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

There are just a couple of days left until the Christmas holiday and my vacation, so far, has been plagued by overcast skies and relentless snowfall. If the weather continues to be as nasty as it has been for the last few days then there is a good chance that I will not be able to take a scope out at all this week. Fortunately, there are still many parts of the country that will celebrate the holidays with clear skies and I want to take this opportunity to talk about a wonderful astronomy target that can help get you into the holiday spirit: the Christmas Tree Cluster (NGC 2264).

The Christmas Tree Cluster is a faint open cluster in the Constellation Monoceros (Greek for Unicorn) near the celestial equator. It is part of a larger celestial region known as NGC 2264 that includes the cluster itself and the magnificent Hubble Space Telescope target called the Cone Nebula. The region gets its named from the arrangement of the 30+ stars that form an almost perfect outline of a Douglas Fir tree. NGC 2264 rises around 1930hrs EST in the eastern sky and is located 11 degrees southwest of the bright star Betelgeuse in Orion. You do not need a large telescope to see this beautiful group of stars as it travels across the heavens. A small (at least 3” reflector/refractor recommended) to medium sized scope will be enough to give a breathtaking view. It was discovered by the famous astronomer William Herschel in 1785.

The nightShifted Astronomy Facebook Group will debut after the new year along with more regular posts. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

A long time ago in galaxy far, far away…I hated the winter. The cold temperatures and biting winds were enough to keep me depressed for six straight months. I was going to write about how I missed the turning of the leaves, but I remembered that I have spent the last nine years of my life living in New Mexico and Texas where there are very few trees and no change in their appearance for the cold season. A man can go crazy living in an environment like that! I would wake up one morning and the trees would be bare! It was as if those monsters from Stephen King’s The Langoliers had descended on our little Texas town and devoured all of the leaves during the night. This was all before I fell in love with astronomy and began taking my telescope outside on a regular basis. It seems, as I recall, that my obsession with astronomy began during the winter months. I remember a distinct, stinging sensation in my hands as I tried to set up my cheapo 3” Newtonian Reflector telescope outside my apartment in New Mexico in 12 degrees F with a 10mph wind in my face. That pain, as almost any amateur astronomer will tell you, is well worth the crystal clear views that you can get from your telescope during the winter months. I spoke a little about the virtues of winter observation to the Clovis News Journal a few years ago during the Clovis Astronomy Club’s annual Astronomy Day at the Library outreach event. It was true in New Mexico and it is true today in Dayton. Winter is also great because, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful night sky targets are prominent in the early evening during the winter months: 1) Orion, including The Great Nebula and The Horse Head Nebula, 2) Lyra, featuring Vega and The Ring Nebula, 3) Cassiopeia with her double star cluster, and 4) Andromeda, with its crown jewel The Great Galaxy in Andromeda. Many of those targets stay up for the entire year, but you have to be willing to up late or get up early to see them.

Are you wondering if I have lost my mind? What kind of damned fools would stand out in the cold so they can look at fuzzy dots in the sky? Why not wait until the summer months when it is warm and you can BBQ and look at the Moon at the same time? It sounds like a pretty reasonable argument, does it?

Following the winter romance with my first reflector telescope, I was excited about the prospect of going outside and using it without a scarf, jacket, gloves, and a campfire. Unfortunately, I found that summer sessions can be, at times, more annoying than a winter session. There is a significant amount of heat that rises from the Earth’s surface during the spring and summer months. The same phenomenon that causes visual distortions on hot highways (i.e. the water mirage) can wreak havoc with an observation session. Heat rising into the atmosphere can cause noticeable distortions and make it very difficult or impossible to collimate scopes or bring some targets into focus. Depressed yet? That is just the beginning! There is another menace that can turn your session into a fight for survival: mosquitoes. I am firm believer that they are the hell-spawn reincarnations of those crusty, pissed-off amateur astronomers that huddle in their own corners at star parties and refuse to share their knowledge with anyone else. They will descend upon your observing session without mercy; they take no prisoners, and they do not care about your citronella candle. Those first few sessions were quite a battle, and it left me with many war wounds before I was smart enough to bring candles and plenty of bug spray. Somehow I wish that I had read a book before just diving into this hobby all those years ago. Not too long ago, a friend named Jeff Barton at Comanche Springs Observatory showed me a mosquito-repellant polo shirt that kept him from having to douse himself in bug spray every thirty minutes. It was pretty cool, but it can cost as much as an intermediate telescope like my 3” refractor (around $400).

I will post my entry before Wednesday because I am going on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday and I do not plan to sit around working on school, work, or nightShifted Astronomy. That entry is already in draft and it deals with my favorite holiday topic: purchasing your first telescope and how to avoid getting a raw deal with those wonderful department store scopes that promise you Hubble-like views of the universe’s greatest wonders. Until then, clear skies!

Image Credit: Unknown

Comanche Springs Astronomy Campus has released its 2010 star party schedule. All parties are subject to cancellation. Events begin with solar observing 2 hours before sunset. A short educational presentation follows at dusk, night viewing continues until 11 PM. For more information call 940-684-1670.

January 16 – DSO / January 23 – Lunar
February 13 – DSO / February 20 – Lunar
March 13 – DSO / March 20 – Lunar
April 17 – DSO / April 24 – Lunar
May 15 – DSO / May 22 – Lunar
June 12 – DSO
July 10 – DSO
August 12-13 – Perseid Meteor Shower Watch
August 14 – Lunar
September 11 – DSO
September 18 – Equinox Party
October 9 – DSO
November 6 – DSO
December 18 – Lunar 
December 21 – Lunar Eclipse Party

Open Campus Dates
Available for groups – BY RESERVATION ONLY.

January 19-22
February 15-19
March 15-19
April 19-23

The weather is turning nasty around here and my desire to go into the cold is quickly dissipating. That is bad news because winter is often the best time to set up a telescope because of the target selection and lack of heat-affected skies. I finally have my Celestron C9.25 telescope back, but I do not have a suitable place to set it up. I wish that it were as easy to find a place in Ohio as it was in Texas. I even put in a request to my city council for a midnight park pass to set up my scope, but was blown off. I never even got a response, just a “we’ll look into it” and nothing more. My backup plan is to start calling local churches and see if they’ll allow me to use their parking lots or grass areas to set up on weekends. There was a church near my home in Wichita Falls that always welcomed me, so I am hoping that I can find a similar location out here. Maybe once I get back to regularly watching the skies, I’ll feel compelled to update this blog with regular science and astronomy updates. Until then, peace and clear skies.

~nomad

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

Planetary nebulae such as the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), Ring Nebula (M57), and the Blue Snowball (NGC 7662) are popular targets for amateur astronomers at public star parties. This is often because bringing out small details in deep space objects like distant galaxies and dark nebulae can be very difficult unless you’re using a large aperture telescope or doing astrophotography. Planetary nebulae are great targets for amateurs, but they’re not immune to challenges as they can be difficult to find because they look comparable to bright stars at lower magnifications. When I show a target such as NGC 7662 to a star party visitor I try to explain as much of the science behind the object as I can. I believed that it’s one thing to see an object and be wowed by its size, beauty, distance, or other attributes, but I think that it helps to invoke a deeper emotional response and helps people to connect more with the universe if they understand the natural processes that led to the object’s creation. In the case of planetary nebulae, the process is relatively simple. These amazing formations are clouds of gas that are the remains of dead stars. In essence, they are the ghosts of solar systems that have come and gone.

Until now, only planetary nebulae that have formed from the remains of stars with masses comparable to our Sun or smaller have been discovered by astronomers. The lack of similar nebulae around stars with heavier masses created a conundrum for researchers. If these nebulae are the remains of expelled gas from dying stars then where are the planetary nebulae around the larger mass stars? Scientists working on the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) in Australia have discovered 15 “super” planetary nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds that may answer that question. Typical planetary nebulae form around stars that are 0.3-1.0 times the mass of our Sun, but some of these new discoveries are estimated to contain 2.3 times our Sun’s mass! The MCELS researchers were so shocked by the discovery that they actually held back their findings for three years to ensure that the objects were in fact, planetary nebulae.

You won’t be seeing these super planetary nebulae on display at your local star party, but that’s not a reason to worry! There are a variety of planetary nebulae that amateurs can find with small telescopes. I’ve seen the Cats Eye Nebula and the Blue Snowball repeatedly in my Orion 3″ refractor. If you are just starting off and want to see some impressive planetary nebulae, then I recommend starting with easy targets such as the Ring Nebula in Lyra, and the Helix Nebula in Aquarius. The Ring Nebula has an apparent magnitude of 9.6 and is almost straight up in the southeastern sky after sundown. The Helix Nebula has an apparent magnitude of 6.5 and is above the horizon in the Southeast after 11:00 p.m. eastern standard time.

Image Credit: NASA/The Hubble Space Telescope

The Perseids Meteor Shower will peak August 11-14 and it is going to be a challenging year for those of us who enjoy this wonderful celestial event. This year, observers will have to work through the light of a waning Moon just as the Perseids make their way across the sky. The Moon will rise around 11:00 p.m. southeast of the constellation Perseus, the origin of the Perseid meteoroids. The additional light may obscure some of the more spectacular meteors, but it should not be a deterrent against watching the shower itself. Perseid meteors are famous for being visible in heavily light polluted metropolitan regions and intense Moonlight. The Perseids Meteor Shower is caused by the remnants of 109P/Comet Swift-Tuttle which was discovered in 1862 by Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle.

Image Credit: Katsuhiro Mouri & Shuji Kobayashi

Additional Information
Perseid Meteor Shower Might Dazzle (Space.com)
109P/Swift-Tuttle (Cometology)

An acquaintance who recently found out that I was an astronomer decided to ask me questions about the night sky at lunch the other day. Instead of asking about the Moon or Venus or Orion, he asked if I had ever seen any lights in the skies or any unusual during my observation sessions. He wasn’t concerned with the next Europa transit or what constellations were going to be visible after sundown, he wanted to know about UFOs. It was enough to make me chuckle because the question is more common than many people would like to believe. I calmly said that I was always watching, but had never seen anything unusual that I couldn’t explain by natural means.

It was no surprise that he wanted to know about aliens and lights in the sky. Just watch any Hollywood film about UFOs or lights in the sky and you’ll see an astronomer somewhere in the center of the mix. It makes sense in other ways too since we spend most of our time looking up at the night sky. It stands to reason that if there is something to see that we’re going to see it. We both shared a laugh over the idea and moved on to other things. Unfortunately, that is not always the case when questions like this come up.

UFOs and alien visitors are taboo subjects for many in the general public, but I’ve never seen such a group of people get as upset over the topic as the amateur astronomers and scientists I’ve worked with in the last few years. I’ve been a witness to many star party visitors being chastised for asking questions about extraterrestrials and similar topics while looking through telescopes. A select few of these astronomers will roll their eyes when asked, but I’ve seen some change their tone and become very mean and testy with the offending person. This is not to say that every amateur astronomer is going to go off on you for asking about aliens and UFOs, but many consider it to be an insult to their credibility to even entertain the idea of “flying saucers” and strange lights in the sky just as my blog is liable to take some serious heat for even mentioning the topic. Some astronomers, such as myself, will tell you the truth about what we think and move on. How hard is that?

Image Credit: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment/Columbia Pictures

Backyard Observing | Image Credit: nightShifted Astronomy

Tonight was a huge letdown. I was excited that we were going to have clear skies tonight after months and months of rain. So, I set the scope up out back and dragged out my laptop for Starry Night reference along with my external motor assembly to run my 3” refractor. I calibrated my finder scope with the Moon and then managed to get a pretty decent polar alignment. I then shifted to Saturn to test out of the seeing, and that’s when things got ugly…The viewing was just horrible. In fact, this was the single worst night of seeing that I’ve had in the three years I’ve lived in this city. It didn’t help that the Moon is positioned about 20 degrees SE of Saturn and the Leo Triplet. It easily washed out the Triplet as well as anything in the western sky near Regulus. In addition the Moon and its generous amount of light pollution, there was a great amount of heat rising off the Earth’s surface and effecting the view.

Saturn was visible, but extremely blurry even in a 14mm eyepiece. The Leo Triplet was completely washed out. M3 was pathetic, and M53 was just as bad. After getting frustrated and sweating from the intense heat outside, I turned my scope to the Moon and put my high powered 6mm Orion Expanse and Lunar filter eyepiece in. The Moon’s landscape was beautiful, but BLURRY! More heat, more terrible views. After an hour and a half of fighting the sky, I packed up and came back inside to write this entry.

I think it’s time to pack the scope up and get it ready to move…