Zooniverse

On Zooniverse I have been studying the lunar surface in unprecedented detail. I have been locating craters, and other lunar features on our very moon. I have depicted the bouldiness of each crater and whether it is of small medium or large bouldiness. Surveying the whole moon will help scientists in their studies of the moon without them having to do a whole bunch of meticulous work.

Astronomy Cast- Radar

So Radar is one of those technologies that changed

everything

but it also changed astronomy and ground-imaging -- tracking asteroids with

great accuracy, allowing spacecraft to peer through Venus’ thick clouds and

reveal secrets through the Earth’s shifting sands. So radar’s reflected light, flashlight shining on wall is reflected light, and in the other case, you’re looking at a light source. So looking at a radio source with radio astronomy and looking at a star or a galaxy with an optical telescope is looking at a light source as well.

In the late 1800s, in the 1880s and 1890s, we

started to realize that light was more than what we could see with our eyes,

and scientists started realizing, “Hey, I can create radio sources, and then

detect those radio sources. Hey, I can create a constant sound in radio and

then reflect that off of something else and by looking for how the reflected

light comes back, how long it takes to come back, I can realize there’s

something out there.” So just as we were figuring out how to do radio

broadcasts, hand in hand, we were realizing that when radio reflects off of

things, well, that reflection means something there, and that’s kind of cool.

There’s a rather

frustrating story related to Pearl Harbor. America, Great Britain, New

Zealand, Russia – nations all around the world -- were struggling to figure

out how to use radar to detect incoming ships, to detect incoming aircraft, to

basically figure out, “Holy ‘expletive!’ We’re about to get killed!” and be

able to get out aircraft, be able to get people into shelters ahead of time to

help save lives, and we hadn’t gotten to the stage yet of everyone in the

military fully understanding the power of radar to detect things, and when

you don’t have fully trained leaders, bad decisions get made. So at Pearl

Harbor out in Hawaii, there were a couple of privates who decided to get in

a couple extra hours of training on radar, and these were radar stations that

were actually supposed to be shut off, and basically their truck hadn’t come

to take them off to get a meal, so they turned on the equipment and started

practicing, and while they were sitting there practicing, they realized that

there was a larger flock of airplanes than they’d ever seen heading towards

the Hawaiian Islands, and they called this in, but unfortunately, as the

information made its way up the food train, the direction the aircraft were

coming in from got lost and it got misinterpreted as being an expected fleet

of bombers coming in vs. the reality was a huge swarm of Japanese fighter

aircraft.

Exactly, so people start playing with different wavelengths,

different colors, realizing that you could see different things like

precipitation just by changing the frequency of the radar beam. It was a

fairly short leap to realize, Oh, wait! If we use sufficiently long

wavelengths, we can start to reflect light off of, well, planets, and accurately

measure how far away is Mercury, how far away is Venus simply by

sending off a pulse of radar and waiting the minutes and minutes and

minutes and minutes for that light to reflect its way back to Earth.. It allows boats and aircraft to see at night and through thick fog,

Astronomy Cast- Reflection and Refraction

So light can do some pretty strange stuff, like pass through objects and bounce off them. It can be broken up and recombined; in fact, everything we see is just the end

result of reflection and refraction of light, so it’s time to understand how it

all works. So this is the part, this is one of the situations…like, I’ve bent the

mind’s of my children when I was explaining to them. You know, the

concept that when they see something that is like green, they’re seeing the

reflected photons that came from the Sun, and they’re like, “What?!” Right?

Furthermore, we’re seeing the refracted photons that have come from the

Sun passing through our atmosphere, and again, it’s super-confusing, so let’s

start with like the journey of a photon, of a photon that leaves the Sun,

travels to Earth, passes through the atmosphere, maybe goes through a

window or two, bounces off something, maybe bounces off something again

and goes into someone’s eyeball. Well, the first thing to realize is, while you may be following the journey of one ray of light, it may not be the same photon that gets to your

eye that left the Sun originally, or in fact, was originally created because

there’s also a whole lot of absorption and re-emission processes that are

going on. So you start off with something creates a photon, and the original

photon that was created may not be the same photon that reaches your eye,

so you have some sort of an event deep in the core of the Sun gives off

energy, and this bit of energy as it travels through the Sun is going to get

absorbed by an atom, re-emitted in a new direction, absorbed by another

atom, re-emitted in another direction, and this entire process is one of what’s

called “Brownian motion.” It’s the path…the way they always explained it

in physics books, which I think says something about the physics

community is “you know how drunk people walk? That trying to get

somewhere, but they’re sort of going in all directions? That’s the motion of

light as it tries to travel to exit the Sun.” Well, once the light finally breaks

free of the surface of the Sun, then it’s mostly a clean path straight to Earth,

so assuming it doesn’t end up hitting dust, doesn’t end up hitting, well,

Mercury or Venus, or anything else that lies between us and the Sun. So different materials causelight to travel at different speeds, and different wavelengths of light respond in different ways, so suddenly it’s very complicated, but looking in general,

when light hits a material that isn’t a vacuum, it’s going to slow down and

this is where something that I consider a bit of the Universe conducting

Black Magic occurs. There’s this property referred to as Snell’s Law that

basically says if you have light at point A and you’re trying to observe light

at point B, the path the light is going to take between those two points, is the

path that causes it to have the shortest journey time. Now, the thing that

makes this kind of Black Magic is if you can imagine that the light is passing

through a series of different materials -- a pocket of hot gas, a pocket of cold

gas, vacuum from the Sun, or vacuum from outer space, and we’re looking

at sunlight, well, as the light passes through each of the materials, its speed

is going to vary, and just as you can imagine driving through a city, and you

have to make these choices. Now, what’s really cool is you can actually change how the

pencil appears to bend by adding things to the water, by comparing side by

side a pencil or a straw in a glass of alcohol, in a glass of sugar water, in a

glass of regular water – it’s very small differences, but it’s still just neat that

we can actually play with the path of light.

APOD 4.8- Sun vs. The Supermoon

The supermoon appears bigger than the sun on this day. On May 6th, the moon was at perigee, which is the closest point to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. At apagee, the moon will fit just inside the sun and will be the farthest distance away from the Earth and this will occur on May 20th. On this date it will be a new dark moon. On May 20th, the moon will be apparent from almost every point of the Earth and thus easy to compare.

APOD 4.6- Evaporating Blobs of the Carina Nebula

In this picture, you can see unusual blobs found in the Carina Nebula. Many of which that are floating in the upper right could be described as evaporating. Energetic light and winds from nearby stars are breaking apart the dark dust grains that make the iconic forms opaque. The blobs, otherwise known as dark molecular clouds, frequently form in their midst the very stars that later destroy them. The Great Nebula in Carina itself spans about 30 light years and is 7,500 light years away.

APOD 4.5-Jupiter and the Moons of Earth

The Earth has many moons, including its largest artificial moon-The International Space Station. In this picture you see the ISS streaking through this lovely skyview with clouds in silhouette against the fading light of a magnificent sunset. Just below and left of the young crescent is Jupiter. Briefly, Jupiter and these moons of Earth formed the remarkably close triple conjunction. Of course the moons of Jupiter are tiny pin pricks when closely examining this photo, which could be a triple conjunction of its own.

APOD 4.4- The Ring Nebula

The Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band, other than the rings of Saturn. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to perspective - our view from planet Earth looks down the center of a roughly barrel-shaped cloud of glowing gas. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous atmosphere represents outer layers expelled from the once sun-like star at the nebula's center. The central ring of the Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,000 light-years away. To accompany tonight's shooting stars it shines in the northen constellation Lyra.

APOD 4.3- A Fox Fur, a Unicorn, and a Christmas Tree

What do the above items have in common? They can all be found in the constellation Monocerous, the Unicorn. The above picture depicts a star forming region named NGC 2264. This complex jumble of dust and new stars is located 2,700 light years away. The dust clouds lay close to the new stars and reflect their light which forms the blue reflection nebulae. This picture spans 40 light years in width and includes the Fox Fur Nebula, a bright variable star and the Cone Nebula.

Biography: Gerald Neugebauer

Gerry Neugebauer was known for his work in scientific studies of infared astronomy. Neugebauer was born in Göttingen, Germany and is the son of Otto Neugebauer, an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science, and Grete Bruck. After moving to the United States at age seven, he received his A.B. in physics from Cornell University in 1954 and his Ph.D. in physics from Caltech in 1960, with a thesis on the photoproduction of negative and positive pions from deuterium.

 Showing his high mental capacity throughout his scholarly years, Neugebauer received his Artium Baccalaureatus degree in physics at Cornell University in 1954 and then receiving his doctorate in the same subject from the California Institute of technology four years later in 1960. Neugebauer played a major role in the design and construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Among Neugebauer's numerous awards are two NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medals (1972, 1984), the 1985 Space Science Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the 1985 Richmyer Lecture Award, the 1986 Rumford Prize, the 1996 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, the 1998 Herschel Medal, and the 2010 Bruce Medal. He was named California Scientist of the Year for 1986 by the California Museum of Science and Industry, and he was elected to the National Academy of the Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Astronomical Society.

 Astrophysicist Gerry Neugebauer headed a small group of Caltech scientists who were at the forefront of early infrared studies of the planets. Informally called the "infrarednecks", Neugebauer and his colleagues designed and built new instruments and observational facilities, and discovered hundreds of new infrared sources in the sky. Neugebauer provided the first infrared study of the center of our galaxy, completed a renowned two-micron sky survey with Robert B. Leighton, and oversaw the NASA, British, and Dutch Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) project, a space-based observatory that surveyed the entire sky at infrared wavelengths.

Neugebauer played a major role in the design and construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Among Neugebauer's numerous awards are two NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medals (1972, 1984), the 1985 Space Science Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the 1985 Richmyer Lecture Award, the 1986 Rumford Prize, the 1996 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, the 1998 Herschel Medal, and the 2010 Bruce Medal. Neugebauer continued to develop and expand infrared, sub-millimeter, and millimeter wavelength observational astronomy for decades.  He was named California Scientist of the Year for 1986 by the California Museum of Science and Industry, and he was elected to the National Academy of the Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Gerry Neugebauer has commented on the ‘Planet X’ in many notable magazines and newspapers. Planet X is either the 10^th planet or the unknown planet. Gerry commented that we do not know what it is, all that we know is that it is a large mass(about the size of Jupiter) that we can see in the distant galaxy.

Right now, Gerry lives in Arizona with his wife Marcia Neugebauer, a geophysicist who has been working at the forefront of solar wind research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the local area.

FUN FACT: Gerry is pronounced ‘Gary’ not ‘Jerry’.

Astronomer Sources: Gerry Neugebauer

http://www.nndb.com/people/061/000171545/

www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/science.html

www.universetoday.com/14486/2012-no-planet-x/

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Lectures on Symmetry, Relativity and Space-Time by Richard P. Feynman

Astronomy Cast: Orion

What’s interesting is that we see it as person-y; other cultures see it as three sisters instead of three belt stars, and so they make up all sorts of different stories based around this set of bright stars that hangs out near the celestial equator, and it’s basically a giant box wearing a belt, and so parcel up that giant box however you want it. Now, in western lore it’s typically Orion the Hunter. Here in the northern hemisphere, the two stars you see generally pointing toward zenith are seen as the shoulders — and one of these is the bright-red Betelgeuse — and he’s seen as either holding up a sword or sometimes holding up a shield as he fends off the oncoming Taurus the Bull. So, it’s one of those constellations that people tend to turn all different sorts of things out of it. In fact, you can sometimes even see him in some of the drawings looking away from Taurus the Bull as Taurus comes up behind him. It’s actually kind of as mixed-up as the pictures of the constellation are. It’s not one of the prominent stories in Greek lore, but the basics that most of the stories agree upon is Orion was a hunter, and he had a run-in with Scorpio, the giant scorpion, and after they both died, they got put into the heavens but on opposite sides of the sky, such that Scorpio is up high in the sky six months before Orion is up high in the sky. Rigel, is hundreds of light years away, and the nearest star in the constellation is just 18 light years away. So, we have this vast disparity in the difference between the nearest and the brightest stars, and if you’re able to make a 3-dimensional map of this (and I’ve had various students do that as a class project), it actually shows this fabulous distance distribution even of the belt stars. So this is just a group of stars that appear lined-up, but that’s only because they happen to randomly be collected in 3-dimensional space in the same direction on the sky. And so this is where you end up with interesting things like Betelgeuse appears amazingly bright. It is amazingly bright, in fact it’s about 670 times the size of the Sun, so this is a giant, red, bright, huge star, and it’s about 640 light years away.  So this is a giant star; it has a puffed-out atmosphere. This is one of the stars in the sky that’s most likely to go supernova in our lifetime – that doesn’t mean it will, that doesn’t mean it will even do it in the next 10,000 years, but it’s still sitting there waiting to potentially do it, and if this giant, red star does go supernova, it will actually be visible for almost the entire planet during the daylight.

Astronomy Cast: The Big Dipper

So when you’re looking at the Big Dipper, you have the bowl, and then moving away from the bowl, you have the three stars that make up the handle, and the middle star of those three if you have really keen eyesight, you’ll see there’s a little buddy hanging out next to the really bright star, and that little buddy is Alcor, and this was an eye test to get into the elite military for a while, so while it’s hard to track down exactly where the constellation came from, I find it fascinating that this may have been one of the very first eye tests around. Now when you say double star, that’s just two stars that appear close together. These aren’t stars that are orbiting one another or anything like that, but it does qualify as a widely-spaced double star. Now, the thing is these stars, if you keep looking at them better, they then split themselves apart again, making this a quadruple system because each of them are independently binary systems.  So, while they are both double systems, you can’t actually split both of them. It’s one of those unfortunate things where Alcor – it really… it’s a spectroscopic binary, so if you look at it with a big telescope attached to a spectrograph, watch it over time, you see the lines dancing apart from the two different stars, but with your standard backyard system, you’re not going to split it into two different stars. Mizar, on the other hand, all you really need is clear skies and a really good eyepiece on even a small backyard telescope, so I’d say pull out your handy dandy friendly 70 mm refractor and a 4 mm eyepiece, if your sky supports it, and you should be able to split those.  So that is one of the brightest stars, but we’re used to thinking of constellations as politely being: alpha’s the brightest, beta’s the next, gamma’s the next, but with this particular constellation, they actually labeled things right to left and sort of didn’t worry about what was the brightest or not, so if you want to keep track of which is which, you start at the upper right-hand star and go around in a clockwise direction and you get alpha, beta, gamma, delta as you go around. So yeah there’s a bunch of stars, they’re not individually as spectacular as the stars in Orion. In Orion you have Betelgeuse and Rigel and it’s a party, but in The Big Dipper, Ursa Major, really it’s about the objects that are clustered around the constellation itself . Many of the most famous Messier objects — ones that you all recognize looking at pictures from Hubble — are all located in this one constellation.

APOD 4.2- Paris by Night

In this picture, you will notice Paris and all the famous landmarks that are a part of this famous city. You will spot tourist attractions from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe. What this picture is focusing on is no tourist destination but the celestial triple conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the Moon which I personally saw from my house near the same time that night. This spectacular beauty was seen by the Western Hemisphere and appreciated world wide for its rariety and lovely appearance. Jupiter is near the moon and Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, looming above both the moon and Jupiter.

APOD 4.1-Rocket Trails in the Milky Way

On the 27th of March, five rockets were launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virgina. The Anomalous Transport Rocket EXperiment (also known as ATREX) began launching at 4:58 am and launched these rockets at 80 second intervals. The chemical tracer that comes out of the rockets releases white clouds within Earth's ionosphere. These cool clouds were seen along the mid-atlantic region of the U.S. as the clouds drifted across the starry sky. This magnificent photograph was captured in New Jersey and the constellations visible in the background include Sagittarius and Scorpius, but also visible is the Milky Way.

APOD 3.9- Jupiter and Venus from Earth

Last week Venus and Jupiter were both visible in sunset conjunction to anyone in the world. If you had a clear western horizon you could see them. This week they are both still noticable but Jupiter has sunk below the brighter Venus. In the picture above, taken in Poland, you see the close approach of the two planets taken a week ago. The bright planets were only separated by 3 degrees. A faint red sunset still appears to be glowing in the background. Another conjunction similar to this will occur in May.

Supernova Remnants

A supernova remnant is the structure resulting from the explosion of a star in a supernova. There are two possible routes to a supernova: either a massive star may run out of fuel, ceasing to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapsing inward under the force of its own gravity to form a neutron star or a black hole; or a white dwarf star may accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a thermonuclear explosion. One of the best observed young supernova remnants was formed by SN 1987A a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud that was observed in February 1987. Other well-known supernova remnants include the Crab Nebula.


A Supernova Remnant goes through these phases:
1. Free expansion of the ejecta    2. Sweeping up of a shell of shocked circumstellar and interstellar gas
3. Cooling of the Shell                 4. Cooling of the interior
5. Merging with the surrounding interstellar medium

There are various types of Supernova Remnants including:
-Shell like, such as Cassiopeia A
-Composite, in which a shell contains a central pulsar wind nebula, such as G11.2-0.3 or G21.5-0.9
-Mixed-morphology