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The Flint River Observer a Frac Special Edition The
1 How it happened is an intriguing tale. Many astronomers considered the change to be a long- THE overdue step in advancing astronomy as a science -- and as many others regarded it as a deception perpetrated by the International Astronomical FLINT RIVER Union (IAU). Curiously, both sides were right. I’ve written about it before, but this Special OBSERVER Edition of the Observer is broader in scope. Written 22 yrs. after the event, it tells both sides of NEWSLETTER OF THE FLINT the story in far greater depth than previously. RIVER ASTRONOMY CLUB (Incidentally, this project began as a brief “This ‘n That” newsletter item about an article that An Affiliate of the appeared in Astronomy Magazine but quickly grew Astronomical League into something much larger. You’ll see what I was writing about on p. 6.) Special Edition October, 2018 -Bill __________________________________________ * * * A FRAC SPECIAL EDITION THE PLUTO QUESTION: What is a Planet? Beginnings. The discovery of Neptune by William Lassell in 1846 brought the solar system’s planet total to eight. However, wobbles in the by Bill Warren orbital paths of Uranus and Neptune led the American astronomer, founder and director of __________________ Lowell Observatory, Percival Lowell, to conclude that a ninth planet -- he called it Planet X – lay Introduction. If you were born before 1990, you somewhere beyond Neptune and was tugging probably remember how upset people were when gravitationally on that planet and Uranus. Lowell Pluto was removed from the solar system’s family died in 1916, but in 1929 Vesto Slipher, his of planets in 1996. -
GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution
GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution Bo Reipurth Institute for Astronomy Special Publications No. 1 George Herbig in 1960 —————————————————————– GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution —————————————————————– Bo Reipurth Institute for Astronomy University of Hawaii at Manoa 640 North Aohoku Place Hilo, HI 96720 USA . Dedicated to Hannelore Herbig c 2016 by Bo Reipurth Version 1.0 – April 19, 2016 Cover Image: The HH 24 complex in the Lynds 1630 cloud in Orion was discov- ered by Herbig and Kuhi in 1963. This near-infrared HST image shows several collimated Herbig-Haro jets emanating from an embedded multiple system of T Tauri stars. Courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute. This book can be referenced as follows: Reipurth, B. 2016, http://ifa.hawaii.edu/SP1 i FOREWORD I first learned about George Herbig’s work when I was a teenager. I grew up in Denmark in the 1950s, a time when Europe was healing the wounds after the ravages of the Second World War. Already at the age of 7 I had fallen in love with astronomy, but information was very hard to come by in those days, so I scraped together what I could, mainly relying on the local library. At some point I was introduced to the magazine Sky and Telescope, and soon invested my pocket money in a subscription. Every month I would sit at our dining room table with a dictionary and work my way through the latest issue. In one issue I read about Herbig-Haro objects, and I was completely mesmerized that these objects could be signposts of the formation of stars, and I dreamt about some day being able to contribute to this field of study. -
May Term 2008 Astronomy Trip Results Michael Herriage, Jeanette Schofield, & Aaron Ward Department of Physics, Mcmurry University, Abilene, Texas 79697
May Term 2008 Astronomy Trip Results Michael Herriage, Jeanette Schofield, & Aaron Ward Department of Physics, McMurry University, Abilene, Texas 79697 Introduction Astraea Pluto Saturn In May of 2008, Dr. Keith and three McMurry students Astraea is an asteroid in the main asteroid belt. The Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and is classified travelled to Flagstaff, Arizona to observe the stars for a asteroid was first discovered in 1845 by Karl Ludwig Lowell Observatory. While on the trip, we stopped by Lowell as a gas giant. One of Saturn's most distinctive features week on the National Undergraduate Research Hencke. We observed Astraea because its well-known Observatory and were able to see the actual device that are its rings which are composed of many small particles Observatory’s (NURO) 31" Telescope. We spent our nights location allowed us to easily practice locating a moving Tombaugh used to discover Pluto. The device, which is orbiting the planet. at the observatory taking data and went sightseeing during object. called a blink comparator, is shown below. We took images of Saturn to get practice in stacking the day. For four of the five nights we were there, we used The image on the right was taken approximately three images. Normally, images taken of Saturn are sharper and the telescope to take images of the night sky (on the fifth hours after the image on the left. By blinking the images do not have a yellow tint. The reason why are images are night, it snowed and we were unable to collect any back and forth quickly, we were able to locate the so fuzzy is due to the combination of a cloud cover the night data). -
Journey to the Edge of the Solar System
Home / Space/ Special Reports Journey to the edge of the solar system History of a space discovery The existence of a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune had been predicted since the 1840s. Astronomers of the time, in fact, thought there was another large planet as yet unknown, situated on the edge of the Solar System, responsible for the disturbances and changes to the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Complex mathematical calculations based on the known mass of Neptune showed, in fact, that its orbit, as well as that of nearby Uranus, did not perfectly correspond to the predictions on the motion of bodies in the Solar System. The search for the ninth planet started seriously in the twentieth century. Percival Lowell, founder astronomer (1894) and director of the Observatory in Flagstaff (Lowell Observatory), Arizona, dedicated the last eight years of his life to the search for Planet X, a phrase used to indicate a planet beyond Neptune. Lowell died in 1916, without being able to prove the existence of the missing planet. We had to wait another 14 years and more precisely 18 February 1930 to demonstrate the existence of Planet X. On that day, the twenty four year old Clyde Tombaugh was intent on observing celestial bodies with a blink comparator, an instrument that allows images of the sky obtained at different times to be compared. Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farmer with a great passion for astronomy, while never having carried out any formal studies on the subject, had got a job at the Lowell Observatory, thanks to drawings of Mars and Jupiter, which he had made using a telescope he had built with pieces of old farm machinery. -
MINIMO: a Search for Mini Proper Motion Stars in the Southern Sky
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Physics and Astronomy Theses Department of Physics and Astronomy 5-3-2007 MINIMO: A Search for Mini Proper Motion Stars in the Southern Sky Charlie Thomas Finch Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/phy_astr_theses Part of the Astrophysics and Astronomy Commons, and the Physics Commons Recommended Citation Finch, Charlie Thomas, "MINIMO: A Search for Mini Proper Motion Stars in the Southern Sky." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2007. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/phy_astr_theses/2 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Physics and Astronomy Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MINIMO: A SEARCH FOR MINI PROPER MOTION STARS IN THE SOUTHERN SKY by Charlie T. Finch Under the Direction of Todd J. Henry Abstract I report 1684 new proper motion systems in the southern sky (declinations ¡90± to ¡47±) with 000:50 yr¡1 > ¹ ¸ 000:18 yr¡1. This e®ort is a continuation of the SuperCOSMOS-RECONS (SCR) proper motion search to lower proper motions than reported in Hambly et al. (2004); Henry et al. (2004); Subasavage et al. (2005a,b). Distance estimates are presented for the new systems, assuming that all stars are on the main sequence. I ¯nd that 34 systems are within 25 pc, including three systems | SCR 0838-5855, SCR 1826-6542, and SCR 0630-7643AB | anticipated to be within 10 pc. -
The Search for Planet X Transcript
The Search for Planet X Transcript Date: Thursday, 22 October 2009 - 12:00AM Location: Museum of London The Search for Planet X Professor Ian Morison The Hunt for Planet X This is a story that spanned over 200 years: from the discovery that Uranus was not following its predicted orbit and was thus presumably being perturbed by another, as yet undiscovered planet, Neptune, followed by the search for what Percival Lowell called "Planet X" that would lie beyond Neptune (where X means unknown), and finally the search for a tenth planet beyond Pluto (where X means ten as well). As we shall see, the search for a tenth planet effectively ended in August 2006 when Pluto was demoted from its status as a planet and the number of planets in the solar system was reduced to eight. Uranus Uranus was the first planet to have been discovered in modern times and though, at magnitude ~5.5, it is just visible to the unaided eye without a telescope it would have been impossible to show that it was a planet rather than a star, save for its slow motion across the heavens. Even when telescopes had come into use, their relatively poor optics meant that it was charted as a star many times before it was recognised as a planet by William Herschel in 1781. William Herschel had come to England from Hanover in Germany where his father, Isaac, was an oboist in the band of the Hanoverian Foot Guards. As well as giving his third child, Freidrich Wilhelm Herschel, a thorough grounding in music he gave him an interest in the heavens. -
Max Wolf, Considered a Pioneer in Astrophotography , Observed Many New Nebulae Both Within the Milky Way and Outside Our Galaxy
Wolf, Maximilian Franz Joseph Cornelius W 1 Wolf, Maximilian Franz Joseph Cornelius Born Heidelberg, Germany, 21 June 1863 Died Heidelberg, Germany, 3 October 1932 Max Wolf, considered a pioneer in astrophotography , observed many new nebulae both within the Milky Way and outside our Galaxy. He discovered more than 200 asteroids along with three comets that now bear his name. Wolf was born to Franz Wolf and Elise Helwerth in Heidelberg, where Max spent most of his life. As Wolf became interested in astronomy, his father, a physician, constructed a private observatory for him, which he used from 1885 until 1896. In 1884, when only 21 years old, he discovered comet 14P/Wolf. Th is discovery was remarkable because the object was fi rst thought to be an asteroid. Wolf received his Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1888 working under Leo Königsberger. He then studied with Hugo Gyldén in Stockholm from 1888 to 1890. Wolf became Privatdozent in 1890 and served as professor of astrophysics and astronomy at the University of Heidelberg from 1893 to 1932. He prompted the building of a new observatory near Heidelberg at Königstuhl, and became its director. Wolf is now also known as the “Father of Heidelberg astronomy.” Wolf developed several new photographical methods for observational astronomy, and was the fi rst astro- nomer to use time-lapse photography, useful, for example, in detecting asteroids . Wolf brought the “dry plate” technique to astronomy in 1880, and introduced the blink comparator in 1900 in conjunction with the Carl Zeiss optics company in Jena. Using a blink comparator , a microscope that optically superimposes two photographic plates onto the same viewing region by blinking between them so quickly that the two plates look like only one, an astronomer can compare two plates and easily fi nd diff erences between them. -
Contents a Search at the Edge of the Solar System
Volume -1, Issue-4, October 2011 A Search at the edge of the Solar System - Discovery remnants of formation but could not have survived upto the present day due to the gravitational disturbance of the of Kuiper belt giant planets. So naming this belt after Kuiper is somewhat of a misnomer! History: The discovery of the first Kuiper belt object (other than Pluto) in the outer reaches of our solar On the observational side, during the decades following system beyond Neptune in 1992 is an important Pluto’s discovery a few outer solar system objects had milestone in the annals of observational planetary been discovered. In 1977 astronomer Charles Kowal had astronomy. Till then the Kuiper belt had remained little discovered a strange object called ‘Chiron’ which more than a conjecture.Its existence had been as wandered between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus and speculative as the Oort’s cloud of Comets and served a exhibited a ‘comet like’ tail. Later a similar object called similar purpose – as a reservoir of comets but of a shorter ‘Pholus’ was recovered. In 1978 astronomer James period (P<200 years). Pluto of course had been Christy found that Pluto was in fact a binary and had a discovered much earlier in 1930 after a painstaking large moon which came to be called ‘Charon’. From photographic search by Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell observatory in Arizona. It had turned up as a faint 15th magnitude speck in the plates, moving slowly relative to the starfield. Pluto’s position was known but there was no information about its size or mass for the next four decades. -
Download Paper
Lens systems for sky surveys and space surveillance John T. McGraw University of New Mexico Mark R. Ackermann Sandia National Laboratories Peter C. Zimmer Go Green Termite University of New Mexico ABSTRACT Since the early days of astrophotography, lens systems have played a key role in capturing images of the night sky. The first images were attempted with visual refractors. These were soon followed with color- corrected refractors and finally specially designed photo-refractors. Being telescopes, these instruments were of long-focus and imaged narrow fields of view. Simple photographic lenses were soon put into service to capture wide-field images. These lenses also had the advantage of requiring shorter exposure times than possible using large refractors. Eventually, lenses were specifically designed for astrophotography. With the introduction of the Schmidt-camera and related catadioptric systems, the popularity of astrograph lenses declined, but surprisingly, a few remained in use. Over the last 30 years, as small CCDs have displaced large photographic plates, lens systems have again found favor for their ability to image great swaths of sky in a relatively small and simple package. In this paper, we follow the development of lens-based astrograph systems from their beginnings through the current use of both commercial and custom lens systems for sky surveys and space surveillance. Some of the optical milestones discussed include the early Petzval-type portrait lenses, the Ross astrographic lens and the current generation of optics such as the commercial 200mm camera lens by Canon. We preview our astrograph designs for commonly available CCD detectors. 1. INTRODUTION Telescopes are usually built to address specific scientific questions, with angular field of view and image resolution being the usual primary design parameters. -
Astronomers Had a Problem: Something Was Wrong with the Orbit of Uranus, the Seventh Planet from the Sun. Then Came the Discovery of Neptune, the Eighth Planet
Astronomers had a problem: Something was wrong with the orbit of Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun. Then came the discovery of Neptune, the eighth planet. But something was still wrong with the orbit of Uranus. Could yest another planet lurk unseen in the distant reaches of the Solar System, and could such a planet be affecting the orbit of Uranus? The first part of the question was answered in 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh, an Illinois farmboy with a high school education and a burning interest in Astronomy, discovered a tiny planet after examining hundreds of thousands of heavenly objects on photographic plates. Named Pluto, the planet Tombaugh discovered has revealed itself with great reluctance. It took fifty years for astronomers to measure Pluto's diameter with some degree of accuracy, yet even today no two figures are quite the same. It took as long for Pluto's moon Charon to be discovered. Yet some astronomers questioned whether Charon is even a moon, believing it instead to be a double planet system with Pluto. The second part of the question asked above has not been answered to astronomer's satisfaction. Pluto, it turns out, does not influence the orbit of Uranus the way it should, so some astronomers are once again looking for another planet, a tenth planet far, far away in the distant reaches of the solar system. What will turn up is, at this point, anybody's guess. There is a good chance however, that anything that does turn up may be unexpected, like Charon or Pluto were. -
New Directions for Pluto: from Clyde Tombaugh Beginnings
Journal of Space Philosophy 4, no. 1 (Spring 2015) New Directions for Pluto: From Clyde Tombaugh Beginnings By Janet Ivey, Janet’s Planet, Inc. March 13th, 2015 marks the 85th anniversary of the official announcement of Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto on February 18, 1930. Clyde William Tombaugh, an American astronomer, was born in Streator, Illinois on February 4, 1906. Clyde developed an early love of astronomy after an uncle loaned him a telescope. A graduate of Burdett High School in 1925, he was financially unable to attend college because a devastating hailstorm destroyed his family’s farm. Despite his dreams of university being delayed, Clyde Tombaugh pursued his interest in astronomy, and, in 1926, built his first homemade telescope. He built two more telescopes in the next two years, mastering optics, grinding his own lenses and mirrors, and further honing his observational skills. Using these homemade telescopes, Tombaugh made drawings of the planets Mars and Jupiter and sent them to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The staff there was so impressed by his work that in 1929, Tombaugh was hired to conduct systematic planet-search photography at Lowell. Specifically, he was hired to attempt to find what was called “Planet-X,” thought to be on the fringes of our solar system, which had been hypothesized by Percival Lowell and William Pickering. Tombaugh used the observatory’s 13-inch astrograph to take photographs of the same section of the sky several nights apart. He then used a blink comparator to compare the different images. When he shifted between the two images, a moving object, such as a planet, would appear to jump from one position to another, while the more distant objects such as stars would appear stationary. -
Pluto's Classification
Southeastern University FireScholars Classical Conversations Spring 2019 Pluto’s Classification Saylor Bane Southeastern University - Lakeland, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://firescholars.seu.edu/ccplus Part of the The unS and the Solar System Commons Recommended Citation Bane, Saylor, "Pluto’s Classification" (2019). Classical Conversations. 1. https://firescholars.seu.edu/ccplus/1 This Term Paper is brought to you for free and open access by FireScholars. It has been accepted for inclusion in Classical Conversations by an authorized administrator of FireScholars. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bane 1 Saylor Bane ENGL 1233 March 21, 2019 Dr. Grace Veach Pluto’s Classification Lurking billions of miles away from the sun, a desolate, frigid world silently waited to be discovered. After observing that both Uranus and Neptune mysteriously wobbled on their paths around the sun, astronomers hypothesized that a planet, nicknamed “Planet X,” was responsible for tugging these two celestial bodies out of their typical orbits. In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh excitedly exclaimed that he had finally found Planet X spinning in the deep, icy outer limits of the solar system. Later, this barren body was named Pluto. As telescopes improved, astronomers discovered many more celestial objects quietly orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. Soon, confusion arose over which of these Trans-Neptunian Objects were categorized as official planets. To clear up the uncertainty, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the universally recognized, governing astronomical organization to which all professional astronomers worldwide adhere, developed official definitions for both planets and dwarf planets (IAU 1). Each of these definitions consists of three criteria.