Published monthly since 1985 by The Binocular and Telescope Shop 84 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe NSW 2037 and 519 Burke Road, Camberwell Vic 3124 available at the shop and at all good Astronomy clubs, centres and free by email or by post for $20 per year. www.bintel.com.au August 2013 * Volume 338 MOON HIT BY SMALL ROCK NARRABRI BRIGHT FLASH SEEN HERE Since 2005 NASA astronomers have The impact crater in Mare UImbri- been monitoring the Moon for signs um could be twenty metres wide. of explosions caused by meteoroids The Lunar Reconissance Orbiter hitting the lunar surface. Lunar will probably be tasked with pho- REVEALED meteor showers have turned out to tographing the area when an op- be more common than anyone ex- portunity presents itself. pected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. Since the monitoring program On March 17 the biggest explosion began in 2005, NASA’s lunar im- in the eight years of the program. pact team has detected more than was recorded. An object about the three hundred strikes, mostly much A few people got very excited size of a small boulder hit the lunar fainter than the March 17th event. recently when they saw some surface in Mare Imbrium, exploded More than half of all lunar mete- telescope equipment being ad- in a flash nearly ten times as bright ors come from known meteoroid vertised at very low prices on as anything seen before. streams such as the Perseids and a website (http://www.sale-tel- Anyone looking at the Moon at the Leonids. The rest are sporadic escopes.com.) Wise heads, and moment of impact could have seen meteors that have no known flight those who could smell a rat in a the explosion--no telescope re- path in the Solar System. sealed jar, quickly figured that quired. For about one second, the The American will be heading the website was one of those impact site was glowing as bright as back to the Moon in a few years. that pop up regularly with unbe- a 4th magnitude star. It’s known that the Chinese have lievably low prices. If the prices An analyst at the Marshall Space the Moon as a future target. Al- are unbelievably low... they’re Flight Center was the first to no- though none of the astronauts who unbelievable. Don’t touch! tice the impact in a digital video landed on the Moon in the Apollo CSIRO COMES CLEAN... AFTER 25 YEARS recorded by one of the monitoring days was struck by a meteroid- * * * COMPACT ARRAY SECRETS OPEN TO PUBLIC program’s 14-inch telescopes. The even a dust-grain sized one, the po- To all those who get the NIGHT The CSIRO is going to invite the public to an Open Day at the Paul Wild meteoroid, estimated to weigh forty tential is still there. Identifying the SKY by post.... sorry! It was Observatory, near Narrabri NSW. kilograms hit the Moon traveling sources of lunar meteors and mea- very late in July. A mis-com- To help celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Australia Telescope Compact at about twenty-five thousand kilo- suring their impact rates should munication within our stores Array, CSIRO’s division of Astronomy and Space Science will invite the metres per hour. 56,000 mph. The give future lunar explorers an idea (and a lost envelope by Austral- public to attend an open day at the Paul Wild Observatory, twenty kilo- resulting explosion was about the of what they might expect. When is ia Post) meant that there was a metres west of Narrabri, on Sunday the 1st September. The open day will same as a good B-52-load of con- it safe to go on a moonwalk? Dur- needless delay before readers offer a rare opportunity for members of the public to go behind the scenes ventional bombs. ing known meteor showers may got their monthly issue of read- of one of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth. More than forty of University and NASA all-sky cam- probably not a good time to ven- ing goodness. our expert staff will be on hand to guide people around the observatory, eras recorded a steady stream of ture outside. answer questions and bring people up-to-date with the latest research in bright meteors entering the Earth’s * * * radio astronomy. atmosphere on the same night. The We mentioned, a couple of issues The Australia Telescope Compact Array comprises six twenty-two meter Earth’s atmosphere soaks up most ago that Meade Instruments had dishes, spread along a three kilometre track. The six dishes work together, meteoroids that are caught by the been bought by a Chinese com- as one instrument, to study the structure and evolution of the Universe. Dur- Earth. They burn up before reaching pany. We jumped the gun a lit- ing the public open day, three of the six dishes will be open to the public, as the surface. The Moon has no atmo- tle. Two further companies put well as the control building and computing room. Astronomy and space sci- sphere, so meteoroids can fly right in marriage bids- one American ence talks by leading experts in radio astronomy and radio engineering will into the lunar surface and explode and one Chinese. It looks as if showcase the achievements of the telescope as a world leading radio astron- on the surface. University of West- the Chinese company, a highly omy instrument. For more information on the 25th Anniversary Open Day ern Ontario scientists calculated experienced manufacturer of visit the website - http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/public/open_day/2013/ that the lunar meteor was probably microscopes may have won This is a rare chance to watch real radio astronomers at their mysterious from the same stream of debris that Meade’s hand. A new Agree- craft as they listen to the universe hissing and whistling at them. collided with Earth’s atmosphere. ment and Plan of Merger has been made with subsidiaries of Ningbo Sunny Electronic Co., WEIRD BLUE PLANET IS HOT, INCREDIBLY FAST Ltd., based near Shanghai. * * * AND BLASTED BY HOWLING GALES, SAYS NASA. We received a huge number of THEY HAVE NO PLANS TO SEND entries in the ‘coke-bottle tel- escope’ competition. Winner ASTRONAUTS ANY TIME SOON. will receive a display card with A strange, blue planet was discovered orbiting the star HD 189733 A in small amounts of genuine dust Vulpecula in 2005, by astronomers who detected it transiting in front of its from a Mars and a Moon mete- star. It’s sixty three light years from us. Constant observation has revealed orite. Due to the very late dis- some amazing facts about this strange object. patch of the printed edition of Recently scientists have managed to deduce that it is a deep blue in colour, NIGHT SKY (see above) we’ve that it has carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and that it is somewhat larger held off announcing a winner than Jupiter. Observation showed that it orbits its parent star in an astonish- for a couple more weeks. Hope ing 2.2 days at a speed of 150 kilometres per second! you don’t mind. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists from NASA and ESA have described a planet that won’t be high on anybody’d bucket list of ‘must visit’ * * * places. One described the most likely scenario as a place being blasted by In the good ‘ole days women glass pushed by “howling 7,000 kilometre-per-hour winds,” . Apparently were supposed to retire from the planet’s atmosphere is laced with silicates, from which we make glass. the workplace, stay at home and The surface would be well and truly sandblasted. and is not on NASA’s list make babies once they were of places to visit in the near future. married. Then there was a lady The enormous speed of the winds also effects the temperature of the plan- called Ruby who worked at the et. It is remarkable even, probably due to the redistribution of heat by the CSIRO. winds. There is evidence that the atmosphere also contains water vapour, Somebody wrote a book about neutral oxygen, methane and some carbon monoxide on the day side of the her. An amazing planet, which is tidally locked to the star. lady! See more about the book Slithy Toves ............................2 subscribe to NIGHT SKY on Page 2 Milancovic ..............................2 Receive your copy every month free by email. August night sky .....................3 ask [email protected] for your copy! OR Mick ‘n Don ............................4 send $20 for a year’s subscription and have it posted. Mike The Binocular and Telescope Shop, 84 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe NSW 2037. Tel: 02 9518 7255 The Binocular and Telescope Shop, 519 Burke Road, Camberwell Vic 3124. Tel: 03 9822 0033 August 2013 * Volume 338 * Page 2 The sky is full of slithy toves tonight! A BOOK ABOUT A SHOULD-BE-FAMOUS WOMAN ASTRONOMER Mel charms the snake handler. In Making Waves, Miller Goss provides insight into the pioneering contributions of a female scientist at Beta (β) Oph or Cebalrai ‘the shepherd’s dog’ is an orange giant star of the beginning of radio astronomy, magnitude 2.8, lying about 82 light years away. Ruby Payne-Scott (1912 – 1981). Rho (ρ) Oph is a wonderful multiple star system for small telescopes. The As one of the first radio astrono- brightest component consists of magnitude 5.0 and 5.7 stars which can be mers in the world, Payne-Scott separated using high magnification in a small aperture telescope.