Wednesday Observations

Another night with very few clouds! At 8 pm I headed out from my 'cave' and made the journey to my driveway (Venice, FL). With the company of my dog and a few old ladies walking around in reflective vests, I started looking up. It was still a bit light out and there was no moon present. At first I attempted to use a toy telescope from elementary school, but abandoned the effort when my dog would not stop trying to knock it over. So instead, I used 8x100 binoculars. I saw Corona Borealis, which was about above me. It was crazy using the binoculars for this observation, there were so many fainter stars I could see. I saw Altair in the summer triangle, which was crazy-bright in the binoculars. I also saw one of our COTW! It was Delphinus. Snaps for you Delphinus, for being super-relevant. So the moral of this story is binoculars are awesome, and advance thank yous to Stephen Colbert.

APOD 1.4

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100923.html

September 23 was the equinox. It(the sun) crossed the celestial equator at 3:09 UT. This marks the change of seasons. The reason that the seasonal weather stays is because the oceans retain hot and cold longer than the atmosphere, so it influences it. Equinox means "equal night", which means a (roughly, but not exact)1:1 ratio of light and dark. There is apperently a myth about egg stability during the equinox that I was unaware of, but it is only an urban legend. Most eggshells have small bumps in them that enable them to be on edge at any day of the year. This image was falsely colored to show emission from highly ionized atoms. The plasma loops are from solar active fields.

APOD 1.3

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100916.html

Right Ascension	20 : 51.0 (h:m)
Declination	30 : 40 (deg:m)
Distance	2.6 (kly)
Visual brightness	5.0 (mag)
Dimension	230 x 160 (arc min)

 The veil nebula is BIG-like six diameters of the moon huge, big enough that early astronomers thought that it was many different objects instead of one . I know what you're thinking, "Mamma mia, a-that's a lot of nebula! Tell me more", so I will. The brightness is magnitude 5, but you can't see it with the naked eye unless your viewing conditions are super awesome because all of the light is distributed along the entire (huge) object.

Observation September 14

8:40
My house

Ah, a not cloudy night finally! The trees around my house are still causing a lot of blockage in my view of the sky, so I took artistic (/imaginary lumberjack) liberties in my scientific sketch below in eliminating them to better view the interaction between the first quarter moon and Venus.

Venus was so tiny, it was difficult to get the angular measurement of it using my fist.
I also viewed the summer triangle some degrees south of the moon.

APOD 1.2

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100906.html

Astronomers are using the Very Large Telescope (VLT, which google tells me also stands for Vita Lemon Tea, Venice Little Theatre, and Varrio Loco Town), which is currently the biggest telescope on Earth, with a combined aperture of 16.4 meters (it is several units combined) to shoot lasers into space. This is a good thing; our atmosphere is constantly changing (sidenote: this is what causes stars to twinkle) so astronomers have to measure distortion in whichever time and direction they want to observe. The laser creates an artificial star and the feedback allows the telescope to deform its mirror to account for this distortion. From the outside, the laser would appear only as a faint star.

Also there was a wiki link to Star Wars, so fun fact: Luke Skywalker’s original name was Luke Starkiller.

Friday Morning Observations

As I walked out of my house to go to school this morning at 6:30, I took some advice I heard somewhere and looked up. There were very few clouds and it was still dark enough to see the stars. The only constellation I could identify was Orion. His belt stood out first, then I searched for the rest and it came into view. I'm aware it's the easiest constellation to see, but hey, a victory nonetheless =)

APOD 1.1

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100822.html

Hoag's Object

Arthur Hoag, also noted for his work in photoelectric and photographic photometry (using the flux of an object to measure its properties), discovered Hoag's Object in 1950 by chance. The outside ring has newer blue stars and the inside contains older red stars. The way these ring galaxy shapes are formed is when a smaller galaxy ("intruder galaxy") passes through a larger galaxy; which I now really desire to see happening because that sounds pretty intense. Hoang's object lies near Serpens (near = 600 million light years).