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

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).

Before I get started on this post, there are new updates from the Mount Wilson Observatory: the fires have passed and the observatory is safe. Fire crews pulled off an amazing feat by control-burning the nearby shrubbery and saving both the observatory and a communications hub used by emergency services throughout the area. Big kudos to the emergency crews that are working through the night to fight the fires. An important part of astronomical history was saved due to their diligence. With that in mind, I promise that tonight’s post is less of an angry, incoherent rant than last night’s.

For anyone who has ever been to a dark sky site and taken a look at a so-called “faint fuzzy”, you’ve probably seen a member of the New General Catalog (NGC) or Index Catalog (IC) list of astronomical objects. The NGC and IC are just a fancy way of cataloging deep space objects much like books are catalogued in a library or DVDs in a video store. Some of the more common star-party NGC objects are the Cat’s Eye Nebula and the Blue Snowball Nebula. There are also a [very] large number of galaxies with NGC and IC designations that you may have been privileged to see. These objects are usually the deep space targets that professional astronomers probe with their telescopes and cameras for years in search of answers to some of the universe’s oldest questions. They also make fantastic challenge targets for advancing amateur astronomers.

Now, thanks to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and its Wide Field Camera, astrophotographers have taken a new image of the distant galaxy NGC 4945 in the Constellation Centaurus. It is a barred spiral galaxy which many astronomers believe looks very similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. The picture is very cool although NGC 4945 has been imaged several times before by professional and amateur astronomers. From our perspective, the spiral galaxy appears as a cigar-shaped structure similar to the Cigar Galaxy in Canis Major. Spectrographic analysis of the galaxy’s light emissions have shown that it contains a supermassive black hole at its core just like our own galaxy, but with one exception…it has an active core as opposed to the Milky Way’s inactive core. What does that mean? It means that when many of these black holes reach a size similar to the one at the center of our galaxy, it no longer actively feeds on the surrounding cosmic matter. The core of NGC 4945 is emitting enough energy to indicate that its central black hole is actively feeding and that the galaxy is filled with intense clusters of forming stars.

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are out of luck for seeing NGC 4945 with our own telescopes. It rises midday and sets well before the Sun is out of the sky. Southern Hemisphere astronomers can easily find the 9.5 magnitude galaxy in the Constellation Centaurus.

Image Credit: ESO/NASA

Before I begin this post, I’d like to apologize to Internet Explorer users for the most recent post about Steve Eve’s Saturn V rocket model. For your information, I use Microsoft Word 2007 to write the posts for this site, but the final formatting and editing is done in Mozilla Firefox. I didn’t realize that the two YouTUBE videos were formatted so strangely in IE8, and there’s nothing I’ve been able to do about it. Again, my apologies, but if you want to view this site as it was intended, I recommend Firefox for the best nightShifted Astronomy viewing experience.

GRB 090423 | Image Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA, D. Fox and A. Cucchiara (Penn State Univ.) and E. Berger (Harvard Univ.)

Now we move away from the geek speak and on to some interesting space news. Scientists have discovered an explosion that is the farthest object every photographed. I know that it seems like every week some new discovery is touted as the most distant object, but discovery is the nature of astronomy! The explosion is called GRB 090423 (GRB stands for Gamma-Ray Burst), and it is 13 billion light years away. That means that the x-ray light that scientists are detecting with NASA’s Swift satellite has been traveling to Earth for 13 billion years, and we’re seeing the object as it appeared that long ago!

The discovery of GRB 090423 is exciting because it helps scientists build on the research conducted after the discovery of the Himiko object I talked about a few days ago. Each of these newly discovered objects can help astronomers paint an interesting picture of how active the early universe was. Previously, the most distant gamma-ray burst, GRB 080913, was discovered by NASA’s Swift satellite and was 12.8 billion light years away.

Artist’s Interpretation of a Gamma-Ray Burst | Image Credit: NASA

Gamma-ray bursts are extremely dangerous pulses of gamma radiation that are emitted during the final phase of a massive star’s life. They shine hundreds of times brighter than a supernova and are about a million trillion times as bright as our Sun! Imagine the type of tan you could get from less than millisecond in the photon path of a gamma-ray burst. According to NASA, gamma-ray bursts are observed daily in random parts of the sky. Because of the brief and volatile nature of these bursts, they are next to impossible for amateur astronomers to view through ground based telescopes. However, a group of amateurs in 2000 using a 40 year old telescope and a CCD camera managed to capture the faint afterglow of a GRB. It can be done, but don’t expect most people at your local star party to be searching for these cosmic oddities.

Himiko Lyman-Alpha Blob | Image Credit: M. Ouchi, et al

Scientists have discovered a strange object which may be the most massive “blob” of matter remaining from the early development of our universe. The object is called Himiko and appears to Earth-based astronomers as a giant glob of matter about 12.9 billion light years away. How big is it you may ask? Well, Himiko is about 55,000 light years across or roughly half the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. It may not seem like a significant size when we consider the prevalence of supermassive black holes and giant, colliding galaxies in our own local neighborhood, but that’s pretty big for something from the Big Bang era. Astronomers have several theories as to what Himiko is, exactly. Some theorize that it’s ionized gas around a supermassive black hole while others believe it’s a gigantic primordial galaxy. Me? I’m hoping we’ve found the Death Star.

Distant mystery objects have always fascinated me, because anytime we look through a telescope at an object like Himiko, we’re literally looking into the past. Light travels roughly 6.5 trillion miles in a year, and just as humans must drive or walk from one point to another to get somewhere, light must travel from one point to another so that we can observe it. The light from a star like Sirius or primordial galactic candidate such as Himiko must travel across the vast, empty vacuum of outer space to our little world so that human eyes can intercept and interpret it. Now, here comes the cool part. Himiko is 12.9 BILLION light years away. That means that the light these astronomers are seeing when they study Himiko began travelling to Earth some 12.9 billion years ago! That’s a long, long time considering that there was NO Earth at that point in the development of the universe!

ISS Node 3 “Tranquility” | Image Credit: NASA

I’m somewhat torn on NASA’s decision to name the new space station module Tranquility instead of using the winner of the agency’s online poll: Colbert. I think that Tranquility is a fine name for the station’s new module as it represents the spirit of America’s space exploration past, but I think that it simultaneously ignores a component that is essential to the survival of America’s role in outer space: public support. Broken down to its core, NASA is a government agency supported by public funds. This means that you, I, and the other millions of Americans each contribute some small amount to help build orbital telescopes, fuel shuttles, and carve our names into the surfaces of far away worlds. If the public support for space exploration dries up, then the funds will follow and we’ll be confined to hitching rides on Russian Soyuz and Chinese Shenzhou rockets.

I’m certainly not a NASA hater as I believe that the agency has accomplished some incredible feats with limited budgets, but I do think that some of their processes could use a little spit and polish action. I personally think that NASA had the best of intentions when it chose the name of the module. For those of you who grew up under a rock somewhere, Apollo 11 (Eagle) landed in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon on July 20, 1969. The name honors those men and women who gave their lives and/or risked everything they had to soar into the endless abyss and eventually land humans on the surface of another world. However, I think that it made a public relations mistake by holding an online poll to name the new station node and then failing to follow through with the public’s selection. The public opinion poll selected Colbert as the most desired name for the new module, but NASA chose Tranquility and stated that it has a longstanding policy of not naming station modules after individuals who are still alive. So basically, Stephen Colbert would have to die to get his name on the International Space Station.

Tranquility Base, 1969 | Image Credit: NASA

I was not a big fan of naming the new module Colbert, but I believe that if that was the (almost landslide) result of the online poll, then NASA should have owned up. The official contest rules did mention that NASA had final say in the naming of the node, but my opinion is that NASA missed a golden opportunity to take advantage of the contest’s media attention. After they realized how interested and supportive people were of naming the node after Colbert, my guess is that the NASA big wigs experienced some panic attack symptoms and moved to name it after Tranquility Base to overshadow the fact that they planned to ignore the public’s opinion. It seems to have worked this time since I haven’t been able to find any serious backlash from bloggers or news sites, but teasing is a dangerous game for an agency in hot water like NASA to be playing these days. I guess we can look on the bright side, they did name the new treadmill after him.

Getting started in astronomy can be an intimidating and often frustrating experience. Curious souls have to wade through a pool of astronomy seaweed which can range from pretentious astronomy forum communities which insist that brand new amateurs should shell out $1,200 for a new SCT to department store telescopes advertising outrageous magnification capabilities from very small apertures with extremely disappointing results. Each is equally responsible for putting a bad taste in people’s mouths and often turning many wannabe astronomers away from our hobby. Thankfully, the internet is not always a haven for junk advice and it has given astronomers (both amateur and professional) the chance to spread their knowledge of optics to perspective telescope buyers that can help them make informed, reasonable decisions about their first telescope purchase. A long time criminal that is responsible for turning untold numbers of people away from amateur astronomy is the dreaded department store telescope. You’ve seen it before: the sleek, well-packaged telescope from “Caldwell” or “Pleiades” or some other celestial sounding “brand” name which promises 500x views of the planets and deep sky objects for a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, these telescopes are loaded with cheap optics and small apertures which take you nowhere near the performance levels of their competitors. The cold, hard truth is that you’re not going to get a usable 500x magnification from a 60mm Wal-Mart refractor, and nightShifted Astronomy is here to explain why.

First and foremost, it is important to note that magnification capability is not the most important aspect of a good telescope. Newcomers to amateur astronomy should be weary of advertisements which focus solely on magnification power because there are a variety of other factors which determine telescopic image quality such as focal length, aperture, and collimation. However, this does not mean that they are all equally important. Since the primary function of a telescope is to gather light from distant objects, aperture is the most important factor when purchasing one. A larger aperture allows us to collect more light and to see more distant objects with greater detail. That’s why universities, the government, and private science organizations build such large telescopes on mountaintops. They’re not just showing off. In astronomy: size DOES matter! A good telescope should be a good selection of focal length, aperture size, and size/weight based on your personal needs (i.e. portability or dome use).

Image Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

It’s very easy to determine magnification levels when using a telescope. Every telescope has a highest useful magnification which is dependent on the size of your telescope’s aperture. A good rule to remember is that a telescope can provide about 60x magnification for every inch of aperture under good viewing conditions (X * A). Inversely, lowest usable magnification is 3.5x per inch of aperture. So let’s assume that we’ve purchased a 2” refractor telescope from Wal-Mart (which I don’t recommend). We can see by using the rule of thumb for highest useful magnification (60x * 2”) that the highest useful magnification for our telescope is going to be 120x. Lowest usable magnification would be 3.5x * 2 which is 7x. Sounds easy, right? In fact, it really is! 120x should get us a good view of our nearest celestial neighbor, the Moon and 7x should give a decent view of bright star areas depending on the quality of the optics. Unfortunately, some dishonest telescope manufacturers will attempt to advertise this telescope as providing “Stunning 400x MAG capability” and attempt to lure us with promises of NGC/IC galaxies and nebulae. Now that you know a little about how to determine highest/lowest useful magnification, you can use that information to perform an integrity check on the next department store telescope you run across.

Now, let’s assume that you’ve avoided the curse of the department store telescope, done your homework and purchased an excellent intermediate telescope: an Orion 100mm refractor. The Orion 100mm has about a 3.3” aperture, focal length of 600mm, and a highest useful magnification of 200x. Our target is M101: The Pinwheel Galaxy. M101 is located 5 degrees from Mizar & Alcor in the Constellation Ursa Major, or Big Dipper. We know that a 100mm refractor can see this target, but we want to make sure that we do not use an eyepiece that will overpower our telescope. We will begin with our lowest power (or largest) eyepiece which is a 25mm. To determine the magnification level when using a particular eyepiece is just as easy as finding highest/lowest useful magnification. Simply divide the focal length by the aperture of the eyepiece. In our case, we would divide 600 by 25. So our magnification level using a 25mm eyepiece in a 100mm telescope with a focal length of 600mm would be 24x, or (600/25=24x). Get it? 24x places us well within the acceptable magnification range for our telescope.

Too Much Power is Bad! | Image Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

This only scratches the surface of a very old and passionate topic among amateur and professional astronomers. There are many great books and websites out there that go into great detail about the mechanics of optics, and I suggest that you visit your local library if you wish to know more. I will cover more topics of this nature in detail as time goes on. In the meantime, just remember that when you’re standing in line at the Wal-Mart checkout counter and that $30 telescope with a 1.5” lens promises to show you an impressive view of NGC 5169 (a magnitude 15 galaxy) and it seems too good to be true…it is.

Highest Usable Magnification: 60x * APERTURE
Lowest Usable Magnification: 3.5x * APERTURE
Magnification Level: FOCAL LENGTH/LENS APERTURE