internet Highlights

Sky Guide - Beginner’s targets for May

Club Notes

Club Observing:

Remember the next club meets every first Friday of the month for our observing sessions held in the MAC grounds. If you wish to be informed of these sessions please email your name and mobile number to [email protected] who will confirm if the session is going ahead (depending on weather).

MAC is a proud member of


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Exercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brain Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

c o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t s Latest Astronomy and Space News China plans for 1st "Heavenly Palace" Space Station in orbit by 2020 ...................................................................... 3

Kepler discovers a rare triple star gem .................................. 3

Observing Challenge: A gathering of Galaxies – Hickson 44 ... 4

MESSENGER finds where X marks the spot on Mercury .......... 4

Budget woes put Allen Telescope Array into “Hibernation” ..... 5

SuperWinds of the Universe - The Galaxy builders ................. 5

Earth has a companion asteroid with a weird orbit ................ 6

Weird Brown Dwarfs observed devouring Planets .................. 6

Astronomers calculate comet's orbit using amateur images from the web ..................................................................... 7

Comets are a thing of the past - literally ............................... 8

Bucket List Object #8: A Total Solar Eclipse .......................... 9

Kids Section Kids Korner ....................................................................... 10

Quizzes and Games Exercise your brain ............................................................ 11

Monthly Sky Guide Beginners sky guide for April .............................................. 12

Internet Highlights Special content only available with the online version of the magazine ................................................................ 13

Front cover image: Staring across interstellar space, the

alluring Cat's Eye nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth. A classic planetary

nebula, the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief yet glorious phase in the life of

a sun-like star.

Seen so clearly in this sharp Hubble Space Telescope image, the truly cosmic eye is over half a light-year across. Of course,

gazing into the Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of

evolution... in about 5 billion years.

Credit & Copyright: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team

MAC meets on the first Tuesday of the month in the Presbyterian Hall, High Street, Tullamore from 8pm.

All are welcome to attend. It also holds infrequent Observing Nights at its Observing Site in

Clonminch, or at a member’s house (weather permitting) on the first

Friday of every month..

You can see more about the club and its events on

www.midlandsastronomy.com or contact the club via e-mail at [email protected] Meetings are informal and are

aimed at a level to suit all ages.

1. If it wasn't for me,

the Earth would be getting bombarded with

asteroids, and terrestrial life would have never

evolved as far as it did. Who am I?

� Jupiter

� the asteroid belt

� the Sun

� Saturn

2. It is suggested that the

universe will come to

an end when its

ever-increasing rate of expansion causes all

matter to basically fly apart. What is the term

applied to this theory?

� The Big Stretch

� The Big Rip

� The Big Fly Apart

� The Big Crunch

3. In billions of years,

when it nears its death, widespread theory has it

that our sun will first shift to what other

colour?

� white

� orange

� blue

� red

4. We are all familiar with

the rings of Saturn.

Which of the other gas giants has no rings?

� they all have rings

� Neptune

� Jupiter

� Uranus

5. The terms 'event

horizon' and 'singularity' r e l a t e t o w h a t

astronomical bodies?

� black holes

� nebulae

� gas giants

� stars

6. Which of the following is

not a type of nebula?

� dark nebulae

� reflection nebulae

� planetary nebulae

� radioactive nebulae

7. Which of the following

word pairs refers to a body's position in orbit

around the Sun?

� perihelion/aphelion

� periapsis/apoapsis

� perigee/apogee

� perimeter/apometer

8. The word gibbous (used

to describe the moon) is

a Middle English word meaning what?

� growing

� full

� swallowing

� bulging

9. Who is considered to

be the father of radio

astronomy?

� Edwin Hubble

� Thomas Edison

� Clyde Tombaugh

� Karl Jansky

10.The famous Perseid

meteor shower is well

known. What is the parent comet of the

Perseids?

� Encke

� 3200 Phaeton

� Halley

� 1862III (Swift-Tuttle)

1 6 2 8 9

8 9 5 3 1 7

6 1

7 3 1 4 8 9

6 8 4 2 1 5

1 7

1 4 2 9 5 8

7 9 8 4 6

SUDOKU

Check your answers

Answer 1: The correct answer was Jupiter. Due to its huge size and gravitation, Jupiter has sucked up countless errant asteroids which, had they impacted with our relatively tiny planet, could easily have extinguished life on Earth on a number of occasions.

Answer 2: The correct answer was The Big Rip. Just as the universe was born with the Big Bang, a relatively recent theory on the death of the universe is the Big Rip.

Answer 3: The correct answer was red. When the Sun dies, it will not explode, or simply burn out. As the theory goes, it will enter its dying phase by turning into a red giant.

Answer 4: The correct answer was they all have rings. Saturn has the biggest and most visible ones. The other gas planets all have smaller rings that are much fainter and barely visible.

Answer 5: The correct answer was black holes. The singularity is the centre of a black hole, and for a certain distance around the singularity, we find the event horizon.

Answer 6: The correct answer was radioactive nebulae.

Answer 7: The correct answer was perihelion/aphelion.

Answer 8: The correct answer was bulging. Bulging is a good description of the moon's shape between it's quarter phase and full phase.

Answer 9: The correct answer was Karl Jansky. The basic unit of radio brightness, the Jansky (Jy), is named after him.

Answer 10: The correct answer was 1862III (Swift-Tuttle). Comet Encke is the parent comet of the Beta Taurids, Halley is the parent comet of the Orionids, while 3200 Phaeton produces the Geminids.


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The 2020 completion date is an auspicious one for China's space program as it is also the target year for a planned manned mission to the moon. China's Chang'e 2 lunar probe was launched in October 2010 and a sample-return mission is in the works for 2017.

Chinese space enthusiasts appear to be excited by the chance to name the new station and cargo ship: as

of April 25th, the official micro-blog at qq.com had already logged around 20,000 followers. as of April 25. Suggestions will be accepted at www.cmse.gov.cn or can be e -ma i l ed t o kong j i an zhan @vip.qq.com with results to be announced by the end of September 2011.

www.dailygalaxy.com

Station (137 tons).” Size doesn't always matter, continued Pang, who pointed out that “multi-module space stations...usually demand much more complicated technology than a single-module space lab.”

China's space program has been growing by leaps and bounds since 2003 when Yang Liwei (left), piloting the one-man Shenzhou-5 capsule, became China's first man in space. This achievement was followed up in 2008 when astronauts aboard the 3-man Shenzhou-7 performed China's first space walk.

Upon completion, the station will be the world's third multi-module space station, following the footsteps of NASA's Skylab, Russia's Mir and the International Space Station (ISS). China is also developing dedicated cargo spaceship to perform regular re-supply missions to the new space station.

According to Pang Zhihao, deputy e d i t o r - i n - c h i e f o f S p a c e International, “The 60-ton space station is rather small compared to the International Space Station (419 tons), and Russia's Mir Space

China's Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) has confirmed rumours that the nation's first orbiting space station will be completed in the year 2020. The space station, provisionally named “Tiangong” (Heavenly Palace), will be constructed in orbit from a series of modules launched separately over the next few years.


Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

China plans for 1st "Heavenly Palace" Space Station in orbit by 2020

red giant more than twelve times the diameter of the Sun and two red dwarf stars each slightly smaller

Kepler discovers a rare triple star gem It may be visible to the naked eye, but it took the unblinking gaze of NASA’s Kepler space telescope to reveal the true triple nature of this star system.

than the Sun. The red dwarfs orbit each other in tight rotation around a central point, which in turn orbits the red giant. The smaller stars complete a full orbit around the giant every 45.5 days and, from our point of view, pass directly in front of and behind the huge star.

The orbital eclipse events of HD 181068 last about 2 days. What’s surprising is that during these eclipses the brightness of the system is not affected very much. This is because the surface brightness's of the three stars are very similar. The current metaphor is a “white rabbit in a snowfall”, wherein the two red dwarfs effectively become invisible when they pass in front of the red giant. It wasn’t until the Kepler mission that we had an observational tool precise enough to detect the structure of this intriguing star system, located 800 light-years away from our own.

“The intriguing nature of this unique system remained unnoticed until now despite the fact that it is nearly

Kid’s�Korner�

bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. We really needed Kepler with its unprecedentedly precise and uninterrupted photometric monitoring to uncover such a rare gem.”

Another unexpected feature of Trinity is its “quiet” nature. Astronomers have known that red giant stars exhibit seismic oscillations, as does our own Sun. But these oscillations are not present in Trinity’s red giant. Scientists speculate that the two red dwarfs may be creating some sort of gravitational offset, effectively negating the red giant’s vibrations. More research will be needed to determine if this is in fact the case.

Find out more about HD 181068 and other recent Kepler discoveries on NASA’s mission site or in the press release issued by the Ames Research Centre, or read the published report on Science.

www.universetoday.com

Unofficially dubbed “Trinity”, object HD 181068 is a multiple star system comprised of three stars: a

It is easy to see that the sky is blue. Have you ever wondered why? A lot of other smart people have, and it took a long time to figure it out!

The light from the Sun looks white. But it is really made up of all the colours of the rainbow.

A prism is a specially shaped crystal. When white light shines through a prism, the light is separated into all its colours. The light you see is just one tiny bit of all the kinds of light energy beaming around the Universe--and around you!

Why is the Sky Blue? Like energy passing through the

ocean, light energy travels in waves, too. Some light travels in short, "choppy" waves. Other light travels in long, lazy waves. Blue light waves are shorter than red light waves.

All light travels in a straight line unless something gets in the way to:

• reflect it (like a mirror)

• bend it (like a prism)

• or scatter it (like molecules of

the gases in the atmosphere)

S u n l i g h t r e a c h e s E a r t h ' s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases

and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny m o l e c u l e s o f air in Earth's atmos-phere . B lue i s s c a t t e r e d m o r e than other colours because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.

Closer to the horizon, the sky fades to a lighter blue or white. The sun-light reaching us from low in the sky has passed through even more air than the sunlight reaching us from overhead.

As the sunlight has passed through all this air, the air molecules have scattered and rescattered the blue light many times in many directions.

Also, the surface of Earth has reflected and scattered the light. All this scattering mixes the colours together again so we see more white and less blue.

What Makes a Red Sunset? As the Sun gets lower in the sky, its light is passing through more of the atmosphere to reach you. Even more of the blue light is scattered, allowing the reds and yellows to pass straight through to your eyes.

Sometimes the whole western sky seems to glow. The sky appears red because larger particles of dust, pollution, and water vapour in the atmosphere reflect and scatter more of the reds and yellows.

Why Does Light Scattering Matter? How much of the Sun's light gets bounced around in Earth's atmos-phere and how much gets reflected back into space? How much light gets soaked up by land and water, asphalt freeways and sunburned surfers? How much light do water and clouds reflect back into space? And why do we care?

Sunlight carries the energy that heats Earth and powers all life on Earth. Our climate is affected by how sunlight is scattered by forests, deserts, snow- and ice-covered surfaces, different types of clouds, smoke from forest fires, and other pollutants in the air.

Relative sizes of the "Trinity" stars

To help find your way around the night sky, Skymaps.com makes available for free each month.

The Evening Sky Map is suitable for all stargazers including newcomers to astronomy and will help you to:

• identify planets, stars and

major constellations.

• find sparkling star clusters,

wispy nebulae & distant galaxies.

• locate and follow bright comets

across the sky.

• learn about the night sky and

astronomy.



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Some three decades ago, Canadian astronomer, Paul Hickson set about the task of completing a list of 100 galaxies clusters. But, they couldn’t be just any set of galaxies – they had to be isolated, compact and within a limited magnitude range. His purpose was to study them for unusual redshifts among their members and to improve our knowledge of galactic evolution. From his work came the theory that perhaps all well-known galaxies once emerged from such clusters and this hypothesis also contributed mightily to our understanding of dark matter as well. What Hickson left us with is a legacy of beautiful objects that challenge not only the telescope – but the mind as well.

In this photo done by Warren Keller, you will see from 11 o’clock: NGC 3193; 3190 and 3187 at centre, and 3185 at 6 o’clock. A closer look reveals two tiny galaxies PGC (Principal Galaxies Catalogue) 2806871 near 8 o’clock and PGC

Perhaps the interaction with nearby NGC 3187 is the root cause? It is, after all, evolving. Studies indicate an evolutionary sequence for Hickson compact groups in which the amount of diffuse light increases with the dynamical evolution of the group. “Compact groups are associations of a few galaxies in which the environment plays an important role in galaxy evolution.” says J. A. L. Aguerri (et al). “The low group velocity dispersion favours tidal interactions and mergers, which may bring stars from galaxies to the diffuse intragroup l ight. Numerical simulations of galaxy clusters in hierarchical cosmologies show that

86788 near 5 o’clock. As you can see, this group is an interesting collection of galaxy types – from barred spiral to elliptical in structure… close enough to share material as they gravitationally interact.

While some of you may recognize the three principle players in this galactic act as the “Leo Trio”, take a closer look at barred spiral NGC 3190. It was first discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1784 and was home to two supernova events in 2002. Lurking at its heart is an active galactic nucleus, home to a super-massive black hole. While the discovery of the rare Type Ia supernova was unusual enough, adding a second similar supernova event occurring simultaneously made this galactic action even more rare. Two young x-ray emitting events, set against a record breaking amount of obscuring dust!

the amount of the diffuse light increases with the dynamical evolution of the cluster.”

While this group of galaxies is evolving and interacting together across vast distances, you can collect them all in the same eyepiece view found about halfway between Gamma and Zeta Leonis (RA: 10h18m00.4s Dec: +21°48’44″). They are by no means easy, the faintest of which is magnitude 13, but it can be accomplished with a minimum of a 150mm telescope under dark, clear skies.

www..universetoday.com

disk; this is a partial solar eclipse. And for some eclipses, the Moon is a little too far from Earth to cover the Sunʼs disk exactly, so it leaves a ring of light around the solar circumference. This is an annular solar eclipse… quite different from a total solar eclipse.

But a total eclipse presents, by far, the most memorable experience for any stargazer. As the event unfolds, the Moonʼs limb first crosses the Sunʼs disk a few hours before totali ty: without a t e l e s c ope , t he e f f e c t i s unnoticeable. Then, a few minutes before the peak of the eclipse, the sky and Earth darken, the temperature drops, and animals and insects are startled into their night time routine. In the final moments before totality, bright beads of light appear along the limb of the merged disks– these are the so-called Baileyʼs Beads caused by the edge of the Sun shining through lunar valleys. As the sun shines through a single

Solar eclipses have struck wonder and fear into mankind since prehistoric times. The classical Greek poet Archilochus wrote of an eclipse:

“Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night, hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men.”

And Mark Twainʼs fictional Connecticut Yankee leveraged a solar eclipse to escape a tight spot in King Arthurʼs court:

“It got to be pitch dark, at last, and the multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold uncanny night breezes fan through the place and see the stars come out and twinkle in the sky.”

The sudden disappearance of the Sun is, understandably, an unsettling sight. But Zeus has nothing to do with it. A solar eclipse results from the clockwork mechanics of the solar system, as the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun and casts a shadow across a narrow band of the Earth's surface, the so-called “band of totality”.

Eclipse are more spectacular because our Moon, which has a diameter 400 times smaller than our Sun, lies almost exactly 400 times closer. This means the disk of the Sun and Moon sometimes overlap exactly, which presents an amazing view of the glowing outer reaches of the solar atmosphere called the chromosphere and corona.

Just outside the narrow “band of totality”, an observer sees the Moon cover only a part of the solar

valley just before and after totality, a “diamond ring” effect may be visible.

Though it lasts just a few minutes, a total eclipse presents one of the most impressive and shocking sights in nature. Science writer

Timothy Ferris, in his book Seeing in the Dark, describes his view of the total solar eclipse of March 2, 1970 in North Carolina:

“Suddenly the sky collapsed into darkness and a dozen bright stars appeared. In their midst hung an awful, black ball, rimmed in ruby red and surrounded by the doomsday glow of the grey corona. No photograph can do justice to this appalling sight: The dynamic range from bright to dark is too great, and the colours are literally unearthly.”

During the brief minutes of totality, you can look towards the sun without eye protection. But keep your wits about you. As the Sun emerges and the diamond ring appears, make sure you look away and watch the rest of the show through the proper solar filters.

Solar eclipses occur almost yearly over a narrow band of the Earth's surface. It may take centuries for an eclipse to grace an particular point on Earth, so if you want to see one, you need to pack your bags and travel.

Here's a link to help you find the next solar eclipse near you:

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html

And if you can't wait that long, here's a wonderful video from the BBC of a total eclipse over India…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOvWioz4PoQ

www.oneminuteastronomer.com

If you turn your telescope towards Leo, you just might discover a group of galaxies which reside close to our own Milky Way – Hickson Compact Group 44. At only 60 million light years away, this diverse and interesting collection has quite a story to tell!

Observing Challenge: A gathering of Galaxies – Hickson 44

Bucket List Object #8: A Total Solar Eclipse

Over the next several months, we present our totally subjective list of ten celestial sights to see before you die, or “kick the bucket”, as they say. We call it the “Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers”. Our list is targeted at the casual stargazer, with no special expertise or training or ambition other than to see some of the most beautiful, and in some cases, transient sights in nature. For some of these objects, you’ll need access to a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Others require travel and good timing and luck. And for others, you need to simply look up. But all these sights are not that hard to see, once you know how and when and where to look for them. We’ll help you with that.

Left: This is no ordinary

"spectacular-corona-

during-a-total eclipse" photo. Look carefully at the Moon. There, in faint out-

line, are the dark seas

and bright highlands

we usually see when the Moon

is full.

Above: A diagram showing how the conjunction of the Moon and the Sun give us a beautiful solar eclipse.

The perpendicular lines that cross the crater are secondary crater chains caused by ejecta from two primary impacts outside of the field of view, according to MESSENGER scientists. MESSENGER has been in orbit of Mercury since mid-March of this year, and its Mercury Dual

Imaging System (MDIS) pivot and Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) spotted this u n u s u a l l a n d f o r m . MESSENGER will be mapp ing more than 90% of Mercury’s surface as part of a high-r e s o l u t i o n s u r f a c e morphology base map that will be created with MDIS.

www.universetoday

.com

MESSENGER finds where X marks the spot on Mercury

Buried treasure on Mercury? If so, I’d look here first. This image shows a currently unnamed crater with an “X” emblazoned on it.

Above: An unnamed crater on Mercury taken by MESSENGER's Narrow Angle Camera .

Above: The four members of HCG 44 by Hunter Wilson.


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According to astronomer Franck Marchis, who works for the SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley – which is responsible for operating the ATA, “the financial state of the observatory degraded significantly over the past 2 years with the loss of various sources of funding (NSF,

In a letter last week, the CEO of the SETI Institute, Tom Pierson told donors that in the ATA has been put into “hibernation,” — a safe mode of sorts, where “the equipment is unavailable for normal observat ions and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff.”

The ATA has been in hibernation since April 15, with the equipment put in a safe configuration so that it stays ready to be turned back on should the SETI Institute find new sources of funding.

While the ATA is not the only radio telescope that can be used for SETI searches, it was the observatory that was primarily used for that task, and now SETI researchers will have to borrow time on telescopes where “competition for observing time can be fierce or piggyback their searches on other on-going observations,” according to John Matson, writing for Scientific American.

The ATA was operating with 42 antennas, and was scheduled to expand gradually to 350 six-meter radio antennas to listen for possible radio emissions from any faraway civilizations that might exist elsewhere in the galaxy. But after the first $50 million phase was completed in 2007, additions to the array were delayed due to lack of funding.

NASA had funded some of the early SETI projects, but Congress cancelled any NASA contributions in 1993. The non-profit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, relies mainly on private donations to support its research. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, had contributed $25 million to the first phase, with donations and grants funding the rest.

California state) at UC Berkeley” forcing UC Berkeley to withdraw from the SETI project. And, as Marchis wrote on his blog, “because the project is mainly funded through private donors, the economic recession had a huge impact and delayed significantly the expansion of the array impacting the overall

project.”

In his letter, Pierson said that NSF funding has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of what it formerly gave to SETI. “This is compounded by growing State of California budget shortfalls that have severely reduced the amount

of state funds available to the Radio Astronomy Lab.”

ATA operations cost about $1.5 million per year, Pierson said, and the SETI science campaign at ATA costs another $1 million annually.

Pierson said that the SETI Institute has been working for more than two years to find additional funding, such as providing assistance to the US Air Force in tracking orbital debris. The SETI Institute is also currently working on a fundraising campaign to raise $5 million so that the ATA can be used to focus on the potentially habitable planets found by the Kepler telescope.


Budget woes put SETI’s Allen Telescope Array into “Hibernation”

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has suffered a big blow. The primary alien search engine –the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in northern California — has been shut down due to budget woes.

Where it all started Long ago, around 5 to 6 billion years ago, our Solar System began to take shape out of a cloud of debris left behind by a star that went supernova millions of years more before that. Our Sun, began to coalesce and get heavier, initiating nuclear fusion for energy at the right time – a star was born.

The outpouring energy of this spinning ball of plasma helped shape the rotating cloud around it. Clumps formed, etching out their own orbits as they scooped up all in their path. Earth was one of these, thought to have formed around 4.6 billion years ago. Anything light enough drifting in between the newly-formed planets was pushed by the solar wind to the further regions of the known Solar System beyond Neptune.

Out here, w h e r e the Sun appears s imply as a v e r y

Most of this ice is frozen carbon dioxide and nitrogen as well as water and other frozen organic compounds. The pockets of gas-ices on the surface and just beneath it explode, shedding more ice, dust and rocks in to a trail following the asteroid – we now have a comet.

Comets usually exhibit 2 trails – a debris trail and an ion trail. The debris trail is left behind in the comet's wake like a stick drawing a line in sand – it follows the path of the comet. The ion trail is usually the gases and the lightest dust that is pushed in the direction that the solar wind flows – similar to blowing the seeds off a dandelion flower. The ion trail glows as the gases released by the comet get excited by electrons in the solar wind – they become ionized. Sometimes the path of the comet lets these two overlap and only one apparent trail is visible.

Beautiful - but regular? Comets have been recorded throughout the existence of man. The appearance of a comet in the sky was often seen as a sign of something bad going to happen. Even the Bayeaux Tapestry depicts the sighting of Halley's Comet in 1066 and the advice given to King Harold of England by his court to not go to war against William the Conqueror. He was defeated as we know, but not because of the comet!

The shortest period comet is Comet Encke with a period of just 3.3 years. The longest period comet with a known return period is Comet McNaught-Russell with an estimated period of 1,430 years. However, other comets that have been discovered and observed for the first time in recorded history can have much longer periods. One of the best known of these is Comet Hyakutake which was seen in the sky in 1995 and estimated to have a period around 70,000 years.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 – could it happen here? Since more powerful telescopes have been made and used by more and more people on the ground, more hours of observation have been recorded spent looking at the planets among other things. With increased observation time comes

bright star, a massive bubble of rock and dust formed. Known today as the Oort Cloud it marks the beginning of a theoretical boundary to the Solar System before entering interplanetary space.

Planetary Freezer, Cometary Nursery Out there it is close to absolute zero, -273 degrees Celsius – cold enough for many gases to freeze as solid ice. Ice forms on everything. This helps small clumps that bump against each other get stuck until, after millions of years and perhaps thousands of knocks later you get asteroids the size of large cities.

Every so often a particular knock will send an asteroid slowly in towards the Sun’s direction. It begins to feel the effect of gravity from the Sun and the other

planets tugging more until it p r a c t i c a l l y

begins i t s o w n o r b i t a r ound the Sun.

At some point, the a s t e r o i d begins to experience the growing heat of the Sun until a c r i t i c a l m o m e n t occurs when melting of the ices takes place.

increased chances to spot something that would otherwise go unnoticed. One such event is a comet impacting a planet.

Earth has been spared this almost-certain armageddon event for probably somewhere between 35 million and 38 million years, but other planets have not been so lucky. Jupiter has been hit a couple times in our generation alone, most recently in July 2009, by an asteroid or comet. We don't know which because all we could see on Jupiter's surface was the scar left over and first discovered by Anthony Wesley in Australia hours later.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 21 or more pieces during a close pass near Jupiter in 1992. This comet actually orbited between Jupiter and the Sun but on this close encounter, Jupiter's gravity tore the comet apart. All of Earth's telescopes, both amateur and professional as well as the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit were trained on Jupiter to watch the impact unfold. Massive bursts of energy were observed as each fragment hit Jupiter over the course of 6 days. The largest impact produced enough energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (or 600 times the world's total nuclear arsenal) – just ONE impact alone!

It is believed that the closest Earth has been to receiving such a blow was the Tunguska event in 1908 in a remote part of Siberia. It is thought a small comet broke through Earth's atmosphere and exploded a few kilometres above the ground. No one was known to have been killed but everything within a radius of 22 miles was destroyed. Whether or not there is going to be another comet on its way to Earth anytime soon, one thing is certain – it is best to keep your distance and just enjoy the show.

Seanie Morris is the Secretary of the Midlands Astronomy Club (MAC) having been a member since 1990 when it used to be known as the Tullamore Astronomical Society ( T A S ) . S ea n i e ' s f a v o u r i t e astronomical interests include meteor watching, deep sky telescope objects and the Moon.


When we observers on the ground get to see a comet in the night sky, there’s little else that will capture our attention more. Halley’s Comet is probably the best known comet having visited Earth every 76 years since 466BC and Comet Hale-Bopp, one of the brightest ever, visiting for the first time in 1997 will not be seen again until the year 4384! Where do these dirty snowballs come from?

Comets are a thing of the past - literally


Above: Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 showing both the ion and debris trails .

Above: An image of the telescopes used in the Allen Telescope Array.

Left: Close-up front view of one antenna of the Allan Telescope Array, a radio telescope for combined radio astronomy and SETI research.

Chandra's X-ray image (blue) has been c o m b i n e d w i t h Hubble's optical image (red and green) to compose this stunning and revealing picture o f NGC 3079 . Towering filaments consisting of warm (about ten thousand

SuperWinds of the Universe - The Galaxy builders

Superwinds are thought to play a key role in the evolution of galaxies by regulating the formation of new stars, and by dispersing heavy elements to the outer parts of the galaxy and beyond. These latest Chandra data indicate that astronomers may be seriously underestimating the mass lost in superwinds and therefore their influence within and around the host galaxy.

A superwind, such as seen in the stunning spiral galaxy NGC 3079 originates in the centre of the galaxy, either from activity generated by a central supermassive black hole, or by a burst of supernova activity.

degrees Celsius) and hot (about ten million degrees Celsius) gas blend to create the bright horseshoe-shaped feature near the centre.


the twin questions of its origin and whether objects in similar orbits are yet to be found. Additionally, they suggest that SO16 may be a suitable test target for the direct detection of the Yarkovsky acceleration as it makes frequent close encounters with the Earth during the next decade.


Right now, SO16 is near one of its closest points of approach, chasing the Earth on its inside orbit. It will be tagging along near Earth for the next few decades until it is pulled all the way over into the outside orbit and it slowly recedes from view.

The researchers say the existence of this long-lived horseshoe raises



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Not that Asteroid 2010 SO16 does an about-face and turns around in mid-orbit — no, the asteroid always orbits the Sun in the same direction. But because of its unique orbital path and the gravitational effects from both the Earth and the Sun, it goes through a cycle of catching up with the Earth and falling behind, so that from our perspective here on Earth, its movement relative to both the Sun and the Earth traces a shape like the outline of a horseshoe: it appears to approach, then shift orbit, and go farther away without ever passing Earth.

This asteroid was discovered on September 17, 2010 by the WISE Earth-orbiting observatory. There are only a handful of other asteroids known to have a horseshoe orbit. But astronomers Apostolos Christou and David Asher say 2010 SO16’s absolute magnitude (H=20.7) makes this the largest object of its type known to-date. It is just a few hundred meters across, so the other asteroids are extremely small, and none of the other horseshoe asteroids have orbits that are likely to survive for more than a few thousand years. But the researchers did computer simulations of SO16’s orbit, which showed it could stay in its orbit for at least 120,000 years, maybe more.

For an asteroid to have such an orbit means it is in almost the same solar orbit as Earth, and both take approximately one year to orbit the Sun. The Technology Review Blog explained it this way:

“Two points are worth bearing in mind. First, objects further from the Sun than Earth, orbit more slowly. Second, objects that are closer to the Sun orbit more quickly than Earth.

So imagine an asteroid with an orbit around the Sun that is just a little

bit smaller than Earth’s. Because it is orbiting more quickly, this asteroid will gradually catch up with Earth.

When it approaches Earth, the larger planet’s gravity will tend to pull the asteroid towards it and away from the Sun. This makes the asteroid orbit more slowly and if the asteroid ends up in a orbit that is slightly bigger than Earth’s, it will orbit the Sun more slowly than Earth and fall behind. After that, the Earth will catch up with the slower asteroid in the bigger orbit, pulling it back into the small faster orbit and process begins again.

So from the point of view of the Earth, the asteroid has a horseshoe-shaped orbit, constantly moving towards and away from the Earth without ever passing it. (However, from the asteroid’s point of view, it orbits the Sun continuously in the same direction, sometimes more quickly in smaller orbits and sometimes more slowly in bigger orbits.)”

represents a huge amount of work. But is it any use?

Today, Lang and Hogg use these images to work out an accurate orbit of Comet 17P/Holmes, a significant achievement given that the data is taken from an ordinary web search and its provenance is entirely unknown.

The method is re la t ive ly straightforward. These guys fed each image into the astrometry.net website which analyses the pattern of stars in the shot and then tells you which part of the sky it shows.

They then created a giant montage of these images, carefully superimposing the stars. Since the pictures were all taken at different

For a short time back in October 2007, Comet 17P/Holmes became the largest object in the Solar System as the thin ball of dust and gas that surrounds it briefly became larger than the Sun. At the same time, Holmes brightened by a factor of half a million, making it visible to the naked eye.

This sudden brightening triggered a huge wave of interest from astrophotographers all over the world, many of whom posted their images on the web. To find out how many, Dustin Lang from Princeton University and David Hogg at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie in Heidelberg, searched the web. They found 2476 different shots of Holmes. That's a significant astronomical database that

times, the superimposed images show the comet moving across the sky (see image to the right).

They then compared the comet's trajectory with the orbit calculated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, finding a remarkably close match.

That's an impressive piece of crowdsourcing. All the more so because it differs in one very important way from the various other crowdsourcing projects on the go, such as GalaxyZoo. None of the astrophotographers who took these shots knew they were taking part and most still don't.

More impressive still is Lang and Hogg's assertion that this is only the beginning for this kind of data mining. "We have only scratched this surface," they say. The big question that concerns them is how far it is possible to take this data mining technique. They say there is a similar body of images for Comet

Hyakatuke and have begun an analysis of these. And they point out that there are more than 3500 images of the Orion Nebula on Flickr alone.

They conclude by asking whether it might be possible to use the collected i m a g e s o f t h e w o r l d ' s astrophotographers to carry out a survey of the entire night sky. "We expect the answer is yes," they say.

www.technologyreview.com

There are plenty of near-Earth asteroids out there, but this latest one studied by two researchers at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland is extremely rare in that it has a weird, horseshoe-shaped orbit.

Earth has a companion asteroid with a weird orbit

Amateur astrophotographs posted online represent a massive untapped resource. Now astronomers have worked out how to mine it

Astronomers calculate comet's orbit using amateur images from the web

Photos from a successful COSMOS 2011

Above: A plan showing possible orbits along gravitational contours. In this image, the earth (and the whole image with it) is rotating counter clockwise around the sun.

A group of nine unusual stars spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in a young cluster above called NGC 3603 that are too cool to be ordinary stars, with analysis of their infrared light emissions indicating surface temperatures between 1700 and 2200 kelvin making them more like brown dwarfs, objects intermediate in mass between planets and fully fledged stars.

The catch is that brown dwarfs are dim objects that should be too faint to detect at the cluster's

20,000 light years from Earth. "We were quite puzzled," says Loredana Spezzi at the European Space Agency in Noordwi jk , the Netherlands. But Spezzi and her colleagues think the enigmatic objects are part of stellar systems that spawned planets, then, devoured them.

Some planets are thought to spiral in towards their stars. That would explain why so many alien worlds have been found in star-hugging orbits. The team says that some may spiral so close that the star

"eats" them -- the star's gravity rips the planet apart and captures its debris.

This captured debris would form a temporary outer atmosphere for the star, which would be cooler than the star's normal light-emitting surface, explaining the apparent low temperatures of the nine mysterious objects.

These bloated stars, or "bloatars", would also be bigger and brighter than brown dwarfs, explaining how they could be seen at such a great distance.


"Bloatars" - Weird Brown Dwarfs observed devouring Planets Here are a few photos

from our annual COSMOS star party.

The committee would like to take this opportunity to offer a big thanks to all those that attended, our guests for your very

pleasant company and especially our speakers for their

time and effort in preparing some excellent talks.

Mark you calendars for

next years COSMOS which is on from the

13th - 15th of April 2012


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According to astronomer Franck Marchis, who works for the SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley – which is responsible for operating the ATA, “the financial state of the observatory degraded significantly over the past 2 years with the loss of various sources of funding (NSF,

In a letter last week, the CEO of the SETI Institute, Tom Pierson told donors that in the ATA has been put into “hibernation,” — a safe mode of sorts, where “the equipment is unavailable for normal observat ions and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff.”

The ATA has been in hibernation since April 15, with the equipment put in a safe configuration so that it stays ready to be turned back on should the SETI Institute find new sources of funding.

While the ATA is not the only radio telescope that can be used for SETI searches, it was the observatory that was primarily used for that task, and now SETI researchers will have to borrow time on telescopes where “competition for observing time can be fierce or piggyback their searches on other on-going observations,” according to John Matson, writing for Scientific American.

The ATA was operating with 42 antennas, and was scheduled to expand gradually to 350 six-meter radio antennas to listen for possible radio emissions from any faraway civilizations that might exist elsewhere in the galaxy. But after the first $50 million phase was completed in 2007, additions to the array were delayed due to lack of funding.

NASA had funded some of the early SETI projects, but Congress cancelled any NASA contributions in 1993. The non-profit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, relies mainly on private donations to support its research. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, had contributed $25 million to the first phase, with donations and grants funding the rest.

California state) at UC Berkeley” forcing UC Berkeley to withdraw from the SETI project. And, as Marchis wrote on his blog, “because the project is mainly funded through private donors, the economic recession had a huge impact and delayed significantly the expansion of the array impacting the overall

project.”

In his letter, Pierson said that NSF funding has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of what it formerly gave to SETI. “This is compounded by growing State of California budget shortfalls that have severely reduced the amount

of state funds available to the Radio Astronomy Lab.”

ATA operations cost about $1.5 million per year, Pierson said, and the SETI science campaign at ATA costs another $1 million annually.

Pierson said that the SETI Institute has been working for more than two years to find additional funding, such as providing assistance to the US Air Force in tracking orbital debris. The SETI Institute is also currently working on a fundraising campaign to raise $5 million so that the ATA can be used to focus on the potentially habitable planets found by the Kepler telescope.


Budget woes put SETI’s Allen Telescope Array into “Hibernation”

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has suffered a big blow. The primary alien search engine –the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in northern California — has been shut down due to budget woes.

Where it all started Long ago, around 5 to 6 billion years ago, our Solar System began to take shape out of a cloud of debris left behind by a star that went supernova millions of years more before that. Our Sun, began to coalesce and get heavier, initiating nuclear fusion for energy at the right time – a star was born.

The outpouring energy of this spinning ball of plasma helped shape the rotating cloud around it. Clumps formed, etching out their own orbits as they scooped up all in their path. Earth was one of these, thought to have formed around 4.6 billion years ago. Anything light enough drifting in between the newly-formed planets was pushed by the solar wind to the further regions of the known Solar System beyond Neptune.

Out here, w h e r e the Sun appears s imply as a v e r y

Most of this ice is frozen carbon dioxide and nitrogen as well as water and other frozen organic compounds. The pockets of gas-ices on the surface and just beneath it explode, shedding more ice, dust and rocks in to a trail following the asteroid – we now have a comet.

Comets usually exhibit 2 trails – a debris trail and an ion trail. The debris trail is left behind in the comet's wake like a stick drawing a line in sand – it follows the path of the comet. The ion trail is usually the gases and the lightest dust that is pushed in the direction that the solar wind flows – similar to blowing the seeds off a dandelion flower. The ion trail glows as the gases released by the comet get excited by electrons in the solar wind – they become ionized. Sometimes the path of the comet lets these two overlap and only one apparent trail is visible.

Beautiful - but regular? Comets have been recorded throughout the existence of man. The appearance of a comet in the sky was often seen as a sign of something bad going to happen. Even the Bayeaux Tapestry depicts the sighting of Halley's Comet in 1066 and the advice given to King Harold of England by his court to not go to war against William the Conqueror. He was defeated as we know, but not because of the comet!

The shortest period comet is Comet Encke with a period of just 3.3 years. The longest period comet with a known return period is Comet McNaught-Russell with an estimated period of 1,430 years. However, other comets that have been discovered and observed for the first time in recorded history can have much longer periods. One of the best known of these is Comet Hyakutake which was seen in the sky in 1995 and estimated to have a period around 70,000 years.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 – could it happen here? Since more powerful telescopes have been made and used by more and more people on the ground, more hours of observation have been recorded spent looking at the planets among other things. With increased observation time comes

bright star, a massive bubble of rock and dust formed. Known today as the Oort Cloud it marks the beginning of a theoretical boundary to the Solar System before entering interplanetary space.

Planetary Freezer, Cometary Nursery Out there it is close to absolute zero, -273 degrees Celsius – cold enough for many gases to freeze as solid ice. Ice forms on everything. This helps small clumps that bump against each other get stuck until, after millions of years and perhaps thousands of knocks later you get asteroids the size of large cities.

Every so often a particular knock will send an asteroid slowly in towards the Sun’s direction. It begins to feel the effect of gravity from the Sun and the other

planets tugging more until it p r a c t i c a l l y

begins i t s o w n o r b i t a r ound the Sun.

At some point, the a s t e r o i d begins to experience the growing heat of the Sun until a c r i t i c a l m o m e n t occurs when melting of the ices takes place.

increased chances to spot something that would otherwise go unnoticed. One such event is a comet impacting a planet.

Earth has been spared this almost-certain armageddon event for probably somewhere between 35 million and 38 million years, but other planets have not been so lucky. Jupiter has been hit a couple times in our generation alone, most recently in July 2009, by an asteroid or comet. We don't know which because all we could see on Jupiter's surface was the scar left over and first discovered by Anthony Wesley in Australia hours later.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 21 or more pieces during a close pass near Jupiter in 1992. This comet actually orbited between Jupiter and the Sun but on this close encounter, Jupiter's gravity tore the comet apart. All of Earth's telescopes, both amateur and professional as well as the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit were trained on Jupiter to watch the impact unfold. Massive bursts of energy were observed as each fragment hit Jupiter over the course of 6 days. The largest impact produced enough energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (or 600 times the world's total nuclear arsenal) – just ONE impact alone!

It is believed that the closest Earth has been to receiving such a blow was the Tunguska event in 1908 in a remote part of Siberia. It is thought a small comet broke through Earth's atmosphere and exploded a few kilometres above the ground. No one was known to have been killed but everything within a radius of 22 miles was destroyed. Whether or not there is going to be another comet on its way to Earth anytime soon, one thing is certain – it is best to keep your distance and just enjoy the show.

Seanie Morris is the Secretary of the Midlands Astronomy Club (MAC) having been a member since 1990 when it used to be known as the Tullamore Astronomical Society ( T A S ) . S ea n i e ' s f a v o u r i t e astronomical interests include meteor watching, deep sky telescope objects and the Moon.


When we observers on the ground get to see a comet in the night sky, there’s little else that will capture our attention more. Halley’s Comet is probably the best known comet having visited Earth every 76 years since 466BC and Comet Hale-Bopp, one of the brightest ever, visiting for the first time in 1997 will not be seen again until the year 4384! Where do these dirty snowballs come from?

Comets are a thing of the past - literally


Above: Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 showing both the ion and debris trails .

Above: An image of the telescopes used in the Allen Telescope Array.

Left: Close-up front view of one antenna of the Allan Telescope Array, a radio telescope for combined radio astronomy and SETI research.

Chandra's X-ray image (blue) has been c o m b i n e d w i t h Hubble's optical image (red and green) to compose this stunning and revealing picture o f NGC 3079 . Towering filaments consisting of warm (about ten thousand

SuperWinds of the Universe - The Galaxy builders

Superwinds are thought to play a key role in the evolution of galaxies by regulating the formation of new stars, and by dispersing heavy elements to the outer parts of the galaxy and beyond. These latest Chandra data indicate that astronomers may be seriously underestimating the mass lost in superwinds and therefore their influence within and around the host galaxy.

A superwind, such as seen in the stunning spiral galaxy NGC 3079 originates in the centre of the galaxy, either from activity generated by a central supermassive black hole, or by a burst of supernova activity.

degrees Celsius) and hot (about ten million degrees Celsius) gas blend to create the bright horseshoe-shaped feature near the centre.


To help find your way around the night sky, Skymaps.com makes available for free each month.

The Evening Sky Map is suitable for all stargazers including newcomers to astronomy and will help you to:

• identify planets, stars and

major constellations.

• find sparkling star clusters,

wispy nebulae & distant galaxies.

• locate and follow bright comets

across the sky.

• learn about the night sky and

astronomy.



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Some three decades ago, Canadian astronomer, Paul Hickson set about the task of completing a list of 100 galaxies clusters. But, they couldn’t be just any set of galaxies – they had to be isolated, compact and within a limited magnitude range. His purpose was to study them for unusual redshifts among their members and to improve our knowledge of galactic evolution. From his work came the theory that perhaps all well-known galaxies once emerged from such clusters and this hypothesis also contributed mightily to our understanding of dark matter as well. What Hickson left us with is a legacy of beautiful objects that challenge not only the telescope – but the mind as well.

In this photo done by Warren Keller, you will see from 11 o’clock: NGC 3193; 3190 and 3187 at centre, and 3185 at 6 o’clock. A closer look reveals two tiny galaxies PGC (Principal Galaxies Catalogue) 2806871 near 8 o’clock and PGC

Perhaps the interaction with nearby NGC 3187 is the root cause? It is, after all, evolving. Studies indicate an evolutionary sequence for Hickson compact groups in which the amount of diffuse light increases with the dynamical evolution of the group. “Compact groups are associations of a few galaxies in which the environment plays an important role in galaxy evolution.” says J. A. L. Aguerri (et al). “The low group velocity dispersion favours tidal interactions and mergers, which may bring stars from galaxies to the diffuse intragroup l ight. Numerical simulations of galaxy clusters in hierarchical cosmologies show that

86788 near 5 o’clock. As you can see, this group is an interesting collection of galaxy types – from barred spiral to elliptical in structure… close enough to share material as they gravitationally interact.

While some of you may recognize the three principle players in this galactic act as the “Leo Trio”, take a closer look at barred spiral NGC 3190. It was first discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1784 and was home to two supernova events in 2002. Lurking at its heart is an active galactic nucleus, home to a super-massive black hole. While the discovery of the rare Type Ia supernova was unusual enough, adding a second similar supernova event occurring simultaneously made this galactic action even more rare. Two young x-ray emitting events, set against a record breaking amount of obscuring dust!

the amount of the diffuse light increases with the dynamical evolution of the cluster.”

While this group of galaxies is evolving and interacting together across vast distances, you can collect them all in the same eyepiece view found about halfway between Gamma and Zeta Leonis (RA: 10h18m00.4s Dec: +21°48’44″). They are by no means easy, the faintest of which is magnitude 13, but it can be accomplished with a minimum of a 150mm telescope under dark, clear skies.

www..universetoday.com

disk; this is a partial solar eclipse. And for some eclipses, the Moon is a little too far from Earth to cover the Sunʼs disk exactly, so it leaves a ring of light around the solar circumference. This is an annular solar eclipse… quite different from a total solar eclipse.

But a total eclipse presents, by far, the most memorable experience for any stargazer. As the event unfolds, the Moonʼs limb first crosses the Sunʼs disk a few hours before totali ty: without a t e l e s c ope , t he e f f e c t i s unnoticeable. Then, a few minutes before the peak of the eclipse, the sky and Earth darken, the temperature drops, and animals and insects are startled into their night time routine. In the final moments before totality, bright beads of light appear along the limb of the merged disks– these are the so-called Baileyʼs Beads caused by the edge of the Sun shining through lunar valleys. As the sun shines through a single

Solar eclipses have struck wonder and fear into mankind since prehistoric times. The classical Greek poet Archilochus wrote of an eclipse:

“Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night, hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men.”

And Mark Twainʼs fictional Connecticut Yankee leveraged a solar eclipse to escape a tight spot in King Arthurʼs court:

“It got to be pitch dark, at last, and the multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold uncanny night breezes fan through the place and see the stars come out and twinkle in the sky.”

The sudden disappearance of the Sun is, understandably, an unsettling sight. But Zeus has nothing to do with it. A solar eclipse results from the clockwork mechanics of the solar system, as the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun and casts a shadow across a narrow band of the Earth's surface, the so-called “band of totality”.

Eclipse are more spectacular because our Moon, which has a diameter 400 times smaller than our Sun, lies almost exactly 400 times closer. This means the disk of the Sun and Moon sometimes overlap exactly, which presents an amazing view of the glowing outer reaches of the solar atmosphere called the chromosphere and corona.

Just outside the narrow “band of totality”, an observer sees the Moon cover only a part of the solar

valley just before and after totality, a “diamond ring” effect may be visible.

Though it lasts just a few minutes, a total eclipse presents one of the most impressive and shocking sights in nature. Science writer

Timothy Ferris, in his book Seeing in the Dark, describes his view of the total solar eclipse of March 2, 1970 in North Carolina:

“Suddenly the sky collapsed into darkness and a dozen bright stars appeared. In their midst hung an awful, black ball, rimmed in ruby red and surrounded by the doomsday glow of the grey corona. No photograph can do justice to this appalling sight: The dynamic range from bright to dark is too great, and the colours are literally unearthly.”

During the brief minutes of totality, you can look towards the sun without eye protection. But keep your wits about you. As the Sun emerges and the diamond ring appears, make sure you look away and watch the rest of the show through the proper solar filters.

Solar eclipses occur almost yearly over a narrow band of the Earth's surface. It may take centuries for an eclipse to grace an particular point on Earth, so if you want to see one, you need to pack your bags and travel.

Here's a link to help you find the next solar eclipse near you:

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html

And if you can't wait that long, here's a wonderful video from the BBC of a total eclipse over India…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOvWioz4PoQ

www.oneminuteastronomer.com

If you turn your telescope towards Leo, you just might discover a group of galaxies which reside close to our own Milky Way – Hickson Compact Group 44. At only 60 million light years away, this diverse and interesting collection has quite a story to tell!

Observing Challenge: A gathering of Galaxies – Hickson 44

Bucket List Object #8: A Total Solar Eclipse

Over the next several months, we present our totally subjective list of ten celestial sights to see before you die, or “kick the bucket”, as they say. We call it the “Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers”. Our list is targeted at the casual stargazer, with no special expertise or training or ambition other than to see some of the most beautiful, and in some cases, transient sights in nature. For some of these objects, you’ll need access to a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Others require travel and good timing and luck. And for others, you need to simply look up. But all these sights are not that hard to see, once you know how and when and where to look for them. We’ll help you with that.

Left: This is no ordinary

"spectacular-corona-

during-a-total eclipse" photo. Look carefully at the Moon. There, in faint out-

line, are the dark seas

and bright highlands

we usually see when the Moon

is full.

Above: A diagram showing how the conjunction of the Moon and the Sun give us a beautiful solar eclipse.

The perpendicular lines that cross the crater are secondary crater chains caused by ejecta from two primary impacts outside of the field of view, according to MESSENGER scientists. MESSENGER has been in orbit of Mercury since mid-March of this year, and its Mercury Dual

Imaging System (MDIS) pivot and Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) spotted this u n u s u a l l a n d f o r m . MESSENGER will be mapp ing more than 90% of Mercury’s surface as part of a high-r e s o l u t i o n s u r f a c e morphology base map that will be created with MDIS.

www.universetoday

.com

MESSENGER finds where X marks the spot on Mercury

Buried treasure on Mercury? If so, I’d look here first. This image shows a currently unnamed crater with an “X” emblazoned on it.

Above: An unnamed crater on Mercury taken by MESSENGER's Narrow Angle Camera .

Above: The four members of HCG 44 by Hunter Wilson.


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The 2020 completion date is an auspicious one for China's space program as it is also the target year for a planned manned mission to the moon. China's Chang'e 2 lunar probe was launched in October 2010 and a sample-return mission is in the works for 2017.

Chinese space enthusiasts appear to be excited by the chance to name the new station and cargo ship: as

of April 25th, the official micro-blog at qq.com had already logged around 20,000 followers. as of April 25. Suggestions will be accepted at www.cmse.gov.cn or can be e -ma i l ed t o kong j i an zhan @vip.qq.com with results to be announced by the end of September 2011.

www.dailygalaxy.com

Station (137 tons).” Size doesn't always matter, continued Pang, who pointed out that “multi-module space stations...usually demand much more complicated technology than a single-module space lab.”

China's space program has been growing by leaps and bounds since 2003 when Yang Liwei (left), piloting the one-man Shenzhou-5 capsule, became China's first man in space. This achievement was followed up in 2008 when astronauts aboard the 3-man Shenzhou-7 performed China's first space walk.

Upon completion, the station will be the world's third multi-module space station, following the footsteps of NASA's Skylab, Russia's Mir and the International Space Station (ISS). China is also developing dedicated cargo spaceship to perform regular re-supply missions to the new space station.

According to Pang Zhihao, deputy e d i t o r - i n - c h i e f o f S p a c e International, “The 60-ton space station is rather small compared to the International Space Station (419 tons), and Russia's Mir Space

China's Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) has confirmed rumours that the nation's first orbiting space station will be completed in the year 2020. The space station, provisionally named “Tiangong” (Heavenly Palace), will be constructed in orbit from a series of modules launched separately over the next few years.



China plans for 1st "Heavenly Palace" Space Station in orbit by 2020

red giant more than twelve times the diameter of the Sun and two red dwarf stars each slightly smaller

Kepler discovers a rare triple star gem It may be visible to the naked eye, but it took the unblinking gaze of NASA’s Kepler space telescope to reveal the true triple nature of this star system.

than the Sun. The red dwarfs orbit each other in tight rotation around a central point, which in turn orbits the red giant. The smaller stars complete a full orbit around the giant every 45.5 days and, from our point of view, pass directly in front of and behind the huge star.

The orbital eclipse events of HD 181068 last about 2 days. What’s surprising is that during these eclipses the brightness of the system is not affected very much. This is because the surface brightness's of the three stars are very similar. The current metaphor is a “white rabbit in a snowfall”, wherein the two red dwarfs effectively become invisible when they pass in front of the red giant. It wasn’t until the Kepler mission that we had an observational tool precise enough to detect the structure of this intriguing star system, located 800 light-years away from our own.

“The intriguing nature of this unique system remained unnoticed until now despite the fact that it is nearly

Kid’s�Korner�

bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. We really needed Kepler with its unprecedentedly precise and uninterrupted photometric monitoring to uncover such a rare gem.”

Another unexpected feature of Trinity is its “quiet” nature. Astronomers have known that red giant stars exhibit seismic oscillations, as does our own Sun. But these oscillations are not present in Trinity’s red giant. Scientists speculate that the two red dwarfs may be creating some sort of gravitational offset, effectively negating the red giant’s vibrations. More research will be needed to determine if this is in fact the case.

Find out more about HD 181068 and other recent Kepler discoveries on NASA’s mission site or in the press release issued by the Ames Research Centre, or read the published report on Science.


Unofficially dubbed “Trinity”, object HD 181068 is a multiple star system comprised of three stars: a

It is easy to see that the sky is blue. Have you ever wondered why? A lot of other smart people have, and it took a long time to figure it out!

The light from the Sun looks white. But it is really made up of all the colours of the rainbow.

A prism is a specially shaped crystal. When white light shines through a prism, the light is separated into all its colours. The light you see is just one tiny bit of all the kinds of light energy beaming around the Universe--and around you!

Why is the Sky Blue? Like energy passing through the

ocean, light energy travels in waves, too. Some light travels in short, "choppy" waves. Other light travels in long, lazy waves. Blue light waves are shorter than red light waves.

All light travels in a straight line unless something gets in the way to:

• reflect it (like a mirror)

• bend it (like a prism)

• or scatter it (like molecules of

the gases in the atmosphere)

S u n l i g h t r e a c h e s E a r t h ' s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases

and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny m o l e c u l e s o f air in Earth's atmos-phere . B lue i s s c a t t e r e d m o r e than other colours because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.

Closer to the horizon, the sky fades to a lighter blue or white. The sun-light reaching us from low in the sky has passed through even more air than the sunlight reaching us from overhead.

As the sunlight has passed through all this air, the air molecules have scattered and rescattered the blue light many times in many directions.

Also, the surface of Earth has reflected and scattered the light. All this scattering mixes the colours together again so we see more white and less blue.

What Makes a Red Sunset? As the Sun gets lower in the sky, its light is passing through more of the atmosphere to reach you. Even more of the blue light is scattered, allowing the reds and yellows to pass straight through to your eyes.

Sometimes the whole western sky seems to glow. The sky appears red because larger particles of dust, pollution, and water vapour in the atmosphere reflect and scatter more of the reds and yellows.

Why Does Light Scattering Matter? How much of the Sun's light gets bounced around in Earth's atmos-phere and how much gets reflected back into space? How much light gets soaked up by land and water, asphalt freeways and sunburned surfers? How much light do water and clouds reflect back into space? And why do we care?

Sunlight carries the energy that heats Earth and powers all life on Earth. Our climate is affected by how sunlight is scattered by forests, deserts, snow- and ice-covered surfaces, different types of clouds, smoke from forest fires, and other pollutants in the air.

Relative sizes of the "Trinity" stars


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Exercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brain Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

c o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t s Latest Astronomy and Space News China plans for 1st "Heavenly Palace" Space Station in orbit by 2020 ...................................................................... 3

Kepler discovers a rare triple star gem .................................. 3

Observing Challenge: A gathering of Galaxies – Hickson 44 ... 4

MESSENGER finds where X marks the spot on Mercury .......... 4

Budget woes put Allen Telescope Array into “Hibernation” ..... 5

SuperWinds of the Universe - The Galaxy builders ................. 5

Earth has a companion asteroid with a weird orbit ................ 6

Weird Brown Dwarfs observed devouring Planets .................. 6

Astronomers calculate comet's orbit using amateur images from the web ..................................................................... 7

Comets are a thing of the past - literally ............................... 8

Bucket List Object #8: A Total Solar Eclipse .......................... 9

Kids Section Kids Korner ....................................................................... 10

Quizzes and Games Exercise your brain ............................................................ 11

Monthly Sky Guide Beginners sky guide for April .............................................. 12

Internet Highlights Special content only available with the online version of the magazine ................................................................ 13

Front cover image: Staring across interstellar space, the

alluring Cat's Eye nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth. A classic planetary

nebula, the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief yet glorious phase in the life of

a sun-like star.

Seen so clearly in this sharp Hubble Space Telescope image, the truly cosmic eye is over half a light-year across. Of course,

gazing into the Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of

evolution... in about 5 billion years.

Credit & Copyright: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team

MAC meets on the first Tuesday of the month in the Presbyterian Hall, High Street, Tullamore from 8pm.

All are welcome to attend. It also holds infrequent Observing Nights at its Observing Site in

Clonminch, or at a member’s house (weather permitting) on the first

Friday of every month..

You can see more about the club and its events on

www.midlandsastronomy.com or contact the club via e-mail at [email protected] Meetings are informal and are

aimed at a level to suit all ages.

1. If it wasn't for me,

the Earth would be getting bombarded with

asteroids, and terrestrial life would have never

evolved as far as it did. Who am I?

� Jupiter

� the asteroid belt

� the Sun

� Saturn

2. It is suggested that the

universe will come to

an end when its

ever-increasing rate of expansion causes all

matter to basically fly apart. What is the term

applied to this theory?

� The Big Stretch

� The Big Rip

� The Big Fly Apart

� The Big Crunch

3. In billions of years,

when it nears its death, widespread theory has it

that our sun will first shift to what other

colour?

� white

� orange

� blue

� red

4. We are all familiar with

the rings of Saturn.

Which of the other gas giants has no rings?

� they all have rings

� Neptune

� Jupiter

� Uranus

5. The terms 'event

horizon' and 'singularity' r e l a t e t o w h a t

astronomical bodies?

� black holes

� nebulae

� gas giants

� stars

6. Which of the following is

not a type of nebula?

� dark nebulae

� reflection nebulae

� planetary nebulae

� radioactive nebulae

7. Which of the following

word pairs refers to a body's position in orbit

around the Sun?

� perihelion/aphelion

� periapsis/apoapsis

� perigee/apogee

� perimeter/apometer

8. The word gibbous (used

to describe the moon) is

a Middle English word meaning what?

� growing

� full

� swallowing

� bulging

9. Who is considered to

be the father of radio

astronomy?

� Edwin Hubble

� Thomas Edison

� Clyde Tombaugh

� Karl Jansky

10.The famous Perseid

meteor shower is well

known. What is the parent comet of the

Perseids?

� Encke

� 3200 Phaeton

� Halley

� 1862III (Swift-Tuttle)

1 6 2 8 9

8 9 5 3 1 7

6 1

7 3 1 4 8 9

6 8 4 2 1 5

1 7

1 4 2 9 5 8

7 9 8 4 6

SUDOKU

Check your answers

Answer 1: The correct answer was Jupiter. Due to its huge size and gravitation, Jupiter has sucked up countless errant asteroids which, had they impacted with our relatively tiny planet, could easily have extinguished life on Earth on a number of occasions.

Answer 2: The correct answer was The Big Rip. Just as the universe was born with the Big Bang, a relatively recent theory on the death of the universe is the Big Rip.

Answer 3: The correct answer was red. When the Sun dies, it will not explode, or simply burn out. As the theory goes, it will enter its dying phase by turning into a red giant.

Answer 4: The correct answer was they all have rings. Saturn has the biggest and most visible ones. The other gas planets all have smaller rings that are much fainter and barely visible.

Answer 5: The correct answer was black holes. The singularity is the centre of a black hole, and for a certain distance around the singularity, we find the event horizon.

Answer 6: The correct answer was radioactive nebulae.

Answer 7: The correct answer was perihelion/aphelion.

Answer 8: The correct answer was bulging. Bulging is a good description of the moon's shape between it's quarter phase and full phase.

Answer 9: The correct answer was Karl Jansky. The basic unit of radio brightness, the Jansky (Jy), is named after him.

Answer 10: The correct answer was 1862III (Swift-Tuttle). Comet Encke is the parent comet of the Beta Taurids, Halley is the parent comet of the Orionids, while 3200 Phaeton produces the Geminids.

General notes May presents some wonderful observing opportunities this year. Starting off with the naked eye, There are two showers this month. The first shower is the Eta Aquarids which peaks on the morning of the 6th. The predictions for this shower vary between 40 and 85. These are typically fast, bright meteors and are of a similar speed to the Perseids. Some will leave persistent trains. However it is not a well placed shower for us. The radiant only rises at 04:00, however on a positive note, there will be no lunar interference.

The second shower this month is a minor one. They are the Eta Lyrids, peaking on the 9th with a ZHR of 3. There will be some lunar interference with first quarter moon in the night sky.

Telescope Targets Many of March's and April's targets are still available for viewing. See those month's picks for these targets.

We'll add a couple of globular clusters to our hunt this month. M3 in Cane Venatici is one of the brightest globulars in the sky (along with M13 and Omega Centauri). To find M3, use the end star of the big dipper's handle (Alkaid) and the very bright star Arcturus.

About halfway between these 2 stars and slightly to the west is a dimmer star called Beta Comae. Place Beta Comea at the edge of your finder's FOV (moving to the east), at this point, M3 should be at the opposite edge of the finderscope field. Centre M3 and enjoy the view!

Don't be afraid to increase the power on this one and see how many individual stars you can pick out. The good news is that M3 should be bright enough to be seen even from moderately light polluted locations, the bad news is that Beta Comea will be invisible to hop from. I've managed to find M3 by using Alkaid and Arcturus and scanning the area halfway between them with the scope at low power (albeit somewhat challenging).

M3 contains as many a 500,000 stars packed into an area of space approximately 200 Light-years in diameter. It is located approximately 40,000 light-years from us and it's age is estimated at 10 - 15 billion years old.

M53 is another globular cluster which is located in the constellation Coma Berenices. Using Arcturus and a much dimmer star just to the west (Muphrid) as our distance measure go approximately twice this distance and slightly north to M53. M53 will take somewhat darker skies to locate than M3.

M53 contains approximately 100,000 stars spanning about 300 light-years across. It is located approximately 65,000 light-years from us.

Also in Coma Berenices is a fairly bright galaxy, M64 (The Blackeye Galaxy). Just north (up from) of M53 is M64 (about the same distance as the distance between Arcturus and Muphrid. Distance estimates to this Spiral Galaxy range from 10 - 40 million light-years. The size estimates for this one range from 25,000 to 100,000 light-years in diameter. You will need dark skies to hunt this one down.

Planets Saturn is visible as an evening object during the month and rises during daylight hours throughout the month. With the planet’s ring plane starting to open up, this is not a good time to try and observe the rings in their full glory. It is however a good time to try and observe the smaller satellites and details on the planet’s surface with the rings out of the picture.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune are all in the morning sky this month and are not observable this month. General notes Check ou t www .heav en s -above.com for the latest passes of the International Space Station and satellites, details of Space Shuttle launches and passes and for details of Iridium Flare activity. Clear skies and good hunting!

By Kevin Daly http://members.aol.com/kdaly10475/index.html

Above: The M3 cluster is one of the largest and brightest, and is made up of around 500,000 stars. It is located at a distance of about 33,900 light-years away from Earth.


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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Issue 24- May, 2011

Latest Astronomy and Space News

Kids Astronomy

Quizzes and Games

Monthly Sky Guide

Internet Highlights

Sky Guide - Beginner’s targets for May

Club Notes

Club Observing:

Remember the next club meets every first Friday of the month for our observing sessions held in the MAC grounds. If you wish to be informed of these sessions please email your name and mobile number to [email protected] who will confirm if the session is going ahead (depending on weather).

MAC is a proud member of


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Each month we will try and bring you the best of the web for astronomy online resources such as movies, podcasts and free software. If you have any suggestions for content in these pages please contact us at [email protected]

Please click on the links provided to view the material and not the images.

astronomers have ever seen before. She also explains how the Webb telescope can see farther back in space and time, and compares the size of the Webb and Hubble primary mirrors to the height of a person.

www.nasa.gov

Amber provides some amazing images of the Hubble and phenomena that it has seen while answering the question, how will Webb improve on what Hubble has seen? Amber tells viewers how Webb's use of infrared light is going to reveal a lot more than



Get some quick "cool" facts about NASA's Webb Telescope

Where no spacecraft has gone be-fore. After 33 years, NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft are still going strong and still sending home infor-mation. This video features high-

lights of the Voyager journeys to the outer planets, and looks at their current status, at the edge of our solar system, poised to cross over into interstellar space.

Internet Highlights

Useful free astronomy resources

IFAS Website

h p://www.irishastronomy.org

Stellarium

h p://www.stellarium.org

Virtual Moon Atlas

h p://www.astrosurf.com/avl/UK_index.html

Celes'a

h p://www.sha ers.net/celes'a/index.html

Sky Maps

h p://skymaps.com/index.html

Heavens-Above

h p://www.heavens-above.com/

Voyager Spacecraft: Humanity's Farthest Journey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVP2tLl0fDU&feature=uploademail

Pale Blue Dot, Animated

http://vimeo.com/22582065

The Universe in a Chocolate Creme Egg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O4eXU8VHM2g

Captain Kirk & the Space Shuttle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlG7W0gkjjE&feature=player_embedded

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/webb-faqs.html

Watch how Curiosity will land on Mars

Propulsion Lab shows how MSL, a.k.a Curiosoity will land on the Red Planet in August of 2012.


Entry, descent and landing is the big moment for any Mars lander mission, and the big honkin’ Mars Science Lab and its sky-crane landing system will truly be unique. This brand new video from the Jet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BudlaGh1A0o

Beautiful Planet – Oh I want to go to the ISS! http://triggerpit.com/2011/04/21/beautiful-planet-oh-i-so-want-to-go-to-the-iss/

Jupiter's moon Europa: Cool Destination for Life?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xEtf5lh3SEw

mac may 2011 magazine

Documents

centre m3

bright star arcturus

bright galaxy

distance estimates

dimmer star

distance measure

end star

bright meteors