Steve’s Virtual Planet

Autumn targets sans planets

These last couple of months have seen the gradual westward track of Saturn. It’s way too early in the year for observing Jupiter. Uranus and Neptune are up later but they aren’t easy to get in a small scope. The evenings are getting dark a little sooner now, so, why not work on finding other nice objects to look at.

Well, check the Messier catalog first. A few choices there. Maybe a planetary nebula or two. Check. Galaxies? Yep. How ’bout stars with color. Yep. Several of those to enjoy. Of course, there’s always the standby - double stars! You never run out of them. The links below will take you to Wikipedia for more details. So, here goes.

First, the Messier objects - M57, the Ring Nebula still one of the best planetary nebula; M11, The Wild Duck (open) Cluster in Aquila, a good wide angle object for binoculars or low power scopes; M45, The Pleiades, another great open cluster, is up later in the evening. For galaxies, there is of course M31, The Andromeda Galaxy. And if you look lots of stars in one view, you can’t go wrong with two of the best globular clusters - M13 in Hercules and M15 in Pegasus.

Two other planetary nebula are in the NGC Catalog and high overhead - The Blinking Planetary (NGC6826) in Cygnus and The Blue Snowball (NGC7662) in Andromeda. Both are slightly brighter than M57, but they benefit from averted vision. So look off to the side slightly in your field of view to get a better view.

For colorful objects, you’ll be seeing red! There’s Herschel’s Garnet Star in Cepheus, a very nice red super giant star; there’s also Antares in Scorpius, and also Arcturus in Bootes, both a very noticeable orange.

Finally, for doubles, there’s Albireo, in Cygnus and Kappa Her in Hercules. Enjoy!!!

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The Lunar 100

If you are on a mission to discover our Moon and your looking for a detailed observing guide, one of the best ones to start with is Charles Woods, Lunar 100. For a number of years now, Charles has written a frequent column about the moon in Sky and Telescope magazine. He came up with this list of 100 favorite objects and published them in 2004. It’s a great reference and the resources below will get you started.

The revised Sky and Telescope reference article is on this page, but there is also a Lunar 100 page on Wikipedia. The table in the second link is easier to work with and has many of the objects hyperlinked for further study. However, the S&T article has the Rukl chart reference number for most of the objects. Antonin Rukl’s Atlas of the Moon is one of the definitive books with all hand drawn maps that are indexed.  There is a useful wiki reference on the web if you can’t find his book. For a printed hold-in-your-hand quide, Shop at Sky has a nice laminated reference on a card. I’ll have more on the Rukl Atlas in a future post.

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Summer Geometry

The night sky is peppered with all kinds of star patterns that have fascinated human kind for untold centuries. These patterns were thought to be gods and creatures of all kinds, kindly (mostly) looking over our affairs here on Earth. For the grander groups of stars, we save the name constellation. But sometimes smaller groups appear that have an even grander attraction. We call these patterns either within (or without) their constellations asterisms.

One of the most recognizable asterisms in the sky is the Summer Triangle. Unlike many other asterisms that are confined to one constellation, with the Summer Triangle, you get three for the price of one! The key stars in The Triangle are as follows: Vega in the constellation Lyra (The Lyre), Deneb in Cygnus (The Swan) and Altair in Aquila (The Eagle). Vega is the brightest of the three and easy to find through the summer into early Fall. Once you get to know how the Triangle is placed in the sky, you can also use it as a guide to other constellations and stars.

Follow the links above to the different objects. You’ll find that the three constellations have long been associated with birds of some kind, no matter what culture is gazing up. If you’re keen to investigate the mythology, check your local library for Richard Hinckley Allen’s “Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning”. It’s one of the great modern resources for ancient astronomy.

Revel in the magic of the Three Mythical Birds of Summer!

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Jupiter’s Christmas Return

It’s now well after the Autumn Equinox and the finish of daylight savings time. Shorter days are now the rule, sunsets coming earlier paving the way for evening viewing and just in time for the return of Jupiter in the mid evening skies. So the shift grants even more time for catching the king of planets.

As we approach mid November, the giant planet will be about 4.5 AU from Earth, about 418 million miles away. The apparent magnitude is now about - 2.08 and will be increasing towards -2.15 by month’s end.

Now would be a good time to begin this season’s Jupiter viewing, coming off of the eastern horizon at 9:15PM. By late November, Jupiter will be rising much earlier and easier to catch in the evening hours.

Jupiter will be with us in the evening sky through the end of May. Plenty of time to explore the moons and features of our largest planet.

More on Jupiter in the coming weeks as the King of the Solar System brings another great season of Big Planet views. Stay tuned!

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S.V.P. Star News - How far are they?

Recently, I found this article on the history of measuring distances to the stars. Accurately measuring the distances to closeby stars allows astronomers to further calibrate their models of stars. This branch of astronomy is known as astrometry.

In august of this year, this topic got a bit more interesting with a new finding of the distance to the Pleiades Cluster. I’ve also written on the general topic of the cosmic distance scale. Not only do scientists benefit from better data in general, they can more accurately judge distances of far off objects based on their measured, or apparent magnitude.

When we look at the sky, we witness the star’s light as apparent magnitude. But we can still appreciate the object itself by consulting the data that has been compiled and calculated. Space is vast and almost beyond our comprehension. These scales give us a sense of our place in the cosmos .. and our size!

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M6 - The Cosmic Distance Scale

What do you get when you put a bunch of bright young stars together in a prominent place? No, it’s not a Hollywood casting party, it’s an open cluster! In fact, you could end up with as many as a thousand stars in one bunch. It’s “Bigger than the Oscars”!!! But we’re talking about open clusters here, not film stars.

There are quite a few open clusters in our galaxy, the Milky Way, over a thousand actually. They are usually relatively close to Earth in the so called galactic plane and thus a little easier to study. They are key elements in our understanding of stellar evolution and astronomers can use them to get a better grasp of the size of our galaxy and the universe in general.

This way of measuring how big things really are out there is known as the Cosmic Distance Scale. In order to make such measurements, we need a reference, a cosmic yard stick. And that’s where Open Clusters come in. One such cluster is The Butterfly Cluster, also known as Messier 6 (M6 is the catalog number). It’s in the constellation Scorpius.

The web site Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) recently had a page on M6 and the topic of how it’s used to measure this scale. Check out the link for the Great Shapley-Curtis debate over the “Scale of the Universe”. It’s guaranteed to make you feel .. well .. small!

Enjoy the party .. and .. Clear skies!

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International Moon

Recently, there were a number of news items on the web about the International Observe the Moon Night, the InOMN. This organization us a combined effort from the NASA Night Sky Network, Astronomical Society of the Pacific and other groups to promote the observation of our closest cosmic neighbor, The Moon!

They have one whole night dedicated to our Sister in space and it’s received some great coverage in the astro press as in this S&T Moonwatching story. But even though this has been organized as a once-a-year event, there are great resources listed in this article for moon watching all year long.

Also on the S&T site is this useful reference called A Month of Moonwatching. There are many great guides for lunar observing and a few get very detailed about watching the moon night by night. It can be quite involved but this article breaks it down to baby steps. It’s a great way to get introduced to the “art” of moon gazing!

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S.V.P. Star News - Pleaides

A recent measurement, made using radio telescopes, has resulted in a new determination of the distance to The Pleaides. The Pleiades, also know as M45, is a fairly close by open cluster. Its close enough such that the distance to it’s stellar members can be measured with different methods. So, multiple technigues lead to more accurate calibrations of those methods.

The new finding disputes the distance measurements to the Pleiades measured by ESA’s Hipparcos satellite is wrong. It seems that ground-based astronomers had it right all along.

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S.V.P. Star News - Solar Maximum minimizes

Our Sun continues to brighten our days and that is a really good thing. It has a characteristic cycle of activity that repeats every 11 years. But it gets a little “moody” now and then, not quite behaving as normal. NASA had a recent article on the mysterious state of the current solar cycle. It looks like soar cycle 24 has lost some of its punch. Earlier this year, there was another take on the Solar Cycle from the BBC, Is our Sun falling silent?

Our sun has been getting a bit of press this year, but most recently on July 18 when there were no sun spots at all. And that even happened three years ago. So, scientist are a little baffled but very curious about all this. And thanks to a wonderful fleet of satellites like SOHO and STEREO constantly monitoring our neighbor star, we get a continuous 24/7 news feed about our favorite star.

If you want the whole scoop on the story, you go to the source, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory web site. And don’t forget your daily Solar activity report from SpaceWeather.com.

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S.V.P. Star News - Supernova SN2014J

There is a lot of excitement surrounding the supernova event in M82. It was discovered on January 21st by the University College of London during a training session with graduate students. The actual event probably occurred around the 15th of January. Known as Supernova SN2014J, the exploding star is “only” 12 million light years away and is thus easily viewable from a moderate sized telescope in a fairly dark sky. As I posted a couple of days ago, it is viewable even from the suburbs with a big enough scope.

So far, there aren’t too many articles on the web for SN2014J but we do know it’s a Type 1A HV supernova, the result of an exploding white dwarf star in the Galaxy M82. I’ve dropped in a few links here with some decent introductions into this object and Supernovae in general.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled for any science bulletins that get into the details of this object. But for now, check these links out.

Introduction from Phil Plaitt

Article from Astro Bob

Sky & Telescope SN2014J viewing guide

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