Astronomy
esiegel | August 23, 2014“When I was ten all I knew was that I hated the weird words used to describe whatever it was that was wrong with my brother — to this day I think it all happened because he was overtaken by evil spirits that got loose in that haunted house ride at the carnival that summer. It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way — reality.” -Tim Cummings
It's one of the oldest and most alluring ideas to all of humanity: the notion that what happens in heavens affects what happens on Earth.
Image credit: Regina Valkenborgh, via NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the…
esiegel | August 18, 2014“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
It's hard to believe that we've almost reached the end of Messier Monday, but with a finite number (110) objects in the catalogue, we were bound to come to this point. By time November ends, we'll have captured them all! In the meantime, the months July-through-September are perfect for capturing the most southerly of all the Messier objects, and today's cluster -- Messier 6 -- is no exception!
Image credit: Ezequiel Bellocchio,…
esiegel | August 14, 2014“When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.” -Tycho Brahe
The Milky Way is home to many of the greatest sights ever to grace the night sky, including some spectacular, transient objects: supernovae! Formed from the death of supermassive stars or the "second-chance" explosions of white dwarfs, they brighten incredibly and then fade away, leaving spectacular remnants (and a plethora of heavy, enriched elements) behind.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and…
esiegel | August 11, 2014“And then you wake up, only to see that the darkness has gone, the light now truly makes you feel vulnerable and you wonder why this darkness did not wish you well and why did it leave you so sudden, without revealing the answers you were looking for.” -Chirag Tulsiani
"You've seen one, you've seen them all," said no skywatcher ever when it comes to these wonders of the night sky. Every star, cluster, galaxy and nebula has its own cosmic story, and Messier Monday provides us with a fabulous opportunity to highlight and explore each one.
Image credit: ©2007–2012 Twin City Amateur Astronomers…
esiegel | August 7, 2014"I’m a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I’m not going to die out. I guess I’m more like a comet then. I’m just going to keep on coming back.” -C. JoyBell C.
Every year, meteor showers sizzle and fizzle, yet no matter what happens in the skies, there's always one meteor shower that's reliable for a good show: the Perseids. After sunset tonight (and for about the next week) in the skies, they'll delight skywatchers across the globe.
Image credit: created by me using Stellarium, available free at http://stellarium.org/.
Have you ever wondered where these (or any) meteors come from? If you'…
esiegel | August 4, 2014“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” -Thomas Sowell
Every object of the 110 in the Messier Catalogue tells its own unique story, but not every object is a true astronomical object on its own! Along with two groupings of stars -- a double star (M40) and a quadruple star (M73) -- there's also a very special object that's neither a star cluster nor a chance grouping: the Sagittarius Star Cloud!
Image credit: RoryG from East Texas, at http://eastexastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/03/messier-24-sagittarius-star….
What you're actually seeing is a hole in…
esiegel | July 31, 2014“The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.” -Richard Feynman
It took 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, billions of years of biological evolution and astronomical numbers of events unfolding exactly as they have to give rise to you and me. And yet, here we are, collections of tens of trillions of cells and some 10^28 atoms.
Image credit: Ed Uthman.
Yet even though we don't often think of it, each one of those atoms has its own, unique cosmic story. It's too great…
esiegel | July 28, 2014“From a little spark may burst a flame.” -Dante Alighieri
It's hard to believe that less than two years ago, we hadn't even begun Messier Monday, and now there are fewer than 20 objects left! Today represents a great milestone, as we finally take on the last of fifteen galaxies that Messier catalogued as part of the Virgo Cluster!
Image credit: Mike Hankey, via http://www.mikesastrophotos.com/galaxies/m100/; annotation & magnification by me.
Even though Messier couldn't see the details that modest amateurs can see today, his (and Méchain's) discovery-and-cataloguing of this object was…
esiegel | July 24, 2014“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell
The Sun, contrary to what you might normally think about it, isn't a constant, uniform source of radiation. It has an active surface, replete with temperature variations, sunspots, and occasionally a large flare or mass ejection.
Image credit: NASA / GSFC / SDO.
But on very rare occasion, a flare like this makes it way through space and just happens to make its way towards Earth, where this hot, fast-moving ionized plasma collides with us. While the aurorae it…
esiegel | July 24, 2014“Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws.” -Tsung-Dao Lee
We normally think of the Universe as being symmetric, in the sense that no one direction, location or configuration is inherently preferred over another. But at some level, the laws of physics aren't completely symmetric, as we see from the decays of certain elementary particles.
Image credit: author durbarsquare of http://readingpenrose.…
esiegel | July 21, 2014“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.” -Blaise Pascal
By now, you've probably learned that Messier objects -- and galaxies in particular -- come in a huge, rich variety of types, structures and compositions. But sometimes, the simplest structure of all is the rarest.
Image credit: © 2006 — 2012 by Siegfried Kohlert, with M89 (left) and M90 (right) together, via http://www.astroimages.de/en/gallery/M89.html.
Think about it: most galaxies are classified as spirals, ellipticals or irregulars. But when was the last time you heard of a spherical…
esiegel | July 16, 2014“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.” -Carl von Clausewitz
You've been hanging around here long enough that you know all about dark matter's successes, from the CMB to large-scale-structure to gravitational lensing. On the largest scales in the Universe, there's no alternative that even comes close to working, unless you also include dark matter!
Image credit: Tony Tyson, Greg Kochanski and Ian Dell’Antonio…
esiegel | July 14, 2014“[T]his all fades to black, and it’s gone. It’s dust. Choose carefully what you obsess about.” -Meshell Ndegeocello
It's been a long time since we've had a new open cluster to look at, since the plane of the Milky Way (and the region towards the galactic center) has been obscured by the Earth and the Sun over the past few months. But finally, the year has progressed to the point where it's becoming visible again, and it brings with it some spectacular views of our galaxy's rich, open clusters!
Image credit: Fernando Cabrerizo, via http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130712.html.
For this week's…
esiegel | July 11, 2014“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.” -Winston Churchill
There's plenty to learn about, to see and to discover when we look out at the Universe today. From the leftover glow from the Big Bang in the microwave to the hundreds of billions of galaxies and the tremendous variety of stars in our galaxy and others, there's no shortage of mysteries to solve and curiosities to uncover.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, the GOODS team and M. Giavalisco (STScI).
But what if we, instead, came about in this Universe 100 billion years from now? How would we perceive…
esiegel | July 7, 2014“When someone demands blind obedience, you’d be a fool not to peek.” -Jim Fiebig
But sometimes, it's the wonders of the Universe that peek out at us from behind the intervening gas and dust that would block the light from them otherwise.
Image credit: © Copyright 1970 — 2014 by Fred Espenak, via http://astropixels.com/globularclusters/M9-01.html.
This week's deep-sky object for Messier Monday -- Messier 9 -- has the distinction of being one of the closest globulars to the galactic center, yet its stars are incredibly old and metal-poor. Oh, and it's been spectacularly imaged by Hubble,…
esiegel | July 1, 2014“Since stars appear to be suns, and suns, according to the common opinion, are bodies that serve to enlighten, warm, and sustain a system of planets, we may have an idea of the numberless globes that serve for the habitation of living creatures.” -William Herschel
When you look up at the stars in the night sky -- bright and dim, young and old, near and far -- can you help but wonder which ones of them might house life of any variety? And if so, how similar or different it might be from that on Earth? It's one of the greatest as-of-yet unanswered questions in all of science.
Illustration…
esiegel | June 30, 2014“In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.” -Henri Poincaré
When it comes to the wonders of the night sky, it seems like no matter what direction you look in, if you peer far enough, you're bound to see something distant, exotic and wonderful. But the Messier catalogue is special for exactly the opposite reason: these are the brightest, most prominent objects as seen from our corner of the Universe.
Image credit: Jim Mazur’s Astrophotography via Skyledge, at http://www.skyledge.net/Messier80.htm.…
esiegel | June 29, 2014“Catch on fire and people will come for miles to see you burn.” -John Wesley
There's nothing quite like a fire on a temperate summer's night, as John Fahey will play for you in his rendition of a Mississippi Fred McDowell classic,
Keep Your Lamps Trimmed & Burning.
But I bet you never thought of combining the biggest burning festival with a 100% flammable astronomical observing party.
Image credit: Tom Varden “Major Tom” of Black Rock Observatory, via http://www.blackrockobservatory.com/.
That's exactly what the folks at Black Rock Observatory are doing, however, with their plans to…
esiegel | June 23, 2014“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.” -William Shakespeare
When I started Messier Monday nearly two years ago, I wanted to highlight two halves of a story: the brightest deep-sky objects visible from Earth and the science of where they come from and what they teach us about the Universe. Today's object -- one of the closest of all the Messier objects to Earth -- provides the perfect chance to do that.
Image credit: Rich Richins’ 2009 Messier…
esiegel | June 19, 2014“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.” -James A. Baldwin
But each day is a chance for hope, learning something new and experiencing something wonderful. In fact, in just a couple of days, it will be the June solstice here on Earth, where the Sun reaches its highest (or lowest) position in the sky for Northern (or Southern) hemisphere observers!
Image credit: Kevin of Build it Solar, via http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Educational/Solargraphy/Solargraph….
You might…