Winter Solstice

NASA is so sure the world will not come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, they've already released a video about the day after. View "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY_Gc1bF8ds

Instead on December 21st, researchers will use NASA's Cassini spacecraft to observe a rare transit of Venus visible from the planet Saturn:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/20dec_transitofvenus/

Sir Patrick Moore

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde

British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died, aged 89, his friends and colleagues have said.

He "passed away peacefully at 12:25 this afternoon" at his home in Selsey, West Sussex, they said in a statement.

Sir Patrick presented the BBC programme The Sky At Night for over 50 years, making him the longest-running host of the same television show ever.

He wrote dozens of books on astronomy and his research was used by the US and the Russians in their space programmes.

Described by one of his close friends as "fearlessly eccentric", Sir Patrick was notable for his habit of wearing a monocle on screen and his idiosyncratic style.

"Through his regular monthly programmes he was telling us what to look for and what was out there and that was a real inspiration”

Maggie Aderin-Pocock Space scientist

Sir Patrick presented the first edition of The Sky at Night on 24 April 1957. He last appeared in an episode broadcast on Monday

Black Marble

Scientists unveiled today an unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever before.

It has been assembled from a series of cloud-free images acquired by one of the most capable satellites in the sky today - the Suomi spacecraft.

The platform was launched by the US last year, principally to deliver critical meteorological data.
The Black Marble dataset shows off one of Suomi's key innovations: the low-light sensitivity of its VIIRS instrument.

VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) can discern a range of phenomena of interest to weather forecasters - cloud, snow, fog, etc - even when the satellite is on the dark side of the Earth.
Most of the time, all VIIRS needs to do its work is some illumination from the Moon. But if that is not available, the instrument can still detect features down below just from the nocturnal glow of the atmosphere itself.
And, of course, just as this Black Marble rendition demonstrates, VIIRS is also very good at capturing the lights of our cities.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Jim Al-Khalili talks to astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell forged her own path through the male-dominated world of science - in the days when it was unusual enough for women to work, let alone make a discovery in astrophysics that was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

As a 24-year old PhD student, Jocelyn spotted an anomaly on a graph buried within 100 feet of printed data from a radio telescope. Her curiosity about such a tiny detail led to one of the most important discoveries in 20th century astronomy - the discovery of pulsars - those dense cores of collapsed stars.
It's a discovery which changed the way we see the universe, making the existence of black holes suddenly seem much more likely and providing further proof to Einstein's theory of gravity.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was made a Dame in 2008 and a year later became the first ever female President of the Institute of Physics.

Meteors

October 7, 2012 Draconids

The radiant point for the Draconid meteor shower almost coincides with the head of the constellation Draco the Dragon in the northern sky. That’s why the Draconids are best viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. The Draconid shower is a real oddity, in that the radiant point stands highest in the sky as darkness falls.

This shower is usually a sleeper, producing only a handful of languid meteors per hour in most years. But watch out if the Dragon awakes! In rare instances, fiery Draco has been known to spew forth many hundreds of meteors in a single hour. With no moon to interfere you may be lucky!

October 21, 2012. Orionids

With the waxing crescent moon setting before midnight (on October 20), that means a dark sky between midnight and dawn, or during the best viewing hours for the Orionid meteors. On a dark, moonless night, the Orionids exhibit a maximum of about 15 meteors per hour. These fast-moving meteors occasionally leave persistent trains and bright fireballs. If you trace these meteors backward, they seem to come from the Club of the famous constellation Orion the Hunter. You might know Orion’s bright, ruddy star Betelgeuse. The radiant is north of Betelgeuse. The Orionids have a broad and irregular peak that isn’t easy to predict.

Watch the skies, keep watching...

with thanks to http://earthsky.org/earth

Curiosity searches for evidence of life

from NASA
Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind.
Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream's flow.
"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. "Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."

FIREBALL!

This text is taken from BAA e-bulletin 698 written by John Mason.

Hundreds of eyewitness reports are coming in of a brilliant fragmenting fireball, visible at about 22:55 BST (21:55 UT) on Friday, 21st September2012. This is clearly one of the most dramatic events reported to the BAA Meteor Section in recent years.

On Friday evening, there was scattered and more continuous cloud cover over much of South-East England, but the rest of the UK and Ireland were largely very clear, with transparent starry skies. This, coupled with the fact that many people were out on a Friday evening and the truly spectacular nature of the fireball itself, are clearly the main factors in it being reported by so many thousands of people over such a very wide area. This extends northwards and westwards from a line roughly linking Norfolk in the East to Devon in the South-West, with the majority of sightings so far received coming from Wales, the North-West, Central and North of England, Scotland and much of Ireland.

When first seen the fireball appeared as a single very brilliant object but it then fragmented into a very large number of bright secondary fireballs, all travelling along roughly parallel paths across the sky.

One highly unusual feature of this fireball is the length of time for which it was visible due to its apparent very slow speed of movement across the sky.  This has led some people to speculate that the fireball was due to the re-entry of a large fragment of space debris.  However, there are several aspects of the event, at this very early phase of the investigation, that do not appear to fit with this hypothesis and it would be unwise to rule out other possibilities at this stage.

More details here.

Visit NASA

Would you like to win a trip to NASA’s Lyndon. B. Johnson Space Center in America? The UK Space Design Competition gives you and your friends the opportunity to do just that! The UK Space Design Competition is an industry simulation experience open to all current secondary school students in the United Kingdom. We’re gearing up towards the 2013 competition which will take place at Imperial College London on the weekend of 23-24 March 2013.

Visit www.uksdc.org for more information.

Waning Cresent

Welcome back to school and hello new astronomy students. What a summer of astronomy. We were really sad to lose two pioneers. Firstly Sir Bernard Lovell, who died aged 98, was the leader of the team that built the Jodrell Bank telescope in Cheshire, at one time the largest steerable radiotelescope in the world.

Secondly we said goodbye to Neil Armstrong, the US astronaut secured his place in history on 20 July 1969, when, as commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and made his famous statement: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

On a much brighter note the Mars Science Laboratory landed safely on Mars and the Curiosity Rover quickly sent back amazing HD images of the surface of Mars. The rover has ten different scientific instruments to analyse the surface of Mars and search for evidence of life.

We excitedly await further discoveries. At the distance of 56 million km (perigee) or 249 million km (apogee) away, these images and experiments are all the more extraordinary. I'm sure Sir Bernard and Neil would be astounded at the rapid pace of space exploration.

And don't forget - wink at Neil next time you look at the Moon!

Auroura beauty

NASA Science explains and shares images from recent solar activity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VVYb-snvJ8

Forecasters say Solar Max is due in the year 2013. When it arrives, the peak of 11-year sunspot cycle will bring more solar flares, more coronal mass ejections, more geomagnetic storms and more auroras than we have experienced in quite some time.

Keep watching those skies.

Thanks to NASA.

Aurora alert in UK

Watch the skies to the north. Keep watching.

http://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/

Stellarium

Investigate the solar system, time travel and even switch off the Sun using stellarium software.

http://www.stellarium.org/

Features of the software include:

• default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
• extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
• asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
• constellations for twelve different cultures
• images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
• realistic Milky Way
• very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
• the planets and their satellites

The view of Earth from the Mars rover

Zoom in to the Milky Way’s centre

Zoom in to the Milky Way’s centre until you see a close-up view of objects orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy.

This zoom sequence stars with a view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, then zooms in towards the crowded center of the galaxy, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius the Archer. Then the scene shifts to an infrared view, which lets us see see through the dusty clouds in this direction and get a close-up view of objects orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. The final views show the motion of a newly discovered gas cloud that is falling rapidly towards the central black hole.

Look out for Noctilucent Clouds

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can only be observed when the Sun is below the horizon.

We are in the right place, at the right time to observe them this summer. Keep watching the skies.

They are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres. They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently-discovered meteorological phenomenon.

Their occurrence can be used as a sensitive guide to changes in the upper atmosphere - increasing frequency, brightness and extent is possibly connected to climate change.

Exoplanets

Extrasolar planets - exoplanets - orbit a star other than the Sun. They are too faint to be seen directly with existing instrumenets, so indirect methods of detection are necessary. The first exoplanet was only discovered in 1992. It orbits a pulsar.

There are three methods for discovering exoplanets:

1. The radial velocity method - looks for a cyclical Doppler shift in the light from a star.

2. The transit method - looks for dips in the brightness of a star as the planet crosses the face of the star.

3. Astrometry - accurately measures the wobble of a star as a planet orbits.

Planet finding spacecraft such as COROT and Kepler use the transit method and to date 786 planets are known.

You can download the free exoplanet app and follow the discoveries. Maybe life is out there waiting for us... THIS IS AN EXCITING TIME indeed.

Summer solstice

Happy June solstice, everyone! If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, the June solstice is your signal to celebrate summer. For us, this solstice marks the longest day of the year. Early dawns. Long days. Late sunsets. Short nights. The sun at its height each day, as it crosses the sky. Meanwhile, south of the equator, winter begins.


Planet Earth, as seen from the Sun, at the instant of June 2012 solstice: June 20 at 23:09 Universal Time (12:09 GMT) on the 21st .

What is a solstice? Ancient cultures knew that the Sun’s path across the sky, the length of daylight, and the location of the sunrise and sunset all shifted in a regular way throughout the year.

They built monuments, such as Stonehenge, to follow the sun’s yearly progress.

Today, we know that the solstice is an astronomical event, caused by Earth’s tilt on its axis and its motion in orbit around the sun.

Because Earth doesn’t orbit upright. Instead, our world is tilted on its axis by 23-and-a-half degrees, Earth’s Northern and Southern Hemispheres trade places in receiving the sun’s light and warmth most directly.

At the June solstice, Earth is positioned in its orbit so that our world’s North Pole is leaning most toward the Sun. As seen from Earth, the Sun is directly overhead at noon 23 1/2 degrees north of the equator, at an imaginary line encircling the globe known as the Tropic of Cancer – named after the constellation Cancer the Crab. This is as far north as the Sun ever gets.

For all of Earth’s creatures, nothing is so fundamental as the length of the day. After all, the Sun is the ultimate source of almost all light and warmth on Earth’s surface.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you might notice the early dawns and late sunsets, and the high arc of the Sun across the sky each day. You might see how high the Sun appears in the sky at local noon. And be sure to look at your noontime shadow. Around the time of the solstice, it’s your shortest noontime shadow of the year.

For us in the modern world, the solstice is a time to recall the reverence and understanding that early people had for the sky. Some 5,000 years ago, people placed huge stones in a circle on a broad plain in what’s now England and aligned them with the June solstice sunrise.

We may never comprehend the full significance of Stonehenge. But we do know that knowledge of this sort wasn’t isolated to just one part of the world. Around the same time Stonehenge was being constructed in England, two great pyramids and then the Sphinx were built on Egyptian sands. If you stood at the Sphinx on the summer solstice and gazed toward the two pyramids, you’d see the sun set exactly between them.

Infrared Astronomy

Y10 Astronomers in infrared

Infrared Astronomy is the detection and study of the infrared radiation (heat energy) emitted from objects in the Universe. All objects emit infrared radiation. So, Infrared Astronomy involves the study of just about everything in the Universe.

In the field of astronomy, the infrared region lies within the range of sensitivity of infrared detectors, which is between wavelengths of about 1 and 300 microns (a micron is one millionth of a meter). The human eye detects only 1% of light at 0.69 microns, and 0.01% at 0.75 microns, and so effectively cannot see wavelengths longer than about 0.75 microns unless the light source is extremely bright.

 

Using infrared the familiar can take on a spectacular guise - Y10 astronomers above or the winter sky constellation Orion in the infrared, as seen to the left, in this false-color image constructed from data collected by IRAS--the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.

Thanks to the University of Sussex, Department of Physics and Astronomy for their expertise and technical wizardry, for illustrating the use of infrared in astronomy.

Scale of the Universe





How big is the Universe? Explore this website.

Quiz questions:

1. By how many factors of ten is the Local Group larger than a proton?

2. What other comparision could be made of the same scale?

http://htwins.net/scale2/

Awesome multiwavelength images

NASA | SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit

As I travelled down the motorway (thankfully as a passenger) I failed to glimpse the transit in my eclipse glasses. 4 minutes later the clouds parted and the Sun came out. Too late.

Thankfully NASA saved the day with this awesome video.

From Svalbard Venus transit in K-calcium

Studying the calcium content of the Sun during the transit

The Birth and Death of Stars

How are stars formed, and how do they die? In this talk you will learn how we use telescopes sensitive to infra red and X rays to see stars being born and dying, and ultimately how we are all made of stars!

All welcome- come to the library at 1.05pm on Thursday 31^st May

Transit of Venus

On Wednesday 6th June, skywatchers in Europe will have their last chance to see Venus pass in front of the Sun for over a century. Be up early.

This event, called a transit of Venus, is one of the rarest sights in astronomy. Transits of Venus occur in pairs 8 years apart, each pair separated from the next by over a century. The last pair occurred in 1881 and 1889, and the next pair will occur in 2117 and 2125. This week's transit is paired with a transit which occurred on June 8, 2004.

In the UK the end of the transit will be visible just after sunrise, it should be visible after 5am. Venus will touch the western edge of the Sun at 5:32am and twenty minutes later the planet will leave the photospheric disc of the Sun and the transit ends (in white light), with the Sun at around 7 degrees above the horizon.