Astronomy

Het is tegenwoordig feest in de nachtelijke lucht :

- Vlak na zonsondergang kan je prachtige structuren ontdekken in de schemering in het westen : door de uitbarsting van de Sarychev vulkaan is er enorm veel vulkaanstof in de lucht. Deze kleine stofdeeltjes geven oorzaak tot horizontale stofbanden boven de westelijke horizon.

- Het Internationale RuimteStation (ISS) kan samen met de Space Shuttle (STS-127) gezien worden als een snelbewegende zeer heldere ster. Vooral het ISS is door zijn grootte een zeer helder en groot object aan de avondlucht. Al met een gewone verrekijker kan men al zien dat dit geen ster of vliegtuig is. Verschillende amateur astronomen hebben met hun telescopen gepoogd om het ISS op de gevoelige plaat te krijgen, met succes. Wil je ook het ISS zien overvliegen, en eens zwaaien naar Frank DeWinne ? Rep je naar heavens-above.com, vul je coördinaten in, en selecteer ISS om een idee te krijgen van de tijdstippen waarop het ruimtestation te zien is.

- En tenslotte kan men 's nachts lichtweerkaatsende wolken zien (NLC's), laag in het noordwesten. Deze ontstaan doordat de zon zo laag onder de horizon zit, dat wolken op grote hoogte nog steeds verstrooid zonlicht naar de aarde weerkaatsen.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions' lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon's surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules' locations evident.

The LRO Camera was able to image five of the six Apollo sites, with the remaining Apollo 12 site expected to be photographed in the coming weeks. The returned high resolution pictures show the remainings of the lunar modules, and on some you even can see scientific instruments and the 40 year old footpaths of the astronauts. Impressive !

Just as with the New Horizons mission to Pluto, NASA is giving you again the opportunity to add the submission of your name & country which will be put onto a microchip & put on the Mars Science Laboratory rover. This mission is scheduled for 2011, so you still have some time to fill in your name. Might there be intelligent life on Mars after all, and if they find the rover, you'll be among the first ones to welcome our Martian overlords (and their probing chambers).

Please note that Robert'); DROP TABLE 'names'; (aka little Bobby Tables) has been added already...

Now that the milky way is getting high into the zenith with the accompanying constellations, an existing comet is getting back into sight. C/2006 W3 Christensen is visible as a hazy comet with a brighter core, and should reach magnitude 8 in the summer.

The planet Mercury is the smallest of the inner planets, and the closest to the Sun. It was visited by the Mariner 10 spacecraft twice in the 1970s, and about 45% of the surface was mapped. On August 3rd, 2004, NASA launched a new mission to Mercury, with the Messenger probe. It is now in the last stages of multiple gravity-assist flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury, en route to an insertion into orbit around Mercury in March of 2011. In just two flyby encounters, Messenger took some very detailled pictures of Mercury, and has already greatly increased our knowledge about Mercury's surface features.

USAtoday has a nice flash presentation, showing the growth of the International Space Station (IIS for short), put against a timeline, and showing an explanation for each module that is being used.

2008 has been the year where scientists have received confirmation that the universe is swarming with planet-filled solar systems. Before last year, it was generally assumed that most stars would have planets, but there was no evidence to back up this assumption.
I wouldn't start packing yet, though : most discovered exoplanets are Jupiter giant sized gas planets, due to the course method used to discover those celestial bodies. Wired features an article explaining the most extreme exoplanets currently discovered.

Are there better times than winter to have clear skies ? Not here : there's so many fine dust in the air, which distributes the shining of street lights, that the winter sky sometimes reminds me of a summer night. Talks with colleagues amateur astronomers teach me the same thing : clear skies, but a horrible seeing. But yesterday, the quality seemed a lot better. So time to haul my 25cm Dobson out of the closet, and have a look to the winter sky, and maybe, to test my Intelliscope Locator fine tuning. Alas, it seems that with temperatures around minus 8 degrees Celsius, any electronics is worthless : the Object Locator froze after a few seconds (computer speak, not literally), so I had to resort to manual control and a good old star map.

• The winter sky is dominated by Orion, and M42 is without a doubt the most beautiful object on the northern sky. Lots of details, a nice view on the inner stars (the Trapezium), and nice long shootouts from the central nebula.
• M78 is a small reflection nebula in Orion, which I hunted for long and in vain with my 114cm telescope, but now I spotted it immediately in the finder scope. Unfortunately, rather a dull object, quite small with little or no details.
• Time to get a quick glance to the Andromeda nebula, M31, which started to disapear into the lower sky glow. Not too spectacular, almost no detail, indicating that the seeing was indeed of lower quality.
• I tried then to find M1, the Crab nebula in Taurus, also an object which I couldn't locate with my first scope. M1 has the reputation to be a dull object, though I couldn't understand why : true, it is rather small, but with my telescope, I spotted rather lots of details.
• Auriga is an interesting spot in the sky : many open clusters, from which M36, M37 and M38 (the Big Three) are the most interesting ones.
• For one or other reason, I kept returning to Orion to find some more deep-sky objects. The Horse nebula is a very difficult object for visual observation, and I had no luck in spotting it, even while using a UHC-III deepsky filter. I really wonder if this nebula is really observable in Belgium with its horrible light pollution.
• Some more open clusters, like M35 in Gemini, and the NGC869-NGC884 combo in Perseus are great objects, but after a while, open clusters tend to get rather boring.
• I then remembered M48, an open cluster in Hydra, which I found a beautiful object at my first astronomy days, and one that I really wanted to see again after such a long time. Unfortunately, not so spectacular as I envisioned it.

Isn't it sad that I can't offer any visuals from my observations ? In the old days, I made some sketches, but I lack the patience for it nowadays, and for photography, a Dobson is rather worthless. Maybe I really should get my sketchbook the next time, but then preferably in warmer temperatures.

Last week, astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost grip on a toolbox during a spacewalk; she and fellow astronaut Steve Bowen were on a space walk to clean and lubricate gears on a space station mechanism. Grease had oozed from a grease gun in her tool bag and slimed over other tools. In the process of trying to clean up the mess, she lost her grip on the 100 000 $ tool bag which would have weighed 30 pounds on Earth but floated away weightlessly in space. Even in space, women lose their purses...

NASA's runaway toolbag can now be seen through binoculars as it orbits Earth. Europeans are favored with a series of flybys in the nights ahead. The backpack-sized bag is drifting away from the ISS and it now leads the station by about eight minutes.

Here are the data for the ISS for the next couple of days :

 
28 Nov -1.3 16:56:55 10 SW  16:59:41 39 SSE 17:02:28 10 E  
28 Nov -2.4 18:32:02 10 W  18:34:58 81 N  18:35:30 56 ENE 
29 Nov -2.2 17:24:06 10 WSW 17:27:01 75 SSE 17:29:58 10 E  
29 Nov -1.5 18:59:31 10 W  19:01:51 51 WNW 19:01:51 51 WNW 
30 Nov -2.3 17:51:37 10 W  17:54:34 78 N  17:56:39 18 E  
30 Nov 0.2 19:27:04 10 W  19:28:19 23 W  19:28:19 23 W  
1 Dec -2.4 18:19:16 10 W  18:22:14 79 NNE 18:23:13 37 E  
1 Dec 1.4 19:54:43 10 W  19:54:53 11 W  19:54:53 11 W  
2 Dec -2.3 17:11:31 10 W  17:14:28 77 N  17:17:24 10 E  
2 Dec -2.3 18:46:58 10 W  18:49:55 73 SSW 18:49:55 73 SSW 
3 Dec -2.3 17:39:19 10 W  17:42:15 81 N  17:45:06 11 E  
3 Dec -0.4 19:14:48 10 W  19:16:47 30 WSW 19:16:47 30 WSW 
4 Dec -2.1 18:07:11 10 W  18:10:07 67 SSW 18:12:09 18 ESE 
4 Dec 1.0 19:43:06 10 W  19:43:51 14 WSW 19:43:51 14 WSW 

Here is the data for the toolbox:

Friday 28 November 2008 Time Object (Link) Event 
 
Ground trackStar chart Appears      18h20m34s  13.5mag  az:261.0° W  
Culmination  18h25m30s   5.9mag  az:351.6° N    h:87.7°
 distance: 354.1km  height above Earth: 353.9km  elevation of sun: -15°
Disappears   18h26m25s   6.3mag  az: 79.8° E    h:39.9°
 
Saturday 29 November 2008 Time Object (Link) Event 
 
Ground track Star chart Appears      18h46m12s  12.8mag  az:272.5° W  
Disappears   18h51m00s   6.0mag  az:320.0° NW   h:76.0°

Monday 1 December 2008 Time Object (Link) Event 
 
Ground track Star chart Appears      18h01m59s  12.5mag  az:273.3° W  
Culmination  18h06m55s   5.9mag  az:  2.7° N    h:79.9°
 distance: 358.7km  height above Earth: 353.5km  elevation of sun: -13°
Disappears   18h08m34s   7.2mag  az: 88.1° E    h:23.3°

"Once you were hanging out with a lady friend and you were looking up at night. She asked you if you could identify any constellations for her, or a particular star. Probably you couldn't. Only if you were a badass you could."
Are you feeling lost every time you gaze up at the night sky ? Would you like to find your way between are those flickering stars ? Quietbay.net has a nice overview of several constellations to identify, so you'll be a starry night pro in no time.