Two things, they say, you cannot escape…Death and Taxes. I have taken note and it seems that even the night sky dots the exclamation point. I got a rare view of the Running Man in my search for interesting objects to photograph. Below is the eerie image I took of the famous Running Man nebula. I exposed my camera for ten minutes to get the picture. (CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.)
Located just above Orion’s sword, the blue reflection nebula is present in NGC 1977, also called the "Running Man Nebula", is part of the stellar nursery that is M42. New stars are in the process of forming in this part of the galaxy. The Orion Nebula has rich red areas of the hydrogen alpha emissions. This is a florescence, where radiation is causing clouds of hydrogen gas to glow.
Yet another winner for me was NGC 891 an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. You may remember that Andromeda is also home to M31, "The Andromeda Galaxy", which is the finest spiral galaxy in the heavens, and probably the most well known.
NGC 891 is described as “a rather faint, but quite a nice edge-on spiral with clearly distinguished dust-lane in large telescopes,” my ten minute image of it makes it one of my favorites.
In this part of the country, you take what you can get as far as astrophotography goes. As I’ve said before, until February, winter is not a good season for this endeavor. The great advantage is that nights are long; however, the clouds and cold temps make for sporadic and unpredictable visits to my observatory. I’ve grown accustomed to outfitting myself in snowmobile dress attire, with a heater two inches from my mouse on the computer, but ever mindful of that big open space above me in my dome where all the heat I can muster floats up and out. That’s why I am not so inclined to take those four or five hour images that others do. I can live with the “noise” in my photos, at least until temps warm up this spring and summer.
Anyway, despite the problems, last evening was one for the books. I imaged three noteworthy nebulae, one of which (The Horsehead) I had been hoping to get.
Located in the constellation Orion beltway, IC 434 is a dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just below Alnitak, the star farthest left on Orion’s Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. It is approximately 1500 light years from Earth. It is one of the most identifiable nebulae because of the shape of its swirling cloud of dark dust and gases, which is similar to that of a horse’s head. (CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER VIEW.)
Here is my 6 minute stacked image:
Another nebula in the Orion beltway is the Flame Nebula. (Like my terminology?….because I’ve driven the entire Washington Beltway, but I digress…)
Also known as NGC 2024, the Flame Nebula is an emission nebula about 900 to 1,500 light-years away. That bright star Alnitak shines energetic ultraviolet light into the Flame and this knocks electrons away from the great clouds of hydrogen gas that reside there. Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine. Additional dark gas and dust lies in front of the bright part of the nebula and this is what causes the dark network that appears in the center of the glowing gas. The Flame Nebula is part of the star-forming region that includes the Horsehead.
Below is the Flame Nebula…stacked images totaling a bit over six minutes of exposure.
Finally, while not in Orion, is the Jellyfish Nebula, or IC 443, in the constellation Gemini. Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles right of center. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, IC 443 is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be almost 200 light-years across.
Below is my 6 minute-plus stacked image.
The rarity of cloudless nights during the winter months should start to ease off in February, but last evening (Jan. 16th) was a passable night, although “seeing” was abysmal.
I did manage to experiment with two DSOs I hadn’t imaged before. The first, spiral galaxy M77, is one of the most unusual objects in Messier's catalog. However, its visual appearance in a 14-inch telescope is far from spectacular. It appears as a small, round, nebulous patch, with a small, bright, almost star-like nucleus. There is an 8th magnitude star just to the west. This star and the tiny nucleus may be what convinced Messier that this was "A cluster of small stars which contains some nebulosity...." P.Mechain, Messier's friend and rival, first observed M-77 in October 1780. However, it wasn't until 1848 that Lord Rosse recognized it as a 'spiral nebula.'
M-77 is the brightest and closest of the Seyfert galaxies. In 1943 Seyfert described this class as spiral galaxies with nuclei that showed emission lines in addition to the normal continuous spectrum. This implies that there is a cloud of rapidly expanding gas in the nucleus. Observations with X-ray and radio telescopes support this. M77, as well as other Seyfert galaxies, is very bright in the infrared, and its brightness is variable. It has a small energy source in its nucleus that is pumping out more energy than several millions of supernovae. Most astronomers now consider Seyfert galaxies to be older versions of the much more energetic, distant, and young, quasars. The central energy source is most likely a billion solar mass black hole which is consuming gas and whole clusters of stars.
Below is a five minute image of it. CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER VIEW.
The next object was galaxy IC2233, an extremely difficult object to image because it is of its low surface brightness.
Since I first observed the sky through a telescope, galaxies are fascinating me in their various forms, shapes, and orientations. Many deep-sky fans are enthusiastic about edge-on galaxies, e.g. spirals with a disc seen nearly from the edge. In this case dust bands and the central bulge are dominant features.
However, IC2233 in the constellation Lynx is one of a group of "superthin galaxies" (in short SGs) which are extreme cases, fitted out with some peculiarities. They lack of a bulge and a dust-ring. In some cases the thin disc is "warped ". They are underdeveloped systems, simple featureless discs showing a flat rotation curve. Due to a small amount of interstellar matter, the internal extinction is low and also the star formation rate is minimal. The resulting low stellar density causes a low surface brightness. Many systems are classified as nearby dwarf galaxies. From their spatial distribution it follows, that these "retarded types" are most common objects in the cosmos.
I took a very short photo of it, 150 seconds, but managed to get some idea of it, although with a lot of noise. It's probably better viewed the way it is, but CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER (AND NOISIER) VIEW. Notice the double star below it.
I have been without my new Meade 14” LX200 ACF telescope for the better part of three months as it needed repair for a defunct GPS capability. It toured the country to get to Meade headquarters in California, then to Mexico for additional work, and finally home to my observatory. I didn’t lose much photography time, though, since clouds have pretty much blanketed the Grand Traverse area until last evening, Jan. 9th, when I had an hour of reasonably good seeing in 10 degree temperature.
During my waiting period I purchased a SBIG AO-8 adaptive optic unit and an AP CCDT67 telecompressor to go deeper into the sky. The results are in: Success on all fronts.
Below is a 3 minute image of M42, the Orion Nebula, which is always a winter favorite. The Nebula is the brightest starforming, and the brightest diffuse nebula in the sky, and also one of the brightest DSOs. Shining with the brightness of a star of 4th magnitude, it is visible to the naked eye under moderately good conditions, and rewarding in telescopes of every size, from the smallest to the greatest Earth-bound observatories as well as outer-space observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. It is also a big object in the sky, extending to over 1 degree in diameter, thus covering more than four times the area of the Full Moon.
My second object was a nebula I had never imaged before, M1, the Crab Nebula. It is actually the remnants of a supernova which exploded in the eleventh century AD. It was noted on July 4, 1054 A.D. by Chinese astronomers as a new or "guest star," and was about four times brighter than Venus. According to the records, it was visible in DAYLIGHT! for 23 days, and 653 days to the naked eye in the night sky.
The nebula was independently rediscovered in 1758 by Charles Messier as he was observing a bright comet. Messier cataloged it as the first entry in his catalog of comet-like objects. Images taken several years apart reveal the slow expansion of the nebula. Tracing back its expansion consistently yields a date for the creation of the nebula several decades after 1054, implying that its outward velocity has accelerated since the supernova explosion.
Below is my three minute image of it. CLICK ON BOTH IMAGES FOR A LARGER VIEW.
A black hole is an object that is so compact (in other words, has enough mass in a small enough volume) that its gravitational force is strong enough to prevent light or anything else from escaping.
The existence of black holes was first proposed in the 18th century, based on the known laws of gravity. The more massive an object, or the smaller its size, the larger the gravitational force felt on its surface.
The name "black hole" was introduced by John Archibald Wheeler in 1967. It stuck, and has even become a common term for any type of mysterious bottomless pit. Physicists and mathematicians have found that space and time near black holes have many unusual properties. Because of this, black holes have become a favorite topic for science fiction writers.
However, black holes are not fiction. They form whenever massive but otherwise normal stars die. We cannot see black holes, but we can detect material falling into black holes and being attracted by black holes. In this way, astronomers have identified and measured the mass of many black holes in the Universe through careful observations of the sky. We now know that our Universe is quite literally filled with billions of black holes.
We cannot glimpse what lies inside the event horizon of a black hole because light or material from there can never reach us. Current theories predict that all the matter in a black hole is piled up in a single point at the center, but we do not understand how this works.
There are so many black holes in the Universe that it is impossible to count them. It's like asking how many grains of sand are on the beach. Fortunately, the universe is enormous and none of its known black holes are close enough to pose any danger to Earth.
Stellar-mass black holes form from the most massive stars when their lives end in supernova explosions. The Milky Way galaxy contains some 100 billion stars. Roughly one out of every thousand stars that form is massive enough to become a black hole. Therefore, our galaxy must harbor some 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified. The nearest one is some 1,600 light years from Earth. In the region of the Universe visible from Earth, there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies. Each one has about 100 million stellar-mass black holes. And somewhere out there, a new stellar-mass black hole is born in a supernova every second.
Supermassive black holes are a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun and are found in the centers of galaxies. Most galaxies, and maybe all of them, harbor such a black hole. So in our region of the Universe, there are some 100 billion supermassive black holes. The nearest one resides in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 28 thousand light years away. The most distant we know of lives in a quasar galaxy billions of light years away.
Some of the nearest black hole regions are to be found in objects I have been photographing this past year. For example, M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. It's nicknamed "the Whirlpool" because of its well-defined spiral arms. It actually consists of two galaxies -- the big spiral (NGC 5194), and a smaller galaxy (NGC 5195) that looks like it's being reeled in by the bigger one.
The smaller galaxy is actually moving away from the bigger one. As they move apart, their gravity is pulling out long streamers of stars that form a "bridge" between the two galaxies. The encounter has also ignited an intense outburst of star birth in the larger galaxy. Since most of the new stars are born in the galaxy's spiral arms, they make M51's spiral structure particularly obvious.
In 1992, Hubble Space Telescope images revealed a dark "X" across the bright core of M51's larger galaxy. This X may be two disks of dust that encircle a black hole about one million times the mass of the Sun (about one-third as massive as the black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy). They form an X because we're viewing them edge-on (like viewing a Frisbee from the side instead of above). They are about 100 light-years wide, and hide the bright inner region of the disk where gas and dust are heated as they spiral in to the black hole. You cannot see the X in my photo of M51, but it’s there. CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A LARGER VIEW.
Another galaxy with black holes is our nearest neighbor, M31. A giant spiral galaxy, it spans about 125,000 light-years, and contains several hundred billion stars….perhaps a trillion. At a distance of about 2.4 million light-years, it is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, and the only one that is visible to the unaided eye.
Using telescopes on the ground and in space, astronomers discovered two large clumps of stars that appear to form a "double nucleus" in M31. The two bright clumps that form this double nucleus are actually the brightest regions of a disk of stars that completely encircle a supermassive black hole. From measuring the speeds at which these stars orbit the center of the galaxy, astronomers deduce that the black hole is about 30 million times as massive as the Sun and roughly 10 times as massive as the central black hole in the Milky Way. Again, you cannot detect the double nucleus in my image of M31, but you may be able to see a satellite trail which seems to emanate from the orange star, bottom right-center if you look closely by CLICKING ON it for an enlarged view.
Since nothing can escape from the gravitational force of a black hole, it was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe. The well-known physicist and author Stephen Hawking proved this in 1974 by using the laws of quantum mechanics to study the region close to a black hole horizon.
The quantum theory describes the behavior of matter on the smallest scales. It predicts that tiny particles and light are continuously created and destroyed on sub-atomic scales. Some of the light thus created actually has a very small chance of escaping before it is destroyed. To an outsider, it is as though the event horizon glows. The energy carried away by the glow decreases the black hole's mass until it is completely gone.
Sci-fi movies have thrived on concepts of worm holes as a means of space travel being inside of black holes. The intense gravity inside of a black hole would crush any space traveller who got too close. However, the controversy is far from over. Microscopic wormholes may provide a breakthrough in our understanding of quantum gravity, or they may completely invalidate our present models, or they may yet prove to be a dead end. I suspect the only worm holes science will find are in the wood in your home's foundation.
Hawking's theory that black holes end with a whimper and not with a bang showed that there is still much to learn about black holes.
However, Hawking's glow is completely irrelevant for any of the black holes known to exist in the Universe. For them, the temperature of the glow is almost zero and the energy loss is negligible. The time needed for the black holes to lose much of their mass is unimaginably long. However, if much smaller black holes ever existed in the Universe, then Hawking's findings would have been catastrophic. A black hole as massive as a cruise ship would disappear in a bright flash in less than a second.
Just as in so much of building an information base on virtually any topic, astronomy is no exception. With the repair of Hubble and more and more amateur astronomers with better and better equipment, the information about the physical universe continues to stun us all.
Example 1: Who would have thought there were lakes on the largest moon of Saturn? Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth’s moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in our solar system, after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and it is larger by volume than the smallest planet, Mercury. Titan is primarily composed of water ice and rocky material, and, with a dense atmosphere, has lakes of liquid hydrocarbons on its surface. The atmosphere of Titan is largely composed of nitrogen, and its climate includes methane and ethane clouds. The climate—including wind and rain—creates surface features that are similar to those on Earth, such as sand dunes and shorelines, and, like Earth, is dominated by seasonal weather patterns. The image below shows a glint of sunlight reflecting off one of the moon’s northern lakes, a region that’s been in darkness during the Cassini mission until Saturn recently passed through equinox and spring returned to the northern hemisphere.
Hints of specular reflection off of liquids on Titan's surface had been seen as far back as 2003, using radar pulses from the giant radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. But that effort probed a region near 26° south, and there was no way to pinpoint a specific feature associated with it.
Not so with Cassini's sunglint. After careful checking, team scientists traced this specular reflection to the southern shoreline of a lake called Kraken Mare which covers about 150,000 square miles, an area larger than the Caspian Sea on Earth.
Example 2: Homer's Iliad tells the story of Troy, a city besieged by the Greeks in the Trojan War. Today, a lone robot sits besieged in the sands of Troy while engineers and scientists plot its escape.
Welcome to "Troy" – Mars style. NASA's robotic rover Spirit is bogged down on the Red Planet in a place the rover team named after the ancient city.
So why aren't scientists lamenting?
"The rover's spinning wheels have broken through a crust, and we've found something supremely interesting in the disturbed soil," says Ray Arvidson of the Washington University in St. Louis.
Spirit, like its twin rover Opportunity, has roamed the Red Planet for nearly 6 years. During that time, the rover has had some close calls and come out fighting from each. In fact, it's been driving backwards since one of its wheels jammed in 2006.
Below, Spirit surveys its own predicament. The bright soil pictured left is loose, fluffy material churned by the rover's left-front wheel as Spirit, driving backwards, broke through a darker, crusty surface. At right is the least-embedded of the rover's six wheels.
From the beginning, the rovers' motto has been "follow the water." Both rovers have been searching Mars for minerals formed in the presence of H2O. Mars appears dry today, but minerals can provide clues that water was once there.
"It's been easy for Opportunity to find such minerals," explains Arvidson. "Opportunity landed in an ancient lake bed. Spirit has had to work much harder. Spirit landed in basaltic plains formed by lava flows chewed up by repeated meteoroid impacts. There's been little evidence of anything that was ever very wet."
But when Spirit reached an area of Mars called the "Columbia Hills," the whole complexion of the mission changed. "Spirit came across iron hydroxide, a mineral that forms in the presence of water. That alerted us to the change. We started coming across more and more rocks formed in the presence of water."
Then Spirit got stuck in a patch of loose soil on the edge of a small crater. Heavy sigh. Stuck again.
But wait!
"Spirit had to get stuck to make its next discovery," says Arvidson.
As the rover tried to break free, its wheels began to churn up the soil, uncovering sulfates underneath.
"Sulfates are minerals just beneath the surface that shout to us that they were formed in steam vents, since steam has sulfur in it. Steam is associated with hydrothermal activity – evidence of water-charged explosive volcanism. Such areas could have once supported life."
"And most amazingly, the boundary between the sulfate-rich soil and the soil with just the generic concentration of sulfates runs right down the middle of the stranded rover. Spirit is lodged on the edge of a crater -- sitting astride the boundary!"
Of the objects visible in the night sky, we are all familiar with the moon, planets, and stars. What we cannot see without a telescope are galaxies, with one exception...the galaxy nearest to our own Milky Way.
A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The name is from the Greek root galaxias [γαλαξίας], meaning "milky," a reference to the Milky Way galaxy. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million stars up to giants with one trillion stars, all orbiting the galaxy's center of mass. Galaxies can also contain many multiple star systems, star clusters, and various interstellar clouds. The Sun is one of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy; the Solar System includes the Earth and all the other objects that orbit the Sun.
Depending on just what level of statistical error can be tolerated, catalogs of galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field list about 3000. This field covers an area of sky of only about 0.04 degrees on a side, meaning that we would need 27,000,000 such patches to cover the whole sky. Ignoring such factors as absorption by dust in our own Galaxy, which make it harder to see outside in some directions, the Hubble telescope is capable of detecting about 80 billion galaxies (although not all of these within the foreseeable future!). In fact, there must be many more than this, even within the observable universe, since the most common kind of galaxy in our own neighborhood is the faint dwarfs which are difficult enough to see nearby, much less at large cosmological distances.
Below is a picture I took of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest neighbor of the over hundred billion such galaxies that we know exists. M31 is estimated to have 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) stars in it. My image is a Track and Accumulate image of 40 images, each 45 seconds in length, or the equivalent of a 30 minute exposure.
CLICK ON TO SEE A LARGER IMAGE.
For millennia, mankind has looked upward to the stars, watched the phases of the moon, learned about the wandering stars identified in later ages as planets, and thought the earth was the center of everything. The earliest astronomers were probably shepherds or watchmen at town gates.
The moon’s changing shape over the course of a lunar month doubtless was an object of curiosity at first. Since its phases were spread over a little more than twenty-seven days, it became a predictable marker of time.
However, other bright objects in the night sky became markers as well. The brightest star, Sirius, captivated the Egyptians. The name Sirius comes from the Greeks. The star was known as Sopdet to the Egyptians. Sometime during the Middle Kingdom (2080 and 1640 BC), Egyptians began to use the rising of the star on the day it became visible just before sunrise as the beginning of their New Year.
However, as time went on, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world-view gave way to that of Copernicus and Galileo. Understandably the Christian church got involved because of the too-literal interpretation of the Old Testament, was proved wrong, and had to admit that science, too, had something valid to say.
Today, Galileo’s protagonists would be amazed to learn that the Vatican has recently hosted a conference to study the possibility of alien life in the universe. Sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences , the event took place on the Vatican grounds from November 6-10. The study was part of events marking the UN-designated International Year of Astronomy.
“The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.
Chris Impey, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said it was appropriate that the Vatican would host such a meeting.
“Both science and religion posit life as a special outcome of a vast and mostly inhospitable universe,” he told a news conference Tuesday. “There is a rich middle ground for dialogue between the practitioners of astrobiology and those who seek to understand the meaning of our existence in a biological universe.”
Thirty scientists, including non-Catholics, from the U.S., France, Britain, Switzerland, Italy and Chile attended the conference, called to explore among other issues “whether sentient life forms exist on other worlds.”
Earlier this year I posted the “What if Factor.” I addressed the topic the Vatican’s beginning discussions will ultimately lead to. To refresh your memory:
The history of Christianity has rested on the assumption that rational beings with spiritual souls residing in earthly bodies are found on this world only. The recent discoveries of exoplanets outside our solar system leads the scientist and theologian to conclude that it is almost unthinkable that intelligent life does not exist anywhere but Earth. There are billions of galaxies with billions of suns with countless billions of planets in the physical universe. The odds that Earth alone has intelligent beings is slim indeed.
To put this into context, in 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and the number of galaxies discovered grows each year.
Jewish and Christian belief in an “original sin” by a set of first parents is well known to the world. What if earth-like beings, similar to humans, exist in other galaxies? If they descended from an “Adam and Eve” on their planet, did their first parents sin and pass that original sin to their offspring? If so, was there a need for a redeemer, another Christ? If the experience of the human race on Earth is any guide, most probably.
Could the Second Person of the Trinity be the Redeemer on other planets? Why not?
What if their “Adam and Eve” did not sin? Would their descendants be tested somehow? I don’t think God makes robots. Free will and choice are apparently part of his plan.
So much for the universe that surrounds us. What is equally as fascinating is the universe beneath us.
Cain Burdeau of the Associated Press recently filed this report:
The creatures living in the depths of the ocean are as weird and outlandish as the creations in a Dr. Seuss book: tentacled transparent sea cucumbers, primitive “dumbos” that flap ear-like fins, and tubeworms that feed on oil deposits.
A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The findings were the latest update on a 10-year census of marine life.
“Parts of the deep sea that we assumed were homogenous are actually quite complex,” said Robert S. Carney, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University and a lead researcher on the deep seas.
Thousands of marine species eke out an existence in the ocean’s pitch-black depths by feeding on the snowlike decaying matter that cascades down – even sunken whale bones. Oil and methane also are an energy source for the bottom-dwellers, the report said. The researchers have found about 5,600 new species on top of the 230,000 known. They hope to add several thousand more by October 2010, when the census will be done.
The scientists say they could announce that a million or more species remain unknown. On land, biologists have catalogued about 1.5 million plants and animals.
They say they’ve found 5,722 species living in the extreme ocean depths, waters deeper than 3,280 feet.
“The deep sea was considered a desert until not so long ago; it’s quite amazing to have documented close to 20,000 forms of life in a zone that was thought to be barren,” said Jesse Ausubel with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a sponsor of the census.
“The deep sea is the least-explored environment on Earth.”
More than 40 new species of coral were documented on deep-sea mountains, along with cities of brittlestars and anemone gardens. Nearly 500 new species ranging from single-celled creatures to large squid were charted in the abyssal plains and basins.
Also of importance were the 170 new species that get their energy from chemicals spewing from ocean-bottom vents and seeps. Among them was a family of “yeti crabs,” which have silky, hairlike filaments on the legs.
In the mid-Atlantic, researchers found 40 new species and 1,000 in all, said Odd Aksel Bergstad, an oceanographer with the University of Bergen in Norway who was reached by telephone in the Azores islands.
“It was a surprise to me to find such rich communities in the middle of the ocean,” he said.
“There were not even good maps for the area. Our understanding of the biodiversity there was very weak.”
Researching the abyss has been costly and difficult because it involved deep-towed cameras, sonar and remotely operated vehicles that cost $50,000 a day to operate, Carney said.
Once the census is complete, the plan is to publish three books: a popular survey of sea life, a second book with chapters for each working group and a third focusing on biodiversity.
It is an exciting world we live in today. Take a look at my image of a dense star cloud in our Milky Way and perhaps you, like me, will stand in awe of the immensity of creation and the creativity of its Creator. So many stars, so many galaxies…and just waiting to be discovered…so much life above, around, and below us.
(CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW.)
My study of the moon has always had a “given” truth…one of those notions that science could never question. After several landings on the moon and detailed mapping of its surface, there simply was no question that the moon was a lifeless, waterless, barren orb of dry dust and rock that have remained that way for millennia.
For these past four decades, the rock solid truth of planetary science (pun intended) has been that the Moon contains no water. Nada, zip, zilch. Not only did the lunar samples returned by Apollo astronauts contain no trace of water, but they also lacked any minerals whatsoever hinting that water existed in the distant past.
This sure bet started to get a second look in the 1990s, when the Clementine and Lunar Prospector orbiters found evidence that water ice might be stashed in permanently shadowed crater floors near the Moon's north and south poles.
More recently, reanalysis of some lunar samples have turned up water traces in little beads of volcanic glass, and from this they conclude that the lunar interior might contain water at abundances of up to 745 parts per million — less than 0.1% — but not zero!
NASA said Friday, Nov. 13th, it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station.
The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference.
"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.
The find is based on preliminary data collected when the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, was intentionally crashed into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole on October 9th.
After the satellite struck, a rocket flew through the debris cloud, measuring the amount of water and providing a host of other data, Colaprete said.
The project team concentrated on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the best information about the presence of water, Colaprete said. A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining light they emit or absorb.
I have used most of my posts displaying astrophotographs I have taken of DSOs. November is not a great month for additional work in that department. However, once in a while the night sky clears and the casual observer might want to know what’s visible above. So here goes…for November.
Weather permitting, the big show during November will be the Leonid meteor shower. The meteors annually appear, emanating from the constellation Leo, which rises in the east later in the evening. Below is a Japanese astronomer's long exposure of the 2001 Leonids. (CLICK ON FOR A MORE DETAILED IMAGE.)
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"On Nov. 17, 2009, we expect the Leonids to produce upwards of 500 meteors per hour," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "That's a very strong display.
Since we begin the month with a return to Eastern Standard Time, everything will get darker by an hour, so be aware that night-time viewing will be easier for all you early risers.
Jupiter is still king this month. Look for it in the south. You can’t miss it.
Mercury is lost in the light of sunrise.
Mars rises around midnight and is very high in the southeast before dawn. It's below Gemini's head stars, Pollux and Castor. Use binoculars to watch Mars near the Beehive Star Cluster. It will be attractive to watch the ice cap change if you do have a scope and are willing to be up that late.
Queen of the morning planets is Venus. I saw it the other morning on a trip into TC. Almost looked like a UFO. I saw another bright object brighter than Venus, but, alas, it was an airplane.
Venus is so bright that it's easy to spot if you look low in the east 60 to 30 minutes before sunrise.
Saturn, only a hundredth as bright, is above Venus and somewhat to the right. Unless you get up before dawn on a clear morning, have a scope, and know where to look, you probably won’t be able to identify it.
I’ll be anxiously awaiting the return of Saturn in the night sky later in 2010, to watch the reappearance of its slightly-tilted rings. We went through a year of ringless Saturn this year.
Although I spent some time in a previous post discussing the NGC catalog, and the following two NGC DSOs were cursorily discussed, the two NGC DSOs visible during this time of year hold great interest for the astrophotographer looking for new objects to image.
At the risk of being repetitious, the first, NGC 6946, is both a spectacular and dim galaxy in Cepheus. At a distance of 10 million light years, this galaxy is one of about a dozen nearby neighbors to the Milky Way.
This galaxy has had an enormous number of supernovae explosions in the past 60 years. If we could watch this galaxy with years passing as seconds, every moment or two we would see a star blow up!
From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy, appropriately named because of all of the explosions of massive supernovae.
Below is my Track and Accumulate composite of 16 images at 45 seconds each.
As the weather turns cool this autumn, perhaps it is a bit premature to look ahead to winter. However, the sky above has a constant reminder of what is coming — snow. NGC 7662, also known as the Snowball Nebula, is visible in moderately sized telescopes as a bluish ball. Located in the fall and early winter constellation of Andromeda (home to our nearest galaxy neighbor, M31), it contains a blue dwarf star at its center, thus having one of the hottest nuclei of any planetary nebulae.
The distance to this nebula is not known with any real accuracy, but some estimates put it at about 5,600 light years away.
Ninety-five percent of all stars we see in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, will ultimately become “planetary nebulae.” This includes the sun. Much as a butterfly emerges from its cocoon, planetary nebulae are formed when a red giant star ejects its outer layers as clouds of luminescent gas, revealing the dense, hot, and tiny white, or bluish-white, dwarf star at its core. The other 5 percent of stars — that is, those born with masses more than eight times larger than our sun — end their lives as supernovae.
Below is my enlarged T & A image of this beautiful nebula.
Speaking of autumn, dark cloudless nights are going to be the exception from now on. Sunset comes earlier each day as we cross the autumnal equinox. As of November’s first Sunday, we will lose daylight savings time, and I will be able to get to the observatory early in the evening. However, because of the generally cloudy skies in our area during November, I’m afraid my viewing nights will be few indeed.
Since I have come to be a fan of the Track and Accumulate method of capturing Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) that the SBIG cameras are known for, I always knew that if I wanted to go deeper into revealing details of DSOs, I would have to learn how to get my camera to self-guide. Self-guiding basically involves calibrating on a bright star with a separate camera…in this case, one that involves a separate computer chip which does the task…and letting this second chip tell the telescope where to stay as it tracks the DSO.
Well, I tried it and here is my first result…M33…tracked for 297 seconds, or almost five minutes. This is hardly an excellent accomplishment, because self-guiding with a properly aligned scope can hold the DSO without star movement for hours, but it is my first step up on the ladder to achieving what amateur astrophotographers with their 50K investments in cameras, scopes, etc. are producing.
M33 is is a member of what’s known as our Local Group of galaxies. Along with our own Milky Way and Andromeda, the group of about 50 galaxies travels together in the universe, bound to one another by gravity. In fact, M33 is one of the few galaxies that is moving toward the Milky Way despite the fact that space is expanding, causing most galaxies in the universe to grow farther and farther apart. It is located about 2.9 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum.
Contrast this DSO with M11. M11 is one of the most condensed open clusters in the sky.
An intriguing and tantalizing sight in binoculars, it is wonderful in a telescope, and is many observer’s favorite open cluster.
Located in the constellation of Scutum, it is sometimes mistaken for a loose globular cluster. M11 is also called the “Wild Duck Cluster” because of it’s resemblance to a flight of wild ducks when viewed in a telescope. Appropriate viewing for this time of year for duck hunters!
M11, with an overall brightness of magnitude 5.8, contains as many as 500 stars ranging from 8th magnitude down to 14th magnitude.
This image of mine was a short 20 second “Grab” photo…no self-guiding needed. Obviously, with that short of an exposure, one doesn’t see the several hundred stars that would be visible if I used the T&A or self-guiding method, but at least it brings into focus what only appears as a blur in binoculars.
Summer is the best time to view two nebulae that are truly outstanding. Nebula is the Latin word for “cloud” … and that really describes it well. Many nebulae form from the gravitational collapse of gas in space. As the material collapses under its own weight, massive stars may form in the center. Some nebulae are formed as the result of supernova explosions, the death throes of massive, short-lived stars. Other nebulae may form as planetary nebulae. This is the final stage of a low-mass star's life, like earth's sun.
My image below is of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. It is of the planetary type, with a dying white dwarf at its center. Taken in early September, this image is a Track and Accumulate, without focal reducer, of seven combined images of 40 sec. each.
The other spectacular nebula is M57, the Ring Nebula. M57 is probably the most looked at and most photographed object in the sky. Much of its popularity rests on the fact that it can be seen in almost any sized telescope. Its appearance as a tiny ring of smoke in a dark sky is a sight not soon forgotten.
In looking back at records I noted, I first saw the Ring Nebula in August of 1999, so I have a bit of nostalgia because it was one of the most memorable sights I had seen in a large telescope. Located in the constellation Lyra, there are three stars in the constellation which form the “Summer Triangle”….Vega, Deneb, and Altair. Since Lyra is almost overhead, it is a bit uncomfortable to view in most telescopes except the Newtonians, because unless your refractor or SCT has a diagonal, you almost have to get on your knees to look up into the finder scope and then your main scope.
M57 is a planetary nebula, and if you look carefully, you can see the white dwarf star in the center. The circle of gases were caused as its former stage collapsed.
It is truly mind boggling that a modest amateur telescope with the latest electronic technology can do today what the greatest telescopes of only a decade or two ago could do. When I was a kid, Mt. Palomar, with its 200” mirror was the ultimate scope.
Below is my 4 minute exposure that is actually as good, if not better, than that taken at Palomar those many years ago. (I’ve seen the old photos.): 
Last evening, even with my scope unable to use its GPS function, I was able to image two DSOs I had not attempted before. The first, NGC 4565, is an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 53 million light-years away. I took a four minute exposure with dark applied of this beautiful galaxy. With a thin disk and bulging central nucleus, this magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices resembles a frosty flying saucer speeding through intergalactic space. Our own Milky Way Galaxy would look much like NGC 4565 if viewed edge on from a distance of 50 million light years or so. Roughly 125,000 light years in diameter, this beauty is about 25% larger than the Milky Way.
The other DSO I captured is M63, The Sunflower galaxy, is a beautiful spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is part of the M51 group of galaxies, located at a distance of about 37 million light years. With a mass of 10 billion suns and a diameter of about 60,000 light-years, the Sunflower Galaxy is only a fraction of the size of our Milky Way. My image is a one minute "Grab" exposure with dark applied.
Last evening was a welcome night for taking DSOs. "Seeing" was great, which meant there was little atmospheric interference from moisture. My GPS function on my new scope needs repair, and this accounts for the elongated stars, but I was able to image a couple of stunners. The first was everybody's favorite, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried just a 2 min. unguided exposure of this galaxy, our nearest neighbor, with an f6.5 focal reducer, and was amazed to see the detail longer exposures failed to show before. (CLICK ON IT FOR A BETTER VIEW.)
The other object of interest...one I had never before selected...was the Bubble Nebula. Nebulae are gaseous cloud formations spewed off from a collapsed star which usually appears near the center of the image as a white dwarf star. You may have to use your imagination a bit to see at least the bottom half of the "bubble," but for a two minute unguided shot, I'd say you can tell where the nebula gets its name.
The Hahnenberg Observatory houses the largest telescope in the area, a Meade 14" LX200-ACF Telescope, an 8" Orion reflector, an 80 mm guide scope, and a Coronado h-Alpha telescope for viewing sun flares and prominences, an SBIG ST-4000XCM CCD camera and autoguider, a 4X Televue Powermate, numous eyepieces and filters, and two digital SLR cameras for planetary and deep-sky photography.
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