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April 2011 |
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Saturn and NGC 2683: For the beginners and for the skilled |
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On April 4th, 2011, at midnight (UTC), the Earth is precisely between Saturn and the Sun. When this happens to a planet we say that the planet is in opposition, therefore Saturn is in opposition. Saturn is the faintest of the bright planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) so you need good conditions to see it in all its glory. When a planet is in opposition you can observe it all night long. That means April 2011 presents the best time of the year to see Saturn and its rings because at opposition the planet is also at its closest to Earth and is as bright as possible in our sky. Saturn is the only visible planet to grace the evening sky all through April and May 2011. Throughout April, Saturn stays out nearly all night long, and sets in the west at dawn. At about the time that Saturn sets, the other four visible planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter – will be rising in the east which will also give observational opportunities.
Saturn is now easy to find, because it’s near the bright star Spica, the alpha star of the constellation Virgo. If you go outside after sunset, and look between east and southeast you should see two bright objects. The slightly brighter one which is higher in the sky is Saturn.
Now here is the hard one: NGC 2683. NGC 2683 is an unbarred spiral galaxy discovered on February 5, 1788 . It was discovered by William Herschel and afterwards nicknamed the "UFO Galaxy" by the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium and Observatory. From Earth it is viewed nearly edge-on and it is located between 16 to 25 million light-years away. It is receding from Earth at 410 km/s (250 mi/s), and from the Galactic Center at 375 km/s (233 mi/s). The reddened light from the center of the galaxy appears yellowish due to the intervening gas and dust located within the outer arms of NGC 2683. You will need a large tescope to have a good image of NGC 2683. To take an image like the image bellow you will need a telesocope with an aperture above 12''. Preferably you can use an online robotic telecope with your class to do this. Specifications can be found here.
To find NGC2683's location in a skymap click here. Links:
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LSST - Large Synoptic Survey Telescope |
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New windows on the Universe will be here in 2014 Proposed for "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move.
Under development since 2000, the LSST is a public-private partnership. This gift enables the construction of LSST's three large mirrors; these mirrors take over five years to manufacture. The first stages of production for the two largest mirrors are now beginning at the Mirror Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Other key elements of the LSST system will also be aided by this commitment. The LSST will be constructed on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile. Its design of three large mirrors and three refractive lenses in a camera leads to a 10 square degree field-of-view with excellent image quality. The telescope's 3200 Megapixel camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed.
In January 2008, this project received $20M from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10M from Microsoft founder Bill Gates because the project has many features that are similar to their own lifetime activity. After beginning its work over ten years of operations, about 2000 deep exposures will be acquired for every part of the sky over 20,000 square degrees. This color "movie" of the Universe will open an entirely new window: the time domain. LSST will produce 30 Terabytes of data per night, yielding a total database of 150 Petabytes. Dedicated data facilities will process the data in real time. "What a shock it was when Galileo saw in his telescope the phases of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, the first hints of a dynamic universe" Simonyi said according to the Brookehaven National Laboratory News. "Today, by building a special telescope-computer complex, we can study this dynamism in unprecedented detail. LSST will produce a database suitable for answering a wide range of pressing questions: What is dark energy? What is dark matter? How did the Milky Way form? What are the properties of small bodies in the solar system? Are there potentially hazardous asteroids that may impact the earth causing significant damage? What sort of new phenomena have yet to be discovered? " "LSST is just as imaginative in its technology and approach as it is with its science mission. LSST is truly an internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. Astronomical research with LSST becomes a software issue - writing code and database queries to mine the night sky and recover its secrets. The 8.4 meter LSST telescope and the three gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity - the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe" Gates said. "It is fun for Charles and me to be a team again supporting this work given all we have done together on software projects." "The LSST will be the world's most powerful survey telescope. This major gift keeps the project on schedule by enabling the early fabrication of LSST's large optics and other long-lead components of the LSST system," said Donald Sweeney, LSST Project Manager. LSST is designed to be a public facility - the database and resulting catalogs will be made available to the community at large with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users (both professionals and amateurs), as well as computationally intensive scientific investigations that utilize the entire database. The public will actively share the adventure of discovery of our dynamic Universe and this will be good for schools too. Link:
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NEW SOLAR SYSTEM SUDOKU |
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Solar System Sudoku is an EAAE transformation of the famous Japanese Sudoku. You have to put on each the nine symbols on each row, each column and each of the nine small nine spaces squares. This means each one of the nine symbols has to appear nine times on the Sudoku puzzle. Instead of numbers, in this new version we use figures of the nine major celestial objects of the solar system (Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). In this new interactive version just go on clicking on the empty cells until the object you want appears. Now you can play it interactively as many times as you want. When you finish you can start a new game. Have fun!
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| Stellar Formation in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud. Image credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, WISE Team |
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| (click on the image to see a bigger version) |
This fantastic false-color composition was accomplished using WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is a dark nebula of gas and dust that is located 1° south of the star ρ Ophiuchi of the constellation Ophiuchus. At an estimated distance of 131 ± 3 parsecs, this cloud is one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System. This cloud complex covers an angular area of 4.5° × 6.5° on the celestial sphere and is one of the most active region of stellar formation in our vicinity. After forming along a large cloud of cold molecular hydrogen gas, young stars heat the surrounding dust to produce the infrared glow. Stars in the process of formation, called young stellar objects or YSOs, are embedded in the compact pinkish nebulae seen here, but are otherwise hidden from the prying eyes of optical telescopes. An exploration of the region in penetrating infrared light has detected emerging and newly formed stars whose average age is estimated to be a mere 300 000 years. That's extremely young compared to the Sun's age of 5 thousand million years. |
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