6degrees, Irwin Horowitz
6degrees AstroBlog
Par…tay! Under the Stars!
As promised last month, I will be talking about next weekend’s Idaho Star Party™ in this column.
Star parties are gatherings of amateur astronomers where we go and experience the awesome majesty of the night sky. Typically, they take place far from city lights and over a weekend evening when moonlight does not interfere with that view. This way, we can best observe some truly stunning objects in our universe. These objects range from planets to star clusters to gaseous nebulae to galaxies. All are generally on the menu when astronomers gather at these events.
Most communities in our country have a local astronomy club or society. The members will organize star parties for their own enjoyment and occasionally for public involvement. Many such groups also organize larger gatherings where amateurs come from far away to enjoy the spectacle of a dark, clear sky.
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6degrees AstroBlog
2007: A Busy Year for Idaho
2007 has been an interesting year for Idaho residents. We have had some amazing highs and some tragic and despicable lows and there are still four more months to go. I’d like to ask readers what they consider to be the three best things to happen here in Idaho so far this year as well as the three worst things. A list of things that is unique to Idaho and which the entire state has shared in. My lists (in no particular order) would include the following. [more]
6degrees AstroBlog
Full Moon Fever
I want to remind my regular readers that there will be a total lunar eclipse visible tomorrow morning. The initial partial eclipse phase will begin just before 3 a.m. MDT (2 a.m. PDT), with totality commencing about one hour later. The total phase will last about 90 minutes, ending shortly before 5:30 a.m. MDT (4:30 a.m. PDT). The final partial phase will end about one hour later. The Moon should be visible for at least part of this time across the entire intermountain west, low in the south or southwestern sky.
A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes through the Earth’s shadow. This can only occur at full moon, when the Earth is located between the Sun and the Moon. It doesn’t occur every month because most of the time, the Moon passes either above or below this shadow. However, about twice each year, it will pass either partially or fully through the shadow, producing a lunar eclipse. The last one occurred on 03 Mar of this year and the next one will be 20 Feb 2008. That one will be visible in the early evening hours here, as the full moon rises in the east. While it will be more accessible here in terms of the time of day, the weather in February is more problematic for ensuring good viewing.
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6degrees AstroBlog
Welcome Home Barbara!
Just a few minutes ago, the space shuttle Endeavour streaked over Hurricane Dean and the western Caribbean to a flawless landing at 12:32 p.m. EDT at the Shuttle Landing Facility located at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This marks the conclusion of a highly successful mission to the International Space Station and was the first flight of an Educator-Astronaut, Idaho's Barbara Morgan.
During the mission, a concern for NASA engineers was the damage caused to the shuttle's heat shield during launch two weeks ago. A gouge several inches deep was ripped out by a piece of foam insulation falling off of the external fuel tank and striking the vehicle during its ascent. Memories of the Columbia tragedy from a few years ago conjured up concerns of a similar fate befalling this mission. However, after extensively surveying and analyzing the damage while docked to the station, NASA engineers decided not to undertake risky repairs on orbit. It remains to be seen in the coming months what is the full extent of that damage and how it may impact the schedule of future shuttle flights.
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6degrees AstroBlog
Citizenre Announces Legal, Financial TeamsAs many of my readers know, I am an Independent Ecopreneur for a new startup company called Citizenre. This company plans to market solar photovoltaic systems to homeowners nationwide using a contracted rental model similar to what is used by the cell phone and satellite television industries. Rather than assuming the upfront capital investment, our customers will only be asked for an affordable security deposit just prior to their installation and to pay a monthly fee based on their rates and the amount of electricity their system produces. Contracts can be chosen from a 1-year, 5-year or 25-year term, with their rate locked in and guaranteed for the entire length.
Yesterday, the company announced some of the details regarding the composition of its financial and legal teams. This is the first in a series of press releases that will be forthcoming over the next few months culminating with the announcement of the location of the manufacturing facility and the identities of the financial institutions providing the necessary funding for this venture. The highlights of today’s announcement are that Ronald S. Borod and Jonathan C. Black of Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP are serving as special counsel to Citizenre and are assisting in securing the major funding for the manufacturing facility. Also, Douglas R. Grossinger and Mark Lundquist of Structured Growth Partners will assist in raising capital and in structuring power purchase agreements for the company. Lastly, Anthony Dixon will serve as a senior advisor to the company’s finance team. He has most recently served as Managing Director in the Financial Institutions Debt Capital Markets group for Citigroup in London.
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6degrees AstroBlog
Idaho Students Query Shuttle Astronauts
This afternoon, 18 Idaho school students had the rare opportunity to ask questions to astronauts aboard the International Space Station and Space Shuttle Endeavour. Located at the Discovery Center of Idaho in downtown Boise, Idaho Space Days culminated with a day-long event for these students, their parents and teachers and the community in general.
I had the distinct pleasure of addressing these students earlier in the day, encouraging them to embrace the spirit of discovery and exploration embodied by Barbara Morgan and her fellow astronauts, and to bring that spirit back with them when they returned to their hometowns later this week. I implored them to infuse that enthusiasm in their family and friends, and to keep working towards a future that embraces that spirit.
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6degrees AstroBlog
Under Western Skies: ‘Shooting Stars’ and Eclipses
Each year around August 12th, the Earth passes through a swarm of debris left in the wake of the passage of a comet known as Swift-Tuttle. As these tiny particles streak through our upper atmosphere, they give rise to the annual Perseid meteor shower. The name of the shower implies that the meteors appear to originate from the constellation of Perseus (this location is known as the radiant), located in the northeastern sky in the early morning hours at this time of year.
Meteor showers are best viewed under dark skies when there is no moonlight to interfere, and this year the Perseids will occur around the time of New Moon. In addition, they are better observed after local midnight...
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6degrees AstroBlog
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
It was 38 years ago today. Across the country, families gathered around their televisions to watch as grainy images were being sent back over 250,000 miles across space as Neil Armstrong bounded down the ladder of the lunar module Eagle and uttered one of the most famous quotes in human history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
It is hard to believe that less than 3½ years later, the crew of Apollo 17 lifted off from that same surface. This was the last time humans left the close environment of Earth orbit. We have sent robotic explorers to each of the planets in the solar system (including one currently en route to the former planet Pluto). However, human space flight has stagnated during the past 3½ decades. Now, we cheer whenever a space shuttle mission manages to safely return from another routine trip to the space station. This is hardly the stuff of which dreams are made of.
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6degrees AstroBlog
Astronomy News from London Meeting
While attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, astronomers from Caltech announced yesterday that they have observed some of the most distant galaxies ever detected. Using one of the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes located at the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii, Professor Richard Ellis and graduate student Dan Stark reported that the light they measured left the host galaxies over 13 billion years ago, when our universe was only about 500 million years old.
This light may very well have come from the first generation of stars to form in the infancy of our universe. The standard model of the Big Bang predicts that after the first few minutes, space was filled with a mixture of free electrons and simple nuclei containing protons and neutrons. Free electrons are very good at scattering light, so during this time our universe was highly opaque and very bright. After about 300,000 years, the expanding universe cooled sufficiently for simple atoms to form, as the electrons became bound to the nuclei. When those electrons were bound up, space became transparent and very dark. It wasn’t until this first generation of stars had formed that light once again shone forth across the universe.
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6degrees AstroBlog
Bogus Basin Star Party Rescheduled
Saturday night, Bogus Basin Ski Resort, the Treasure Valley Math & Science Center and the Boise Astronomical Society will be co-hosting the rescheduled annual Bogus Basin Star Party, weather permitting, in the parking lot of the Frontier Lodge located at the ski resort. I invite everyone to come up and join us for an evening under the stars. We will be starting at 7 p.m., with viewing of the Sun prior to sunset using specially filtered telescopes. At 7:30 p.m., park rangers will take interested attendees on a nightlife nature hike around the area that will last about one hour.
Sunset will occur around 9:30 p.m., and then the magic truly begins. As the twilight gives way to darkness, Venus will stand out as a shining beacon in the west. A much fainter Saturn will be located to the right of our sister planet and the pair will descend down together towards the horizon. While this is occurring, mighty Jupiter rises above the trees in the southeast. We will observe a plethora of objects, from binary stars and star clusters, to nebulae and galaxies millions of light years away. We will take our guests on a constellation tour, pointing out such luminaries as Ursa Major (the Great Bear) and its famous asterism the Big Dipper, Leo the Lion, and Hercules.
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