Zooniverse

Zooniverse is fun place to identify craters. The last couple of weeks i have been identifying the craters on the moon. There are various sizes of craters on the moon that need to be located. The boldness is also distinguished when using Zooniverse. Surveying the surface of the moon can prove to be beneficial to scientists. This is basically a simple way of how scientists go about classifying these craters since they have to also do it by computer. There are many features of the moon that still need to be classified

Astronomy Cast Radar

So Radar is one of those technologies that changed. It allows boats and aircraft to see at night and through thick fog, everything but it also changed astronomy and ground-imaging -- tracking asteroids with great accuracy, allowing spacecraft to peer through Venus’ thick clouds and reveal secrets through the Earth’s shifting sands. So radar’s reflected light, flashlight shining on wall is reflected light, and in the other case, you’re looking at a light source. So looking at a radio source with radio astronomy and looking at a star or a galaxy with an optical telescope is looking at a light source as well.In the late 1800s, in the 1880s and 1890s, we started to realize that light was more than what we could see with our eyes,and scientists started realizing, So just as we were figuring out how to do radio broadcasts, hand in hand, we were realizing that when radio reflects off of things, well, that reflection means something there, and that’s kind of cool. There’s a rather frustrating story related to Pearl Harbor. America, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia – nations all around the world -- were struggling to figure out how to use radar to detect incoming ships, to detect incoming aircraft, to basically figure out, “Holy ‘expletive!’ We’re about to get killed!” and be able to get out aircraft, be able to get people into shelters ahead of time tohelp save lives, and we hadn’t gotten to the stage yet of everyone in the military fully understanding the power of radar to detect things, and when you don’t have fully trained leaders, bad decisions get made. So at Pearl Harbor out in Hawaii, there were a couple of privates who decided to get in a couple extra hours of training on radar, and these were radar stations that were actually supposed to be shut off, and basically their truck hadn’t come to take them off to get a meal, so they turned on the equipment and started practicing, and while they were sitting there practicing, they realized that there was a larger flock of airplanes than they’d ever seen heading towards

the Hawaiian Islands, and they called this in, but unfortunately, as the information made its way up the food train, the direction the aircraft were coming in from got lost and it got misinterpreted as being an expected fleet of bombers coming in vs. the reality was a huge swarm of Japanese fighter

aircraft. Exactly, so people start playing with different wavelengths,different colors, realizing that you could see different things likeprecipitation just by changing the frequency of the radar beam. It was a fairly short leap to realize,  If we use sufficiently long wavelengths, we can start to reflect light off of, well, planets, and accurately measure how far away is Mercury, how far away is Venus simply by sending off a pulse of radar and waiting the minutes and minutes andminutes and minutes for that light to reflect its way back to Earth.

Astro Cast Reflection/ Refraction

So light can do some pretty strange stuff, like pass through objects and bounce off them. It can be broken up and recombined; in fact, everything we see is just the end

result of reflection and refraction of light, so it’s time to understand how it

all works. So this is the part, this is one of the situations…like, I’ve bent the

mind’s of my children when I was explaining to them. You know, the

concept that when they see something that is like green, they’re seeing the

reflected photons that came from the Sun, and they’re like, “What?!” Right?

Furthermore, we’re seeing the refracted photons that have come from the

Sun passing through our atmosphere, and again, it’s super-confusing, so let’s

start with like the journey of a photon, of a photon that leaves the Sun,

travels to Earth, passes through the atmosphere, maybe goes through a

window or two, bounces off something, maybe bounces off something again

and goes into someone’s eyeball. eye that left the Sun originally, or in fact, was originally created because

there’s also a whole lot of absorption and re-emission processes that are

going on. So you start off with something creates a photon, and the original

photon that was created may not be the same photon that reaches your eye,

so you have some sort of an event deep in the core of the Sun gives off

energy, and this bit of energy as it travels through the Sun is going to get

absorbed by an atom, re-emitted in a new direction, absorbed by another

atom, re-emitted in another direction, and this entire process is one of what’s

called “Brownian motion.” It’s the path…the way they always explained it

in physics books, which I think says something about the physics

community is “you know how drunk people walk? That trying to get

somewhere, but they’re sort of going in all directions? That’s the motion of

light as it tries to travel to exit the Sun.” Well, once the light finally breaks

free of the surface of the Sun, then it’s mostly a clean path straight to Earth,

so assuming it doesn’t end up hitting dust, doesn’t end up hitting, well,

Mercury or Venus, or anything else that lies between us and the Sun. when light hits a material that isn’t a vacuum, it’s going to slow down and

this is where something that I consider a bit of the Universe conducting

Black Magic occurs. There’s this property referred to as Snell’s Law that

basically says if you have light at point A and you’re trying to observe light

at point B, the path the light is going to take between those two points, is the

path that causes it to have the shortest journey time. Now, the thing that

makes this kind of Black Magic is if you can imagine that the light is passing

through a series of different materials -- a pocket of hot gas, a pocket of cold

gas, vacuum from the Sun, or vacuum from outer space, and we’re looking

at sunlight, well, as the light passes through each of the materials, its speed

is going to vary, and just as you can imagine driving through a city, and you

have to make these choices. by comparing side by

side a pencil or a straw in a glass of alcohol, in a glass of sugar water, in a

glass of regular water – it’s very small differences, but it’s still just neat that

we can actually play with the path of light.

APOD 4.8

On this date it will be a new dark moon. On May 20th, the moon will be apparent from almost every point of the Earth and thus easy to compare. The supermoon appears bigger than the sun on this day. On May 6th, the moon was at perigee, which is the closest point to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. At apagee, the moon will fit just inside the sun and will be the farthest distance away from the Earth and this will occur on May 20th.  

David Levy Biography

Levy was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1948. He developed an interest in astronomy at an early age. However, he pursued and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature. In 1967 he was nearly expelled from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's Montreal Centre after a disagreement with some members of its administration. "Levy will never amount to anything," one senior official of the RASC remarked in 1968. Years later, Levy began a correspondence with Isabel Williamson, the person most responsible for his near-ouster. These letters turned into visits, the presentation of the National Service Award to Miss Williamson, and the naming of the Montreal Centre's Observatory after her Because of his interest in astronomy, Levy was an ardent comet watcher; by the beginning of the 1990s, he had discovered more than 20 comets. He first met the Shoemakers in 1988, when the couple was tracking a comet he had discovered. In March 1993 the team discovered Shoemaker-Levy 9 in orbit around the planet Jupiter while they were working at the Palomar Observatory in southern California. In 1994 Levy and the Shoemakers watched through telescopes as the major fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. Following months of speculation as to what the impacts would entail, the event itself proved equal to the most optimistic predictions. From the atmosphere of a bruised and battered Jupiter arose tall, bright plumes that left broad, dark stains beneath them, providing a spectacular show for sky watchers around the worldHe lives with his wife Wendee in Vail, Arizona, where they operate the Jarnac Observatory, surveying the sky for comets and promoting astronomical education.

BIO SOURCES

"David H. Levy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Levy.

 

"About David." Welcome. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2012. http://www.jarnac.org/aboutdavid.htm.

 

"David H. Levy (Canadian astronomer and science writer) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia." Britannica Online Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2012. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/338050/David-H-Levy.

 

APOD 4.6

In this picture, you can see unusual blobs found in the Carina Nebula. Many of which that are floating in the upper right could be described as evaporating. Energetic light and winds from nearby stars are breaking apart the dark dust grains that make the iconic forms opaque. The blobs, otherwise known as dark molecular clouds, frequently form in their midst the very stars that later destroy them. The Great Nebula in Carina itself spans about 30 light years and is 7,500 light years away.