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.

APOD 4.5

 In this picture you see the ISS streaking through this lovely skyview with clouds in silhouette against the fading light of a magnificent sunset. Just below and left of the young crescent is Jupiter. Briefly, Jupiter and these moons of Earth formed the remarkably close triple conjunction. Of course the moons of Jupiter are tiny pin pricks when closely examining this photo, which could be a triple conjunction of its own.

Astronomy Cast- Big Dipper

When looking at the big diper there is the bowl, and then moving away from the bowl, you have the three stars that make up the handle, and the middle star. When you say double star, that’s just two stars that appear close together. These aren’t stars that are orbiting one another or anything like that, but it does qualify as a widely-spaced double star. Now, the thing is these stars, if you keep looking at them better, they then split themselves apart again, making this a quadruple system because each of them are independently binary systems.  So, while they are both double systems, you can’t actually split both of them. It’s one of those unfortunate things where Alcor. it’s a spectroscopic binary, so if you look at it with a big telescope attached to a spectrograph, watch it over time, you see the lines dancing apart from the two different stars, but with your standard backyard system, you’re not going to split it into two different stars. Mizar, on the other hand, all you really need is clear skies and a really good eyepiece on even a small backyard telescope, so I’d say pull out your handy dandy friendly 70 mm refractor and a 4 mm eyepiece, if your sky supports it, and you should be able to split those.  So that is one of the brightest stars, but we’re used to thinking of constellations as politely being: alpha’s the brightest, beta’s the next, gamma’s the next, but with this particular constellation, they actually labeled things right to left and sort of didn’t worry about what was the brightest or not, so if you want to keep track of which is which, you start at the upper right-hand star and go around in a clockwise direction and you get alpha, beta, gamma, delta as you go around. So yeah there’s a bunch of stars, they’re not individually as spectacular as the stars in Orion. In Orion you have Betelgeuse and Rigel and it’s a party, but in The Big Dipper, Ursa Major, really it’s about the objects that are clustered around the constellation itself . Many of the most famous Messier objects. ones that you all recognize looking at pictures from Hubble. are all located in this one constellation.

Astronomy Cast- Orion

Other cultures see Orion as three sisters instead of three belt stars, and so they make up all sorts of different stories based around this set of bright stars that hangs out near the celestial equator, and it’s basically a giant box wearing a belt, and so parcel up that giant box however you want it. In western lore it’s typically Orion the Hunter. Here in the northern hemisphere, the two stars you see generally pointing toward zenith are seen as the shoulders — and one of these is the bright-red Betelgeuse — and he’s seen as either holding up a sword or sometimes holding up a shield as he fends off the oncoming Taurus the Bull. So, it’s one of those constellations that people tend to turn all different sorts of things out of it. In fact, you can sometimes even see him in some of the drawings looking away from Taurus the Bull as Taurus comes up behind him. Most of the stories agree upon is Orion was a hunter, and he had a run-in with Scorpio, the giant scorpion, and after they both died, they got put into the heavens but on opposite sides of the sky, such that Scorpio is up high in the sky six months before Orion is up high in the sky. Rigel, is hundreds of light years away, and the nearest star in the constellation is just 18 light years away. So, we have this vast disparity in the difference between the nearest and the brightest stars, and if you’re able to make a 3-dimensional map of this it actually shows this fabulous distance distribution even of the belt stars. So this is just a group of stars that appear lined-up, but that’s only because they happen to randomly be collected in 3-dimensional space in the same direction on the sky. And so this is where you end up with interesting things like Betelgeuse appears amazingly bright. It is amazingly bright, in fact it’s about 670 times the size of the Sun, so this is a giant, red, bright, huge star, and it’s about 640 light years away.  So this is a giant star; it has a puffed-out atmosphere. This is one of the stars in the sky that’s most likely to go supernova in our lifetime – that doesn’t mean it will, that doesn’t mean it will even do it in the next 10,000 years, but it’s still sitting there waiting to potentially do it, and if this giant, red star does go supernova, it will actually be visible for almost the entire planet during the daylight.

APOD 4.4

M57, The Ring Nebula is probably the most famous celestial band. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to perspective - our view from planet Earth looks down the center of a roughly barrel-shaped cloud of glowing gas. But expansive looping structures are seen to extend far beyond the Ring Nebula's familiar central regions in this intriguing composite of ground based and Hubble Space Telescope images with narrowband image data from Subaru. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from the dying, once sun-like star at the nebula's center. Intense ultraviolet light from the hot central star ionizes atoms in the gas.

APOD 4.3

they all occur in the constellation of the unicorn Monoceros. Pictured above as a star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264, the complex jumble of cosmic gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant and mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark interstellar dust clouds. Where the otherwise obscuring dust clouds lie close to the hot, young stars they also reflect starlight, forming blue reflection nebulae. The above image spans about 3/4 degree or nearly 1.5 full moons, covering 40 light-years at the distance of NGC 2264.

APOD 4.2

 What this picture is focusing on is no tourist destination but the celestial triple conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the Moon which I personally saw from my gf's house near the same time that night. This spectacular beauty was seen by the Western Hemisphere and appreciated world wide for its unsual and beautiful appearance. Jupiter is near the moon and Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, looming above both the moon and Jupiter.

APOD 4.1

On March 27, five rockets were launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virgina. The Anomalous Transport Rocket EXperiment  began launching at 4:58 am and launched these rockets at 80 second intervals. The chemical tracer that comes out of the rockets releases white clouds within Earth's ionosphere. These cool clouds were seen along the mid-atlantic region of the U.S. as the clouds drifted across the starry sky. This magnificent photograph was captured in New Jersey and the constellations visible in the background include Sagittarius and Scorpius with Antares also visible in Scorpius.

Astronomy Cast- Ice in Space

Threre is not a lot of ice stored in outer space because simply there isnt a whole lot of mass in comparison to the size of our galaxy. it’s also scattered into what’s called the Scattered Disk, and beyond the Kuiper Belt. the water line is midway through the Asteroid Belt, and then the freeze line is out there pretty much between Jupiter and Saturn, and these are basically the places where you go from completely blasted dry to  things of varying mixtures of rock and ice, and then the, in general, pure ice stuff in the outer solar system, and what you’re seeing is, essentially, the thermal gradient of when our Solar System formed. early Solar System was this mix of molecules and atoms.  For the most part, the nice, happy, solid icy bodies we see — these are the Centaurs, the Kuiper Belt objects, the Scattered Disk objects — while they have variation in composition, we think, we’re still figuring this out.While they may have differences in composition on differences in albedo, they all formed in basically the same area and then got scattered around by gravitational interactions. if you pull together all the mass in the Kuiper Belt, it’s kind of a large rocky planet’s worth of materials. Some of the objects in these groups of celestial bodies are just one kind of a small family of icy material. However there are still many places in our galaxy that could potential be a gold mine of ice that we just havent identified yet.

Astronomy Cast- Future Civilizations

There are many things in the universe that could potentially eliminate our world. Such as the sun and asteroids and even ourselves as we are destroying our own planet. However if we were to survive for another hundred years what are the possibilities of us forming civilizations on other places in the universe. One of the possible projects for the future is the first real super-giant huge in-space structures that we’re likely to see are, first of all just a colony on the moon. It will probably start as the equivalent of a trailer park on the moon, something built down, hollowed into the sides of craters.  Our first mega-structure is likely to be built roughly under the surface of the moon. One of the reasons that huge modern day structures arent possible on the moon immediately is because there is radiation on the moon. if we ever figure out how to deal with radiation without requiring dirt, water, earth… something between us and the solar wind. If humans can make that breakthrough, suddenly the doors open to create much more exciting mega-structures.  Here on the planet Earth, we’re protected by our own magnetosphere. the wonderful magnetic field that comes along with the north and south magnetic poles that allow us to navigate. The moon doesn’t have that sort of a magnetic field. If you get high enough up in the Earth’s orbit, you don’t have enough protection in orbit

Astronomy Cast- What if things were different?

The number of moons, the age of the Sun, and our placement in the Milky Way all had an impact on the formation of the Earth and the evolution of life on our planet, but what if things were different? the lives of galaxies change as they go from low-density environments to high-density environments over the course of the history of the Universe. Over time, as the galaxies have swept one past the other, the gravity of them tearing at each other has sucked all the dust out into the spaces between the galaxies, and without dust there’s no star formation. Without star formation in one of the bigger galaxies such stars that form Orion's belt may not of been created. if our Sun had been one of that 0th generation of stars which formed pretty much 400,000 years after the Big Bang, it would have been giant. It would have been a runaway star because it wouldn’t have had any metals to help it cool off. That’s one of those strange things in star formation. This pretty much that we wouldnt be here right now.  there wouldn’t have been any of the stuff to make planets. Initially, it was hydrogen, helium, trace amounts of lithium, and beryllium none of the silicon we need to make rock, none of the iron we need in our blood, none of the metals at all existed initially so that first generation of stars if we’d been one of the first generation of stars, no planets would have formed. If we were closer to the core of our galaxy there would a higher risk of collision. The galaxy formed in such a way that made it ideal conditions for life to be sustainable on our planet.

Exotic Life ASTRO CAST

In order for people or living things to grow we need certain elements in our system.  One phosphorus atom and four oxygen atoms forming a molecule. ADP cycle within the body which includes phosphate as one of the major constituents of the process. One of the crucial parts of forming the DNA molecule, that twisted helix that defines who each of us are genetically, one of the necesities of forming that molecule is phosphate.This explanation of our body processes is available simply by looking at a periodic table. the first row only has hydrogen and helium, the next row has a limited number of things. It has two things on the left and six things on the right. That pattern of the periodic table is actually built on the pattern of orbiting electrons, so in hydrogen and helium you only have two possibilities of where to place electrons. Then with each successive movement down the list you add more possibilities for these electrons. Each column in the periodic table represents how many gaps are left in the outer-most orbital, the outer-most layer that electrons can live within. So when you’re looking at oxygen, when you’re looking at sulfur and so on. They are trying to see if bacteria can grow and with traces of phosphate and salt. The process in question is their metabolism. Are they using elements in their metabolism to grow or simply just phosphate. There is life that is known to exist that metabolizes phosphate at even lower levels than what existed in this particular salt. One of the things that is on the list of things that scientists are going to be doing next is figuring out how to image the DNA. It is interesting to see if scientist can prove more life in outerspace and too see if anything more complex in form is out there.

APOD 3.8

These 5 hand drawn sketches were made by using a 16 in telescope. Jupiter was observed on different days on November and December 2011. There have been edits made to these drawing and they have been made into  a video clip. Galileo's moon have been added to the clip to show how everything orbits around it. IO and Ganymede are the main ones from start to finish.

APOD 3.7

Venus is now visible at twilight. It is the predominating star in our night sky. It is a celestial body that has many observers interested. However there are many clouds that cover the reflective light off venus making it hard to observe.  The data was recorded through near-ultraviolet, green, and near-infrared filters (left), and red, green, and blue filters while Venus stood high above the western horizon just before sunset. These colors have been taken by cameras with special color filters.

APOD 3.6

There was a supernova in 1987. It was the brightest recorded supernova in recent history and it was located in the Magellanic cloud. Through telescope the amount of energy released in this explosion allowed us to capture the remnats from the violent transition. However there are rings that are a mystery as to how they formed. The make a figure 8 around the explosion. A possible theory is that these are beamed jets emmited from a hidden neuron star

Biography Edward Charles Pickering

Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer and physicist. Pickering was born on July 19, 1946 in Boston, Massachusetts where he spent nearly all of his childhood. He attended Boston Latin School and then went on to receive his B.S. degree at Harvard University, graduating in 1865. In 1867, Pickering became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and held that position for ten years.  In 1876 he was given the position of professor of astronomy and director of the Harvard College observatory. He helped construct the first first student observatory where students were required to log obervations and make measurements. This observatory had one telescope that was dedicated to stellar photometry. That same year he co-founded the Appalachian Mountain Club, one of the United States’ oldest outdoor groups. Pickering was the director of the observatory for 42 years during which time he and his staff observed more than 45,000 stars. Pickering assembled a group of women that would help him with this observations. These women would later become reknowned for their achievements. They included Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta S. Leavitt, Williamina P. Fleming, and Antonia Maury. These women became popularly known in the scientific community as “Pickering’s Harem.” One of his big contributions in the field of astronomy  was the construction of the meridean photometer. This machine basicalle took two stars in the night sky  and took an image of them. Then this image was later used to compare the brightness of these stars with another group of northen stars.  Much of the data collected from this device was used to compile another catalogue entitled Harvard Photometry. He also established an observatory in Arequipa, Peru in 1891, where he collected data of southern stars that he combined with the data collected in Massachusetts. From this data, he published the first all-sky photographic map. there have been 75000 photographs that have been captured by this observatory. Pickering and Hermann Carl Vogel both independently discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. Pickering also discovered a new series of spectral lines that were formed because of the natural ionization of helium. In 1911 alongside william olcott Pickering established a group that encouraged amateur astronomer to continue in this science. This group was called the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Edward Pickering died at Harvard on February 3rd, 1919.

Biography Sources

Works Cited

"Edward Charles Pickering." NNDB: Tracking the entire world. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2012. <http://www.nndb.com/people/940/000100640

 

"The Bruce Medalists: Edward C. Pickering." SSU Department of Physics & Astronomy - Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2012. http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/brucemedalists/pickering/.

 

"Biographical Memoir." Biographical Memoir. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2012. <books.nap.edu/html/biomems/epickering.pdf>.

 

APOD 3.5

The Rosette is a cosmic cloud of dust and gas, that also resembles flowers. At the ledge of the large molecular clouds in the constellation Monocerous. These stars are in the NGC 2244 and are only a few million years old. This nebula can be seen first hand with a small telescope toward the constellation Monocerous. The 'petals' of this Nebula are sculpted by the winds and the radiation from its hot, young central stars.

APOD 3.4

The constellation Orion is 16,000 light years away and it contains mass amounts of dust particles. These dust particles were made in the outer atmospheres of very large cool stars.  A cool star, or carbon star is made up of more carbon than oxygen and is similar to a red giant. Another forming star cluser, Trapezium, is also found in this nebula. The Orion nebula is very active right now and is therefore producing more of these dust particles as stars are cooling down.

APOD 3.3

There is a very unique green light that eminates from our planet in the northern pole. This is commonly known as the aurora borealis. This natural effect occurs when there is a mass coronal ejection. This ejection produces a huge electromagnetic storm. As our sun is highly active at this moment it is producin more ejection and then this result in more storms and this causes a more widespread effect in both the northern and southern lights.

APOD 3.2

As the rover Opportunity spent the last winter on mars there were many worries in the NASA space program that its batteries could finally die out. The rover was not sure of where to go. The rover was instructed to climb Greenley's Haven at a 15 degree angle. This haven is visible from a long distance away. The exploration of this haven will end in a couple of months and the end of the martian winter.

APOD 3.1

 The Witch Head Nebula, is a relfection nebula. This nebula reflects light from the multiple bright stars in its surrounding. This nebula lies 1000 light years away and is associated with the red giant Rigel which is located in the constellation, Orion the hunter. It can more effectively reflect the color blue because of the same effect reproduced on Earth. The molecule in the air mixed with the light from the sun gives off a blue color.

Astronomy Cast- Giovanni Cassini.

Cassini was an Italian astronomer that dedicated most of his life to discovering most of Saturn's moons. The space probe cassini was also sent to further examinate the Saturnian moons. He was born in 1625, and so he was growing up learning about all these things going on, but he got to follow far enough behind them that he had much better optics to play with. Cassini got his PhD at age 25, and he had this interesting joint career where he was working in Bologna. he also made huge contributions in the fields of Mathematics and Physics. He was the first one to realize that Saturn's rings had divisions in them. He also discovered the rate of rotation of the planet Jupiter. Cassini was also very precise with his calculations. he tried to write down everything at the exact time of him noticing it.

Astronomy cast- Craters

There are many moons in the galaxy and on every moon there are tons of craters! There are several different names for the rocks that hit the planets and leave these imprints. Chondrites are the most common and they are basically iron meteors that crash on the surface of a planet and leave a crater. The angle of impacts affects what direction the ejecta travels. This is the cloud of material that gets thrown out of the ground and spewed in different directions. The shape of the crater depends on how the material from the initial impacts rises and later settles on the surface again. This is also affected by the angle of impact. For this reason there are many craters that have rings from the center to the outer part of the crater. You end up with craters that have neat layers layered through them with all sorts of different morphologies depending on where you hit. Craters are fascinating as they can carry substance from a planet from a very far place.

Astronomy Cast- Christian Huygens

Christiaan Huygens came from an important Dutch family. Tutored at home by private teachers until he was 16 years old, Christiaan learned geometry, how to make mechanical models and social skills such as playing the lute. Christiaan Huygens studied law and mathematics at the University of Leiden from 1645 until 1647. Van Schooten tutored him in mathematics while he was in Leiden. From 1647 until 1649 he continued to study law and mathematics but now at the College of Orange at Breda. He solved the related problem of how to hang weights on the rope so that it hung in a parabolic shape. Huygens soon turned his attention to lens grinding and telescope construction. Around 1654 he devised a new and better way of grinding and polishing lenses. Using one of his own lenses, Huygens detected, in 1655, the first moon of Saturn. The following year he discovered the true shape of the rings of Saturn. Huygens explained the phases and changes in the shape of the ring. Work in astronomy required accurate timekeeping and this prompted Huygens to tackle this problem. In 1656 he patented the first pendulum clock, which greatly increased the accuracy of time measurement. His work on the pendulum was related to other mathematical work. He was a great astronomer and mathematician of his time.

Astromomy Cast: The Milky Way

Milky Way is actually derived from a Latin term. It basically comes from the fact that there is this band of light that to the naked eye is perceived as this light patch, this illuminated patch that spreads in an arc across the sky. The Milky Way is that unusual band that crops up in the sky in dark locations. It literally looked like someone had spilled milk across the sky and that’s where the name came from. Galileo first paid attention to the milky way in 1610 when he observed the entire sky and all he could see was an infinite amount of stars.  It comes up higher in the north and lower in the south so there is this ring of light that essentially goes all the way around the Solar System.  William Herschel tried to map out the shape of the Milky Way. He counted stars in all the directions and drew a diagram and he thought that the Solar System was in the center of the Milky Way. There are bunches of stars that in groups that are called Globular Clusters. Instruments that help observe the Milky way are the Radio and infrared telescopes. They help pick out stars that are orbiting super-massive black holes. This is also why you can see more stars toward the center of the galaxy as opposed to the outskirts.

APOD 2.8

This is a huge bright apparition in the southern hemisphere. The tail of this comet lovejoy appears to be fading across the entire celestial pole. This picture was taken in Victoria Australia where the sky was covered with stars. This comet can be easily identified in the Milky way and there are several bright stars next to it. 2 important stars are Canopus and Sirius.

Biography Pierre Mechain

    Pierre Méchain was born August 16, 1744 in Laon, France. He was the son of Pierre-François Méchain, who was an architect, and Marie-Marguerite Roze, and early in his life wanted to follow his father in a career in architecture. He studied mathematics and physics, but due to financial difficulties he ended up leaving college. He then became friends with Jérôme de Lalande, who allowed him to proof-read parts of the second edition of his book, L'Astronomie.  This landed him a job as an assistant hydrographer at the Depot of Maps and Charts of the Navy in Versailles.  Pierre Méchain’s fame as an astronomer would not have started if it had not been for becoming friends in 1774 with one of his fellow co-workers, Charles Messier. The two astronomers worked together to discover deep sky objects and cataloged them in Messier’s catalog. Méchain discovered two comets in 1781 and was able to calculate their orbits. With these same calculations he was able to prove that the comets discovered in 1532 and 1661 were actually two different comets.

In 1777, Méchain married Barbe-Thérèse Marjou whom he met while working in Versailles. They had two sons: Jérôme, and Augustin. After his intrigue in the study of comets and other space objects, Mechain made at least 30 considerable deep sky objects that were most likely nebulous compounds. He made 26 of these discoveries between 1779 and 1782.  His most famous comet discovery was of Comet Encke in 1786. It is the comet with the shortest period ever discovered. He discovered the Sunflower Galaxy, the Phantom Galaxy, the Spiral Galaxy M77, the Pinwheel Galaxy, and the Coma Pinwheel Galaxy. These are included in Messier’s catalog along with M72, M75, M78, M79, M85, M94, M95, M96. However after all these discoveries some of them were received with controversies, mostly because of other astronomers asking for credit in discovering these sky objects.  Méchain disclaimed his discovery of M102 as an erroneous re-observation of M101, thereby initiating a still open discussion on the true founder of this object. He is also accredited with discovering M104, M105, M106, M107.  He sent them to Bernoulli, the editor of the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch at the time. Since these four objects were not contained in the original Messier catalog, they were attributed separately to Pierre Méchain, John Herschel, and J.L.E. Dreyer.

After Mechain announced to the public his discoveries he later dedicated his life to other astronomical discoveries.  In 1787, Méchain collaborated with J.D. Cassini and Legendre on measuring the accurate longitude difference between Paris and Greenwich. In 1791, Méchain undertook the southern part of a new survey of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona, together with an assistant, Tranchot. However much of his work was impeded by the french revolution. He and his partner got arrested in Essone.  Pierre returned home and became a member of the new Academy of Science and the Bureau of Longitudes. He was unsatisfied with his work for finding the meridian, so he left Paris but died in 1804 after catching yellow fever.



APOD 2.7

 Astronaut McCandleless, in this picture is floating free in space guided by a manned manuevering unit(MMU). Astronauts McCandleless and Robert Stewart were the first to experience a nontethered free float in space. This is the farthest out any astronaut in history has ever gone. MMU has been put to use by deploying space probes and satelites. They work by shooting jets of nitrogen. Compared to the amount of weight on earth these jet packs are virtually weightless in outer space. there have been many upgrades to this jetpack that make them easier to use.

Biography Sources

1999, and provisionally. "Pierre Méchain (1744-1804)." SEDS Messier Database. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2012. http://messier.seds.org/xtra/history/pmechain.html.

 

"Mechain biography." GAP System for Computational Discrete Algebra. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2012. http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Mechain.html.