Weekly hour log for zooniverse 8

On Tuesday, 5/31, I spent an hour working on the Solar Stormwatch Project.  On Thursday, 6/2, I spent an hour working on the Solar Stormwatch Project again.  Then on Friday I spent the class period working on the Galaxy Zoo:Mergers Project.  So I spent a total of 3 hours working on Zooniverse this week.

weekly hour log for zooniverse 7

On Wednesday, 5/25, I worked on the Planet Hunters Project for an hour.  On Thursday, 5/26, I worked on the Planet Hunters Project again for an hour.  Then on Friday, 5/27, I worked on the Old Weather Project for the last half of the class period.  So I spent a total of 2.5 hours on zooniverse this week.

Weekly hour log for zooniverse 6

On Monday, 5/16, I worked on the Galaxy Zoo: Supernovae Project on zooniverse in class.  On Wednesday, 5/18, I worked on the Galaxy Zoo: Supernovae Project again at home for an hour.  The on Friday, 5/20, I worked on the Old Weather Project for half the class period.  So I spent a total of 2.5 hours on zooniverse this week.

APOD 4.8

This is a photo of a dusty island universe and is one of the brightest spiral galaxies in planet Earth's sky.  NGC 253 is only 13 million light-years away, and is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of galaxies and is neighbor to our own local galaxy group.  This is a five frame mosaic based on data assembled from the Hubble Legacy Archive.  Beginning on the left near the galaxy's core, the image follows dust filaments, interstellar gas clouds, and even individual stars toward the galaxy's edge at the right.  The vista spans nearly 50,000 light-years.  The frame at the far right has been compressed slightly to bring into view an interacting pair of background galaxies.  Designated a starburst galaxy because of its "frantic" star forming activity, NGC 253 features tendrils of dust rising from as galactic disk laced with young star forming regions.  NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, likelydue to massive black holes near the galaxy's center.

Quarter 4 Astronomy Biography

"Grote Reber."  Encyclopædia Britannica.  Encyclopædia Britannica.  Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011.  17 May. 2011.

Quarter Four Astronomy Biography

            Grote Reber was born on December 22^nd, 1911 in Chicago, Illinois.  His father was Schuyler Colefax Reber and he owned a canning factory.  His mother was Harriet Grote Reber and he had a younger brother named Schuyler Reber.  His mother was a school teacher before marrying and she taught Edwin Hubble 7^th and 8^th grade science.  Grote Reber attended Wheaton High School in Wheaton, Illinois.  He then went to the BS Electrical Engineering University and the Illinois Institute of Technology.  He graduated in 1933 with a degree in electrical engineering. 

He was an amateur radio operator and worked for many radio manufacturers in Chicago from 1933 to 1947.  He operated a ham radio station in his spare time.  He learned of Karl Jansky’s work in 1933 regarding his discovery of radio waves from the Galaxy.  This prompted him to teach himself astronomy after deciding this was the field he wanted to work in.  He applied to Bell Labs, where Jansky was working, but this was during the peak of the Great Depression and there were no jobs available.  In 1937 he constructed the world’s first radio telescope.  It was made mostly out of sheet metal and was a 31-ft parabolic transit dish powered by an extension cord to his back yard.  Until the end of World War II, he remained the world’s only radio astronomer.  In 1938, his device picked up radio emissions from the Milky Way, which confirmed Jansky’s discovery.  Reber had difficulty having his findings published because astronomers at the time knew too little about radio and radio engineers knew little about astronomy.  His papers were finally published in Astrophysical Journal only after several, better educated, astronomers had visited his dish in Wheaton, Illinois.  Reber refused a research appointment from Yerkes.

He then focused on making a radiofrequency sky map.  He conducted the first thorough survey of radio waves across the sky and organized his data in maps showing the radio radiation of the Milky Way.  He completed this in 1941 and extended it in 1943.  In 1944, he became the first to detect radio emissions from the Andromeda galaxy and the sun.  As his reputation grew, Reber became a professional scientist when he was hired at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards of Technology) in 1947, to manage the agency’s first radio telescope.  He wasn’t fond of the bureaucracy and quit within a few years.  He ended up moving to Hawaii where he designed and built a rotating antenna to study the ionosphere.  In the 1950s, he turned his focus to cosmic radio waves at very low frequencies, which can only penetrate the Earth’s ionosphere in certain areas and times of low solar activity.  One area where these waves can reach the Earth is the Tasmanian region of Australia, so Reber relocated and continued his studies there until his death, with generally unrestricted grants from the Research Corporation.  The standard theory of radio emissions from space was that they were due to black-body radiation, light (of which radio is a non-visible form) that is given off by all hot bodies.  According to this theory, it would be expected that there would be considerably more high-energy light than low-energy, due to the presence of stars and other hot bodies.  Reber demonstrated that the reverse was true, and that there was a considerable amount of low-energy radio signal.  It was not until the 1950s that synchrotron radiation was offered as an explanation for these measurements.  Reber sold his telescope to the National Bureau of Standards, and it was built on a turntable at their field station in Sterling, Virginia.  Eventually the telescope made its way to NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia.  Reber supervised its reconstruction at that site and he also helped with a reconstruction of Jansky’s original telescope.  He also conducted research in archeology, botany, electronics, and meteorology, and designed his own energy-efficient home and electric car.  He died on December 20^th, 2002 in Tasmania, Australia.

 

Weekly hour log for zooniverse 5

On Wednesday, 5/11, I worked on the Old Weather Project for an hour at home.  On Thursday, 5/12, I worked on the Old Weather Project again at home for an hour.  On Friday, 5/13, I worked on the Moon Zoo Project for the last half of the class period.  So I spent a total of 2.5 hours on zooniverse this week.

Quarter 4 Astro Bio Sources

"Grote Reber." National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO): Look Deeper. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_reber.shtml>.

"Grote Reber." NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Soylent Communications. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://www.nndb.com/people/090/000172571/>.

Dieckhoff, Kerby. "Grote Reber." Angelfire: Welcome to Angelfire. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/concordiasci/reber/reber.html>.

"The Bruce Medalists: Grote Reber." SSU Department of Physics & Astronomy - Home. The Bruce Medalists. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/brucemedalists/reber/index.html>.

APOD 4.7

The Trifid Nebula is a cosmic study in colorful contrasts.  It is also known as M20 and it lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius.  A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid illustrates three different types of astronomical nebulae: red emission nebulae (dominated by light emitted by hydrogen atoms), blue reflection nebulae (produced by dust reflecting starlight), and dark nebulae (where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette).  The bright red emission region, roughly separated into three party by obscuring, dark dust lanes, lends the Trifid its name.  The red emission is also juxtaposed with the telltale blue haze of reflection nebulae.  Pillars and jets sculpted by newborn stars, below and left of the emission nebula’s center, appear in Hubble Space Telescope close-up images of the region.  The Trifid Nebula is about 40 light-years across.

Weekly hour log for zooniverse 4

On Tuesday, 5/3, I worked on the Solar Stormwatch project in class.  Then on Thursday, 5/5, I continued to work on the Solar Stormwatch project at home for an hour.  Then on Friday, 5/5, I worked on the Boulder Wars project for the last half of the class period.  So I spent a total of 2.5 hours on zooniverse this week.

APOD 4.6

Stars swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15.  This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy which was long before our Earth existed and when ancient globs of stars condensed and orbited a young Milky Way Galaxy.  It continues to orbit the Milky Way's center.  M15, one of about 150 globular clusters remaining with M3 being one of the largest, is noted for being easily visible with only binoculars, having at its center one of the densest concentrations of stars known, and containing a high abundance of variable stars and pulsars.  This image was taken by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, and it spans about 120 light-years.  It shows the dramatic increase in density of stars towards the cluster's center.  M15 lies about 35,000 light-years away toward the constellation of Pegasus (the Winged Horse).  Recent evidence suggests that a massive black hole might reside as the center of M15.

APOD 4.5

There has been speculation about whether or not there is a monster in IC 1396.  It is known as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula and parts of the glowing gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on an ominous form, some nearly human.  The entire nebula might even look like a face of a monster.  It is actually a bright young star too far from Earth to be dangerous.  Energetic light from this star is eating away the dust of the dark cometary globule at the top right of the image.  Jets and winds of particles emitted from this star are also pushing away ambient gas and dust.  It is nearly 3,000 light-years distant and the IC 1396 complex is relatively faint and covers a region in the sky with an apparent width of more than 10 full moons.  Recently, over 100 young stars have been discovered forming in the nebula.

APOD 4.4

 

The spiky stars visible in the foreground of this cosmic image are within the Milky Way Galaxy.  The two galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years.  Their distorted appearance is due to gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters.  They are cataloged as Arp 273 (also as UGC 1810) and the galaxies do look peculiar but interacting galaxies are now understood to be common in the universe.  The nearby large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is known to be some 2 million light-years away and approaching the Milky Way.  Arp 273 may offer an analog of their far future encounter.  Repeated galaxy encounters on a cosmic timescale can ultimately result in a merger into a single galaxy of stars.  From our perspective, the bright cores of the Arp 273 galaxies are separated by only a little over 100,000 light-years. 

Weekly hour log for Zooniverse 3

I worked on the Planet Hunters Project in class on Tuesday, 4/19.  I worked on the Planet Hunters Project again at home for an hour on Thursday, 4/21.  I spent a total of 2 hours this week on Zooniverse.

Weekly hour log for Zooniverse project 2

On Tuesday, 4/12, I spent the class period working on the Planet Hunters Project.  On Thursday, 4.14, I spent the class period working on the Planet Hunters Project again.  So this week I have a total of 2 hours.

APOD 4.3

This photo depicts a "quiet" day on the Sun.  But even during off days, the Sun's surface is a busy place.  This photo is in ultraviolet light, and the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius.The bright area visible near the horizon is the large sunspot group AR 9169 from the last solar cycle.  The bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots has a temperature of over one million degrees Celsius.  The reason for the high temperature is unknown but thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma.  Large sunspot group AR 9169 moved across the Sun during 2000 September and decayed in a few weeks.

Weekly hour log for Zooniverse Project

On Tuesday, 4/5 , I spent the period working on the Moon Zoo Project.  On Thursday, 4/7, I spent the period working on the Moon Zoo Project as well.  Then on Friday, 4/8, I spent half of the class working on Boulder Wars (after I finished the Constellation Quiz and did my APOD).  So I completed a total of 2.5 hours this week.

APOD 4.2

NGC 2438 is a planetary nebula, the gaseous shroud cast off by a dying sunlike star billions of years old whose central reservoir or  hydrogen fuel has been exhausted.  It is located about 3,000 light-years within the boundaries of the constellation Puppis.  It also appears to lie on the outskirts of bright, relatively young open star cluster M46.  But NGC 2438's central star is not only much older than the stars of M46, it moves through space at a different speed than the cluster stars.  Distance estimates also place NGC 2438 closer than M46 and so the nebula appears in the foreground, only by chance along the line-of-sight to the young star cluster.  This image of NGC 2438 shows a halo of glowing atomic gas over 4.5 light-years across, extending beyond the nebula's bright inner ring.

APOD 4.1

This is a photo of NGC 5584 and it is more than 50,000 light-years across and lies 72 million light-years away toward the constellation Virgo.  This is an island universe and it has winding spiral arms that are filled with luminous young star clusters and dark dust lanes.  It hosts some 250 Cepheid variable stars and a recent Type Ia supernova explosion, key objects for astronomical determinations.  NGC 5584 is one of 8 galaxies used in a new study that includes additional Hubble Space Telescope observations to improve the measurement of Hubble's Constant (the expansion rate of the Universe).  The results of the study allude to the theory that dark energy really is responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe, restricting models that try to explain the observed acceleration without the dark energy.

Quarter 3, Observation 5

I looked at the sky this morning, March 30th, around 6 A.M. when I woke up.  I saw the Moon from my front yard and it was in the phase of a waning crescent.  It was clear that this is one of the last couple of days before it turns in to a new moon because only a very slight portion of the crescent was still illuminated and visible.  The rest of the sky was completely dark and the sky was relatively clear but I couldn't locate any stars or constellations.

APOD 3.8

Towards the end of last year, a bright and new storm erupted in Saturn's northern hemisphere.  It was nicknamed "the Serpent Storm" and the northern hemisphere disturbance is still going and now circles far around the planet.  The Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft has a great view of the storm.  But this photo was taken on land in Buena Vista, Georgia.  It is visible on land because the storm shows enough contrast with the banded cloud tops.  The bright storm was first spotted in early December 2010 by amateur astronomers.  The ringed gas giant rose in predawn skies and the astronomers continue to monitor the storm's progress.

APOD 3.7

This cosmic cloud looks very similar to the outline of California.  It is drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy.  The Sun lies within the Milky Way's Orion Arm and is only about 1,500 light-years from the California Nebula, also known as NGC 1499.  The classic emission nebula is around 100 light-years long.  The most prominent glow of the California Nebula is the red light characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons, ionized by energetic starlight.  But in this photo, hydrogen in colored green while sulfur is mapped to red and oxygen to blue.The bright, hot, bluish Xi Persei, is the star most likely providing the energetic starlight that ionized much of the nebular gas.  The California Nebula can be spotted with a wide-field telescope under a dark sky toward the constellation of Perseus, not far from the Pleiades.

 

APOD 3.6

This is a photo of the bright blue reflection nebula, NGC 1999, and it lies south of the large star-forming Orion Nebula.  NGC 1999's illumination is provided by the embedded variable star V380 Orionis.  The nebula is marked with a dark sideways T-shape near center is this photo.  This broad cosmic vista spans over 10 light-years.  The dark shape was once assumed to be an obscuring dust cloud seen in silhouette against the bright reflection nebula.  But it has been determined that the shape is likely the be a hole blown through the nebula itself by energetic young stars using infrared images.  This region is filled with energetic young stars that produce jets and outflows that create luminous shock waves.  The shock, Herbig-Haro (HH), appears bright red in this view that included HH1 and HH2 just below NGC 1999.  The objects were named for astronomers George Herbig and Guillermo Haro.  The stellar jets and outflows push through the surrounding material at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second.

Quarter 3 Astronomy Bio

Dictionary of Scientific Biography.  C. Gillispie, editor.  Charles Scribner's Son, publisher. 1981

Kendall, Phebe. "Maria Mitchell." Pine Tree Web Home Page. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://www.pinetreeweb.com/maria-mitchell.htm>.           

Quarter 3 Astronomer

Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts.  Her father was a member of the Quaker religion and he felt strongly that girls should receive education equal to that of boys.  At sixteen, Maria was already a teaching assistant to a schoolmaster.  At seventeen, she decided to open her own school.  She rented a room and put an advertisement in the newspaper.  But the school was closed when Maria took a job as the librarian of Nantucket’s Atheneum Library.  Maria’s father built an observatory on his room and installed a brand new four inch telescope.  He made star observations for the United States Coast Guard and Maria helped her father take these measurements. 

            Maria was very intelligent and even had the sky memorized.  Her observation skills were also impeccable.  One night in the Autumn of 1847, Maria looked at the sky through the telescope and saw a star five degrees above the North Star and she knew there hadn’t been a star there before.  She thought that it might be a comet so she recorded its coordinates.  When she checked again the next night, sure enough, it had moved and she knew it had to be a comet.  Her father wrote a letter to Professor William Bond at Harvard University to tell him about Maria’s discovery.  The king of Denmark had offered a gold medal to any person who discovers a comet seen only through a telescope.  Therefore, Professor Bond submitted Maria’s name to the king.  But Father Francesco de Vico of Rome had discovered the comet two days later than Maria and he had been awarded the prize before the news of Maria’s discovery had arrived in Europe.  But one year later, it was decided that Maria deserved the award.  The comet was named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” 

            Maria continued to work as a librarian but her fame was spreading.  She was receiving letters of congratulations from scientists and tourists were coming to take a look at the miraculous woman astronomer.  In 1848, she was voted as the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  The same happened with the Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850.  In 1849, she took a job with the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office as a computer (the one who does the computations) of tables of positions of the planet Venus.  She also started traveling to attend scientific meetings.

            In 1856, a rich man named General Swift offered Maria the chance to accompany his daughter Prudence on a trip to the South and to Europe.  Maria accepted the offer and took her almanac work with her.  Together they went to New Orleans, then to London where Maria got to visit the Greenwich Observatory.  Prudence returned to the United States but Maria decided to stay in Europe.  She ventured to France on her own and then traveled to Rome with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family.  Her hopes of visiting the Vatican Observatory were dashed when she received the news that women were not admitted.  She managed to eventually get special permission but was only granted the right to visit in the daytime.  She was never able to look at the stars through the telescope at night.  When she got home, she was given a new telescope bought with money raised for women for the first woman astronomer of the United States.  She used it to study sunspots and other astronomical events.

            In 1965, she became a professor of astronomy and director of the college observatory at the newly opened Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.  There, she had access to a twelve-inch telescope which was the third largest in the United States.  She often extended an invitation to her students to come up to the observatory at night and watch meteor showers or other astronomical events.  (Sounds a lot like you, Mr. Percival)  Maria continues her own research in studying the surface features of Jupiter and Saturn.  She was also interested in photographing stars.  In 1869, she became the first woman elected to the American Philosophical Society.  In 1873, she helped found the American Association for the Advancement if Women and served as its president from 1874 to 1876.  In 1873, she attended the first meeting of the Women’s Congress.  The Congress also hosted many women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, etc.

            Maria retired from Vassar in 1888 because of her deteriorating health.  She died on June 28^, 1889 in Lynn, Massachusetts.  The Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket, founded in 1902, was developed by her friends and supporters after her death.  She was elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York University (now at Bronx Community College) in 1905.  In 19954, she was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. 

 

Quarter 3 observation 4

I observed the sky from my front yard on Saturday, February 19th at 9:30 pm.  The sky was completely dark but no stars were visible.  The moon was in the southeastern part of the sky and was in the full moon phase.  The moon was really bright and looked white.

Quarter 3 observation 3

I came to the observation session at pine view on sunday night, february 20th.  I looked through the telescopes and everything and used the binoculars to locate first magnitude stars such as algol, etc.  We were also able to locate many constellations such as auriga, triangulum, perseus, orion, taurus, etc as well as the pleiades and hyades.

APOD 3.5

On Valentines Day 2011 the Sun had one of its most powerful explosions which was an X-class flare.  The blast was the largest so far in the new solar cycle.  It erupted from active region AR 1158 in the Sun's southern hemisphere and the flare is shown here in this extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.  The intense burst of electromagnetic radiation momentarily overwhelmed pixels in the Solar Dynamic's detector causing the bright vertical blemish.  This X-class flare also had a coronal mass ejection which is a massive cloud of charged particles traveling outward at nearly 900 kilometers per second.

Astro Bio Quarter 3 Sources

Bois, Danuta. "Maria Mitchell." Women's Biographies: Distinguished Women of Past and Present. 1996. Web. 17 Feb. 2011. <http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/mitchell.html.>

 

"Maria Mitchell." Female Ancestors - Find Female Ancestors. Web. 17 Feb. 2011. <http://female-ancestors.com/daughters/mitchell.htm>.

 

Quarter 3 observation 2

on friday february 4th I went out and observed the sky from my friends back yard.  it was around 8 p.m. when i was observing and the sky was completely dark. I couldnt see the moon so it was in the new moon phase. I could see many stars and was even able to identify a few constellations.

Quarter 3 observation 1

on saturday january 29th I went out and observed the sky from my front yard at around 8 p.m.  the phase of the moon was a waning crescent. I couldnt see many stars because there was still some fog lingering in the sky.

APOD 3.4

This is a photo where a cloud appears to be different colors.  This is a rare phenomenon known as iridescent clouds and it can show unusual colors vividly or a whole spectrum of colors at the same time.  These clouds are formed with small water droplets of nearly the same size.  When the Sun is in the right position and mostly hidden by thick clouds, these thinner clouds significantly diffract sunlight in a nearly coherent manner, with different colors being deflected by different amounts.  Thus, different colors will come to the observer from slighly different directions.  Many clouds start with uniform regions that could show iridescence but quickly become too thick, too mixed, or too far from the Sun to show these different colors.  This photo was taken last year from the Top of the World Highway outside Dawson CIty, in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada.

APOD 3.3

This infrared portrait is from the WISE spacecraft.  It is a photo of the runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi which produces the arching interstellar bow wave or bow stock.  It is about 20 times more massive than the Sun and it lies near the center of the frame, moving toward the top at 24 kilometers per second.  It has a strong stellar wind that precedes it, compressing and heating the dust interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front.  Relatively undisturbed clouds of material lie around it.  Zeta Oph is though to have been a member of a binary star system at one time, and its companion star was more massive and shorter lived.  When the other star exploded as a supernova (losing mass), Zeta Oph was flung out of the system.  About 460 light-years away, Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the SUn and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it werent surrounded by dust.

APOD 3.2

NGC 660 is near the center of this photo which is in the boundaries of the constellation Pisces.  It is over 20 million light-years away and it has a peculiar appearance because it is a polar ring galaxy.  These galaxies are rare and have substantial populations of stars, gas, and dust orbiting in rings nearly perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disk.  It is postulated that the configuration could have been caused by the chance capture of material from a passing galaxy by the disk galaxy, with the captured debris strung out in a rotating ring.  The polar ring component can be used to explore the shape of the galaxy's otherwise unseen dark matter halo by calculating the dark matter's gravitational influence on the rotation of the ring and disk.  NGC 660's ring spans about 40,000 light-years.

APOD 3.1

This is a photo of globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, also known as NGC 104.  It roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy and so does some 200 other globular star clusters.  This is the second brightest globular star cluster (Omega Centauri being the brightest) as seen from Earth, and it is about 13,000 light-years away.  It can be spotted by the naked-eye near the Small Magellanic Cloud in the constellation of the Toucan.  This dense cluster is made up of several million stars in a volume of only 120 light-years across.  The red giant stars on the outer regions of the cluster are easy to see as yellowish stars in this photo.  Globular cluster 47 Tucanae also has x-ray binary star systems.

Lunar Eclipse Observation

I came to Pin View on December 20th, 2010 to view the lunar eclipse.  I got there around 1 A.M. so I guess it was technically the 21st.  I stayed and watched the whole thing.  It was amazing to be able to see an entire cycle of the moon , which usually takes a moth, all in just a few hours.

APOD 2.8

This is a photo of the spiral galazy NGC 3521 and it is 35 million light-years distant.  It is toward the constellation Leo.  It spans about 50,000 light-years, and its central region is shwon in this image.  This photo was constructed from data from the Hubble Legacy Archive.  The galaxy has multiple patychy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust and clusters of young, blue stars.  Many other spirals have large, sweeping arms.  NGC 3521 is a bright galaxy in Earth's sky and is easily visible in small telescopes.

The Sun Class Activity

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/pickoftheweek/old/09aug2007/304spicules.jpg

http://www.tilmari.pp.fi/sunspot.jpg

http://physics.usc.edu/solar/images/910726.large.gif

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0403/sunprom2_soho.jpg

http://www.sustainabilityninja.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/solar-eclipse.jpg

http://s424.photobucket.com/albums/pp327/beyond50/Video%20Clips/?action=view&current=Clip-SunandEarthRotating.mp4

Quarter 2 Astronomer Biography

Dictionary of Scientific Biography.  C. Gillispie, editor.  Charles Scribner's Son, publisher. 1981

Quarter Two Astronomer Biography

            Pierre Simon Laplace was born in Beumont-en-Auge, Normandy, France on March 23^rd, 1749.  His father, Pierre Laplace, was involved in the cider trade and did well for himself and his mother, Marie-Anne Sochon came from a farming family in Tourgeville.  Pierre Simon Laplace attended a Benedictine priory school in his home town of Beaumont-en-Auge between the ages of 7 and 16.  His father sent him to this school because he expected him to pursue a career in the Church.  When he was 16, Laplace enrolled in Caen University to study theology because he was still planning on a career in the Church.  But during his two years at the University of Caen, Laplace realized that he was gifted in the area of mathematics and how much he loved the subject.  This realization is accredited largely to two mathematics teachers at Caen: C Gadbled and P Le Canu.

            Laplace chose to leave Caen without his degree and went to Paris.  He was given an introduction letter to d’Alembert from Le Canu, his teacher.  Laplace was only 19 years old when he got to Paris but d’Alembert was very impressed by him and he began to direct his mathematical studies and found him a position as professor of mathematics at the Ecole Militaire.  Laplace began to produce many groundbreaking mathematical papers and the first was presented in the Academie des Sciences in Paris on March 28^th, 1770.  Laplace’s first paper to be published was one on the integral calculus which he translated into Latin and published at Leipzig in the Nova acta eruditorum in 1771.  On March 31^st, 1773, Laplace was elected an adjoint in the Academie des Sciences.  By the time he was elected, he had already read thirteen papers to the Academie in less than three years.  In 1780, Laplace and the chemist Lavoisier applied quantitative methods to a comparison of living and nonliving systems, with the aid of an ice calorimeter that they had invented, showed respiration to be a form of combustion.  In 1784, Laplace was appointed as the examiner at the Royal Artillery Corps.  Laplace was promoted to a senior position in the Academie des Sciences in 1785.  Laplace marries Marie-Charlotte de Courty de Romanges on May 15^th, 1788.  They had two children and their son, Charles-Emile, who was born in 1789, went on to a career in the military.  Before the 1793 Reign of Terror, Laplace and his wife and two children left Paris and lived 50 km southeast of Paris. He did not return to Paris until after July 1794. 

            Laplace presented his famous nebular hypothesis in 1796 in Exposition du systeme du monde, which looked upon the solar system as originating from the contracting and cooling of a large, flattened, and slowly rotating cloud of incandescent gas.  Exposition du systeme du monde was written as a non-mathematical introduction to Laplace's most important work Traité de Mécanique Céleste whose first volume appeared three years later.  Laplace had discovered the invariability of planetary mean motions.  In 1786 he had proved that the eccentricities and inclinations of planetary orbits to each other always remain small, constant, and self-correcting.  These and many other of his earlier results formed the basis for his second work.  Laplace became Count of the Empire in 1806 and he was named a marquis in 1817 after the restoration of the Bourbons.  Laplace continued to apply his ideas of physics to other problems such as capillary action (1806-07), double refraction (1809), the velocity of sound (1816), the theory of heat, in particular the shape and rotation of the cooling Earth (1817-1820), and elastic fluids (1821).  Laplace died on the morning of March 5^th, 1827. 

APOD 2.7

This is a photo of the Winter Hexagon.  They say if you can find Orion in the sky, you will probably be able to locate the Winter Hexagon.  The Winter Hexagon is composed of some of the brightest stars that are visible.  They combine to form a large and easily spotted "pattern" in the winter sky located in Earth's northern hemisphere.  These stars can usually be seen even in the inconducive to star watching bright night skies of a big city.  This photo was taken in Stagecoach, Colorado.  There are six stars in the Winter Hexagon: Aldebaran, Capella, Castor (and Pollux), Procyon, Rigel, and Sirius.  In this photo, the band of the Milky Way Galaxy runs through the center of the Winter Hexagon, and the Pleiades open star cluster can be seen just above.  The Winter Hexagon "asterism" takes over many constellations including Orion. 

Quarter 2 Astronomer Biography Sources

Ball, Rouse. "Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827)." TCD School of Mathematics. Web. 04 Jan. 2011.    <http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Laplace/RouseBall/RB_Laplace.html.>

  

Robertson, E.F. "Laplace Biography." MacTutor History of Mathematics. School of Mathematics and Statistics. Web. 06 Jan. 2011. <http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Laplace.html>.

 

"Pierre-Simon Laplace." NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Soylent Communications. Web. 04 Jan. 2011. <http://www.nndb.com/people/871/000031778/>.