With NASA seriously discussing more Lunar missions as a result of President Bush’s proposal to be back on the moon (and beyond) by 2020, a lot of money is at stake. Money for research, testing new vehicles for use in space, and experimental projects on the moon itself - the imagination can run wild.
Astrophysicists are worried - worried that the moon money may bump plans they have for research into the stars. So they are adapting with astrophysics projects on the lunar surface. Ron Cowen, writing for Science News, has an extremely interesting article on what we could do with astrophysics experiments on the moon.
Scientists who study the moon and design the spacecraft to get there are typically worlds apart from astronomers who explore the realms of space beyond the solar system. The two groups attend different meetings, talk a different lingo, and usually get their funding from different divisions within NASA. But with a financially strapped space agency setting its sights—and the majority of its resources—on a highly publicized plan to return to the moon and establish a base there (SN: 12/9/06, p. 373: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20061209/fob5.asp), astronomers are looking for ways to jump on the lunar bandwagon.
“There’s a serious concern that [astrophysics] will be left behind” if astronomers don’t become part of the lunar initiative, says Webster Cash of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“The NASA administrator has actually challenged the astronomical community to come up with scientific ideas that can benefit from a return to the moon,” notes astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Cowen’s article goes on to talk about radically simple inventions that - on the moon - could achieve far more than they can on earth. Spinning liquid parabolic mirrors and plastic coated dipole radio antennae’s are two of the ideas floating around (no pun intended), along with telescopes in lunar orbit.
When astrophysicists start talking shop with lunar landers, what happens next is usually not printable. Not because it’s inappropriate in mixed company - it’s just usually not invented yet. Take a look - while Science News is a subscription service, this particular article is still free to the public.
April 2nd, 2007
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This should be fun. In our area (central Alabama), we may see some of this happening during late evening hours.
UPDATE: Make that early evening hours - as in when the moon first appears. The times are shown in eastern so we will be one hour earlier than this chart indicates.
At the instant of greatest eclipse (23:21 UT) the Moon will lie in the zenith for observers in Nigeria and Cameroon. At this time, the umbral magnitude peaks at 1.2331 as the Moon’s southern limb passes 2.4 arc-minutes north of the shadow’s central axis. In contrast, the Moon’s northern limb will lie 6.9 arc-minutes from the northern edge of the umbra and 32.2 arc-minutes from the shadow centre. Thus the northern sections of the Moon will appear much brighter than the southern part, which lies deeper in the shadow. Since the Moon samples a large range of umbral depths during totality, its appearance will change dramatically with time. It is not possible to predict the exact brightness distribution in the umbra, so observers are encouraged to estimate the Danjon value at different times during totality (see Danjon Scale of Lunar Eclipse Brightness). Note that it may also be necessary to assign different Danjon values to different portions of the Moon (i.e. north vs. south).
During totality, the spring constellations will be well placed for viewing so a number of bright stars can be used for magnitude comparisons. Spica (mv = +0.98) is 40º southeast of the eclipsed Moon, while Arcturus (mv = -0.05) is 49º to the northeast. Alphard or Alpha Hya (mv = +1.99) is 28º to the southwest and Procyon (mv = -0.05) is 50º to the west. Saturn shines at magnitude +0.8 about 24º northwest of the Moon near the western border of Leo.
The entire event will be visible from Europe, Africa and western Asia. In eastern Asia, moonset occurs during various stages of the eclipse. For example, the Moon sets while in total eclipse from central China and southeast Asia. Western Australia catches part of the initial partial phases but the Moon sets before totality. Observers in eastern North and South America will find the Moon already partially or totality eclipsed at moonrise. From western North America, only the final penumbral phases are visible.
March 2nd, 2007
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I was sorry to see this. The primary Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has provided such a “big bang” (pun intended) to a huge array of images from the earliest parts of the universe.
It was the most heavily in demand from the astronomical community and accounted for two-thirds of the latest proposals for observing time on the Hubble, said Preston Burch, associate director and program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at Goddard.
Especially after it’s given us pictures like this:
(click to enlarge)
And this:
(click to enlarge)
But perhaps there’s an upside:
However, all is not lost. Next year NASA plans to send space shuttle astronauts to upgrade the popular telescope in a mission to install new instruments that will actually exceed the capabilities of the current system.
In the meantime, astronomers must fall back on the 16-year-old Hubble’s other instruments.
“So, clearly the observations will continue, science will continue, but it’s a great loss, no doubt. It’s a great loss because this was a fantastic camera that just produced incredible science,” said astronomer Mario Livio at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which coordinates use of the Hubble by the scientific community.
I guess we shouldn’t complain - the ACS system was designed for a five year life. It was installed in 2002. NASA noted “That’s typically the design life of most of these instruments and it’s pretty well met that.” Wow. A very well spec’d out timeline. That’s a tight parameter to be so close to target. The Mars Rover mission is way over the expected end-of-life timeline.
How do they engineer time constraints that predictably?
January 30th, 2007
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A few weeks back, I had a post about the impending Aurora Borealis caused by Sun activity. While this photo is not a result of that, I found it while looking for representative pictures to post about that event. I ran across this photo as a contest winner. It was copyrighted so I didn’t want to post it without permission.
Well, I got permission and wanted to share this:
Celestial Symmetry - Copyright by Rich Lacey
The photo is by Rich Lacey who lives in the UK but got this shot while working in the Yukon area of Canada. He has some other great shots on his website - RichLacey.com.
I’m gonna see one of these events before I’m gone.
January 5th, 2007
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Speaking of forecasts, this should create quite a stir today.
From Fox News - a geomagnetic storm.
The caption:
Sunspot 930, responsible for the solar flare that had astronauts sleeping in protected areas aboard the space shuttle and international space station
It looks harmless.
It’s not. But it sure makes for pretty lights up north.
Photos by Claudia Perko over Hancock, MI in July of 2004.
Photo by Jan Curtis.
The photo’s are copyrighted, so don’t reproduce it.Nice, huh?
December 14th, 2006
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I love a good explosion. Fireworks, M-80’s (well, I could get them when I was kid), and Supernova’s. Tonights Hubble image is special in a few ways.
Cassiopeia A
A supernova is the result of a massive star that collapses on itself due to its own gravity - sort of a “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” with a bad outcome. The outer layers of the star are blown off in a massive explosion and as the Hubble Heritage Project notes in its description “…can briefly outshine its entire parent galaxy.” Cassiopeia A (or Cas A as the Hubble folks call it) lives in the constellation Cassiopeia (duh). Some of the more descriptive parts of HHP’s caption:
The image is a composite made from 18 separate images taken in March and December 2004 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and it shows the Cas A remnant as a broken ring of bright filamentary and clumpy stellar ejecta. These huge swirls of debris glow with the heat generated by the passage of a shockwave from the supernova blast. The various colors of the gaseous shards indicate differences in chemical composition. Bright green filaments are rich in oxygen, red and purple are sulfur, and blue are composed mostly of hydrogen and nitrogen.
I found that comment interesting - “rich in oxygen”. I haven’t seen that descriptor often. And this explanation of the nine months difference noted something that just wows me -
In the latest observing campaign, two sets of images were taken, separated by nine months. Even in that short time, Hubble’s razor-sharp images can observe the expansion of the remnant. Comparison of the two image sets shows that a faint stream of debris seen along the upper left side of the remnant is moving with high speed - up to 31 million miles per hour (fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 30 seconds!).
Cas A is considered to be a young remnant - maybe about 340 years old. But if you think about visualizations, like the “man in the moon”, I see a creature that reminds me of something on “Lord of the Rings”.
At least it’s still ten million ways away from us. I have time to build a better mousetrap.
December 11th, 2006
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The Cats Eye Nebulae.
The write-up at Hubble Heritage is appropriate - Cats Eye looks like Sauron, the evil sorcerer from “Lord of the Rings”. The odd shape is caused by layers of gas being gently cast off by the sun like star. Cats Eye was the first nebulae to ever be discovered but it has remained the most complicated one for astronomers.
From the Hubble Heritage site, a few descriptors:
In 1994, Hubble first revealed NGC 6543’s surprisingly intricate structures, including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas, and unusual shock-induced knots of gas.
As if the Cat’s Eye itself isn’t spectacular enough, this new image taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) reveals the full beauty of a bull’s eye pattern of eleven or even more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat’s Eye. Each ‘ring’ is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky — that’s why it appears bright along its outer edge.
Observations suggest the star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. These convulsions created dust shells, each of which contain as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined (still only one percent of the Sun’s mass). These concentric shells make a layered, onion-skin structure around the dying star. The view from Hubble is like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer is discernible.
Until recently, it was thought that such shells around planetary nebulae were a rare phenomenon. However, Romano Corradi (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain) and collaborators, in a paper published in the European journal Astronomy and Astrophysics in April 2004, have instead shown that the formation of these rings is likely to be the rule rather than the exception.
Well, as in other star formations, pictures are the next best thing to actually ‘being there’. This puppy is about 3000 light years out. According to the distance charts that 1000 parsecs. A really long - really - bike ride.
The glorious thing about being that far away? According to man-law, anything men do that’s further than 250 parsecs away would not be wrong.
Of course, getting there is a little complicated. Thankfully, we have Hubble carrying that load.
December 1st, 2006
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From the Hubble Newscenter, a recently released photo of NGC5866, the Lenticular Galaxy. What does this have to do with dhimmicrats, radical Islam, or the open borders problem? Not a damn thing.
Sometimes you just have to look at something else to put the rest back into the right mood. The description of this image is taken from the Hubble Newscenter and is posted below. You can go here and see a boatload of additional imageas.
This is a unique view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight. Hubble’s sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy’s structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type “S0″ (pronounced s-zero). Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure. It remains in the spiral category because of the flatness of the main disk of stars as opposed to the more spherically rotund (or ellipsoidal) class of galaxies called “ellipticals.” Such S0 galaxies, with disks like spirals and large bulges like ellipticals, are called ‘lenticular’ galaxies. NGC 5866 lies in the Northern constellation Draco, at a distance of 44 million light-years. It has a diameter of roughly 60,000 light-years only two-thirds the diameter of the Milky Way, although its mass is similar to our galaxy. This Hubble image of NGC 5866 is a combination of blue, green and red observations taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006.
It’s just pretty. At 44 million light years distance, I won’t be vacationing there anytime soon, but Hubble can take us there.
Well, almost.
November 23rd, 2006
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