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CURRENT MOON Exoplanet Count 429 as of 03/03/2010 05:26 PM -0500.Basic Astronomy The best way to find the wonders of the night sky is to learn constellations. There are 88 named constellations, but learning a few dozen will get you started. Click the links below for descriptions of constellations (Northern Hemisphere):
Hint for beginning stargazers: the best time to look for planets is right after sunset when they are easy to spot. Planets "come out" before most stars because they are so much closer to us. How do you distinguish a star from a planet? Stars twinkle because they make their own light. Planets don't twinkle, but rather shine from reflected light from our sun. How far is far away? Our Sun is about 8 light-minutes away and Saturn is between 68 and 84 light-minutes away, but the next-closest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.23 light years distant. Improve your night vision! Eat your veggies, especially carrots. Deep breathing also helps oxygenate your eyes for clearer sight. Adults need about ten minutes for their eyes to adjust to the dark; children need less time. Astronomers use a red flashlight to avoid having to re-adjust their eyes. Night vision is completely different from day vision. In dim light, your eyes switch over from color vision of your cones to monochromatic vision of your rods. The center of your eye is packed with cones, but has few rods, while the periphery is filled with rods and has no cones. Since you are using only your peripheral rod-vision at night, it is often easier to see a star by looking slightly away from it; this is called averted vision. A system to classify stars by their apparent brightness was set up by ancient Greeks. They called the brightest stars first magnitude (think 'first class'). The faintest stars you can see with your naked eyes are 6th magnitude. As the number goes up, the brightness goes down. Deneb has an apparent magnitude of 1, Vega of 0, and Polaris of 2. What's the brightest star in the sky? This is a trick question. Answer: our Sun at magnitude negative 27. Sirius, a winter star, is the brightest star outside our solar system, with a magnitude negative 1.5. The faintest stars visible to the unaided eye are sixth magnitude To standardize the magnitude scale, astronomers chose Vega to represent magnitude zero at all wavelengths. Thus, for many years, Vega was used as a baseline for the calibration of absolute photometric brightness scales. However, this is no longer the case, as the apparent magnitude zero point is now commonly defined in terms of flux, the amount of energy moving in the form of photons at a certain distance from the source per steradian per second (J·m−2·s−1). This approach is more convenient for astronomers, since Vega is not always available for calibration. Astronomy Catalogs
Messier Catalog- Charles Messier was a French comet hunter who published a catalog in 1774. Amateur astronomers have "Messier Marathons" usually in March, to log the objects in this catalog. New General Catalog was published in 1888. The Abell Catalog of rich star clusters was originally published in 1958 by George Ogden Abell who was studying at the California Institute of Technology. The catalog formed part of Abell’s PhD thesis, and was prepared by looking at plates of the Palomar Sky Survey.
What's up? When we go outside and look up on a moonless night, 99% of the stars we see are in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and within 100 light years of earth. A light year is 6 trillion miles (that's 12 zeros). Astrology...oops, I mean Astronomy Constellations of the Zodiac, the "circle of animals" parade along the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path the sun, moon and planets appear to take, and where eclipses occur. The large scale structure of the universe At a conference in 1977, scientists suggested that the universe consists of superclusters of galaxies surrounding empty voids. The Perseus-Pisces supercluster was one of the first to be discovered. The Perseus-Pisces supercluster is a dense wall of galaxies almost 300 million light years long. It is much too faint to be seen with the naked eye. It lies next to the most obvious void in the sky: The Taurus Void, a circular void of about 100 million light years. Black Holes According to the American Astronomical Society, every large galaxy has a black hole at its center. Andromeda is believed to have a supermassive black hole. Astronomers are confident that our own Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, called Saggitarius A. Can we see into a black hole? Though its interior is invisible, a black hole may be detected by observing matter in orbit outside its event horizon, for example, by tracking the motion of orbiting stars or the hot gas that spirals into it. |
News Peter Diamandis Makes a Case for Private Space. This article by Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on February 15, 2010 as part of a debate on commercializing the cosmos; valuing asteroids at $20 trillion each."Two fundamental realities now exist that will drive space exploration forward. First, private capital is seeing space as a good investment, willing to fund individuals who are passionate about exploring space, for adventure as well as profit. What was once affordable only by nations can now be lucrative, public-private partnerships. Second, companies and investors are realizing that everything we hold of value —metals, minerals, energy and real estate— [everything? what the hell planet is he from! ed.] are in near-infinite quantities in space. As space transportation and operations become more affordable, what was once seen as a wasteland will become the next gold rush. Within the next several decades, privately financed research outposts will be a common sight in the night sky."Why does this scare the crap out of me? Read the complete article here.
February 16,
2010- The Flag of Earth symbolizes the Earth (the center blue disk), the Sun (the yellow disk), and the Moon (the white disk ). The Flag of Earth website is administered by NAAPO - the North American Astrophysical Observatory, a not-for-profit organization formed to run the Big Ear Radio Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, and which now runs the Ohio Argus Array. Flag of Earth donations go toward supporting the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using the Ohio Argus Array, and also funds the Big Ear Legacy Project, and the John D. Kraus Memorial Amateur Radio Club, W8JK. For more on these projects, please see the NAAPO homepage. NAAPO has received the endorsement of the family of the late James Cadle, who originally designed and marketed the Flag of Earth. James' unsold inventory of Flag of Earth flags, pins, and decals have been donated to NAAPO. January 13,
2010- of an Exoplanet! By studying a triple planetary system that resembles a scaled-up version of our own Sun’s family of planets, astronomers have been able to obtain the first direct spectrum — the “chemical fingerprint” — of a planet orbiting a distant star, thus bringing new insights into the planet's formation and composition. The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe. “The spectrum of a planet is like a fingerprint. It provides key information about the chemical elements in the planet’s atmosphere,” says Markus Janson, lead author of a paper reporting the new findings. “With this information, we can better understand how the planet formed and, in the future, we might even be able to find tell-tale signs of the presence of life.” The researchers obtained the spectrum of a giant exoplanet that orbits the bright, very young star HR 8799. The system is about 130 light-years from Earth. The star has 1.5 times the mass of the Sun, and hosts a planetary system that resembles a scaled-up model of our own Solar System. Three giant companion planets were detected in 2008 by another team of researchers, with masses between 7 and 10 times that of Jupiter. They are between 20 and 70 times as far from their host star as the Earth is from the Sun; the system also features two belts of smaller objects, similar to our Solar System's asteroid and Kuiper belts. Our target was the middle planet of the three, which is roughly ten times more massive than Jupiter and has a temperature of about 800 degrees Celsius,” says team member Carolina Bergfors. “After more than five hours of exposure time, we were able to tease out the planet's spectrum from the host star's much brighter light.” This is the first time the spectrum of an exoplanet orbiting a normal, almost Sun-like star has been obtained directly.. more at: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1002/ Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe released its seven-year results on January 26th. Highlights:
...more at: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/
1/05/09 Want To Go To Mars? Start by moving to Canada. A consortium of thirteen countries are participating in the ExoMars Programme: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, plus Canada. Check out the Mars Express here.
9/25/09
Need something else 9/09/09 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business after astronauts refurbished it in May. The first snapshots showcase the 19-year-old telescope's spectacular new vision.
This portrait of Stephan’s Quintet , above, was taken by Hubble's new Wide Field Camera. Hubble can resolve individual stars in the bluish dwarf galaxy at upper left, NGC 7320. It is only 40 million light-years from Earth, whereas the other three galaxies are 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.
Hubble snapped this view of a small region in the core of Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri. There are about 100,000 stars in this image . The entire cluster contains nearly 10 million stars. |
Center of the Milky Way- combined
data from Click the links below to learn about constellations and interesting objects of the night sky (Northern Hemisphere):
"Go out one clear starlit night
and look up at the sky, at
those millions of worlds over your head. Before all these worlds, ask
yourself what are your aims and hopes... remember where you are and why you
are here. Do not protect yourself and remember that no effort is made in
vain. A quotation that's going around a lot these days: "Dance like nobody's watching... Love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth." You might be surprised to learn who wrote it originally. Mark Twain. See beautiful photos at www.flickr.com (search: dance like nobody's watching) But the real question: is anybody watching? Or are we all alone in this vast, ancient, and ever-blooming universe?Radio astronomer Frank Drake proposed a scientific solution to this problem. The Drake Equation is a formula for predicting the number of possible intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way by inputting stars born each year, stars with planets, stars with planets capable of supporting life, and so on. Scientists know enough to make reasonable guesses on some of the variables, but for others, your guess is probably as good as theirs! To try the Drake Equation for yourself click here . Update: according to Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and director of Berkeley's Center for Integrative Planetary Science, "... we have news. The discovery of jupiters, saturns, and neptunes, along with protoplanetary disks around young stars, provides convincing evidence that Earth-sized planets are probably common. The Kepler mission will tell us the exact frequency of such planets. Taking all of the evidence in hand, probably 30-50 percent of all stars have Earth-sized planets. Surely about a fourth are in the habitable zone where the water would be liquid. So, probably at least one out of every 10 stars has a habitable Earth-like planet. In our Milky Way Galaxy, with its 200 billions stars, this means that there are 20 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. Each of these 20 billion planets offers a separate throw of the biological dice in the cosmic chances for life. Drake's Equation now allows us to fill in one number! The remaining question is how many Earth-like planets spawn technological life. For that, the planet must have both water and continents, because you can't build computers, clarinets, or spacecraft in the ocean. We don't know how many Earth-like planets have just the right environment to support technological life, nor how long that life will survive against the foibles brought by its own technology." Which leads to another question:Just how much do we know about our own universe? From the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a NASA Explorer mission, has emerged scientific consensus on the contents, age, and geometry of the universe. Somewhat like me, it is old, flat, and expanding. But the most interesting conclusion:
The rest is "stuff’, and "energy" of an undetermined nature: Twenty-three percent Cold Dark Matter. Seventy-two percent Dark Energy. Four percent Everything We Know. See The Universe 101 Tutorial at http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov We Earthlings had better get
busy;
"Few people without a training in science can realize the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. -H.G. Wells (1866 — 1946) from "The Star" Reprinted from The American Museum. |
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