Star Party!

The Star party was a lot of fun. My man and I had a marvelous time. I slept well. In my opinion, forget tents. Get a mini-van, fill it with blankets and voila!, instant camping. Okay, so you have to cook and after all the blankets I had piled in there, nine, including my sleeping bag, there wasn’t room but for me. So make your friends get a tent and keep the van to yourself. But, I had no bugs, it was pretty quiet inside, and no danger of getting rained on. And no putting up and taking down of a tent, except for my man’s. He got to sleep on the ground.

Anyway, enough about camping, which I love doing. We were on the banks of the Missouri River, which was part of Lewis and Clark’s exploration, (I learned that on their entire trip up the river, one or the other of them walked the shoreline). It was far enough from any cities that the viewing was not affected by the lights or cityglow. On Saturday night, the second night, there was a pretty nice, not too bright, showing of the aurora borealis. Hmm, pretty amazing to realise now that those would have come from sunspots that I viewed earlier in that day through a solar scope. To view the Sun, a special filter had to be put on the scope or you can have a special scope that is made solely for viewing the Sun. The special filter, a hydrogen alpha filter, allows in only a narrow spectrum of light, emitted by the hydrogen alpha gas. The Sun appears very red, not dark red, about the color of a stoplight. I viewed the Sun through the special scope and also through a 12-inch Smith-Cassegrain both with the hydrogen alpha filter. The smaller one showed an almost sandy texture across the entire Sun. There were a couple of sunspots visible. The most interesting feature visible with the hydrogen alpha filter were flares (prominences). These were visible around the edge of the Sun and looked a little like whiskers. They were not very long and after some time watching, you could see them curve back to the Sun’s surface. There were two prominences that we saw. The sunspots, I learned, have light and dark areas and form along magnetic lines that run north and south from the Sun’s poles. I also learned that the Sun rotates faster at its equator than at the poles. All the effects, this had, I don’t exactly know, but it is very cool and interesting, and I want to know more. We also looked at the Sun through a Mylar filter which showed white light and the sunspots. The sphere was coloured, but the background sky was entirely black in both views. So that was daytime viewing.

It rained during one of the speakers’ talks in the evening. The talks I did not anticipate would be so interesting. If you read Sky and Telescope magazine, or read your boyfriend’s, if you read the last issue, June 2005, the cover article is written by Elizabeth Warner. She came and spoke about the topic addressed in her article, the impact of an explorative probe with Comet Tempel, scheduled for July 4th. The group she is working with wants to involve and record as much data as possible about the effects visible from Earth. It is already known that comets give off the most light when they are at perihelion (closest to the Sun) and losing the gases and dust as they melt, and gradually decrease in intensity. The purpose of this study and the impact is to discover what and how a comet is made. Amateurs can help by recording how bright the comet appears over a period of time.

Another speaker, Vishnu Reddy, gave a detailed talk on his discovery of 23 asteroids. Asteroids are found by viewing thousands of pictures of the night sky and picking out which tiny spots have moved across the sky. The stars themselves do not move. The Earth rotates, making all stars move at the same rate across the sky, while planets and asteroids move in comparison to the stars behind them because they are orbiting the Sun. (That is why you can see Venus, known as the Morning or Evening Star, at various times and places. See more about Venus below.)

Dave Weinrich spoke about speaking at various schools in Sri Lanka about Astronomy. In one year, 250,000 people viewed the showing at the only planetarium in Sri Lanka. He gave the comparison that Sri Lanka is 1/3 the size of Minnesota with a much higher population, and had one planetarium, while Minnesota has 10.

Jim Zimbelman, a planetary geologist, fascinated me the most with his description of the Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. This is NASA’s site and has some really amazing stuff: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/ . These are rovers that have cameras, wheels, sample-retrieving arms, and drills that are all controlled by teams at NASA and have retrieved amazing information about Mars. The goal was for them to explore for 90 days before they lost power, but they have lasted for 500 days. The rovers are powered by solar panels. The atmosphere is very dusty, and the team had expected the dust to accumulate so much dust that the panels could not get enough sunlight to power the rover. The power for Spirit had decreased from 900 watts at landing to 300 watts, and the engineers estimated that at least 280 was necessary and the rover would die soon. The next day, the power was up to 950 watts. They aimed the cameras at the solar panels and discovered that a dust devil, which are common on Mars, had cleaned the solar panels. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20050325.html Something similar happened to the other rover as well. He showed a PowerPoint presentation of photos from NASA’s website showing the landscape, rocks, craters, dunes and other geological formations. The next day, he gave a presentation on the Cassini spacecrafts exploration of the moons of Saturn, of which there are 50. He showed how they affect one another and the rings around Saturn. The F Ring has a heliated structure which I had read a little about on www.nineplanets.org and also in, I believe, Sky and Telescope. This is caused by two moons which orbit on either side of the ring. The moons that are within the rings cause waves to appear in the rings. One of the pairs of moons greatly affect one another, to the degree that when Dione passes Enceladus, the crust of Enceladus flexes in and out as much at 100 meters. On this moon, they say there is evidence of cryo-vulcan activity, (frozen volcanic). It is so cold, -300 degrees Fahrenheit, that the ice acts like rock. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

Tim Young told how amateur astronomers could find extra-solar planets by watching certain stars at certain times to see of the planet(s) transited the surface of the star. (a transit occurs when a celestial object crosses in front of a another object). Last June, Venus crossed the face of our Sun. These scientists have found stars that have planets because the stars wobble slightly when the planet orbits the star. If the planet is large enough, it causes the star to describe a circle inside the planet’s orbit. So far the planets they have found have been very large, up to 7 times the size of Jupiter, because these planets are large enough to affect the movement of the star. They are hoping to find a small planet like ours. They identify the stars that wobble by observing how the light appears to us using a spectra.

Then there were two speakers who talked about the geology described in Lewis and Clark’s journals. So that was all of the speakers, which were very interesting.

The first evening, I talked to a group of Girl Scouts who were there for the star party along with some other events. I ended up taking them over to my man’s telescope, and he showed them Jupiter and Saturn. I helped them find them by naked eye and also find the Little Dipper and talked about what constellations they are part of. That was a lot of fun. One girl saw the rings around Saturn and could only gasp, “It’s like, it’s like, it’s like.” Another girl decided she was going to study stars when she grew up. They left, and then my man and I walked around and looked through some of the other telescopes there. The biggest one was a 17½ inch Dobsonian. (That means it had to be turned by hand.) We looked through several others as well. During the two nights of observing, I saw the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Ring Nebula, the Owl Nebula and a galaxy close enough to be in the same field of view, two galaxies that interact, M81 and M82, and M65 and M66, and M63. I also looked at the Hercules Cluster and Jupiter. It was very damp and after about 1:30 am everyone closed up.

See www.seetheglory.com for each of these. When you hold your pointer over the picture, the name will show up next to your pointer.

The second night, I was exhausted, so I slept in the van until my man woke me up at 1 am because it had cleared up since I went to sleep. (Add another point for portability to sleeping in your camper-van). Most people had taken their scopes down, but one man had his computer-driven 12-inch Smith-Cassegrain up yet. He asked what I would like to see. He let me use the computer controls to adjust the centering of the object. The stars are on a coordinate map of declination and right ascension. So, you can know these numbers and find the stars just like you can find places on Earth using latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. The computer has these has a catalogue of celestial objects and is attached to a GPS. Using the controls of a computer-driven telescope is quite simple. You punch in the identifying number of the object, M63, and the computer controls the engine to turn the telescope to point at the object. So, the man let me run his telescope. It was really easy to used and amazing to watch. My man’s telescope, an 8-inch reflector, compared quite well to the larger scopes. I teased him that he didn’t have to buy a new, bigger, computer-driven telescope, to which he chuckled and said, “No, I’ll let you get a computer-driven scope.” Sigh, so do I save for a telescope or a horse?

I almost forgot, we got home and unloaded the telescope. My man had read an article about looking for Mercury in the daylight with the naked eye. This is nigh unto impossible, and the author didn’t even really think it was possible. But, close to sunset, it is possible to find Venus. We looked for Venus, and found it, BEFORE the Sun set. It is about 15 degrees east of the Sun. Typically, Venus is easily visible shortly after sunset. To me it is as far at my hand at arm’s length making a ‘Y’. It is not straight up in the sky from the Sun, but angled slightly to the south. See if you can see it. It was really exciting to see something (besides the Moon) in the sky while the Sun was up.

Websites:
Astronomy magazine
www.Skyandtelescope.com

Really beautiful photos of deep-sky objects
www.seetheglory.com

Info on the planets and their moons
www.nineplanets.org

NASA's project homepage
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

The talk that Elizabeth gave about the comet impact
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/

Rovers
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/

Specific Facts about the rovers. This website has a lot of the pictures and information that Jim Zimbelman shared at the Star Party.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/factsheets/pdfs/Mars03Rover041020.pdf

Facts and photos from NASA's probe orbiting Saturn.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm