Do you regret not taking that astronomy course in college? Starting tonight, the Cincinnati Observatory is offering an weekly introductory course called A-2-Z Astronomy taught by University of Cincinnati Professor Dave Bosse. The course will cover everything from the Moon to our Solar and Galactic systems. The course is free to Observatory members in the $50 range and higher. Reservations are required as space is very limited. Contact the Observatory at 513-321-5186 to register.

As the blizzard of the century continues to pound on my front door I felt inspired to write an entry about another icy world in our solar system that has astronomers’ horns locked in a “heated” debate over ice volcanoes, underground oceans, and the growing religious status of Lime Diet Coke. Ok…so not so much the Diet Coke thing, but Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, is a really cool (no pun intended) place that has baffled astronomers for years and now a general consensus has been reached that there is an ocean of liquid water beneath the planet’s surface. This makes Enceladus one of two places in the solar system that scientists suspect of harboring a subterranean ocean; the other is Europa, the legendary Jupiter moon that is science fiction home of the monolith race from 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the debate over the presence of liquid water raged in science labs and UFC octagons across the world, the Cassini probe silently performed a series of flybys in 2008 to search for the presence of negative ions. According to SPACE.com, the sample that provided the data set came from Cassini’s much-publicized plunge through an ice geyser eruption in 2008. These geysers pump gigantic plumes of ice into space which become caught up in Saturn’s gravitational pull and ultimately form the planet’s gigantic e-ring. These negative ions are believed to represent the flow of water and have only been found on Earth, Enceladus, and passing comets. Their discovery has shifted the balance of discussion in favor of a subterranean ocean and should definitely make the planet a prime candidate for the search for life outside of our world.

Enceladus is one of the larger moons in the Saturn system and can easily be seen with a small telescope. I recommend nothing smaller than 3” reflector although I have had some success in seeing the Saturnian moons with a 1.5” department store refractor (bad bad bad). I highly recommend using an astronomy program such as Starry Night or TheSKY to ensure that you know exactly how to identify Enceladus among the other Saturnian moons.

Image Credit: Starry Night Professional

In light of the Spirit Rover recently getting stuck in the Martian sand, I felt that this XKCD comic was very appropriate to repost. XKCD is one of the funniest and most enlightening comics available on the web today. Visit the official website for more math, language, and love.

As it struggles to come to terms with the loss of its manned space program and begins to divert funds to other missions, NASA has extended the Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn until 2017. Cassini has been returning beautiful photos of the ringed planet as well as important data on the composition and behavior of its moons since 2004. The probe arrived at Saturn in June of 2004 carrying the European-built Huygens probe designed to land on Titan. In January of 2005, Huygens became the first man-made object to penetrate the atmosphere and land on the surface of Titan. The first photos of Titan’s surface revealed a hazy world sculpted by lakes of liquid methane and mountains made of rock-hard ice and exposed a place that is considered by many scientists to be the closest example we have to what our own little world looked like in its primordial stages of development. The 2011 extension known as Cassini-Solstice will be the second extension since the probe arrived and is sure to continue a Cassini tradition of giving us incredible views of the jewel of our solar system.

CASSINI-HUYGENS 2010 MISSION HIGHLIGHTS 

• Rhea Flyby – March 2
• Titan Flyby – April 5, May 20, June 5, June 21, July 7, September 24, November 11 
• Enceladus Flyby – April 28, May 18, August 13, November 30, December 21

Saturn is primed to put on a dazzling show for professional and amateur astronomers this year. Right now, it is rising through Virgo in the eastern sky just after 2245 EST. While the ringed planet always makes for wonderful observing with even the most modest of telescopes, it will be perfectly positioned to show off its magnificant rings around April. To celebrate the event, the Cincinnati Observatory will be hosting “Saturnday” on April 17-April 24 to give the general public an opportunity to see it through a professional-grade telescope. The cost of the event is $6 per person. You can visit the observatory’s website to learn more information. Weather permitting, nightShifted Astronomy will be set up in the Dayton area around that time. Watch the blog and events calendar for details.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cassini-Equinox

Astronomers working at NASA’s Infrared Observatory at Mauna Kea in Hawaii have announced an exciting new ability to identify molecules in the atmosphere of planets around distant stars using small, ground-based observatories. The new method used a spectrograph to isolate the unique light signatures generated by carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere around planet HD189733b located around the star HD 98505 in the Constellation Vulpecula. Spectrographs have been used to detect molecules in the atmospheres of dozens of exoplanets, but a new calibration method developed by the research team has allowed for extremely sensitive atmospheric characterization research to be conducted using Earth-based facilities. The research is extremely promising since the Mauna Kea Observatory ranks as #40 among ground based telescopes which mean that larger and more precise scopes should be able to detect compounds and characterize the atmosphere of exoplanets with greater efficiency and accuracy. Right now, a majority of planets orbiting other stars are Jupiter-like and orbit very close to their host stars. Using this new research method, astronomers hope to use larger telescopes to detect rocky, Earth-like planets.

HIP 98505 is a magnitude 7.65 orange-dwarf star located in the Constellation Vulpecula about two degrees from 13 Vulpeculae. If you would like to see the star for yourself, it rises at 0425 EST in the east-northeast sky and travels about ninety degrees before sunrise at 0615 EST. I recommend a medium to large telescope and would begin looking for this star without a filter.

Image Credit: Starry Night Professional

You may remember my entry last week about Mars and how good it would look in a telescope as it approached its opposition with Earth on January 29. Well, opposition has come and gone, but things are about to get a little more interesting. Tonight and tomorrow night (Feb 1) offer a special treat for those astronomers that are willing to carry their equipment back out into the frigid winter temperatures. Mars and The Beehive Cluster (M44) will be within 4 degrees of each other as they rise together in eastern sky after 1830 EST. The Beehive is a magnitude 4.00 open cluster of stars in the Constellation Cancer and should be relatively easy to see with a small to moderate sized telescope.

NASA’s Constellation Program is in trouble and it really is no surprise to anyone who knows how NASA or the United States Government operates. When Constellation was announced as a main component of President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004, it was to be the “Apollo Program on Steroids” that would return us to the Moon and eventually land humans on Mars. Space advocates cheered for the idea of a new rocket, but honeymoon was pretty much non-existent as the cheers gave way to petty bickering between space travel advocacy groups and scientists over the design, cost, and proposed destination of the new system. In fact, nightShifted Astronomy shares some of the guilt in the petty bickering as we were a contributing member to The Planetary Society until they published a report suggesting that Constellation skip the Moon and go directly to Mars. I do not regret pulling my membership because I feel that they do not truly represent the desires of the people when it comes to space exploration initiatives, but it did happen and we do have to live with being part of the mess.

Now, Constellation is under intense review by the Obama White House and every day it seems that the program is growing closer and closer to joining the oblivion inhabited by so many other NASA projects (see The Countless Many Who Cried Spacewolf and The Sharks are Circling). The Augustine Commission, which was appointed to review the Constellation Program and specifically, its Ares I and V rocket designs, gave very little support to NASA and its program. This does not bode well for an agency competing more and more with commercial rocket companies. There is a huge amount of contempt for the new designs and it has unfortunately put NASA’s future in limbo. Everyone that depends on the United States Space Program for their livelihoods is on high alert as they wait for an announcement from President Obama about the future of the agency. Keith Cowing, the ultimate NASA watchdog has more information at NASAWatch.

I believe that it would be reasonable to cancel the Ares I rocket because I feel that there is enough evidence available to show that it is a gross waste of hardware and is an unnecessary redesign of technology that is already available in mass quantities today. I have spoken before about getting human ratings for Delta rockets and other ICBM-type missiles and I still believe that it would be our best bet. I really like the DIRECT Launcher proposal which takes hardware from the Space Shuttle Program and combines it with the Orion capsule. DIRECT makes perfect sense if the Government decides to cancel the Ares I rocket. However, I think that a full-on cancellation of the Constellation Program would be a blow to our nation’s space program of unfathomable consequences. The U.S. Government and NASA have let us down too many times in the realm of space exploration and there are already very few people listening to what they have to say. Another failure, especially one of this magnitude, would be nothing more than the death rattle of a glorious agency strangled by partisan politics and overburdened by meaningless bureaucracy.

Image Credits: NASA/DIRECT

If you are lucky enough to have clear skies then you should step outside tonight and see Mars (magnitude -1.23) in its most brilliant display of the year as it moves quickly toward its opposition, the point when our planet, Mars, and the Sun are lined up, on January 29. Mars rises in the Eastern sky at 1828hrs EST and is best visible around midnight. Click here for a Starry Night screenshot showing Mars as it will appear at 1930hrs EST. While a small telescope will definitely show the round shape of Mars, a medium to large sized scope (recommended w/color filters) is necessary to bring out any of the red planet’s details. Assuming that the weather clears up at some point during the day I plan to set up my C9.25 and try to see Mars, but I am confident that the rain, snow, fog, and cloudy skies that have plagued Southwest Ohio for the last month will continue well into the rest of my life. If you live in the Southwest Ohio area and are up for a trip to Cincinnati, then check out the Cincinnati Observatory! They started an event on Thursday called Marsapalooza 2010 which gives the general public a chance to see the red planet as it approaches its closest distance to Earth on January 27. Marsapalooza 2010 lasts from January 21-24 and reservations are required. Call the Observatory at (513) 321-5186 or email Craig Neimi to RSVP.

Just as with any other close Mars approach, the famous “Mars Hoax E-mail” is once again making the rounds. I received one this morning in my university e-mail account and the person sending it had been worked into a frenzy. After explaining the origin and truth behind this message to so many people, I just felt shame. A lot of other space/astronomy websites and blogs have already debunked this annoying e-mail so I will simply point you in their direction. Suffice to say that at no point will Mars appear as large and detailed as the Moon. Our Moon is roughly 250,000 miles away and has an apparent magnitude of -12.6 while Mars is about 34,000,000 miles away with an apparent magnitude of -1.23. It would take a significant celestial event to move Mars anywhere near our world. SPACE.com’s article about the Mars approach has an excerpt at the bottom which explains the Mars Hoax E-mail. NASA has a page on the e-mail. Last but not least, there is a Wikipedia entry on the e-mail.

Image Credit: NASA

Imagine that you live on a distant planet in the Alpha Centauri star system and you have decided to spend the evening watching the suns set. Yes, I said suns. It is late in the evening and the twin suns that dominate your sky are slowly making their way toward the horizon. Your face catches a gentle rush of wind as Centauri A and Centauri B begin to disappear behind the curve of your home world. The enchanting spectacle is short lived, but extremely common among worlds orbiting G-class stars. The two suns disappear beneath the horizon and ultimately give way to a sea of glistening stars. One of those stars…is our home…

That star, our Sun, is an unbound G-class star—a lonely outcast. Fortunately it did not take years of psychotherapy and a library of self-help books for astronomers to realize it. Observations of distant star systems such as Alpha Centauri have helped us understand that most G-class stars are binary—meaning that they are part of an orbiting pair—each star orbits the other just as the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun. Centauri A and Centauri B are gravitationally linked to each other just as are a majority of the G-class stars in our galaxy. Why are we so special? Where is our companion star? Unfortunately, we do not have one. Our Sun is alone and this is a very valuable thing for us to understand.

Astronomers used to believe that a majority of stars were gravitationally linked. That line of thinking has changed in the last few years as we have learned that over half of the stars in our own galaxy are not gravitationally bound to other stars. That is because a majority of those are stars M-class which tend to be less massive than our own. The stars with higher masses such as our Sun often form in darker clouds of matter where it is theorized that their cores are more susceptible to fragmentation. A prime example of a star formation region where this may take place is the Eagle Nebula. Imagine a new, high-mass star has formed inside the nebula but its core is unstable and fragments during formation. The two fragments then gather enough matter between the two of them to form separate, but gravitationally bound stars.

Another theory is that all stars are born as binary systems and are torn apart after their formation. This could be from passing too close to a black hole or being caught in the gravitational pull of other stars. Whatever the answer is, the fact remains that our star is unique among its G-class brothers and the fact that it is a single system adds another item to the list of reasons that our place in the universe is precious.

Some interesting facts…

- 70% of stars are single star systems/30% are multiple star systems
- G-class stars (i.e. our Sun) only make up 7% of our galactic star catalogue

There are many fascinating regions of space that are forming new stars. These can be seen with a small to moderate sized telescope. Two of the most visible are The Great Nebula in Orion (Messier 42) and The Eagle Nebula (Messier 16).

The stress of my real job and my proclivity for forgetting basic information and tasks requires that I carry a device that will remind me of the mundane meetings and endless tasks that have to be completed throughout the day. Since I have always had an aversion to carrying my cell phone with me except for emergency purposes, I have always used a personal data assistant to keep track of my work and my life. Until a couple of months ago, I used an HP iPaq 110 handheld running Windows Mobile 6. However, I recently joined the twenty first century and transitioned to a third generation Apple iPod Touch with which I immediately fell in love. While the app store has a wide variety of applications that can turn an iPhone or iPod into a powerful astronomical tool, I have found a nice selection of free apps that can get an amateur astronomer working in the field in a matter of minutes. In no particular order, here are the four recommended free astronomy applications from Apple’s Store.

• DISTANT SUNS (LITE) [Full Version $6.99] – The Distant Suns iPhone app is a descendent of the 80s desktop application that is still a favorite of many amateur and professional astronomers. This free app has a database of thousands of stars, 88 constellations, all 9 planets (that’s right…Pluto included), and a realistic portrayal of the Milky Way glow. Each star in the Distant Suns database includes the appropriate right ascension, declination, and magnitude information to find it in the night sky. Quick options on the bottom toolbar allow you to instantly select a planet, constellation, or other target and easily navigate yourself across the sky. I recommend it for someone looking for an app to create a realistic representation of the sky.

 

• ASTROCALC – This app rocks. It is a wonderful little tool that allows you to input each piece of astronomy gear that you own and use it to calculate focal length with different eyepiece or optical tube assembly (OTA) configurations. For example, this screenshot shows viewing data for my Orion AstroView 100mm refractor with an Orion 25mm eyepiece installed.

 

• PLANETS 1.6 – Planets is a cool little app that has options for a two and three dimensional view of the night sky as well as 3D rotational views of each planet in the solar system. It is very comparable to Distant Suns, but is more like a star chart than a realistic representation of the sky. In addition to the two views of the sky, the app includes general information and viewing opportunities for each planet as well as the Sun and the Moon. It makes a great companion application to Distant Suns and the AstroCalc.

 

• MOON GLOBE – Regular readers know that I pretty much worship the Moon. I think that it is an overlooked and underappreciated night (and day) sky target. Even the smallest and worst-quality telescopes can bring out incredible mountain chains, craters, valleys, canals, and other wonders of our nearest celestial neighbor. Moon Globe gives you an unparalleled access to our Moon by allowing you to rotate, flip, or zoom in and around it. Highly recommended for anyone interested in watching the brightest object in our night sky.

nightShifted Astronomy received no compensation for endorsement of these applications. You can download each of these applications from the Apple App Store.