Sky & Telescope January 2010

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for 2010 p. 36

THE ESSENTIAL MAGAZINE OF ASTRONOMY JANUARY 2010

Amateurs Breathe New Life into NASA Pictures p. 76

GALAXIES from the Dawn of Time New Hubble Pictures See Deeper than Ever p. 24

Where Is E.T.? p. 94 Nebulae and Clusters Galore p. 65 July’s Pacific Solar Eclipse p. 32 Probing the Sun’s Deepest Mysteries p. 22 Visit SkyandTelescope.com

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January 2010 VOL. 119, NO. 1

NASA

On the cover: Astronauts on the Space Shuttle Atlantis photographed Hubble’s back end after its release into free flight May 19th.

THI S M O N TH ’ S S K Y

44

Northern Hemisphere’s Sky

AL S O IN THI S I S S U E

8

By Robert Naeye

By Fred Schaaf

47

January’s Sky at a Glance

49

Binocular Highlight

10 12

22 NASA Sets Its

Sights on the Sun The Solar Dynamics Observatory will reveal new details about how the Sun generates powerful storms that affect Earth. By Laura Layton & Dean Pesnell

50

Planetary Almanac

53

Sun, Moon, and Planets

57 61

F First Galaxies H Hubble has imaged the most distant galaxies yet, but to see the di first galaxies, astronomers need to go even deeper. By Jonathan P. Gardner

65

75, 50 & 25 Years Ago News Notes Mission Update By Jonathan McDowell

71

Going Deep By Ken Hewitt-White

Exploring the Moon By Charles A. Wood

24 Finding the COVER STORY

14 20

By Fred Schaaf

Letters By Leif J. Robinson

By Gary Seronik FE ATURE S

Spectrum

74

Telescope Workshop By Gary Seronik

Celestial Calendar By Alan MacRobert

84

Gallery

Deep-Sky Wonders

94

Focal Point

By Sue French

By Jacob Haqq-Misra & Seth D. Baum

32 July’s South

Pacific Eclipse On July 11th a lot of ocean and a few tiny bits of land will lie under a Moon-blackened Sun. By Fred Espenak & Jay Anderson

36 Hot Products for 2010

76 Spacecraft Imaging

for Amateurs An international community of space enthusiasts has become adept at processing and reinterpreting images from planetary spacecraft. By Emily Lakdawalla

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FRED & NAN ESPENAK

Our annual roundup of Hot Products highlights the most intriguing new astronomy gear on the market. By Dennis di Cicco

SKY & TELESCOPE (ISSN 0037-6604) is published monthly by Sky & Telescope Media, LLC, 90 Sherman St., Cambridge, MA 02140-3264, USA. Phone: 800-253-0245 (customer service/subscriptions), 888-253-0230 (product orders), 617-864-7360 (all other calls). Fax: 617-864-6117. Website: SkyandTelescope.com. © 2010 Sky & Telescope Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Massachusetts, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail sales agreement #40029823. Canadian return address: 2744 Edna St., Windsor, ON, Canada N8Y 1V2. Canadian GST Reg. #R128921855. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Sky & Telescope, PO Box 171, Winterset, IA 50273. Printed in the USA.

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The Essential Magazine of Astronomy

Is the James Webb Space Telescope a Good Thing? This month’s cover story discusses the recent discovery with

NA

SA

Hubble’s new camera of the farthest galaxies ever seen. Hubble brings us closer than ever to the birth of galaxies. But as the article also points out, we’ll need NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to see this process in action. I must confess that I have mixed feelings about Webb. On the plus side, building a large infrared space telescope is the most practical way to accomplish this exciting science. Supercomputers can give us useful predictions about how the first galaxies formed, but astronomy is ultimately an observational science, so we need to see this process in action to fully understand it. In addition, Webb will teach us a tremendous amount about star and planet formation, and it will be able to image some nearby exoplanets. Webb could fo monitor transiting exoplanets, and perhaps spectroscopically detect chemimon cal constituents indicative of life. So it’s fair to say that Webb has the potential to make revolutionary discoveries on some of science’s most p profound questions. It will also take pretty pictures. pro But on the flip side, Webb will cost in the neighborhood of $5 Bu billion, surpassing any NASA space telescope other than Hubble. bi NASA’s astronomy budget will remain flat or decrease in the coming years, and as scientists and engineers construct this tenniscourt-size spacecraft, it consumes such a large fraction of the available astronomy budget that there’s little money to develop other missions. Moreover, Webb will be the largest and most complex space telescope ever built. As Jonathan Gardner explains in his article, Webb’s deployment involves a challenging series of maneuvers. There’s a lot that can go wrong, and the telescope will not be serviceable. Given NASA’s outstanding track record, and the high caliber of people on Webb’s science and engineering teams, the mission has a very high probability of success. But in this era of tight budgets, the last thing astronomers need is a $5 billion public relations fiasco. Building Webb at the expense of several cheaper missions is like putting most of astronomy’s eggs in one basket. Is this a good thing? I suppose it depends on your perspective. If you’re interested in the science questions that Webb will address, or if you’re an infrared astronomer, Webb is the greatest thing since the invention of the telescope. But if you’re an X-ray astronomer, or a physicist who wants to build a spacecraft array to detect gravitational waves from merging black holes, Webb is not your friend. As I experienced fi rst hand when I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s funding process often pits one group of scientists against another as they battle for precious resources in an era when there’s not enough money to go around. The professional astronomy community is not one big happy family, and neither is NASA.

Editor in Chief 8 worldmags

January 2010

sky & telescope

EDITORIAL

Editor in Chief Robert Naeye Senior Editors Dennis di Cicco, Alan M. MacRobert Associate Editor Tony Flanders Imaging Editor Sean Walker Editorial Assistant Katherine L. Curtis Editors Emeritus Richard T. Fienberg, Leif J. Robinson Senior Contributing Editors J. Kelly Beatty, Roger W. Sinnott Contributing Editors Edwin L. Aguirre, Greg Bryant, Paul Deans, Thomas A. Dobbins, David W. Dunham, Alan Dyer, Sue French, Paul J. Heafner, Ken Hewitt-White, Johnny Horne, E. C. Krupp, David H. Levy, Jonathan McDowell, Fred Schaaf, Govert Schilling, Ivan Semeniuk, Gary Seronik, William Sheehan, Mike Simmons, Charles A. Wood, Robert Zimmerman Contributing Photographers P. K. Chen, Akira Fujii, Robert Gendler, Tony & Daphne Hallas ART & DESIGN

Design Director Patricia Gillis-Coppola Illustration Director Gregg Dinderman Illustrator Casey Reed PUBLISHING

VP / Publishing Director Joel Toner Advertising Sales Director Peter D. Hardy, Jr. Advertising Services Manager Lester J. Stockman VP, Production & Technology Derek W. Corson Production Manager Michael J. Rueckwald Production Coordinator Kristin N. Beaudoin IT Manager Denise Donnarumma VP / Consumer Marketing Dennis O’Brien Consumer Marketing Nekeya Dancy, Hannah di Cicco, Beth Dunham, Ellen Higgins, Jodi Lee, T.J. Montilli, Mike Valanzola Credit Manager Beatrice Kastner NEW TRACK MEDIA LLC

Chief Executive Officer Stephen J. Kent Executive Vice President / CFO Mark F. Arnett Corporate Controller Jordan Bohrer Office Administrator Laura Riggs Editorial Correspondence: Sky & Telescope, 90 Sherman St., Cambridge, MA

02140-3264, USA. Phone: 617-864-7360. Fax: 617-864-6117. E-mail: editors@ SkyandTelescope.com. Website: SkyandTelescope.com. Unsolicited proposals, manuscripts, photographs, and electronic images are welcome, but a stamped, self-addressed envelope must be provided to guarantee their return; see our guidelines for contributors at SkyandTelescope.com. Advertising Information: Peter D. Hardy, Jr., 617-864-7360, ext. 2133.

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Canada: $49.95 (including GST); all other countries: $61.95, by expedited delivery. All prices are in U.S. dollars. Newsstand and Retail Distribution: Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd., New Milford, NJ 07646-3048, USA. Phone: 201-634-7400. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise copied (with the exception of one-time, noncommercial, personal use) without written permission from the publisher. For permission to make multiple photocopies of the same page or pages, contact the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Phone: 978-750-8400. Fax: 978-750-4470 Web: www.copyright.com. Specify ISSN 0037-6604. The following are registered trademarks of Sky & Telescope Media, LLC: Sky & Telescope and logo, Sky and Telescope, The Essential Magazine of Astronomy, Skyline, Sky Publications, SkyandTelescope.com, http://www.skypub.com/, SkyWatch, Scanning the Skies, Night Sky, and ESSCO.

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M51 image courtesy Greg Morgan. Alta U16M camera (4096 x 4096); RCOS 12.5” f/9 Ritchey-Chretien on Paramount ME; Astrodon filters.

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Letters

If it were true that “energy flowing through a system tends to organize that system, into ever more complex and unpredictable forms,” (“The New Habitable Zones,” October issue, page 20) then we should be seeing piles of bricks and rubble spontaneously turning into houses all over the place. And ashes should be spontaneously turning into firewood. I belive that the reason we do not see such things is because the energy flowing through systems tends to disorganize them, not organize them (like explosions, for example). Furthermore, any engineer can tell you that inputting free energy into a system, as the Sun does to the Earth, increases the rate of disorganization; it does not reverse it. The Second Law of Thermo-

Write to Letters to the Editor, Sky & Telescope, 90 Sherman St., Cambridge, MA 02140-3264, or send e-mail to [email protected]. Please limit your comments to 250 words. Published letters may be edited for clarity and brevity. Due to the volume of mail, not all letters can receive personal responses.

ON THE WEB S & T W E E K LY N E W S L E T T E R AND ASTROALERTS:

SkyandTelescope.com/newsletters

dynamics, therefore, does stand as an insurmountable obstacle to all theories of chemical evolution. John Tors Toronto, Ontario, Canada [email protected] Editor’s reply: You’re confusing violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics — bricks jumping up to form houses — with “emergent phenomena”: energy flowing through a system causing local organization at the expense of increased entropy elsewhere. You see this happening throughout nature — from complex turbulence appearing spontaneously in fluid flow, to life processes driven by sunlight increasing in complexity, over billions of years, to do things like build houses. — Alan MacRobert

Who makes their own optics anymore? I have been receiving Sky & Telescope since 1975, and I can’t help but miss the past abundance of articles on amateur telescope making and making your own optics. Doesn’t anyone make their own mirrors anymore? Sure, the new fancy telescopes from the major manufacturers have made great strides in price and quality, but there

G E T T I N G S TA R T E D I N A S T R O N O M Y :

SkyandTelescope.com/gettingstarted SKY-TOUR PODCASTS:

SkyandTelescope.com/podcasts L AT E S T A S T R O N O M Y N E W S :

SkyandTelescope.com/newsblog

A L M A N A C F O R Y O U R L O C AT I O N :

SkyandTelescope.com/almanac SELECTING A TELESCOPE:

SkyandTelescope.com/equipment/ basics

D A I LY S K Y - E V E N T D I A R Y :

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DO-IT-YOURSELF PROJECTS

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SKY PUBLISHING CORPORATION

And God said, Let there be emergent phenomena!

Mirror-making with the Gainesville Boys’ Club in the early 1960s.

has got to be someone out there besides me who enjoys crafting something technical and precise just for the satisfaction! John McMichael Milwaukie, Oregon [email protected] Editor’s reply: John is correct that the availability of high-quality, affordable commerical telescopes has impacted the amateur telescope making hobby. Nevertheless, S&T covers the topic in every issue with Gary Seronik’s Telescope Workshop column, and we welcome article proposals and submissions related to all aspects of telescope making. — Robert Naeye

WHAT D OE S THAT ME AN? BROWSE OUR ASTRO GLOSSARY

Trying to wrap your mind around astronomy terms? Looking to understand celestial coordinates? Confused about the Greek alphabet? Let us help you at SkyandTelescope.com/ Glossary. Learn the correct constellation names once and for all, and click the link to our Greek alphabet page directory while you’re there for more helpful information! S&T: GREGG DINDERMAN

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This mon ths fe ature d bra nds:

Gordon R. Lyell Johnston City, Illinois

Goodbye, IYA 2009!

For the Record

2009 brought us the International Year of Astronomy, marking 400 years since Galileo turned his telescopes to the Moon, planets, and stars. I’d like to recognize the amateurs and professionals who took the time to open observatories or set up equipment on sidewalks and in parks to give

✹ The two farthest supernovae recently discovered by Jeff Cooke and colleagues (October 2009, page 12) were found by stacking selected long exposures from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope’s Legacy Survey taken during good seeing, not from short exposures taken to freeze the seeing.

75, 50 & 25 Years Ago Sky Watcher 10" & 12" Dobsonians On Sale!

people a glimpse of our universe. As it becomes a memory, let’s remember IYA2009 with pride. Someday our current work, discoveries, and inventions will be celebrated as history by generations yet to come. Now that’s a nice thought.

January-February 1935 Important Nova “In the early evening of December 13 an English meteor observer J. P. M. Prentice . . . noted that between the stars Vega in Lyra and Gamma Draconis . . . there existed a star of naked eye brilliance where hitherto naught [but] starless sky had been the lot of the observer unpossessed of optical aid.” Decades later nova DQ Herculis would be instrumental in unlocking the secrets of these binary systems where one component transfers mass to a white dwarf. When this heated and compacted gas accumulates sufficiently, hydrogen fusion explosively occurs. January 1960 Planetarium Inventor “Perhaps no one person has done more for the popularization of astronomy than Walther Bauersfeld [1879-1959]. . . . “In 1919 he conceived the idea of the modern projection planetarium, designing and building the first instrument of this type. . . . More than 30 other Zeiss projectors have been erected. . . .” Very Irregular Stars “One most interesting feature of the Orion nebula is its

Leif J. Robinson large number of variable stars, a characteristic not discovered until the early years of this century. . . . “Many of these stars are noted for the rapidity of their light variations. . . .” My ego forces me to include this item; it was my first contribution to this magazine. January 1985 Digitized Planetarium “A new age in planetariums has arrived. . . . “Conventional star projectors cannot transport the viewer very far from the solar system, to see the heavens from other vantage points in space. Nor can they portray the changes wrought to constellations over time. . . . “With the advent of Digistar, a new planetarium projector that uses computer graphics, such displays are possible.” CCDs for All “For about two decades professional astronomers have used charge-coupled devices (CCD’s) as detectors. . . . “Undoubtedly, within a few years amateur astronomers will be using CCD’s as they now use photographic methods. A revolution has begun!” Christian Buil was prophetic. He built a linear CCD array and described it in S&T’s first such article aimed at amateurs.

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ATIK’s Maryland office (inset Warren Keller)

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News Notes For astronomy news as it breaks, see SkyandTelescope.com/newsblog. S ky

Sorting Out the Water on the Moon

ISRO / NASA / JPL / BROWN UNIV. / USGS

happen that way; the impact sprayed little visible debris, and what little data the probe and ground-based observatories collected was still being analyzed as this issue went to press. Just three weeks earlier, NASA had announced a total surprise: its Moon Mineralogy Mapper on India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter detected H2O and OH (the hydroxyl radical) on the Moon’s daylit side, especially at high latitudes — contradicting more than a century of certitude that the Moon’s baking dayside is absolutely dry. Two other spacecraft confirm the discovery. You had to read further to find out that the “water” is only a molecule or two thick, bound to dust grains in the top millimeters of the lunar soil. Still, if you could sweep up a ton of the topmost dust, it might yield as much as a kilogram (liter) of water. That’s

Before Impact

If all the recent news concerning water on the Moon has left you confused, you’re not alone. Here’s the situation. Lunar geologists have long suspected that frost might accumulate over millions of years in permanently shadowed crater floors near the Moon’s poles. Water molecules arriving from rare comet-nucleus impacts on the Moon could freeze out onto this cold ground and stay there. (It’s as cold as 40 kelvins, scientists were recently surprised to find.) Loose water molecules might also be created over the ages from hydrogen in the solar wind reacting with oxygen atoms in surface rocks. And indeed, recent lunar orbiters have found clear evidence that the permanent shadowlands, and their surroundings, harbor hydrogen — most likely bound up in H2O, though at such a cold temperature it could also be in the form of frozen ammonia (NH3) or methane (CH4 ). On October 9th, the crash of NASA’s LCROSS mission into one of the shadowlands was supposed to settle the question spectacularly — by blasting up a huge plume of dust and water vapor for easy analysis, thereby paving the way for future lunar bases and settlements. It didn’t

Channel 8

After Impact

NASA / GSFC / UCLA

Channel 9

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Channel 7

Channel 6

drier that the driest desert on Earth — but still a potentially precious resource. The source may be protons (hydrogen nuclei) in the solar wind. Perhaps confusing some readers, the same stories in many media also discussed the fresh craterlets on Mars that are seen to expose widespread glaciers of pure ice, many meters thick, just under the Martian soil at high latitudes (S&T: July 2009, page 16). In the Moon Mineralogy Mapper image above, blue indicates the strongest water and hydroxyl spectral features at infrared wavelengths, red marks the iron-bearing mineral pyroxene, and green is reflected infrared sunlight. North is up. At left are temperature maps of the LCROSS impact area, taken in the midand far infrared by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, two hours before and 90 seconds after the impact. The fresh crater site shows as a warm pixel or two near bottom center.

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News Notes

Herschel’s First Show

thermal emission of very cold interstellar dust. The nebula is transparent at these wavelengths. Notice the bright points of star formation happening deep inside a few of the densest, coldest fi laments, almost like pearls on strings (inset). With a 3.5-meter aperture, Herschel is the largest space telescope yet flown.

ESA / SPIRE & PACS CONSORTIA (2)

As soon as the new Herschel Space Observatory was checked out and up to speed, the European Space Agency released a gorgeous mosaic of a very cold nebula as proof. One rendering of the picture, which spans 2° of sky near the Milky Way’s midline in Crux, is shown below.

It may look like other nebula images, but it’s not. It’s the first far-infrared/ submillimeter-wave image of the heavens taken with such clarity. Emission at 70 microns is shown as blue, 160 microns as green, and 250, 350, and 500 microns are combined as red. What we see here is mostly the weak

16 January 2010 worldmags

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News Notes

ALMA Progressing

Saturn’s New King Ring

Speaking of far-infrared and millimeter waves: What’s about to be the world’s most powerful imaging telescope of any kind? You could make a good case that it’s ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array, now under construction on the 16,000-foot (5,000-meter) Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. ALMA will consist of at least 66 dishes, 12 and 7 meters in diameter, spread over distances as great as 18.5 kilometers. They will be tightly integrated to form one huge, diffraction-limited synthetic

Phoebe is the black sheep of Saturn’s major moons. It’s the farthest out, and it orbits backward compared to the rest. It’s probably not an original member of the Saturnian family but a Kuiper Belt object that was captured ages ago. Just 135 miles (215 km) across, this oddball now has new claim to fame: Saturn’s biggest ring. Astronomers hunting for trace rings with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope find that Phoebe orbits within a gigantic, but very tenuous, dust ring vastly larger than those previously known.

Saturn

Like the orbit of Phoebe, it’s tipped 27° to the plane of the inner Saturnian system. A mere 1 cubic kilometer of Phoebe dust, ejected by impacts, could account for the entire big ring. Planetologists suspect that this dust has something to do with why Iapetus, Saturn’s next moon in, is very dark on its leading hemisphere.

Messenger’s Third Look at Mercury

NASA / JHU-APL / CARNEGIE INST. OF WASHINGTON

ESO

aperture working at wavelengths from 350 microns to 9 millimeters. Its typical image resolution will be about 0.02 arcsecond, ten times sharper than Hubble. At left, a specially built transporter carries the first 12-meter, 100-ton dish to its docking site on the plateau, which is above about half of Earth’s atmosphere and nearly all of its water vapor. The ALMA team plans to link three antennas to form an interferometer by early 2010 and begin scientific observations with several more dishes in the second half of 2011. The full array could be finished in 2012.

NASA’s Messenger probe made its third flyby of Mercury on September 29th, revealing more lands never before seen. Among the sights: impact craters with big, irregular depressions or pits on their floors. The pits appear to have formed by the collapse of subsurface magma chambers. If so, they are more evidence of volcanism at work on the innermost planet. An example is the elongated beanshaped depression near the middle of the large crater above. Another possible example is centered in the large crater below it. When Messenger next comes to Mercury, on March 18, 2011, it will fire a braking rocket, slip into orbit, and finally begin an intensive year-long study of the planet.

SOURCE: NASA / JPL, S&T ILLUSTRATION: CASEY REED

Apophis Turns Less Menacing

Phoebe

Titan

Iapetus

The world’s biggest asteroid scare so far came during Christmas week of 2004. Early orbit calculations showed the recently discovered asteroid 99942 Apophis (then called 2004 MN4) having a 1-in-37 chance of hitting Earth on April 13, 2029. About

News Note stories are presented in greater depth, with links, at SkyandTelescope.com; search for the keyword SkyTelJan10.

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900 feet (300 meters) wide, Apophis would arrive with the energy of several hundred megatons of TNT, roughly 10 times more energy than the largest thermonuclear bomb ever tested. But as soon as its positions were measured over a longer time span (thanks to pre-discovery images being located), an impact in 2029 was ruled out completely. Nevertheless, a 1-in-45,000 chance remained for April 13, 2036. Now, with ever longer orbital tracking, that chance has been downgraded to 1 in 250,000. Another impact possibility has shown up for April 13, 2068, but at only the 1-in-300,000 level. Do mark your calendar for April 13, 2029, however. Apophis will miss us by only three Earth diameters, and will be visible to the unaided eye creeping across the night sky as bright as 3rd magnitude.

Mission Update

Surviving the Late Heavy Bombardment Conventional wisdom has been that the solar system’s “Late Heavy Bombardment,” which pummeled all the inner planets and gave the Moon its biggest impact scars, must have sterilized Earth. The bombardment ended 3.9 billion years ago, so biologists assume that the ancestors of all living things today originated after that. Trace evidence of life exists from 3.83 billion years ago — which implies that life started as soon as it possibly could. That, in turn, would suggest that life arises quickly and easily on suitable planets everywhere. But a new study finds that bacteria several kilometers deep in Earth’s crust (where some microbes live today) could survive even multiple blows severe enough

Jonathan McDowell

Fobos-Grunt to Mars: Delayed

PHOBOS: HIRISE / MRO / LPL / NASA. SPACECRAFT: NPO LAVOCHKIN.

Russian space scientists have a long and mostly bitter history with the Red Planet. The occasional technical success (in 1971 Mars2 was the first human artifact to reach the planet’s surface) has been overshadowed by repeated failures. Most recently, in 1996 Russia’s first post-Soviet Mars p probe crashed in Bolivia soon after takeoff . off Undaunted, Russia’s Institute of Space

Research began planning an even more ambitious mission, Fobos-Grunt (“PhobosSample”). The U.S. has long discussed, but never funded, a sample return from the surface of Mars. Anticipating the Augustine Commission’s “stay out of gravity wells” recommendation, Fobos-Grunt would instead return a soil sample from Mars’s largest moon. Russia insisted that the mission would fly R during the October 2009 Mars-launch window. dur But no one was surprised when in September Bu word came at the last minute that Foboswo Grunt would not launch until 2011. In fact, G fundamental design questions remain about fu the type of soil sampler to be used.

Yinghuo-1 to Mars: Delayed Yi Also delayed is Fobos-Grunt’s Chinese passenger, a microsatellite to study the Martian environment. Hitching a ride to Mars on the Russian spacecraft, the 120kg Yinghuo-1 would be dropped off in an elliptical orbit. As it passes behind the limb of Mars as seen from Fobos-Grunt, its radio signals will allow scientists to measure Martian ionospheric conditions.

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OLEG ABRAMOV / UNIV. OF COLORADO

News Notes

to boil off all of Earth’s oceans. These microbes could later recolonize the surface when times improved. If so, today’s life could have originated anytime in Earth’s first 800 million years. If life didn’t necessarily spring into being as soon as conditions allowed, this weakens the case that life probably gets going easily on every good planet. The image above is from a temperature simulation of Earth during the bombardment era. ✦

Piggybacking to Venus The Yinghou-1 mission was to be the first of a new generation of small, cheap spacecraft flying as passengers on expensive planetary missions, but it now looks to be scooped by two Japanese probes. When Japan’s Venus Climate Orbiter takes off this May (S&T: November 2009, page 16), the second stage of its H-IIA rocket will jettison two small experiments into solar orbit. IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-Craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun) is a 20-meter-wide solar sail covered with photovoltaic cells. The sail will spend several months in a technology demonstration, generating power and using solar radiation pressure to change its orbit. UNITEC-1, the second passenger, is a 15-kg, 30-cm cube developed by a group of Japanese universities to test on-board computers in the interplanetary radiation environment, as well as deep-space communications and tracking. Flush with the success of a plethora of student-built 1-kg ‘cubesats’ in low Earth orbit, other university groups are also looking to interplanetary space for the first time. Contributing editor Jonathan McDowell covers more missions at Jonathan’s Space Report: www.planet4589.org.

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Peering into the Sun

NASA

SETS ITS SIGHTS ON THE

SUN

laura layton & dean pesnell The Solar Dynamics Observatory will reveal new details about how the Sun generates powerful storms that affect Earth. SOHO / NASA / ESA

THE S UN

PROFOUNDLY INFLUENCES influences Earth and our technology. When our nearest star produces flares and coronal mass ejections — sudden massive eruptions of gas and solar material with embedded magnetic fields — the solar wind can send swarms of particles that slam into Earth’s magnetic field. The effects of this space weather range from beautiful aurorae

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to more dramatic and deadly power outages, interrupted satellite communications, and harmful radiation. NASA’s newest Sun-focused mission — the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) — will study and investigate changes in solar variability and their effects on Earth. SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living With a Star Program. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch

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Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE)

Atmosphere Imaging Assembly (AIA) Solar arrays

Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) High-gain antennas

S&T: CASEY REED

Solar Dynamics Observatory

in early 2010 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. An Atlas V rocket will lift the 6,800-pound (3,100-kg) spacecraft into an inclined, geosynchronous orbit around Earth so it can continuously watch both the Sun and its dedicated ground station near Las Cruces, New Mexico. The spacecraft will study small-scale changes in the Sun’s atmosphere in many wavelengths simultaneously and observe how its powerful magnetic field is generated and structured. Scientists will also investigate how stored magnetic energy is converted and released in the form of the solar wind and energetic particles, and how these processes influence changes in solar energy output. We anticipate the spacecraft’s primary science mission to last 5 years, but it has enough fuel for 10 years. The $850 million mission will collect a staggering amount of data. SDO will take full-disk solar images every second with 10 times the resolution of high-definition television. At 4,096 by 4,096 pixels, SDO images will have the visual quality of an IMAX movie. Three instruments will collect about 1.5 terabytes of data per day, about the equivalent of downloading 500,000 songs daily. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), a four-telescope array, will image the outer layer of the Sun’s corona in multiple wavelengths nearly simultaneously. AIA will image the Sun in 10 wavelengths every 10 seconds. The images will span at least 1.3 solar diameters at a resolution of about one arcsecond (a patch of the Sun about the size of New Mexico). AIA data will help scientists understand how the Sun’s changing magnetic fields release the energy that heats the corona and triggers solar flares.

The Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) will measure variations in the Sun’s extreme-ultraviolet spectral irradiance over multiple time spans. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) will look inside the Sun and map the plasma flows that generate the Sun’s magnetic fields. HMI will use the sound waves moving across the Sun to build up images of the solar interior. HMI will also measure the strength and direction of magnetic fields emerging from the photosphere. HMI data will give insight into the mechanisms that cause the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle and reveal how magnetic fields become concentrated in the areas around sunspots. Combined, the SDO instruments will probe the Sun’s magnetic field and its terrestrial influences. Scientists will use SDO data to understand what causes a coronal loop to arch above the Sun, a solar flare to erupt, and a coronal mass ejection to suddenly blast millions of tons of material toward Earth. Learning more about these forms of space weather will help better protect our access to electricity, satellites in space, and human explorers who venture beyond Earth’s atmosphere. ✦ Laura Layton is a science writer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dean Pesnell is the SDO project scientist, and is also based at NASA Goddard.

◀ SOLAR ERUPTION This composite image from the SOHO spacecraft’s LASCO and EIT instruments shows a coronal mass ejection (CME) that contains millions of tons of material. SDO’s AIA instrument lacks a coronagraph for blocking out the Sun itself, but it will directly image CMEs more frequently, at more wavelengths, and at higher resolution.

IN GODDARD CLEAN ROOM A technician works on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The craft spans 14.8 feet (4.5 meters) along the Sun-pointing axis and weighs 6,800 pounds.

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NASA / SDO

▶ SDO

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Seeing the Universe Take Shape

Finding the First jonathan p. gardner

Hubble has imaged the most distant galaxies yet,

NASA / ESA / GARTH ILLINGWORTH / RYCHARD BOUWENS, ET AL.

AUTHOR PHOTO: NASA / BILL HRYBYK

N

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Galaxies but to see the first galaxies, astronomers need to go even deeper.

STAR-FORMATION HISTORY Right: A variety of surveys have enabled astronomers to plot the rise and fall of star formation dating back to redshift 8. Given the fact that mature stars existed at redshift 8, the first stars and galaxies must have formed even earlier, during a mysterious epoch that the James Webb Space Telescope is being built to explore.

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Age of universe (billions of years) 0

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GOING ULTRA-DEEP Left: By using Hubble to stare at a single field, astronomers bore a “tunnel” through space and time to see galaxies in the early universe. The latest Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, which shows the same patch of sky as an earlier Ultra-Deep Field, includes data taken by the new WFC3 camera. By going further into the infrared, this image reveals 5 galaxies around redshift 8.5.

southern constellation Fornax for more than 500 hours of exposure time. The resulting Hubble Ultra-Deep Field could see the faintest and most distant galaxies that the telescope is capable of viewing in visible light. The more recent WFC3 observations were made over the course of about 48 hours in the same field, and they extend the wavelength coverage into the near-infrared. From the Ultra-Deep Field and other galaxy surveys, astronomers have built up a history of star formation. The peak occurred about 10 billion years ago, about a fourth of the universe’s current age, when galaxies were churning out stars at about 15 times the rate today. As we go further back in time to when the very first stars and galaxies formed, the average star-formation rate should drop to zero. But the new WFC3 observations reveal a star-formation rate that remains comparable to that of galaxies today. Despite Hubble’s impressive technical accomplishment, we have to go even deeper to observe how the universe’s first galaxies formed. There are two problems: the first galaxies are too faint for Hubble or any existing telescope, and cosmic expansion has redshifted their visible light even beyond Hubble’s new near-infrared capability. To detect them,

Star formation rate

In May 2009, astronauts installed two new cameras in the Hubble Space Telescope, making Hubble more powerful than ever. The new Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) increases Hubble’s sensitivity and field of view at nearinfrared wavelengths, improving its ability to search for distant galaxies by as much as a factor of 20. It didn’t take long for WFC3 to make its mark. Garth Illingworth, Rychard Bouwens (both at the University of California, Santa Cruz), and their colleagues recently used WFC3 to find 5 galaxies, circled in the image to the left, that are more distant than any seen before, pushing our knowledge of galaxy evolution back to just 600 million years after the Big Bang (a redshift of about 8.5). These early galaxies are about the same distance as gamma-ray burst 090423, which recently established the record for most-distant known object (S&T: September 2009, page 26). But we’re interested in more than just breaking records. We want to understand how galaxies formed, and how they built themselves up into the giant congregations that we see today. Astronomers study distant galaxies by taking long exposures in relatively empty fields. In 2004 astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a small field in the

ALL SPACECRAFT ILLUSTRATIONS: S&T: CASEY REED

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Near Infrared (Hubble)

Infrared (Spitzer)

Combined Visible–Infrared (Hubble & Spitzer)

NASA / ESA / JPL-CALTECH / BAHRAM MOBASHER

Visible (Hubble)

DISTANT GALAXY The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes teamed up to detect one of the most distant galaxies ever seen (circled), at a redshift of about 6.5. The relatively massive galaxy becomes increasingly brighter in near-infrared and infrared wavelengths, an indication that its stellar population is surprisingly mature for a galaxy that existed only 850 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery suggests that the galaxy and many of its stars formed hundreds of millions of years earlier.

NASA is building the James Webb Space Telescope for launch around 2014. Webb will have a 6.5-meter primary mirror, much bigger than Hubble’s 2.4-meter primary, and Webb will be optimized for infrared observations to see the highly redshifted first galaxies.

Building Galaxies

NASA / ESA / NORBERT PIRZKAL

After the Big Bang, the universe was fi lled with hydrogen and helium, expanding and cooling and responding to

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the gravity of growing clumps of dark matter. Theory says that large stars formed first, when the universe was about 100 million years old, a redshift of 30 (S&T: May 2006, page 30). These stars quickly exploded as supernovae, whose winds blew all the gas out of the relatively small dark-matter clumps, disrupting any chance that nearby stars would form. At about 250 million years (redshift 16), clouds of gas began to collapse to form stars very rapidly, in a wide range of sizes. The first galaxies were born.

4.90

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The early galaxies seen in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field were small by today’s standards, not much bigger than globular clusters. They look like a mess: compact, blobby aggregations that resemble train wrecks. Their masses are difficult to measure, but they are all clearly smaller than our Milky Way. But these galaxies evolved into the regular galaxies that make up the Hubble Sequence. Galaxies build up through hierarchical merging. Relatively nearby galaxies appear to be interacting gravitationally, producing tidal tails, rings, and other structures that indicate recent collisions. When two large spiral galaxies collide in supercomputer simulations that trace the gravitational interactions of hundreds of millions of stars, they go through stages that look like observed merging galaxies (S&T: October 2006, page 30). The final result of these simulations is an elliptical galaxy. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are built up over cosmic history, as larger and larger galaxies merge. Spirals become ellipticals in major mergers; ellipticals merge in the centers of galaxy clusters to become central dominant galaxies, such as M87 in the Virgo Cluster. By this process, the very small galaxies that first formed in the early universe built up into the giant congregations we see today. For example, hundreds of small galaxies merged to form galaxies such as our Milky Way. The earliest galaxies are not only faint because they are very distant; they are also ultra-faint because of their diminutive size.

Techniques for Going Deep Computer models give us good ideas for how galaxy mergers occurred, but we’d like to see how this process occurred in the early universe. One way to accomplish this task is to use a technique predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The dark matter in a cluster of galaxies can act as a gravitational lens, focusing the light from background objects and boosting their observed brightness by a factor of 10 or more. Astronomers have used this technique to find a few faint and very distant galaxies, but the magnified area is small, so it’s difficult to obtain a statistical sample. The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field was taken through 4 wide visible-light filters, with the recent WFC3 addition taken through 3 near-infrared filters. For the most distant

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ROBERT GENDLER

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COLLIDING GALAXIES The famous colliding galaxies of the Antennae (NGC 4038 and 4039) allow astronomers to study the same merger processes in the relatively local universe that occurred much more frequently in the early universe. Note the extended tidal tails from gravitational interactions. The two galaxies might eventually merge into a giant elliptical galaxy.

galaxies, cosmic expansion has redshifted their ultraviolet output into the near-infrared. Intergalactic gas absorbs light emitted at even shorter ultraviolet wavelengths, so even-higher-redshift galaxies successively drop out of the images. By observing how galaxies disappear in these deep images, astronomers can measure the galaxies’ redshifts. But at the highest redshifts, when the emitted ultraviolet light is redshifted beyond the near-infrared part of the spectrum, Hubble can’t see the galaxies at all, not even when using a gravitational lens. Infrared light is heat radiation, so a telescope must be very cold to see it at all. Otherwise, doing infrared astronomy with a warm telescope is like doing visiblelight astronomy with a telescope full of light bulbs; the telescope itself outshines what you’re trying to observe. Heaters keep Hubble at room temperature, about 25°C,

TRAIN WRECKS These faint, fuzzy blobs in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field might not seem like much, but they’re the building blocks of today’s galaxies. Each blob is 1/100 to 1/1,000 the size of our Milky Way, but blazes with the light of millions of young stars. The tadpole-like tails in three of the galaxies indicate that they’re merging with neighboring galaxies. The numbers refer to each galaxy’s redshift.

For more on the James Webb Space Telescope, visit www.jwst.nasa.gov.

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tion of stars, but contained a substantial population of older stars, possibly as much as 400 or 500 million years old. Some of these galaxies must have formed when the universe was much less than 1 billion years old, and their ultraviolet light was redshifted well into the infrared, beyond Hubble’s reach. Although Spitzer was cold enough to detect infrared light, its primary mirror is just 85 centimeters. This small size limits Spitzer’s sensitivity to faint galaxies in two ways. First, it’s simply not collecting enough light to see galaxies fainter than those in the Ultra-Deep Field. Second, the telescope’s resolution depends on the ratio of the wavelength divided by the aperture. With longer wavelengths and a smaller mirror, the faintest galaxies in Spitzer images overlap one another.

Primary Mirror Sizes

Hubble (2.4 meters)

Webb (6.5 meters)

The James Webb Space Telescope

Spitzer (0.85 meter)

The James Webb Space Telescope will be colder than Hubble and larger than Spitzer. Sitting behind a giant sunshield, Webb will radiate its heat into deep space and passively cool to beyond –225°C. Its large mirror and cold temperature translates into the infrared sensitivity needed to detect the first galaxies that formed 250 to 400 million years after the Big Bang. There are major technological hurdles in building Webb. As Hubble goes in and out of sunlight, heaters keep the telescope at a constant temperature. NASA launched Spitzer into a solar drift-away orbit, orbiting the Sun behind Earth and drifting 10 million miles from Earth each year. By moving away from us, Spitzer can use a shield to prevent sunlight from heating the telescope. Webb will also hide behind a sunshield, one as big as a tennis court! NASA will launch Webb into a special orbit around the second Lagrangian point in the Earth–Sun system, called L 2, about 1 million miles from Earth. Being more distant from the Sun than Earth, the observatory would normally take longer than one year to orbit the Sun, and slowly drift away, like Spitzer. But at L2, Earth’s gravity will pull on Webb just enough to keep it in synch, so the Sun, Earth, and the L 2 point are always in a line. Webb’s sunshield will not only protect the telescope from the Sun’s heat, but also from scattered light from the sunlit portions of the Earth and Moon. The telescope will always be overhead at midnight each night. The largest launch rockets are 5 meters wide, so

in order to maintain its stability as it goes in and out of sunlight in low-Earth orbit. Although the telescope has some near-infrared capability, its temperature limits its sensitivity at the longest wavelengths. In 2003 NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared-sensitive telescope that uses liquid helium to stay colder than –262°C, or only 11°C above absolute zero. Spitzer provides the infrared sensitivity that Hubble lacks. When astronomers pointed Spitzer at the Ultra-Deep Field, they were surprised to discover that some of the most distant galaxies were shining brightly in the infrared. When galaxies first form stars, the largest stars dominate their light. These stars, 30 to 50 solar masses, are very hot and put out most of their radiation in the ultraviolet. But burning brightly has its price, and the most massive stars are also the shortest lived. After just a few million years, they run out of hydrogen fuel and explode as supernovae. Smaller stars, like our Sun, come to dominate the light output of the galaxy. These smaller stars are cooler and put out most of their energy as visible or near-infrared light, with much less ultraviolet. For the distant galaxies in the Ultra-Deep Field, their emitted ultraviolet light is redshifted to the edge of the visible-light band, and their emitted visible light is redshifted into the infrared. The Spitzer detections showed that these galaxies were not forming their fi rst genera-

VISIBLE

S&T: CASEY REED (2)

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another technological development is needed to enable Webb to deploy its 6.5-meter primary mirror in space. The mirror consists of 18 segments, each with an independently controllable position. The mirror will stand on its edge in the rocket and the three segments on each side will be folded back like the leaves of a tabletop. The sunshield is folded around the mirror. After launch, the solar panels will unfurl to supply the observatory with power. The communications antenna will point toward Earth, and a deployed isolation tower will separate the telescope from the spacecraft. The sunshield will then unfold, and its five layers will separate. The sunshield has five layers for two reasons. First, heat can escape between the layers. Second, if it’s punctured by a micrometeorite, the holes will be unlikely to line up in such a way that sunlight will scatter onto the primary mirror. Finally, the secondary mirror will be supported on a three-legged spider, and the leaves of the primary mirror will be folded out. Once everything has been deployed, the telescope will be pointed at a bright star, and the 18 petals of the primary mirror will be brought to a common focus. All this new technology comes at a price. The total lifecycle cost of Webb will be about $5 billion for NASA, plus additional contributions from Europe and Canada. Late 1990s estimates ranged from $500 million to $1 billion for construction costs only, which did not include technology development, design work, or post-launch operations. But even the cost of the construction phase has more than doubled. Much of this increase is due to the rigorous testing program that will virtually ensure that Webb will work when it reaches its proper orbit. The current cost of Webb is comparable to the cost of Hubble’s construction, once corrected for inflation and changes in accounting procedures. Following an independent review, the Webb

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DEEP AND DARK The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field lies in the dim constellation Fornax, tucked into a dark loop of Eridanus. The field is centered on right ascension 3h 32m 40.0s, declination –27º 48´ 00˝. Only 3 arcminutes on a side, it spans as much sky as a grain of sand held at arm’s length. The yellow cross marks the spot; the actual field at this scale is microscopic.

Lagrangian Points L5

L 2 Earth

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L4 Not to scale

S&T: CASEY REED

Webb

James Webb The James Webb Space Telescope is named for NASA’s second administrator. James Webb’s term (1961–1968) spanned the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, a period of rapid growth for NASA that witnessed the successful completion of the Mercury and Gemini manned spaceflight programs, and the early years of Apollo. Many successful spacescience missions were also developed or flown during Webb’s tenure.

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THE NEXT GENERATION OF

ASTRONOMY

CAMERAS

MANUFACTURED TO INDUSTRIAL STANDARDS

8

project recently transitioned to its formal “implementation” phase, and NASA certified the budget and schedule to Congress.

1/4“ CCD (60FPS) 1/3“ CCD (30FPS) 1/2“ CCD (15FPS)

The James Webb Space Telescope will be the successor to Hubble and Spitzer. Like Hubble, it represents a major international collaboration, with contributions from the European and Canadian space agencies. Although initially designed to detect the first galaxies, it will be a general-purpose observatory able to address nearly every aspect of astronomy. Stars and planets form in dense clouds of gas and dust in a complex interaction between gravity, angular momentum, gas pressure, and magnetic fields. Dust blocks much of the ultraviolet and visible light from escaping the cloud, and stellar cradles such as M16 appear as beautiful but opaque nebulae. Infrared light penetrates the dust to reveal the forming stars. At a later stage, the star forms a protoplanetary disk; the star heats the disk so that it glows in the infrared. By providing high-resolution, high-sensitivity images in the infrared, Webb will be a powerful tool for investigating the formation of stars and their planetary systems. Like Hubble and Spitzer, Webb will be used by thousands of astronomers from

WWW.ASTRONOMYCAMERAS.COM THE

IMAGINGSOURCE ASTRONOMY CAMERAS

30 January 2010 worldmags

sky & telescope

Jonathan P. Gardner is Chief of the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

HUBBLE

SPITZER

JAMES WEBB

Low-Earth Orbit

Heliocentric Earth-Trailing

Sun–Earth L 2

13.3 meters

4 meters

22 meters

11,110 kilograms

865 kilograms

6,530 kilograms

300 kelvins

5.5 kelvins*

35 to 55 kelvins

1990

2003

2014 (scheduled)

Space Shuttle Discovery

Delta II

Ariane V

57.6 meters

10.2 meters

131.4 meters

No. of instruments

5**

3*

4

Angular resolution

0.043 arcsec at 0.5 microns (μ)

1.6 arcsec at 6.5 μ

0.063 arcsec at 2.0 μ

Orbit Length Mass Mirror temperature

Launch vehicle Focal length

CONTROL SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

around the world, and it will deliver beautiful pictures. And just as we saw with Webb’s predecessors, its most important discoveries are likely to be things we haven’t even thought of yet. ✦

NASA Space Telescopes Compared

Launch date

USB CONNECTORS FIREWIRE CONNECTORS

Redshift is a measure of how much an object’s light is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Redshifts for objects within our galaxy are generally due to motion away from Earth. But redshifts for distant galaxies result from cosmic expansion, with the higher the redshift, the farther the galaxy. We see distant galaxies as they existed long ago, and the expanding universe has grown in size since then. So astronomers often refer to distances to extragalactic objects in terms of redshift rather than light-years. Astronomers sometimes use lookback time, or time elapsed since the Big Bang, which took place about 13.7 billion years ago.

A General-Purpose Observatory

NOW IN GigE MONOCHROME COLOR WITH & WITHOUT IR CUT

High Redshift = Large Distance

* Since the depletion of coolant on May 19, 2009, the Spitzer primary mirror has warmed up to about 30 kelvins, and only 1 instrument is working. ** Hubble currently has 5 science intruments, plus the Fine Guidance Sensor, which is sometimes used for astrometric science. Hubble has had 12 total instruments over its liftime, including those that have been replaced in the servicing missions.

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Chasing the Moonshadow

July’s

South Pacific Eclipse On July 11th a lot of ocean and a few tiny bits of land will lie under a Moon-blackened Sun.

The third total eclipse of the Sun in three years is coming up on July 11th, when the long, thin finger of the Moon’s shadow will again draw its tip across Earth’s surface. But unlike the 2007 and 2008 total eclipses, which offered many possibilities for land-based viewing, the 11,000-kilometer (6,800-mile) path of the 2010 eclipse is confined almost exclusively to the South Pacific Ocean.

The Path of Totality Total eclipse begins at sunrise almost 2,000 km northeast of New Zealand, at 18:15 Universal Time. Five minutes later the Moon’s shadow makes the first of its very few appearances on terra firma. The island of Mangaia is a mountainous volcanic remnant in the Cook Islands just south of the eclipse path’s central line. The duration of totality here is 3 minutes 18 seconds, with the Sun 14° above the horizon. The northern edge of the shadow’s umbra (totaleclipse zone) just misses Tahiti in French Polynesia, passing a tantalizingly close 20 kilometers south of the island.

fred espenak and jay anderson

Just to the east, several atolls of the Tuamotu Archipelago are more fortunate. Tiny Haraiki and Tauere are deep in the eclipse path, but neither has facilities of any kind. The slightly larger Hikueru atoll does have a territorial airport in support of its small permanent population. Totality here lasts 4 minutes 35 seconds. When greatest eclipse occurs, at 19:33:31 UT, the duration on the central line is 5 minutes 20 seconds — but this point is hundreds of kilometers from any land. Nearly 40 minutes later and 1,000 kilometers farther southeast, totality crosses Easter Island, one of the world’s most remote inhabited locations. The landscape is dominated by three extinct volcanoes and 887 mysterious stone statues carved a thousand years ago by the thriving inhabitants at the time. From the capital, Hanga Roa, the Sun’s altitude is 40° during the 4 minutes and 41 seconds of total eclipse. Tourism is Easter Island’s main industry, and the eclipse will bring record numbers to this remote destination. The shadow then must travel 3,700 kilometers to reach its final landfall in extreme southern South America. ALL ECLIPSE PHOTOGRAPHS © FRED ESPENAK

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The eclipse fortunately occurs during the “dry” season, though this is a relative term at best for tropical and subthou tropical locations. Satellite cloud-cover data show that the sunniest spots lie at the lowest latitudes, favoring French Polynesia and the Tuamotu Archipelago. Mangaia lies within the subtropical high-pressure belt circling the globe at 30° south latitude, but it has the misfortune to be close to the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ). Winds from the eastern and western Pacific converge in the SPCZ, producing a band of enhanced cloudiness and showers that meanders in response to local conditions. This gives Mangaia an average cloudiness of 63% and many rainy days. Tahiti’s clear-sky prospects are better. Average cloudiness at Papeete’s airport for the past 20 years is a promising 48%. Sunshine for July averages 68% of the maximum possible (that is, 68% of daytime is sunlit). The surrounding waters are less cloudy, so prospects on the central line south of the island will be even better. The

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Chil mountainous region has no suitable viewing sites, Chile’s tourist resort of El Calafate offers promise but Argentina’s A the final opportunity before the shadow’s umbra lifts as th from Earth at sunset and returns to space.

ds at sunrise

OCEAN ECLIPSE The July 11th total eclipse begins at sunrise northeast of New Zealand, sweeps across the South Pacific for 2½ hours, and ends at sunset over a wild region of South America. Only 0.48% of Earth’s surface experiences totality, but a much larger area sees a partial eclipse. At any location, interpolate between the red lines to find the percent of the Sun’s diameter that the Moon will cover at maximum partial eclipse. The blue time lines show when this will happen, in Universal Time (GMT).

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added advantage of mobility that a ship provides makes cruise ships off Tahiti the venue of choice for this eclipse. East of Tahiti, satellite observations show that average cloudiness is 5% less than at Papeete. At Hao, near the southern edge of the path, land-based observations show the average cloudiness to be just over 50%, and satellite observations are even more favorable. Easter Island’s more southerly latitude dims its weather prospects. The island is often enveloped in frontal systems

▴ Just

before totality during the eclipse of March 29, 2006, author Fred Espenak took this rapid series of images capturing the crescent Sun’s breakup into Baily’s beads on the Moon’s edge.

◀ Partial

and total phases of the 2006 eclipse.

▶ Fred

and Nan Espenak take a break from their cameras to watch totality from Jalu, Libya, in 2006.

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FRED ESPENAK

FOR MORE INFORMATION The NASA Solar Eclipse Bulletin for 2010 contains detailed local predictions, tables, maps, and weather prospects. For a free copy of the 77-page book, email the author at [email protected]. It is available in PDF format at eclipse.gsfc .nasa.gov/SEpubs/2010/rp.html. More information, updates, maps, and diagrams are at eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/ SEmono/TSE2010/TSE2010.html.

sweeping up from the Southern Hemisphere’s “Roaring Forties” latitudes. Average cloud cover is 69%, and the percent of possible sunshine is just 50%. The island’s volcanoes are important cloud-makers on their leeward sides, so observers are advised to select coastal sites exposed to the onshore wind. Cloudiness changes constantly from one location to another. In the South American mountains, cloud-cover prospects in the El Calafate region are reasonable with an average value of 54%. However, the low altitude of the Sun makes this a challenging venue, as any amount of cloud will appear thicker near the horizon. Low clouds are frequent during this season, probably generated in large part by the local lakes. Finding a site upwind from the lakes may make the difference in successfully viewing the total eclipse suspended just above the distant Andes peaks. While the 2010 eclipse offers challenges to prospective eclipse viewers, it

S&T: GREGG DINDERMAN

Chasing the Moonshadow

E A S TE R I S L AND TO U R For eclipse chasers seeking a land-based site, Sky & Telescope is cosponsoring a cruise to Easter Island. See SkyandTelescope.com/ easterisland.

will be the last opportunity to observe the Sun’s corona for more than two years. The next total eclipse occurs November 13–14, 2012 — visible at sunrise from northern Australia but mostly, again, from the South Pacific. ✦ Astronomer Fred Espenak (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) runs the websites eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov and www.MrEclipse .com, and he coauthored the recently published Totality: Eclipses of the Sun (3rd edition) with Mark Littmann and Ken Willcox. Meteorologist Jay Anderson (University of Manitoba) has made eclipse weather forecasts since 1979 and has journeyed worldwide to confirm his predictions in person.

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CGEM – $1,399

CG5 – $575

Celestron NexStar SE PRIORITY DELIVERY FREE SHIPPING 4” SE – $499 5” SE –$699 6” SE – $799

8” SE –$1,199 BEST VALUE!

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IT DOES ALL THE WORK. YOU HAVE ALL THE FUN. The LS-6 with LightSwitch™ Technology combines the most sophisticated optics, mechanics and electronics to bring you the most sophisticated, easiest to use telescope available. Only from Meade®. Aligning a telescope, even a computerized one, is a daunting task. But the LS-6 changes all of that. Just flip the switch and all of the work is done for you in just minutes. Leaving the rest of the evening for you to have all of the fun. Not only is the LS-6 the easiest telescope to use, but with its array of features, it’s one of the highest performance scopes you can buy.

UNPARALLELED MEADE OPTICS Take your pick: Meade’s SchmidtCassegrain (SC) optics for high performance at the best possible price. Or, for the truly discerning who will not tolerate anything but the very best, there is Meade’s Advanced ComaFree™ (ACF™) optical system for the sharpest, brightest image you can get.

HEAVY-DUTY MECHANICAL DESIGN With 4.87" solid aluminum, helically-cut gears and brass worm drives, the motion on the LS-6 is smooth and solid. That, and an oversize aluminum fork arm, guarantees the precision needed for incredibly accurate pointing and tracking.

STATE-OF-THE-ART ELECTRONICS With a 400Mhz BlackFin® processor at its core the LS-6 has enough computing power and speed to take you to the edge of the Universe and back, again and again. It’s the most technologically advanced computer system ever put in a commercial telescope.

MEADE’S EXCLUSIVE ASTRONOMER INSIDE Take a multi-media guided tour of the universe or select your favorite object and the LS-6’s Astronomer Inside™ gives you over four hours of fun and informative audio descriptions of the objects you are viewing in the eyepiece.

OPTIONAL VIDEO MONITOR Experience the whole dazzling multi-media presentation that is built into the LS-6. The video monitor shows you videos, animations and photos of the objects you are viewing. It also provides easy to navigate menus to make using the LS-6 even easier. For more information on the revolutionary LS-6 — or on any of the full line of Meade astronomical products — go to www.meade.com.

NEW! OPTIONAL VIDEO MONITOR AND BRACKET. Designed specifically for the LS-6, this optional 3.5" monitor completes the multimedia experience. Only $99!

6" LS-6 SC - $1,399 • 6" LS-6 ACF - $1,499 ©2010 Meade Instruments Corp. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change. BlackFin is a registered trademark of Analog Devices. 30-09060.

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Telescopes.com 800.303.5873

Woodland Hills 888.427.8766

OPT Telescopes 800.483.6287

Astronomics 800.422.7876

Optics Planet 800.504.5897

Scope City Canada • Khan Scopes 800.235.3344 800.580.7160

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Innovative Astronomy Gear

Hot New Products Our 12th annual roundup of Hot Products highlights the most intriguing new astronomy gear in the worldwide market.

By the Editors of SKY & TELESCOPE

2010 2010 for

What a year! After more than a decade scouring the astronomical marketplace for our annual Hot Products roundups, we have a pretty good idea of what a typical year serves up, and 2010 is anything but typical. Our initial search revealed dozens and dozens of new products. The winnowing process, honed by years of experience, still produced a “short list” with more than twice the usual number of candidates, making our fi nal selection especially difficult. But just because something is new doesn’t mean we consider it “hot.” For that, we need to see an item offering a new technology, providing a simple solution to an old problem, or delivering a remarkable price-to-performance ratio. And that last qualification played a major role this year. Consider, for example, a 120-mm apo refractor that delivers visual performance on par with premium-priced instruments but costs only $1,495 (page 39), or a 10-inch Ritchey-Chrétien astrograph costing about one-fourth what similar instruments did just a couple of years ago (page 42). Whether or not you agree with our picks, we hope you’ll enjoy reading about the products that intrigued us the most.

JUST FLIP THE SWITCH Meade’s LightSwitch technology adds a new level of automation to the set up and use of Go To telescopes. Available with the company’s 6-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain and Advanced Coma-Free telescopes, LightSwitch uses GPS satellites, internal level and magnetic-north sensors, and a built-in medium-field CCD camera (for identifying alignment stars) to automatically initialize the Go To computer. All you do is set the scope down, plug it in, and flip one switch. After a few minutes you’ll be ready to view thousands of celestial objects at the push of a button. And that’s just the beginning — the scope’s integrated multimedia material is as educational as it is entertaining. Watch for our review in the coming months.

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Meade 6-inch LightSwitch telescopes US price: from $1,299 Meade www.meade.com

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THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT HAT

US price: from $11.99 Available from the iPhone App Store http://star-map.fr

AstroTrac Travel System ▶ US price: about $2,500 AstroTrac www.astrotrac.com

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Edge HD Telescopes US price: from $1,299 Celestron www.celestron.com

STELLAR PERFORMANCE Billed as aplanatic Schmidt telescopes, the Ed EdgeHD HD series i represents t th the firstt major j redesign of the Schmidt-Cassegrain optical system that Celestron introduced in the 1960s. The addition of a two-element field flattener and coma corrector in the scope’s main baffle tube produces pinpoint star images across the whole field of today’s large-format CCD cameras. And a new mirror-support system reduces the image shift that was often the bane of earlier Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes. Watch for our review in the coming months.

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Starmap

Want to know what that bright star is in the morning twilight? Now you can find out with an app for your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch. Starmap is a full-featured planetarium program with top-notch graphics, which can show you where the Sun, Moon, planets, up to 2½ million stars, and thousands of deep-sky objects are located in your sky. Input your location and time manually, or let the GPS feature of your iPhone do it automatically. Starmap is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, and Danish. sh.

It doesn’t get much more portable than this — the entire equatorial tracking setup pictured here (sans telescope) fits in a shoulder bag just 6 inches (150 mm) in diameter and 29½ inches long. Weighing about 26 pounds (12 kg), the Travel System from AstroTrac has a payload capacity of 33 pounds, making it ideal for cameras and small telescopes. Its tracking accuracy is sufficient for unguided exposures several minutes long, depending on your camera’s focal length. The heart of the Travel System is the TT320X tracking mount, an updated version of the model we reviewed in the October 2008 issue, page 38. Sk yandTelescope.com

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Innovative Astronomy Gear

Nautilus Motorized Filter Wheels

AFFORDABLE FILTER WHEEL P i d more like Priced lik manually ll operated t d models, d l th the Orion Nautilus Motorized Filter Wheel is an excellent value for those looking to add computer automation to their imaging systems. Versions are available that hold four 2-inch or seven 1¼-inch filters. Both require less than 1 inch of back focus, are powered by USB computer connections, and are compatible with 64-bit Vista, Windows 7, and ASCOM. T-threads on both sides of the body and an included 2-inch nosepiece provide a variety of mounting options.

FirstScope

Digital Display Gauge ▾

US price: $49.95 Celestron www.celestron.com

Available on select William Optics telescopes William Optics www.williamoptics.com

ORION TELESCOPES & BINOCULARS

US price: from $429.95 Orion Telescopes & Binoculars www.oriontelescopes.com

STARTING OUT RIGHT

S&T: DENNIS DI CICCO

Don’t let the toy-store price fool you; the exceptionally well-designed Celestron FirstScope received praise from the S&T staff, as well as high marks in our Quick Look review in the October 2009 issue, page 40. The intuitively easy-to-use 3-inch reflector features a solid Dobsonian-style mount and quality construction throughout. The rack-and-pinion focuser accepts standard 1¼-inch eyepieces and is supplied with 20- and 4-mm eyepieces that yield 15× and 75×, respectively. It’s one the best values we’ve ever seen for a “beginner’s” telescope.

S&T: DENNIS DI CICCO

Red Dot Finder Heater US price: $25 Kendrick Astro Instruments www.kendrickastro.com

PRECISSION FOCUSING

KENDRICK ASTRO INSTRUMENTS

DEW BE GONE

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Red dot fi Red-dot finders nders are universally praised for their simplicity and intuitive operation. But their viewing windows are often the first things to dew up under a clear sky. Now Kendrick Astro Instruments, long known for its dew-fighting innovations, has a custom-made window heater for one of the most popular styles of red-dot finder. The 12-volt DC heater draws just 0.2 amp. It’s an elegant solution to a common problem.

The Crayford-style Crayford style focuser on select William Optics telescopes now includes a built-in digital readout accurate to one-hundredth of a millimeter. The fully electronic system reads the focuser’s position from a special encoder strip located beneath the engraved scale on the drawtube. The gauge makes it a snap to zero in on the precise focus for digital cameras.

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DELIGHTFUL SKYWATCHER

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S&T: DENNIS DI CICCO

The price may not look like it belongs to a 120-mm (4¾-inch) apo refractor, but the views through the eyepiece certainly do. Reviewed in the October 2009 issue, page 38, the SkyWatcher SW 120mmED Refractor offers color-free, crisp, contrasty views that are on par with apo refractors costing thousands of dollars more. Making the deal even sweeter, the f/7.5 refractor (shown on an optional mount) comes with a 2-inch diagonal, 20- and 5-mm eyepieces, a 9 × 50 finder, tube rings, a Vixen-style dovetail mounting bar, and a carrying case.

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100° Eyepieces

EXPANSIVE VIEW

US price: from $399 www.televue.com www.explorescientific.com www.tmboptical.com

For or the third year in a row row, eyepie eyepieces with an incredible 100° apparent field of view have been selected as Hot Products. It’s understandable, since observers worldwide have raved about the experience of looking into an eyepiece where you have to roll your eye around to take in the whole scene. In addition to two new Ethos eyepieces (10- and 21-mm) from Tele Vue, the company that pioneered the 100° astronomical eyepiece, there are two models from TMB Optical (9- and 16-mm) and three from industry newcomer Explore Scientific (9-, 14-, and 20-mm). Check out the respective company websites for complete details and prices.

SW 120ED Refractor US price: $1,495 Sky-Watcher U.S.A. www.skywatcherusa.com

Hyperion Astrograph

DEEP-SKY HEAVYWEIGHT

US price: $10,000 Starizona www.starizona.com

Several everal years in development development, the Hyperion 12½ 12½-inch f/8 astrograph is designed for large-format astrophotography. The Harmer-Wynne optical system promises flatfield, diffraction-limited performance across a 70-mm-diameter (1.6°) image circle with less than 10% vignetting. A host of advanced features such as carbon-fiber tube, temperature-compensated focusing, and built-in instrument rotator included in the base price make this a serious entry in the rarified world of premium astrographs.

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Innovative Astronomy Gear

A FLATTER FIELD

S&T: SEAN WALKER

With only a few noteworthy (and (a expensive) exceptions, refractors need optional field flatteners in order to deliver acceptable star images across the field of today’s DSLR cameras. Custom-designed flatteners usually cost hundreds of dollars, but the Astro-Tech 2″ Field Flattener is only $150. Furthermore, it’s designed for any refractor with a focal ratio between f/6 and f/8. And there are reports that it helps flatten the field of Astro-Tech’s Ritchey-Chrétien astrographs (see page 42). The flattener was reviewed in the September 2009 issue, page 38.

2-inch Field Flattener US price: $150 Astronomy Technologies www.astronomytechnologies.com

TMB92 Light US price: $1,495 TMB Optical www.tmboptical.com

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TMB-92 The TMB 92 Signature Series Refractor got such a rave review in our March 2009 issue, page 36, that we could not help but take note when the company introduced a new “light” version costing hundreds of dollar less. Featuring the same 92-mm f/5.5 triplet objective as the original, the light version has a smaller-diameter tube and the premium Feather Touch focuser has been replaced with a conventional dual-speed 2-inch focuser. Same great views; new lower price.

US price: $399.95 Orion Telescopes & Binoculars www.oriontelescopes.com

NO MORE PINCHED FINGERS

SMARTER STARBLAST The 6-inch 6 i h f/5 Newtonian N t i refl flector t that received an excellent review in our September 2008 issue, just got a brain. Orion’s StarBlast 6i IntelliScope now includes the company’s time-tested computerized object locator, which makes it a breeze to find more than 14,000 celestial objects stored in its built-in database. The feature-packed scope comes on a fully assembled Dobsonian-style mount that we found to be exceptionally beginner friendly without compromising the needs of experienced observers. 40 worldmags

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FARPOINT ASTRONOMICAL RESEARCH

ORION TELESCOPES & BINOCULARS

Eukleídes Binocular Mount US price: $485 Farpoint Astronomical Research www.farpointastro.com

By “literally turning it inside out,” the folks at Farpoint Astronomical Research have made the traditional parallelogram binocular mount stiffer, more resistant to vibration, and safer (no accessible moving parts to pinch fingers). An internal sliding counterweight adds to the mount’s elegant appearance. There are a variety of options available for attaching binoculars to the unit.

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Pressure-tuned Solar Filter Lunt Solar Systems www.luntsolarsystems.com

QUANTUN SCIENTIFIC IMAGING

COMPACT CCD CAMERA

QSI 583 CCD Camera US price: from $3,595 Quantum Scientific Imaging www.qsimaging.com

No CCD sensor in recent memory has generated as much excitement as the 8.3megapixel Kodak KAF-8300 with tiny 5.4-micron pixels. All the major manufacturers of astronomical CCD cameras offer models with this detector, but those from Quantum Scientific Imaging caught our eye, because the built-in filter wheel is so close to the sensor that it works with standard 1¼inch filters. This can save hundreds of dollars compared to cameras that use external filter wheels and, by necessity, larger filters.

DREAM CELLULAR

CAST MIRROR BLANKS

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TUNING IN THE SUN

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Even ven though the Sun has been notably absent of spots lately, it’s still a fascinating target for telescopes equipped for viewing in hydrogen-alpha (H-alpha, for short) light. Long a leader in the field of H-alpha filters, Lunt Solar Systems has developed a new pressure-tuning method for rapidly shifting the passband of its etalon-based fi lters by more than 0.75 angstrom. A quick turn of the pressure regulator allows you to see the changing appearance of solar features that are Doppler shifted by their motion toward and away from us. The system is seen here installed on the company’s LS60THa/B1200CPT solar telescope priced at $1,493.

Ligh Lightweight mirrors have been the Holy Grail of telescope makes (both amateur and professional) for decades. Reducing a mirror’s mass reduces ama the time it takes to adjust to temperature changes. It also reduces the mass and complexity of the optical support system and the telescope in general. A new start-up company, Dream Cellular, is using sophisticated computer technology to design and cast some of the most advanced lightweight mirror blanks ever made for telescopes. Having as Cellular Mirrors little as 25% of the mass of a conventional solid mirror, the blanks still exceed the stiffness of a Dream Cellular www.dreamcellularllc.com monolithic disk.

TRIO OF TITLES It’s no surprise that we like books books, but three titles captured our fancy this year. Part coffee-table book and part observer’s guide, the lavishly illustrated Atlas of the Messier Objects ($54.95, Cambridge University Press) breathes new life into the sky’s most popular deep-sky objects and the people who discovered them. The Cambridge Double Star Atlas ($35, Cambridge University Press) is a pure observer’s guide, with data and charts for hundreds of multiple stars covering the entire sky. The new edition of Star Testing Astronomical Telescopes ($34.95, Willmann-Bell) is a major update of a work that should be on the shelf of every observer who wants to get the most from his or her telescope. We highly recommend all three titles.

Three Books Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Willmann-Bell www.willbell.com

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Innovative Astronomy Gear

LEAVE THE COMPUTER HOME Many deep deep-sky sky astrophotographers shooting with DSLR cameras don’t want to lug a computer outside to run an autoguider. Fortunately, there’s now the StarShoot Solitaire AutoGuider from Orion Telescopes & Binoculars. The stand-alone unit has a 3.8-ounce guider head with a CMOS sensor that fits in conventional 1¼-inch focusers and a palm-size control box that runs on 12-volt DC power. The Solitaire is compatible with any mount that complies with the de facto SBIG ST-4 autoguiding standard.

StarShoot Solitaire AutoGuider US price: $599.95 Orion Telescopes & Binoculars www.oriontelescopes.com ORION TELESCOPES & BINOCULARS

8- and 10-inch Ritchey-Chrétien Astrographs

CASSEGRAIN COLLIMATION For many years Newtonian telescope owners have enjoyed the benefits of laser collimators to align the optics of their scopes during daylight. Now HoTech Corp. has expanded its line of laser collimation tools to include a unique system for Cassegrain telescopes. The Advanced CT Laser Collimator uses a target with three built-in lasers and a special reflector that fits in the scope’s eyepiece holder, providing a highly accurate double-pass optical arrangement.

Advanced CT Laser Collimator US price: about $500 HoTech Corp. www.hotechusa.com

SWEET ASTROGRAPHS

HOTECH

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US price: $1,395 (8-inch), $2,795 (10-inch) Astronomy Technologies www.astronomytechnologies.com

Ritchey-Chrétien refl regarded among today’s elite Ritchey Chrétien reflectors flectors are highly reg astrophotographers, and premium instruments often carry price tags starting at about $1,000 per inch of aperture. So it’s the best kind of “sticker shock” to see the prices for Astro-Tech’s 8- and 10-inch f/8 Ritchey-Chrétiens, which pack features too numerous to list here. Our review of the 8-inch scope appears in last month’s issue, page 38, and our initial hands-on look at the 10-inch suggests that it will be equally exciting for deep-sky astrophotographers.

SG-4 Autoguider

Twenty Group forever changed the world of deep-sky wenty years ago the folks at Santa Barbara Instrument Instrum astrophotography with their introduction of its now-legendary ST-4 autoguider. The latest model in the company’s evolution of stand-alone autoguiders is the SG-4. You only need a separate computer for a one-time calibration with your telescope mount. After that, the SG-4 runs independently, making it ideal for DSLR photographers who want to keep things simple in the field. Indeed, the SG-4 is billed as a “smart” autoguider that features one-button operation. 42 worldmags

January 2010

sky & telescope

SBIG (2)

ONE-BUTTON AUTOGUIDING

US price: $995 Santa Barbara Instrument Group (SBIG) www.sbig.com

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A PAIR OF PORTABLE GEMS Rated for payloads l d off 40 and d 90 pounds, d respectively, i l Celestron’s C l ’ CGEM (left) and CGE Pro German equatorial mounts offer unquestionable value when it comes to Go To performance for astrophotographers and observers. Designed for portable operation using 12-volt DC power, both mounts have many advanced features, including precise polar-alignment routines that don’t require clear views of the celestial pole. Our review of the heavyweight CGE Pro appears in the November 2009 issue, page 50. S&T:

N RO ST

US price: $1,399 (CGEM) and $4,999 (CGE Pro) Celestron www.celestron.com

DI C ICCO

LE

NIS

CE

D EN

German Equatorial Mounts

LARGE-FORMAT AND SELF GUIDING

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IG )

Self-guiding STX CCD Camera

SB

After development, SBIG has introduced fter several years of development d its STX line of CCD cameras. Designed to handle largeformat sensors, including Kodak’s 16-megapixel KAF-16803 803 chip, the STX series is unique in featuring the company’s ’s patented self-guiding technology. A separate CCD, mounted nted next to the imaging sensor, monitors guide stars at the edge of the field. New to the STX line is its ability to let users indepennde dently tweak the focus of the guiding chip, which is important mportant given its significant off-axis position due to thee large ima imaging aging ch chip.

US price: $11,875 Santa Barbara Instrument Group (SBIG) www.sbig.com

Versa 108 ED Refractor US price: $1,699 iOptron www.ioptron.com

APO WITH A FIELD FLATTENER

IOP

TRO

N

We were w impressed when the cost of some 4-inch 4 inch apo refractors dropped to the $2,000 range, so there’s little surprise we like the dropp 108-mm (4¼-inch) f/6.1 apo from iOptron. The ED-glass Versa 10 objective is fitted to a well-crafted, 114-mm-diameter doublet o assembly with a rotating, dual-speed 2-inch focuser. And tube assem photographers shooting day or night will like the included 2-inch photo field flattener that turns the scope into an excellent “telephoto” lens of 660 mm focal length.

Sk yandTelescope.com

January 2010

43

worldmags

Fred Schaaf Northern Hemisphere’s Sky

New Sights for the New Year A familiar constellation can offer surprises.

“There is nothing new under the Sun,” says one of the most famous expressions of world-weariness. But if you’re an astronomer, you can reply that there’s plenty new beyond the Sun — not to mention, in, on, and around it. And “new” means not just an ever-changing series of events. It also means discoveries of never-beforeknown objects and phenomena — even new kinds of objects and phenomena — in our universe. So astronomy is an opening for newness in our lives. What new sights and perspectives can we look for in the skies of evening at the beginning of this new year? Let’s look high in the east at the time of our all-sky chart, where the constellation Auriga is following Perseus to the zenith for viewers at mid-northern latitudes.

Capella

Stock 10

M38 M36

AKIRA FUJII

M M37

Leaping Minnow

β Tauri

44 January 2010 sky & telescope worldmags

Auriga’s bright open clusters. All beginners quickly learn Capella, Auriga’s zero-magnitude star, and the other stars of the pentagon that constitutes Auriga’s main pattern. Telescope users also soon learn about the three open star clusters in this constellation that were cataloged by French comet hunter Charles Messier: splendid M36, M37, and M38. But how many people know that many of Auriga’s other clusters are visible in small telescopes and binoculars? All but one of these bright clusters are shown in Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas and Sky Atlas 2000.0, which can be purchased at ShopatSky.com. And the remaining cluster — the sparse but fascinating Stock 10 — is labeled in the photograph at left. While you’re studying Epsilon Aurigae undergoing its long, mysterious eclipse for the first time in 27 years (S&T: May 2009, page 58), scan a few degrees west to behold NGC 1664. Sue French discusses NGC 1893, another prominent cluster, on page 65. Lovely little NGC 1907 is a close neighbor to M38. And in easternmost Auriga, solitary NGC 2281 is brighter than — though not as prominent as — the Messier clusters. The Minnow. If you’ve looked inside the Auriga pentagon with your naked eye under a dark sky, have you ever wondered about that strange elongated glow — no, maybe a short line of faint points of light? Though the glow is only a few degrees from M36 and M38, it’s not from those clusters. It’s an asterism that Sky & Telescope senior editor Alan M. MacRobert calls the Leaping Minnow: a Delphinus-like pattern of 5th- and 6th-magnitude stars that’s striking in binoculars — and shown well in the photograph at left. As Sue French points out on page 65, the Minnow is part of the larger asterism Melotte 31. Coming soon. Still hungering for new sights and perspectives? Next month in this column, I’ll tell how Capella was once the brightest star in Earth’s sky, how it shone 46° farther south, and how it used to be not just Earth’s North Star but something more amazing: part of the ultimate double North Star with an even brighter (negative-magnitude) luminary. ✦ Fred Schaaf welcomes your comments at [email protected].

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ALL STARS POINT TO . . . Magdalena Ridge Observatory Socorro, NM www.mro.nmt.edu

In the fall of 2006 we completed the installation of the 40.375 foot Observa-DOME at Magdalena Ridge Observatory which will house a 2.4 Meter Telescope.

[email protected]

46 January 2010 worldmags

sky & telescope

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Sky at a Glance

January 2010

MOON PHASES SUN

MON

TUE

WED

THU

FRI

1

2

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

NIGHT: The Quadrantid meteor shower should be somewhat active late on these nights, but strong moonlight will be a severe hindrance.

2

EVENING: Mars rises about 7° left of the Moon. And Earth reaches perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, for 2010.

7

LAST-QUARTER MOON (5:39 a.m. EST).

8

PREDAWN: Saturn’s rings are tilted 4.9° with respect to Earth, the widest they appear from October 2008 through August 2010.

11

DAWN: Antares is very close to the waning crescent Moon as seen from North America. In easternmost North America, the Moon occults Antares around sunrise; for details see SkyandTelescope.com/jan-11-2010.

13

DAWN: The very thin crescent Moon is 5° or 6° lower right of Mercury very low in the southeast a half hour before sunrise: a difficult but rewarding observation. Bring binoculars.

15

NEW MOON (2:11 a.m. EST). An annular solar eclipse is visible in a thin path from Africa to China, and a partial solar eclipse takes place across much of Asia and Africa and parts of Europe; see SkyandTelescope.com/jan-15-2010.

SAT

3

24

2– 4

PLANET VISIBILITY ◀ SUNSET

MIDNIGHT

SUNRISE ▶

Mercury

Visible January 12 to February 9

Venus

Hidden in the Sun’s glow all month E

Mars Jupiter

SW

SE

S

W

W E

Saturn

S

SW

PLANET VISIBILITY SHOWN FOR LATITUDE 40o NORTH AT MID-MONTH.

16–29 DAWN: Mercury has a good apparition. It’s easiest to see very low in the southeast about 45 minutes before sunrise. 17

EVENING: The thin crescent Moon is about 5° lower right of Jupiter in the west-southwest as twilight fades.

23

FIRST-QUARTER MOON (5:53 a.m. EST).

27

NIGHT: Mars is closest to Earth, appearing bigger through a telescope than at any other time from 2009 through 2013. But Mars appears almost the same size from mid-January through mid-February.

29

NIGHT: Mars is at opposition: rising around sunset and setting around sunrise. And the full Moon, which is also opposite the Sun, hovers near Mars all night.

30

FULL MOON occurs at 1:18 a.m EST (10:18 p.m. PST on the 29th). Just three hours later, the Moon makes its closest approach to Earth for 2010: 221,600 miles or 356,600 km, 7% less than its average distance. This will make the full Moon appear slightly larger than usual.

IMAGE BY NASA / JIM BELL / MIKE WOLFF

An asian eclipse

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The Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture exquisite detail during Mars’s record-close approach in August 2003. You’ll never see Mars like this through the eyepiece of a telescope, but it’s a goal to dream of.

See SkyandTelescope.com/ataglance for details on each week’s celestial events.

Sk yandTelescope.com

January 2010

47

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Facing North

Northern Hemisphere Sky Chart

15h Al

Z

co

h

18

E A

Ve

N

G

iza

r

E

H

ga

M

+60°

I

B

r

Thuban

DRACO Z

A

12 h

Di

g Bi er pp

c Fa

G

G

A

in

M

B

URSA MINOR

Little Dipper

U

B

A

A

R

JO

S

+80°

R

A

B

rn he s s

Q

D

g

N

E

D

rt

D

M81

S

M82

U

M LE IN O

PAR

DAL

D

Dou Clus ble ter +60° O

b ne A De

x

E

G

M 42

K

B

ge Ri

s

O2

E

E

I Q

Z

H

S TU CE

l

B

ERID ANUS

M

IS

41

M

D

A

T

B

–20°

R

S FORNAX

a

c Fa

ar

h Ad

JO

E

i

M

B

A

Z

t

T O R E Q U A

A

0h

A

LU

G

le rc Ci

A

N

D

Z

B

riu

N

LE PU

PEGASUS

H M

M Ja

A

CA EL UM

S –40° Q

3h

sky & telescope

G

S E C IS P

X

B

A

A

IAN TR

H

TA UR US

A

B

3 M3

M

B

LU

L

Great Square

1 M3 G

34 M

GU

des

tri

IO

lla

Be

R

Moo Jan 22n E C L I P T I C

Hya

A

O

39

A B G

a

A

C

ANDROMEDA

IS

E

G

B

A

Mir

Si A

C

SE

61

ELO

+20°

IES

B

B

6h

LA

CA

SSI O

I G

O

M50

M47 M46

ng

M52

PEI A R

AR

s

0°

A

G

R CE

D

l

B

Al go

Z

e

L

A

us

lge

te

ran

M

CAM

D

E

Be

A

eba

E

O

+80° A

S

I

H

G

Plei

ade

Ald

TA

G

R SE U

AURIGA

M38 M36

M37

Zenith

G

1 2 3 Star 4 magnitudes

48 January 2010

ZC E P HE US

G

PE

Capella

A

B Q

M35

M

Mo Jan on 26 Z

Procyon

A

S RO CE NO MO

M48

0

A

X

S CANI R MINO A

B

HYDRA

B

M

Y N

A

h

GEMINI

Castor

Pollux

M44

B

CAN CER

G

M67

A

9

Facing East

M Jan oon 29

29 M

Polaris

B

L

A

s

–1

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G

A

R

ar

N

O

LE O

M

Facing South

C

U

L

P

T

O

R

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c Fa

in

g

N

W L

Binocular Highlight:

WHEN

Ghostly Galaxy M74

Late November

11 p.m.

Early December

10 p.m.

Late December

9 p.m.

Early January

8 p.m.

Late January

Dusk

These are standard times.

R

B

Y

A

re lbi

o

N Cro

Using the Map

C

G

DELP

HINU

S

C

M2

7

Y

G

HOW

h

US

B

A

Q

RI UA

g

SW

Jupiter

ci Fa

n

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Example: Rotate the map a little so that “Facing SE” is right-side up. Nearly halfway from there to the map’s center is the constellation Orion. Go out, face southeast, and look halfway up the sky. There’s Orion! Note: The map is plotted for 40° north latitude (for example, Denver, New York, Madrid). If you’re far south of there, stars in the southern part of the sky will be higher and stars in the north lower. Far north of 40° the reverse is true. Jupiter and Mars are positioned for mid-January.

AQ

Moon n 19

Facing West

M2

E

EQUULEUS

M15

21

Go outside within an hour or so of a time listed above. Hold the map out in front of you and turn it around so the yellow label for the direction you’re facing (such as west or southeast) is at the bottom, right-side up. The curved edge is the horizon, and the stars above it on the map now match the stars in front of you in the sky. The map’s center is the zenith, the point overhead.

Galaxy Double star

You can create a sky chart customized for your location at any time at SkyandTelescope.com/ skychart.

L ast month we looked at the finest galaxy in the Messier catalog, M31 in Andromeda. This month . . . well, let’s just say that M31 is exceptional. The truth is, most galaxies are difficult binocular objects. M74 in Pisces is far more typical of the breed. Found a little more than 1° northeast of Eta (η) Piscium, M74 is positioned midway, and just below, a line connecting Eta with a nearby pairing of 6th- and 7th-magnitude stars. Pinpointing the galaxy’s location is key to finding this low-surface-brightness object. Seeing M74’s 9.4-magnitude glow isn’t easy even under reasonably good skies. With 10×50 binos and averted vision, I can detect the galaxy only about half the time, observing from my semirural backyard. M74 provides yet another lesson in the importance of magnification when it comes to objects at the threshold of visibility. Using my 15×45 image-stabilized binoculars, I can hold the galaxy in view continuously and even begin to appreciate its ghostly dimensions. Does more light-gathering power help? My 15×70s improve the view slightly, but the extra aperture doesn’t make as much difference as going from 10× to 15×. If your skies aren’t dark enough to pull in M74, try for the nearby double star, Psi1 (ψ1) Piscium. This pairing marks the top right of a large, squat Y asterism. Psi1 is an attractive double that features 5.3- and 5.4-magnitude stars separated by a scant 30″. That’s tight for most binoculars, but I can split the duo cleanly in my 10×50s — as long as the binos are mounted. Hand held? Forget it. Here again, boosting the power helps — the extra magnification of my 15×45s make easy work of this gem. ✦ — Gary Seronik

Z1

PISCES

5°

bin

ocular view

M74

Variable star Open cluster Diffuse nebula

H

Globular cluster Planetary nebula

Sk yandTelescope.com

January 2010

49

worldmags

Planetary Almanac

Sun and Planets, January 2010

Mercury

Nov

11

Jan 1

21

Sun

31

Right Ascension

Declination

Elongation

Magnitude

Diameter

Illumination

Distance

h

m

–23° 02′

—

–26.8

32′ 32″

—

0.983

h

m

–17° 31′

—

–26.8

32′ 28″

—

0.985

1

h

19 20.7

m

–20° 30′

9° Ev

+2.9

9.6″

6%

0.703

11

18h 30.2m

–19° 56′

14° Mo

+1.7

9.5″

14%

0.711

21

18h 30.6m

1

18 44.9

31

Venus Mercury 1

20 53.2

31

16

Mars

–21° 06′

24° Mo

–0.1

7.6″

48%

0.888

h

m

–21° 58′

24° Mo

–0.2

6.3″

69%

1.066

1

h

18 33.7

m

–23° 39′

3° Mo

–4.0

9.8″

100%

1.708

11

19h 28.3m

–22° 41′

1° Mo

—

9.7″

100%

1.711

21

20h 21.7m

31 Venus

1

16

31

Jupiter

19 10.9

–20° 35′

2° Ev

–4.0

9.8″

100%

1.710

h

m

–17° 28′

5° Ev

–3.9

9.8″

100%

1.705

1

h

9 29.3

m

+18° 48′

141° Mo

–0.8

12.7″

96%

0.739

16

9h 14.8m

+20° 28′

160° Mo

–1.1

13.8″

99%

0.679

31

8h 51.6m

31 Mars

Jupiter

16

21 13.2

1

Saturn

Saturn Uranus

+22° 19′

175° Ev

–1.3

14.1″

100%

0.665

h

m

–13° 39′

46° Ev

–2.1

35.0″

99%

5.637

h

m

21 55.1

31

22 20.4

–11° 20′

22° Ev

–2.0

33.4″

100%

5.896

1

12h 19.6m

+0° 22′

96° Mo

+0.9

17.8″

100%

9.323

31

12h 19.4m

16

+0° 33′

127° Mo

+0.7

18.7″

100%

8.864

h

m

–3° 18′

58° Ev

+5.9

3.4″

100%

20.603

h

m

23 37.0

Neptune

16

21 49.4

–13° 37′

29° Ev

+8.0

2.2″

100%

30.878

Pluto

16

18h 15.5m

–18° 18′

22° Mo

+14.1

0.1″

100%

32.678

16 The table above gives each object’s right ascension and declination (equinox 2000.0; no longer equinox of date) at 0 h Universal Time on selected dates, and its elongation from the Sun in the morning (Mo) or evening (Ev) sky. Next are the visual magnitude and equatorial diameter. (Saturn’s ring extent is 2.27 times its equatorial diameter.) Last are the percentage of a planet’s disk illuminated by the Sun and the distance from Earth in astronomical units. (One a.u., the mean Earth–Sun distance, is 149,597,871 kilometers, or 92,955,807 international miles.) For other dates, see SkyandTelescope.com/almanac.

Uranus Neptune

Planet disks at left have south up, to match the view in many telescopes. The blue ticks indicate the pole currently tilted toward Earth.

10"

14 h 12h RIGHT ASCENSION

16 h

18h

+40°

Vega

HERCULES

Castor Pollux

LEO

Arcturus

+20° +10° 0° AQUI LA

Jan 29–30

Mars Regulus

Saturn

VIRGO

OPHIUCHUS

6h GEMINI

2h

4h

25

Pleiades

ECL CANCER

4

Betelgeuse

IPT

22h

0h

ARIES

IC

TA U R U S

PEGASUS

22 PISCES

19 E Q U AT O R

LIBRA

Spica

Pluto Antares

–30°

10 am

Sirius

CORVUS

E R I D A NUS

H Y D R A

8 am

4 am

2 am

Midnight

10 pm

+10°

Neptune

–10°

Venus Fomalhaut

6 am

+20°

0°

Jupiter

CETUS

CANIS MAJOR

10

SCORPIUS

SAGITTARIUS

7

+30°

AQUARI US

Uranus

Rigel

–10°

20 h

CYGNUS

Procyon

ORION

Mercury

–40°

8h

10 h

BOÖTES

+30°

DECLINATION

Pluto

8 pm

LOCAL TIME OF TRANSIT 6 pm 4 pm

C APRI C ORN US –30°

2 pm

–40°

The Sun and planets are positioned for mid-January; the colored arrows show the motion of each during the month. The Moon is plotted for evening dates in the Americas when it’s waxing (right side illuminated) or full, and for morning dates when it’s waning (left side). “Local time of transit” tells when (in Local Mean Time) objects cross the meridian — that is, when they appear due south and at their highest — at mid-month. Transits occur an hour later on the 1st, and an hour earlier at month’s end.

50 worldmags

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sky & telescope

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Saturn’s Moons Jan 16 0h UT

Jan 1 2 3

EAST

WEST

Titan

4 5 6 7 8 9

Tethys

10 11 12 13

Rhea

14 15 16 17

Enceladus

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Dione

30 31 The wavy lines represent five Saturnian satellites; the central vertical bands are Saturn and its rings. Each gray or black horizontal band is one day, from 0 h (upper edge of band) to 24h UT (GMT). The ellipses at top show the actual apparent orbits; the satellites are usually a little north or south of the ring extensions.

Sk yandTelescope.com

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Fred Schaaf Sun, Moon, and Planets

Mars at Its Brightest The Red Planet takes center stage. Every evening

in January, Jupiter sets earlier and Mars rises earlier. By month’s end Mars is at opposition: rising around sunset, staying up until dawn, and shining at its closest and brightest for the year. Saturn, much dimmer, rises due east in late evening and is highest in the predawn hours. Finally, as dawn brightens in the second half of January, Mercury climbs into view, putting on a fine show.

E A R LY E V E N I N G Jupiter shines fairly high in the southwest as the sky grows dark on New Year’s Day, but by month’s end it’s much lower and sets soon after the end of twilight (for observers at mid-northern latitudes). For the sharpest views of Jupiter’s globe, point your telescope at it as early in dusk as possible. On January 1st Jupiter blazes in eastern Aquarius at magnitude –2.1, only 2° east of 8th-magnitude Neptune. Jupiter crosses into Capricornus a few

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Dawn, Jan 10–12 1 hour before sunrise Moon Jan 10

days later, and by month’s end it’s nearly 8° from Neptune. Uranus, at 6th magnitude, remains an easy binocular target just south of the Circlet of Pisces (see our finder chart in last September’s issue, page 55). But Uranus is getting lower. On January 1st it’s more than 40° above the southwestern horizon at twilight’s end, but by January 31st it’s only half that high. Venus remains hidden in the Sun’s glare all month, reaching superior conjunction (passing behind the Sun) on the 11th. It will reappear very low in the sunset in February.

Throughout January and February, Mars appears brighter and bigger (through telescopes) than it has since early 2008 or will again until 2012. Early in January, the cold desert world rises around 7 p.m. and is highest after 2 a.m. Mars reaches opposition to the Sun on January 29th, rising around sunset, climbing highest around midnight, and setting around sunrise. At this relatively distant opposition, campfire-colored and steady-shining Mars

Dawn, Jan 13

Moon Jan 11 10°

Antares

SCORPIUS Mercury Moon

Looking Southeast

Looking Southeast

Castor

About 9 pm Pollux

Moon Jan 1

Moon Jan 2

Mars

Sickle of LEO

EVENING AND NIGHT

30 minutes before sunrise

Moon Jan 12

Jan 1 – 3

G

Regulus Moon Jan 3

Looking East

peaks at magnitude –1.3, a bit dimmer than sapphire-hued, sparkling Sirius. On January 27th Mars makes its closest approach to Earth, at a distance of 0.664 a.u. (61.7 million miles or 99.3 million kilometers). Its apparent diameter then is only 14.1″. (During its record-close approach in August 2003, Mars shone These scenes are drawn for near the middle of North America (latitude 40° north, longitude 90° west); European observers should move each Moon symbol a quarter of the way toward the one for the previous date. In the Far East, move the Moon halfway. For clarity, the Moon is shown three times its actual apparent size. The visibility of objects in bright twilight is exaggerated. The 10° scale is about the width of your fist at arm’s length.

Sk yandTelescope.com

January 2010

53

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Sun, Moon, and Planets

ORBIT S OF THE PL ANE T S Mars

The curved arrows show each planet’s movement during January. The outer planets don’t change position enough in a month to notice at this scale.

at magnitude –2.9 and appeared 25.1″ across.) For more on observing Mars this season, see page 57 of last month’s issue. As Earth overtakes Mars in their orbital race, Mars appears to retrograde (move westward relative to the stars). This movement carries it 10° in January, from just west of the Sickle of Leo to central Cancer, near Gamma Cancri (Asellus Borealis) and the Beehive Cluster. Saturn rises around 11:30 p.m. on January 1st but two hours earlier by the end of the month. The planet sits almost on the celestial equator, remaining nearly stationary and shining at magnitude +0.8 about 1° north of 4th-magnitude Eta Virginis (Zaniah). Saturn is highest, offering its crispest telescopic image, in the small hours of the morning. Its disk appears to grow slightly this month, from 18″ to 19″. On January 8th the rings achieve a temporary maximum tilt of 4.9° with respect to Earth. After that, the rings start to close back down to a 1.7° minimum tilt in late May.

Earth

Mercury

March equinox

Venus June solstice

Saturn

Uranus Jupiter Neptune Pluto

DAWN Mercury goes through inferior conjunction with the Sun on January 4th and then, over the next few weeks, brightens and climbs into view before sunrise. From January 15th to 30th, observers around 40° north will find Mercury 9° or 10° above

Dusk, Jan 16 –18

Dawn, Jan 30 –31 1 hour before sunrise

Sickle of LEO

Enif

_ Aqr Regulus Jupiter

` Aqr

Moon Jan 31

Mars

Moon Jan 17 Moon Jan 30

b Cap Moon Jan 16

Looking West-Southwest

54 worldmags

January 2010

sky & telescope

Sept. equinox

Sun

1 hour after sunset

Moon Jan 18

December solstice

Looking West

the southeast horizon 30 minutes before sunrise. Look earlier to catch Mercury lower in a darker sky, or later to get a crisper telescopic view.

MOON AND SUN The longest annular eclipse of the Sun until the year 3043 takes place on January 15th, visible in parts of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and China; see SkyandTelescope/ jan-15-2010 for details. The Moon is waning gibbous when it rises about 7° right of Mars on the evening of January 2nd, as shown on page 53. On January 11th the waning lunar crescent occults Antares around sunrise in northeastern North America; for details see SkyandTelescope.com/jan11-2010. Back in the evening sky, the waxing crescent Moon shines about 5° lower right of Jupiter at dusk on January 17th, as shown at left. And the full Moon of January 29th rises, once again, 7° right of Mars. Earth is at perihelion, nearest to the Sun, on January 3rd. It is then 91.4 million miles (147.1 million km) from the Sun, 1.7% less than its average distance. ✦

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INVITES ITS READERS AND FRIENDS TO JOIN FORMER EDITOR IN CHIEF RICK FIENBERG ON A UNIQUE ASTRONOMY VOYAGE

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Charles A. Wood Exploring the Moon

Craters upon Craters Layered impact features offer visual clues to the Moon’s history. Textbooks often illustrate the concept

example, Theophilus formed close enough to Cyrillus — both are about 100 kilometers (62 miles) across — that the younger crater’s rim sliced through the first, causing debris to flow across the floor of Cyrillus. If the younger crater is larger than the existing one, it eats into it, with varying results. The effects on the younger crater are less obvious, but still visible. Porter and Rutherfurd are two smaller craters on the rim of Clavius. Both impactors hit very uneven terrain; one side of each is high up on the rim of Clavius and the other is on the old crater’s floor. Clavius is nearly 5 km deep, so the younger craters are strongly tilted into the larger, ancient crater and their interiors

of cratering by depicting the impact, excavation, and ejection events on a completely flat terrain. In reality, most lunar impact craters formed on an irregular landscape that already had impact features. Craters typically form on or near pre-existing craters, affecting the appearance of both. To appreciate these effects, let’s examine the textbook case of a crater that impacted onto a maria; Copernicus is a good example. Its outline is nearly circular, and its walls are about equally high on all sides. This symmetry reflects a high-angle impact onto a relatively flat terrain. The effect of a new crater on a pre-existing one depends on their proximity and their diameters. For

The Moon • January 2010 Highlighted Feature

Description

A

Theophilus

Crater (60 miles)

B

Clavius

Crater (140 miles)

C

Steinheil

Crater (40 miles)

D

Nasireddin

Crater (32 miles) N

Phases Last quarter New Moon First quarter Full Moon

31

30 January 7, 10:39 UT January 15, 7:11 UT January 23, 10:53 UT January 30, 6:18 UT

Distances January 1, 21h UT diam. 33′ 36″ January 17, 2h UT diam. 29′ 1″ January 30, 9h UT diam. 33′ 50″

Librations Nicholson (crater) January 1 Cleostratus (crater) January 30 Cusanus (crater) January 31

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W

E

A

Jan 1

D C S

L ÜK ÍN R KL A N TO N Ü R N Í A N TO N

B

For key dates, black dots on the map indicate what part of the Moon’s limb is tipped the most toward Earth by libration under favorable illumination.

S&T: SEAN WALKER

Perigee 222,900 miles Apogee 252,535 miles Perigee 221,600 miles

Craters that formed over earlier impacts often leave their mark on both features. When Theophilus was excavated, its ejecta covered the floor of older Cyrillus to the Southwest.

Sk yandTelescope.com

January 2010

57

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MICK HYDE

Exploring the Moon

Clavius sports the two smaller craters Porter (upper right) and Rutherfurd (lower right) on its rim; both are slumped inward toward the center of the older, massive basin.

of crater rim elevations found that craters in maria have nearly constant height, whereas craters in the highlands commonly have uneven rims. This reflects the fact that the highlands are typically a billion years older than the maria and the first billion years of lunar history had a much higher cratering rate. During the last 3.5 billion years, nearly every crater formed in the highlands smashed into preexisting craters, affecting both the old and the new. Next time you observe the Moon, see if you can discover more low rims and mounds of debris where craters overlap. ✦ For a daily lunar fix, visit contributing editor Charles Wood’s website: lpod.wikispaces.com.

DAMIAN PEACH

are visibly affected. Both craters have uneven rim heights and their floors are displaced toward the center of the older one. On Clavius’s northern rim, Porter has a very low rim inside of Clavius, and its flat floor is sloped downhill. Rutherfurd, on Clavius’s southern rim, has much more wall-collapse debris under its high rim and its floor and central peak are also offset toward the low side. Steinheil and Watt provide another example of a later crater sloughing off material into a nearby older one. These nearly twin craters are each about 65 km in diameter, though Steinheil cuts the rim of Watt. Its rim is noticeably lower where it overlaps Watt, and most of Watt’s floor is covered by rubbly debris — the missing material from Steinheil’s rim. A final instance of craters interfering with one another is the cluster Orontius, Huggins, Miller, and Nasireddin, which formed in that sequence. Mountains of rock slumped into both Huggins and Miller when Nasireddin formed between them. The effect is most dramatic where masses of slumped rock appear as if they were bulldozed across Miller’s floor. If you look closely, you’ll see that Nasireddin’s rim is somewhat lower on that side. Notice that all of these examples are in the lunar highlands. A study 30 years ago

Near the southeast limb, Steinheil (upper left) and Watt form a prominent pair of similar craters, though the overlapping wall of Steinheil belies its younger age.

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Alan MacRobert Celestial Calendar

The Long Rise of R Leporis Watch Hind’s Crimson Star climbing to its peak. Late on dark December evenings, and earlier after dinnertime in January, bright Orion marches up the southeastern sky with dim Lepus, the Hare, crouching under his feet. In front of the hare’s forehead and ears, and just 7° south-southeast of Orion’s leading foot, pulses the red carbon star R Leporis. R Lep was first noticed for its color by John Russell Hind 165 years ago, while he was scanning the area with a 7-inch refractor from London. A few years later he wrote to William Henry Smyth, author of the observing guide A Cycle of Celestial Objects: In October, 1845, I remarked a most fiery or scarlet star on the confines of Lepus and Orion . . . . This star is by far the most deeply colored

ORION

Left: Lepus crouches south of Orion, and R Leporis is only 7° from Orion’s foot-star Rigel — hardly more than a typical binocular’s field of view. Star-hop there using this photo as your finder chart. The yellow box shows the field of the close-up chart below. Below: Visual magnitudes of comparison stars around R Lep are labeled to the nearest tenth with the decimal point omitted.

Rigel

62 64

67

100

R

R

74

91

73

–15°

57 95

LEPUS

α

90

β

LEPUS

76

84

86

AKIRA FUJII

–16°

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γ

5h 04m

Sk yandTelescope.com

5h 00m

57

January 2010

61

worldmags

Celestial Calendar

18 30

The red star soon proved to be a longperiod variable of the Mira type, but in the century and a half since, it has been less predictable than most. R Lep is currently varying from about magnitude 6.8 to 9.5 and back with a period of nearly 16 months. Its next maximum is due around January 14th. But it has gone through long spells when its entire range was much dimmer. For instance, in the late 1950s and again in the mid-1990s, its cycles ranged from magnitude 9 at maximum down to 11.5 at minimum. During these weak spells the star went cycling right along while displaying, at all phases, less than a tenth of the light it does now. Its period has also varied, ranging rather irregularly between 13 and nearly 16 months. It’s currently near the long end of this range. In his Astronomical Objects for Southern Telescopes (1968), E. J. Hartung refers to R Lep “gleaming like a crimson jewel in a field well-sprinkled with stars.” In 1905 Agnes Clerke wrote, “As with most other variables, however, increase of light brings with at a paling of colour. Near maximum, intense redness gives way . . . to a coppery hue.” R Lep owes its color to two factors: Mira variables often tend to be cooler than other red giants, and R Lep is also a carbon star. Its spectrum displays strong absorption bands of the C2 molecule that “blanket” much of the spectrum’s blue end, leaving the red light to shine through. And yet, while the star is brightening,

Dec. PERSEUS 38

Algol

21

TRIANGULUM 34

Algol (Beta Persei) shines high overhead on December and January evenings. It dips from magnitude 2.1 to 3.4 and back every 2 days 20 hours 48 minutes, taking several hours to fade and to rebrighten. It remains near minimum for about two hours. On this chart, numbers are comparison-star magnitudes to the nearest tenth with the decimal points omitted. Algol normally matches Gamma Andromedae (labeled 21), but at minimum it’s as dim as Alpha Trianguli (34).

it also displays blue emission lines at these same carbon wavelengths. The emission lines disappear before the star reaches maximum. At certain phases of the cycle, all the spectral lines turn double, indicating a shock wave driving outward through the atmosphere. And like other Miras, R Lep is losing mass in a thick stellar wind — about the Sun’s mass every 500,000 years. Some of this material has accumulated as infrared-emitting dust in the vicinity. We are clearly catching this star in a relatively brief phase near the end of its life.

R Leporis Range of Variation, 1904–2008

Maxima

6 7 8 9 10

Minima

11

AAVSO

Apparent magnitude

5

Minima of Algol

29

of any that I have yet seen, and in striking contrast with a beautifully white star preceding it [by] about one minute.

12

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Although most Mira-type variable stars repeat their cycles fairly well, the maxima and minima of R Lep have wandered in tandem far up and down, as recorded by generations of AAVSO observers.

62 worldmags

January 2010

sky & telescope

UT

Jan.

UT

1

7:02

1

20:04

4

3:51

4

16:53

7

0:41

7

13:43

9

21:30

10

10:32

12

18:19

13

7:21

15

15:08

16

4:10

18

11:57

19

1:00

21

8:46

21

21:49

24

5:35

24

18:38

27

2:24

27

15:28

29

23:14

30

12:17

These geocentric predictions are from the new heliocentric elements Min. = JD 2452253.559 + 2.867362E, where E is any integer, derived by Gerry Samolyk (AAVSO) from recent timings.

Watching the Rise As early as the start of December, you may be able to see R Lep in binoculars — and if not, it will rise out of the deeps soon enough. A 4- to 8-inch telescope shows its color well, but a larger scope may make the color appear less vivid due to irradiation (overexposure) in the eye. Use the chart on the previous page to estimate the variable’s brightness occasionally until Lepus disappears into the sunset in April. If you find that this project intrigues you, write to the American Association of Variable Star Observers, www.aavso.org. They have enough datacollecting work to keep you as busy as you choose for a lifetime of clear nights. Or just keep notes in your observing log. How full the sky is with such ongoing celestial dramas, unsuspected by most people over whose heads they pass, but so readily viewable by those who pay attention! ✦ Alan MacRobert’s binocular introduction to Lepus, as a teenager, was the fine wide double star Gamma (γ) Leporis, labeled on the photo on page 60. Its stars are 4th and 6th magnitude and aligned north-south. One is a little brighter, and the other dimmer, than the Sun.

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Sue French Deep-Sky Wonders

Auriga, the Charioteer Some of the sky’s finest nebulae and star clusters adorn this constellation. Thou hast loosened the necks of thine horses, and goaded their flanks with aff right, To the race of a course that we know not on ways that are hid from our sight. As a wind through the darkness the wheels of their chariot are whirled, And the light of its passage is night on the face of the world. — Algernon Charles Swinburne, Erechtheus, 1876

According to one myth, Erechtheus (or Erichthonius) was the mortal son of the Greek god Hephaestus. Erechtheus created the first four-horse chariot (quadriga) to ride beneath the heavens, which impressed the gods and earned him a place among the stars as the constellation Auriga. We’ll start our tour of Auriga’s starry realm with Melotte 31. This elongated group of 35 stars spans 2¼° with golden 16 Aurigae at its center. In a suburban sky, Melotte 31 looks like a hazy glow to the unaided eye, but a rural sky may allow you resolve a few of its stars.

The group is easily visible through a finderscope, binoculars, or a small telescope at low power. The bright stars strung from 16 to 19 Aurigae are particularly eyecatching. Sky & Telescope senior editor Alan MacRobert has long referred to this cute asterism as the Leaping Minnow, while California amateur Robert Douglas calls it Auriga’s Frying Pan. Despite the striking countenance of Melotte 31, its stars seem to be largely unrelated. Melotte 31 is named for the British astronomer Philibert Jacques Melotte, who included it as one of the 245 objects listed in his 1915 Catalogue of Star Clusters shown on the Franklin-Adams Chart Plates. Melotte is also well known for his discovery of Pasiphaë, one of Jupiter’s moons. Through my 105-mm (4.1-inch) refractor at 28×, the Minnow shares the field of view with the emission nebula IC 410 and its embedded open cluster NGC 1893. This coarse gathering of suns is framed by a triangle of 9thmagnitude stars and ensnared in the eastern reaches of a gauzy mist. The cluster appears about 12′ across while the nebula overspreads at least 19′. Boosting the power to 76×,

ROBERT GENDLER

Deep photographs show that IC 405, 410, and 417 (right, center, and far left) are actually the brightest parts of a single nebula. The bright stars of Melotte 31 shine between IC 405 and 410.

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Deep-Sky Wonders

M38

+36°

1907

Cheshire Cat IC 405

Stock 8

F

Mel 31

1931 IC 417

4 5 6 7 8 9

AE

19

Sh 2-273

Star magnitudes

AURIGA

+34° Flaming Star Nebula

1893 16 IC 410 5h 30m

Espin 322

14

5h 20m

5h 10m

Right: The nebula IC 410 and its embedded star cluster NGC 1893 are gorgeous in David Jurasevich’s hydrogen-alpha image. The author saw the southern Tadpole (Simeis 130) through her 10-inch reflector, but not the fainter northern Tadpole, Simeis 129.

I count forty 9th- to 13th-magnitude stars. The nebula is patchy and irregular, with a dimmer bay in its eastern side and dark blotch just west of the cluster’s center. NGC 1893 reveals 60 stars, and it doubles in size when seen through my 10-inch reflector at 70×. Many of the bright stars follow a pattern that reminds me of a pair of crossed candy canes, and the brightest star in the northeastern part shines with a golden hue. IC 410 stretches westward to a 9th-magnitude star near the cluster’s edge and faintly beyond toward the nice double star Espin 332. The pair consists of an 8.9-magnitude primary with a 9.5magnitude secondary to its southwest. Suspecting a small brighter spot in the nebula about one-third of the way from the golden star to the 10th-

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66 January 2010 worldmags

sky & telescope

magnitude star at the center of the cluster, I zoomed in on the area with higher powers. They gave a much better view, and I could easily see a patch of enhanced brightness. A faint star rests inside and a dimmer one nuzzles the southern edge. This bright region marks the head of Simeis 130, one of IC 410’s cometary nebulae. Nicknamed Tadpoles, they are sites of denser gas and dust being eroded by stellar winds and radiation from the cluster. I didn’t notice the head of the other Tadpole, Simeis 129, located 4′ northwest, nor did I see the Tadpoles’ tails trailing away from the cluster. Can you? About ¾° northwest of the Minnow, we find the eruptive variable AE Aurigae, a blue-white star that fluctuates irregularly between magnitude 5.4 and 6.1. This runaway

STEVE CANNISTRA

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As with IC 405 and 410, IC 417 (right of center) and Sharpless 2-237 are the two brightest parts of a single, huge nebula.

star was ejected from the Orion star-forming complex approximately 2.5 million years ago. It’s thought that a close encounter between two binary systems led to some star swapping that resulted in the eccentric binary Iota (ι) Orionis and two high-speed escapees, AE Aurigae and Mu Columbae. AE Aurigae now serves as the chief source of illumination for the emission/reflection nebula IC 405, which it only chanced upon in astronomically recent times. The German astronomer Max Wolf noted that the nebular material surrounding AE Aurigae “looks like a burning body from which several enormous curved flames seem to break out like gigantic prominences.” He thought this “flaming star” worth study, and its nebula thus became known as the Flaming Star Nebula. With my 105-mm refractor at 17×, nebulous haze is

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fairly obvious near AE Aurigae and the 7.7-magnitude, pale yellow star 8′ to its northwest. If you have a hydrogen-beta filter, IC 405 is one of the relatively rare objects you can add to its trophy case — but a narrowband fi lter can also be of help. In my mirror-imaged view, I faintly see a 1½° J of nebulosity, especially when I scan east-west across it. The J dangles upside down in the sky, but only the bright region in its hook forms the Flaming Star Nebula. Now lets move eastward to the 5th-magnitude star Phi (φ) Auriga. Phi gleams in the smile of a 1.5° asterism that New York amateur Ben Cacace dubbed the Cheshire Cat. There are six stars in the wide grin, tipped north-northeast, and two eye stars to their west. Phi and the northern eye both glow yellow-orange in my 105-mm scope at 17×. Since the vanishing cat’s dimmest star is magnitude 6.9, the asterism is an easy target for most binoculars.

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Since

1975

Chariot of Stars, Clouds of Fire Object

Type

Magnitude

Size/Sep.

RA

Dec.

h

m

Melotte 31

Asterism

—

135′

5 18.2

+33° 22′

NGC 1893 / IC 410

Cluster / nebula

7.0

40′ × 30′

5h 22.6m

+33° 22′

Espin 332

Double star

8.9, 9.5

14.8″

5h 21.4m

+33° 23′

—

30′ × 20′

IC 405

Bright nebula

h

m

+34° 25′

h

m

5 16.6

Cheshire Cat

Asterism

3.9

90′

5 27.3

+34° 52′

Stock 8 / IC 417

Cluster / nebula

—

15′

5h 28.1m

+34° 25′

NGC 1931 / Sh 2-237

Cluster / nebula

—

7′

5h 31.4m

+34° 15′

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Angular sizes and separations are from recent catalogs. Visually, an object’s size is often smaller than the cataloged value and varies according to the aperture and magnification of the viewing instrument. Right ascension and declination are for equinox 2000.0.

AL AND ANDY FERAYORNI / ADAM BLOCK / NOAO / AURA / NSF

The opulent open cluster Messier 38 decorates the northern corner of the Cheshire Cat’s mouth. Splashy M38 and nearby, powdery NGC 1907 were featured in Ken Hewitt-White’s “A Chariot Full of Clusters” (S&T: March 2008, page 55). Off the lip of the Cheshire Cat, right next to Phi Aurigae, the open cluster Stock 8 is wrapped in the nebulous cloak of IC 417. Through my 105-mm refractor at 47×, they appear as a hazy patch with several faint stars, the brightest one shining at 9th magnitude near the center. This star becomes a double (∑707) at 76×, with the 11th-magnitude companion 18″ southeast of the primary. The sparse

Sharpless 2-237 is so bright that it almost hides NGC 1931, its embedded star cluster.

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cluster shows 11 stars and is elongated north-south about 6½′, while the nebula is a little longer and extends farther east of the cluster than west. Stock 8 looks much richer when viewed through my 10-inch reflector at 118×. I see 35 to 40 moderately bright stars loosely strewn across 11′ of sky. IC 417 engulfs the more crowded regions of the cluster and covers about 8′. Viewed through my little refractor at 47×, IC 417 shares the field with the smaller but much more obvious nebula Sharpless 2-237. The 11th-magnitude star nestled in its heart is almost overpowered by the glow of the nebula, but it shows up much better when I increase the power to 87×. It sits at the northwest corner of a 3½′ box that it forms with 3 dimmer stars. The nebula is very bright close to its star and fades sharply outward to a diameter of perhaps 3½′. NGC 1931, the cluster associated with Sh 2-237, begins to emerge in my 10-inch scope at high power. The bright star is shown to be a quadruple with the three brightest members arranged in a tiny triangle and the fourth component to their northeast. Several additional stars straggle south through west-southwest of the group. The three clusters highlighted here are among the youngest in the sky. Their eldest members are a mere 4 million years old, and starbirth is still ongoing. ✦ Sue French welcomes your comments at [email protected].

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Ken Hewitt-White Going Deep

Galaxy Groups in Triangulum This small constellation has much to offer beyond well-known M33. Eastern triangulum has no shortage of

14

obscure galaxies. Among them are two galaxy-rich areas — one small and the other really small — that should appeal to those who enjoy sorting out faint fuzzies in a high-magnification field. You’ll need a sky that’s countrydark for this project. The descriptions below were made far from city lights with my 17.5-inch f/4.5 reflector working mostly between 222× and 285×. The first area, approximately 20′ × 30′ in extent, lies 3¾° east-southeast of 4th-magnitude Gamma (γ) Trianguli. Let’s begin at its northern end with three NGC galaxies crowded into a mere 4′ of sky. The brightest is 12.3-magnitude NGC 969. Only 1.5′ × 1.2′, it materializes in my scope as a distinct round cloud. NGC 974 is a bit larger but more diff use. The 14.8-magnitude, 0.7′ × 0.2′ edge-on galaxy NGC 970 is a barely perceptible sliver of light 1.5′ south of a 10.6-magnitude star. If you want to push a little deeper, PGC 9754 is a 7¼′ hop westward from that same star. I found it just 1¾′ west-southwest of an 11.0-magnitude star.

2h 30m

2h 00m

B 15

G 890

973 11

Star magnitudes

925 969 1060

+35° +

D E 7

FPO

TRIANGULUM 784

12

972

5 6 7

+30° +

6

ARIES

4

A

10

970 974 969

978A

978B 5′

POSS II / CALTECH / PALOMAR OBSERVATORY

Less than 8′ southeast of NGC 974 are the overlapping galaxies NGC 978A and NGC 978B. (Images of the pair indicate that the latter galaxy lies in front of the former.) NGC 978A is magnitude 12.9 and only about 1.3′ × 1.0′ in extent, but it’s conveniently placed 6′ west of an 8.1-magnitude star and thus an easy catch. Eyeing this combo briefly at 222×, I see a single, strongly condensed nebulosity. But a longer look produces an egg-shaped mass oriented east-west. With increased magnification my averted vision picks up the barest hint of the minute, 14.4-magnitude PGC 9754 B component extending southward from NGC 1978A. For the other targets in this area, slide 25′ south-southwest to 7.7-magnitude HD 15896. Only 3.3′ southeast of that star is small, roundish, 12.9-magnitude IC 1815. (Can you pull in its teensy attendants, PGC 213027 and PGC 213028?) Less than 5′ northeast of the star is the edgeon galaxy NGC 973, a pale, diff use spindle that seems much dimmer The photographs in this article were synthesized from POSS II red and blue plates downloaded from the Digitized Sky Survey. Red and blue were averaged to create the green channel.

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Going Deep

2h 45m

PGC 213029

2h 40m

987

+33°

974

1067 HD 16954

973

2h 35m

1066

1060

973 HD 16594

969 978A HD 15896

+32° Star magnitudes 6 7 8 9 10

HD 15896

POSS II / CALTECH / PALOMAR OBSERVATORY

PGC 213027 IC 1815 PGC 213028

PGC 213076 1067 UGC 2201

1066

1057

1061 1060

VGC 2202 PGC 213071

POSS II / CALTECH / PALOMAR OBSERVATORY

HD 16954

PGC 10325

PGC 10299

than its listed magnitude of 12.8. I detect a gradual thickening and brightening toward the middle of the 3.7′ × 0.5′ object, but I cannot make out the bisecting dust lane that shows so well in photographs. The star’s glare certainly doesn’t help. Still, my averted vision can pick up little PGC 213029 off the spindle’s northeastern tip. The second, more compact field of fuzzies I want to describe lies roughly 2° east of NGC 973. Three stars will guide you there. I start by centering HD 15896 in my finder. After that I hop eastward 11/3° to 7.4-magnitude HD 16594, then another ¾° to similarly bright HD 16954. Six NGC galaxies lie several arcminutes northwest of that star. The objects are arranged in two sets of three, which I call “east group” and “west group.” The two groups together occupy a 10′ × 15′ rectangle of sky. They fit comfortably into my 222× field, but I prefer to concentrate on each group separately at 285×. The heftiest member of the west trio is NGC 1060. Sporting dimensions of 2.3′ × 1.7′ and a magnitude of 11.8, it’s the most prominent object in our survey. By contrast, NGC 1057 and NGC 1061 are unimpressive 14th-magnitude glows. Even so, all three galaxies show readily in my scope. The very tight east group is dominated by NGC 1066, which is 1.7′ × 1.4′ and glows at magnitude 13.3. NGC 1067, 2¼′ to the north, is smaller and dimmer but still accessible. Not so for the edge-on galaxy UGC 2201 almost between them. With dimensions of 1.4′ × 0.3′ and a magnitude of 14.9, this mini-mist fails to register in my scope. Consider this cosmic ghost your challenge of the night! Keep your eyes peeled for other tiny galaxies in the area. For example, look about 10′ south of the west group and 3′ west-northwest of an 8.7-magnitude star to see PGC 10325. It’s fairly easy in my scope at high power. I’ve swept up several other non-NGC galaxies scattered among the objects described above. I only wish I could say the same was true for UGC 2201! ✦ Canadian deep-sky hunter Ken Hewitt-White observes galaxies from the darkest places he can find.

72 worldmags

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Gary Seronik Telescope Workshop

Reign of the Chiefspiegler The future of ATMing is looking bright and unobstructed. These are exciting times to be an amateur telescope maker. For the first time in decades, ATMs are melding incremental changes of existing designs with significant innovations, and thereby altering future directions for the hobby. For example, in this column last July (page 70), I wrote about the development of ultra-fast, large Newtonian primary mirrors, including the work of Illinois ATM-turned-professional Mike Lockwood. Mike continues to break speed limits with his recently completed 14-inch f/2.55 reflector shown at the Okie-Tex Star Party last September. But another, perhaps equally revolutionary, route is signaled by Ed Jones’s Chiefspiegler telescope. I featured Ed’s design in my November 2008 column (page 87). The “Chief” is a clever off-axis telescope that avoids the Newtonian reflector’s central obstruction by tilting the primary mirror, and correcting the resulting aberrations with a pair of lenses. How’s this revolution going? Slowly, for the moment. So far only a handful of Chiefs have seen first light, but among them is the 20-inch behemoth pictured here. The handiwork of ATM Kevin Frederick of Bedford, Pennsylvania, it’s currently the largest amateur-built tilted-component telescope (TCT) in existence!

The Big Chief was a collaborative effort. Kevin made the scope’s primary mirror, while Ed fabricated the corrective lenses and their housing and helped with testing. Even though Kevin’s scope is f/8, the folded optical layout results in a decidedly non-behemoth eyepiece placement. Kevin’s Chief keeps the eyepiece closer to the ground than it is with his conventional 20-inch f/5 Newtonian. And the views? Kevin reports that they’re stunning. He expected its unobstructed, big-aperture f/8 optics to make the scope a great planetary instrument, but it’s the deepsky views that impress him the most. He finds M13 and the Andromeda Galaxy especially beautiful, set against the pitch-black sky that the scope’s long focal ratio ensures. At the other end of the size spectrum, Ed recently posted specifications for a 4-inch f/10 Chief in the Yahoo “spiderless” discussion group. This design uses off-theshelf optics and, as such, is an ideal project for anyone just dipping a toe in the Chiefspiegler waters. And if the 4-inch aperture seems a touch modest, keep in mind that historically this size is typical for TCTs. Greater acceptance of the Chief might sound the death knell for other, more complex TCTs. “I do expect the Chief to replace all other off-axis scopes,” comments Ed. “The fact that the optics for smaller Chiefs can be purchased ready made, and the primary mirrors fabricated with standard procedures, means that the design will appeal to a lot of builders. There are still many ATMs who haven’t heard of the Chiefspiegler and assume I just misspelled Schiefspiegler!” That will change as more of these scopes find their way to major star parties. And a forthcoming how-to book that Ed is busy working on can only increase the scope’s popularity. ✦ Contributing editor and long-time telescope maker Gary Seronik observes the night sky at his home in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He can be contacted through his website, www.garyseronik.com.

KEVIN FREDERICK

Bedford, Pennsylvania, telescope maker Kevin Frederick stands next to his newly completed 20-inch f/8 Chiefspiegler. In spite of the scope’s long focal length, its configuration ensures that the eyepiece remains at a convenient height.

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Planetary Close-ups

emily lakdawalla

Spacecraft Imaging for Amateurs An international community of space This is Mars’s Big Sky Country, a windswept, nearly featureless plain. Tiny ripples in the rust-colored sand march farther than the eye can see, to a horizon so flat one might be able to see the curvature of the planet. As far as anyone knows, those ripples have not budged in eons. But all is not still; gaze upward, and you might be surprised by the rapid motion overhead, where feathery cirrus clouds, frosty with bright crystals of water ice, float on high Martian winds. The scene is from Meridiani Planum, composed from eight images captured by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity just before she reached a deep crater named Victoria, on the 950th Martian day of her mission. But the beautiful image was not created by anyone on the Mars

DATA: NASA / JPL

Earthbound observers never see Mars as a crescent, but spacecraft do. The author created this view from six images taken by Viking Orbiter 2 in 1976. Note the bluish frost extending up from the south pole.

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Exploration Rover team; no scientist would likely have produced it, because it owes its beauty as much to art as it does to science. The image is the collaborative creation of a whole amateur-imagesmith community; six people, each from a different country, had a hand in it. Twelve hours after Opportunity took the photos, the data had been received on Earth and posted to the internet. Within another 17 hours, rover fans had found the photos, assembled the mosaic, and shaded the sand and sky based on color photos Opportunity had taken of a similar landscape the day before. The entire sequence unfolded spontaneously on an internet forum. “There was no behind-the-scenes coordination or plan,” explains key participant Michael Howard. “Each contributor just took the latest posted image and ran with it.” See page 80 for the whole story. The beautiful scene is just one of thousands produced by a lively international community of amateur image processors who are breaking down the barriers that formerly existed between interplanetary missions and the general public.

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enthusiasts has become adept at reinterpreting images from planetary spacecraft.

DATA: NASA / JPL / CORNELL UNIVERSITY; PROCESSING: MICHAEL HOWARD / GLEN NAGLE

Buried Treasures The vast majority of image data that has been sent to Earth from the dozens of interplanetary missions never sees official public release. For example, only a few hundred Voyager images have ever been prepared for publication, yet the two spacecraft returned more than 80,000 separate image products to Earth. What happened to the rest of the data? It’s always been available, just inconvenient for the general public to access. Since 1966, when the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) was established at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the archived data from all science missions has been made available to researchers upon request and for a nominal fee. All NASA missions are required to archive their data with the NSSDC after a proprietary period has elapsed. Similar archives exist for the Japanese and European space agencies. In 1977 NASA established a system of Regional Planetary Imaging Facilities (RPIFs). RPIFs are like NASA public libraries, storing collections of image data in both digital and print formats. I whetted my own appetite for

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space imaging at the Brown University RPIF, which hosts, among other goodies, the entire Magellan Radar and Lunar Orbiter image data sets in hard copy — thousands of stunning photographic prints up to 30 by 40 inches in size. I routinely dig into the archives for previously unpublished views of the planets, like the unusual crescent Hyperlinks for all the websites mentioned in view of Mars shown at left. this article can be found at SkyandTelescope These resources were mostly .com/amateur-spaceimaging. only used by professional researchers until recently. As early as the 1980s, the NSSDC was distributing some data electronically, but few in the wider public had the bandwidth, hardware, or training necessary to download, process, or understand the data. That’s all changing. High-speed internet connections and blazingly fast home computers have brought the necessary bandwidth and hardware into people’s homes. At the same time, the digital-photography revolution has given millions of people basic image-processing skills. In the past five years, several missions have given the Sk yandTelescope.com

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public free access to raw image data almost as soon as it’s received on Earth. As a result, amateurs can now download terabytes of data from dozens of planetary missions, some of it only hours old. Of course, the most exciting images from any mission have most likely already been turned into products for public release. So what’s in there to reward the amateur who digs into the planetary image archives? Quite a lot, actually. For instance, until recently, nobody had seen an image of one of Neptune’s moons

passing in front of the planet. But last August, Ted Stryk (a professional philosopher and amateur planetary scientist) realized that such images probably lay hidden in the Voyager 2 archive. After much effort, he succeeded in locating the relevant images and producing the amazing composite view shown on the facing page of Despina and its shadow crossing Neptune’s face. “Processing the Voyager images to get every last bit out of them is our only way to get better close-ups of these worlds in the near term,” remarks Stryk. “The only serious proposal for a

DATA: NASA / JPL; PROCESSING: MATTIAS MALMER

This view of Venus was composed from 78 frames taken by Mariner 10 in 1974. The colors were synthesized from images taken with orange and ultraviolet filters. The clouds are more prominent than they would appear to the eye, but nowhere near as exaggerated as in pure UV images.

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return to Neptune is a mission called Argo. But assuming it is approved (and that’s very questionable), it won’t get there until 2029.” I first encountered the amateur image-processing community after being frustrated in an online search for a photo of Venus as it might look to a human observer flying in space. This request is easy to satisfy for all of the other planets in the solar system, but the only spacecraft images of Venus that I could find either showed it as seen in ultraviolet light (which artificially exaggerates its cloud patterns) or stripped of its atmosphere entirely (in global views from the Magellan Radar Mapper). During my searches I had stumbled across an online forum called unmannedspaceflight.com, which had started as a place for amateurs to share their work with raw Mars Exploration Rover images, but which had broadened to cover work with all robotic spacecraft data sets. After posting my request I was rewarded with new views of Venus from Mariner 10, Venus Express, and Messenger. Why hadn’t any of the missions produced such images for public release? It’s because cameras are sent to space to gather data for scientists, who have quite different goals from the general public. When scientists are in charge of image processing, they usually seek to emphasize faint features and subtle differences in color, while taking care not to compromise the quality of the images as science data. Fundamentally, a science image is a matrix of data, encoding how many photons of specific wavelengths of light are received at a detector from a given location in space. To process an image is to manipulate these matrices, performing calculations on the numbers. Excessive manipulation is not only unnecessary, it departs from the actual data gathered by the spacecraft. The rest of us aren’t so tied to data fidelity; we want pretty pictures that illustrate the adventure of space exploration and allow us to imagine ourselves out there in the solar system exploring these strange new worlds. So when non-scientists get their hands on image data, they process it in ways that scientists won’t: they paint out data gaps, fiddle with contrast, sharpen photos by stacking or filtering them, and produce color as the human eye might see it by washing black-and-white images with color or by computing red, green, and blue channels from data taken in other wavelengths. The beautiful images that result are rarely useable for research, but are uniquely appropriate for illustration.

Sharing the Wealth Space image data archives may be free, but they’re difficult for neophytes to access. Images are stored in a peculiar format, and it takes considerable time and study to learn how to find and process them. However, since 2004 there has been an explosion in public participation

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DATA: NASA / JPL

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Twenty-year-old images discovered recently in the Voyager 2 archive by Ted Stryk (professor of philosophy at Roane State Community College) show tiny Despina and its shadow crossing the face of Neptune.

in image processing thanks to the generosity of two scientists from the Mars Exploration Rover mission. As NASA/Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) prepared for the launch and landing of the rovers, project scientist Steve Squyres and imaging-team leader Jim Bell, both of Cornell University, approached JPL with a new idea: to allow the general public to experience the rover missions as they unfolded by spewing all of the rovers’ image data directly to the internet. The proposal was revolutionary; scientists have traditionally held their data close to the vest for as long as possible. But, Bell says, “I truly believe that it’s a privilege to be involved in exploring Mars. The folks who paid for the mission — and even those who didn’t — deserve to see what’s coming in every day, as quickly as we can make it available.” So as JPL prepared the ground systems that would process and distribute the rover data to the mission’s scientists and engineers, they built a parallel system that would convert the data into a format easy to consume by the public and push it onto a server outside the lab’s firewalls. Since their landings in January 2004, every image captured by the Spirit and Opportunity has been posted within hours of its receipt on Earth to JPL’s website. The raw images have been automatically contrast-enhanced and converted to JPEG format to make them easy and quick to browse. They proved so popular that JPL imposed the same protocol on its Cassini mission, which arrived at Saturn in June of the same year. Visitors can tune in to JPL’s website for daily snapshots showing where the Mars rovers and Cassini have most recently been. Since 2004, other missions that have shared raw image data with the public include Deep Impact, New Horizons, Phoenix, and an engineering camera on Europe’s Mars Express. Sk yandTelescope.com

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DATA: NASA / JPL / CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Planetary Close-ups

(below) became the Astronomy Picture of the Day a week later, on October 17, 2006. Inspired by Di Lorenzo’s image, Glen Nagle of Australia reinterpreted Howard’s original mosaic. In the foreground, Nagle retained the brightness and (unrealistically high) contrast of the original Rover photos. Then he extracted the clouds from Howard’s mosaic using a screening process and

re-projected them onto a freshly painted sky. The resulting image, though arguably less faithful to the data than Di Lorenzo’s, works better on the printed page, and may be more

evocative to people familiar with deserts on Earth. See SkyandTelescope.com/ amateur-spaceimaging for a link to the web thread where the collaboration took place.

PROCESSING: MICHAEL HOWARD / TAYFUN ÖNER / DAMIEN BOUIC / MARCO DI LORENZO

The image of Mars’s Big Sky Country on pages 76–77 was the product of many hands and minds. The collaboration started when Jan van Driel from the Netherlands noticed some interesting cloud patterns in the most recent set of raw photos from one of the Mars Rovers (top). He stitched two cloud shots together (right) and asked for assistance in producing a bigger panorama. Michael Howard (United States) figured out how to compensate for the fact that the clouds were drifting while Opportunity was photographing them and expanded van Driel’s mosaic to four frames. He also made a mosaic of the ground beneath the clouds and remapped everything to a vanishing-point perspective. Then Tayfun Öner of Turkey painted in the gap between the ground and sky, Damien Bouic of France colorized the image using data from a different camera, and Marco Di Lorenzo of Italy tweaked the color and contrast. The resulting image

PROCESSING: JAN VAN DRIEL

Birth of an Image

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A Two-Way Street Providing open access to images has created an international community of space enthusiasts who eagerly consume the data. Their work helps a much broader

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The $1395 Astro Tech AT8RC was the first sensibly-priced 8” Ritchey-Chrétien to be introduced to the U. S. market. It was the first to be delivered to excited astrophotographers. It was the first – and is still Astro-Tech AT8RC the only – sensibly-priced 8” $1395 f/8 R-C with premium features like low thermal expansion quartz mirrors (not ordinary glass like the competition) and a carbon fiber body (not rolled steel) to minimize focus changes as the temperature drops; brighter 99% reflectivity dielectric mirror coatings (rather than the lower-reflectivity aluminum of the competition); and two dovetails, Vixen and Losmandy (the competition has only one). The Astro-Tech AT8RC. We were the first – and we’re still the best.

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These images allow the public to follow missions in real time, seeing the images as quickly as the science teams do. Depending on the relative timing of downlink and the sleep cycles of science team members, the public may actually see the data first! Of course, this gives the public (or even other scientists) an opportunity to “scoop” the mission’s science team, becoming the first to discuss new discoveries in public. For example, last summer, when the Mars Phoenix lander dug up some bright clods of soil that disappeared in the four days that separated two images of a trench, that event and the interpretation — that Phoenix had indeed become the first spacecraft ever to reach out and touch water on Mars — appeared first on unmannedspaceflight.com, and only later from the Phoenix press office. Scientists are divided on whether these issues of priority really matter. Bell says he’s not concerned: “I don’t think the scientists involved will really get scooped: quantitative scientific analyses require much more time and rigorous calibration work, and it’s much more important to be right than to be first.” In contrast, many amateurs who have posted their own processed versions of raw Cassini images to forums and blogs have been contacted by the Cassini imaging team and asked to desist from manipulation of “their” data. However, Cassini mission management at JPL supports any public use of the mission’s raw images, processed or not. Probably the greatest scoop occurred in January 2005, when the European-built Huygens probe descended to the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. Shortly after the images were received on Earth, raw JPEG versions were inadvertently posted to a public University of Arizona website. By the time that ESA released three small images from Huygens, amateurs had already produced and posted gorgeous mosaics.

The 8” Astro-Tech Ritchey-Chrétien – the first and still the best.

Modern interplanetary spacecraft return so many images to Earth that there are plenty of gems waiting to be discovered by the armchair space explorer. This example from the Cassini archive shows Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon, passing behind Dione, its fourth largest. Dione appears bigger because it’s much closer to the spacecraft.

public visualize the strange worlds being explored by our robotic emissaries. On a few occasions, amateurs have also been able to contribute to space missions. The most notable example happened as NASA’s New Horizons mission prepared for its gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter. The goal of New Horizons’ Jupiter encounter, which took place only a year after its launch, was to speed the spacecraft onward to Pluto. Of course, the science team hoped to use the flyby to test out their instruments and systems and

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DATA: NASA / JPL / SSI (2)

Planetary Close-ups

Planetary Society web editor Emily Lakdawalla blogs daily about planetary exploration missions at planetary.org/blog. 82 worldmags

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Both of these views were created from images taken by Cassini when Saturn’s rings were nearly edgeon to the Sun. In the version at right, the Cassini imaging team brightened the rings by a factor of 20 to 60 to make them more spectacular. The author’s more naturalistic rendition (left) shows how faint the rings really are when sunlight is just glancing over their surface. The difference in Saturn’s phase is due to the fact that Cassini took the underlying photos at different points in its orbit.

Two Different Interpretations of Identical Data These mosaics were created from the same data set: eight images captured by Voyager 2 near its closest approach to Uranus’s moon Miranda on January 24, 1986. The spacecraft was traveling very fast with respect to Miranda, so the images vary in scale, and the moon appears to rotate from one image to the next. So significant warping of the images was required to assemble the mosaics. The version produced by the Voyager science team (below) is an orthographic map projection, in which the images were processed

DATA: NASA / JPL (2)

do some valuable science. But the tight schedule and limited budget allowed very little time to examine the flyby geometry for “Kodak moments,” opportunities to take photographs that might be useful for public outreach. In February 2006, New Horizons imaging team member John Spencer posted a note to unmannedspaceflight.com inviting forum participants to search for potential Kodak moments. Within 24 hours, forum member Richard Hendricks had posted a list of possible shots, two of which were eventually captured by New Horizons during its flyby. The successful experiment in amateur-professional collaboration inspired Spencer to issue a similar call for Kodak-moment opportunities during New Horizons’ 2015 Pluto encounter. Despite such successful interactions, NASA and ESA have not yet taken advantage of the skill and enthusiasm of amateurs by outsourcing any of their production of graphics for public consumption. But individual researchers have taken note of the work of amateurs. Scientists do their own processing work to analyze their data. But when it’s time to present their research, they want to put their best foot forward. At conference after conference, I’ve seen researchers incorporate amateurprocessed images into their slide presentations, because amateurs create some of the most evocative views of worlds never seen up close by human eyes. ✦

to be accurate with respect to latitude and longitude, and to remove the effects of solar phase angle on brightness of the surface. The result is scientifically precise but lifeless. The version above was produced by Ted Stryk, who stretched the component

frames using a rubber-sheet method. Although his version is less geometrically accurate, it does a far better job of portraying Miranda as an only quasi-round world whose mountains and canyons produce noticeable bumps and grooves on its limb.

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Sean Walker Gallery

▴A

RARE SPECTACLE Gianluca Valentini Late last September, active region 11027 brought a temporary break to the long drought of solar activity. Details: TEC APO180FL refractor with Solar Spectrum 0.3-angstrom Hydrogen-alpha filter and Lumenera Infinity 2-1M video camera. Stack of multiple frames. ▶ CORONAL

COMBS Babak A. Tafreshi Observers were treated to a display of coronal streamers and polar combs during the total solar eclipse of July 22, 2009. Details: Canon EOS 20D DSLR camera with 400-mm lens at f/8. Single exposure of ¼ 0 second, ISO 1600. 84 January 2010 worldmags

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◀ SWIRLING

GIANT Brian G. Combs Jupiter Oval BA (upper right) sported a reddish hue throughout 2009, though its tint was less pronounced. South is up. Details: Celestron C14 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with Lumenera SKYnyx2-0 video camera. Stack of multiple frames recorded through red, green, and blue filters. ▾ THE

EAGLES NEST Chris Cook Hot stellar winds from the young open cluster in M16 have carved a hollow in the cloud left over from the stars’ creation. Details: Astro-Physics 130EDFGT refractor with SBIG ST-8E CCD camera. Total exposure was 3⅓ hours through Astrodon color filters and enhanced with 4 hours of Hα data. Gallery showcases the finest astronomical images submitted to us by our readers. Send your very best shots to [email protected]. We pay $50 for each published photo. See SkyandTelescope.com/aboutsky/guidelines.

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Gallery

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BUSY SPIRAL Bob and Janice Fera Messier 33 displays prodigious star formation, indicating the galaxy has interacted with other galaxies in the recent past. Details: Officina Stellare RC360AST 14-inch RitcheyChrétien telescope with SBIG STL-11000M CCD camera. Three-panel mosaic totaling 22½ hours exposure through Astrodon color filters. ▶ OREGON

STARTRAILS Joshua Bury Stars trace their nightly path over Grants Pass in Oregon. Details: Nikon D200 digital SLR camera with zoom lens set at 11-mm. Composite of multiple images spanning 4 hours. ✦

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January 2010

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January 2010

89

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OPTICS

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APRIL 2010 ISSUE Ad Space Close: January 1st

Classified ads are for the sale and purchase of noncommercial merchandise, unique items, or job offers. The rate is $1.50 per word; minimum charge of $24; payment must accompany order. Closing date is 15th of third month before publication date. Send to: Ad Dept., Sky & Telescope, 90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140. WANTED: No-longer-used telescopes, parts, and accessories. Contact Gary Hand, 26437 Ridge Rd., Damascus, MD 20872. Phone: 301-482-0000. FOR RENT: Beautiful new, fully furnished 3BR/2BA adobe home in Jack Newton’s Arizona Sky Village (www.arizonaskyvillage.com). Observe under the darkest, clearest, most transparent skies in the Lower 48! Contact [email protected], 520-306-0860, www. arizona-dreaming.com. AUTHORS/SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS: is your passion astronomy and would you like to see your work published by Willmann-Bell? If so, let’s explore the possibilities. Call 1-800-8257827 or write PO Box 35025, Richmond, VA 23235. EINSTEIN THEORY EXPLAINED to show the Hubble Universe Expansion is a natural relativistic effect. See: www.olduniverse. com. JAMES SHORT & ALVAN CLARK telescopes wanted. Will pay top dollar. Don Yeier, 607-659-7000 (New York), yeierco@ frontiernet.net.

Ad Material Close: January 10th

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COSTA RICA PROPERTY: Astronomers’ delight. Dark-sky view estate lots and panoramic ocean view lots for sale in a secluded gated community in the coastal mountains of Guanacaste in the sunny Pacific Northwest. Cielo Grande Observatory Estates is offering to reimburse travel costs to purchasers of the remaining lots (limited amount). See lot sizes, location, and pricing at www. cielograndevistas.com or e-mail [email protected] for more information.

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January 2010

91

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Product Locator

Inside This Issue BINOCULARS Celestron (Pages 4, 5, 55, 96) Celestron.com 310-328-9560 Meade (Pages 7, 35) Meade.com 800-919-4047 | 949-451-1450 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000

CAMERAS Apogee (Page 9) CCD.com 916-218-7450 Celestron (Pages 4, 5, 55, 96) Celestron.com 310-328-9560 FLI (Page 70) FLIcamera.com 585-624-3760 Meade (Pages 7, 35) Meade.com 800-919-4047 | 949-451-1450 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 QSI (Page 58) QSImaging.com 888-774-4223 The Imaging Source (Page 30) AstronomyCameras.com 704-370-0110

Astrodon (Page 88) Astrodon.com Celestron (Pages 4, 5, 55, 96) Celestron.com 310-328-9560 Meade (Pages 7, 35) Meade.com 800-919-4047 | 949-451-1450 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 Tele Vue (Page 2) TeleVue.com 845-469-4551

TELESCOPES

Celestron (Pages 4, 5, 55, 96) Celestron.com 310-328-9560 iOptron (Page 11) iOptron.com 866-399-4587 Meade (Pages 7, 35) Meade.com 800-919-4047 | 949-451-1450 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 Paramount (Page 95) Bisque.com 303-278-4478 Stellarvue (Page 90) Stellarvue.com 530-823-7796 Tele Vue (Page 2) TeleVue.com 845-469-4551

Astro-Tech (Page 81) Astronomics.com 800-422-7876 | 405-364-0858 Astrotelescopes (Page 90) HandsonOptics.com 866-726-7371 Celestron (Pages 4, 5, 55, 96) Celestron.com 310-328-9560 Explore Scientific (Page 19) ExploreScientific.com 888-599-7597 iOptron (Page 11) iOptron.com 866-399-4587 JMI (Page 70) JMITelescopes.com 800-247-0304 | 303-233-5353 Meade (Pages 7, 35) Meade.com 800-919-4047 | 949-451-1450 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 PlaneWave Instruments (Page 90) PlaneWave.com 310-787-9411 Sky-Watcher USA (Page 21) SkyWatcherUSA.com 888-880-0485 Stellarvue (Page 90) Stellarvue.com 530-823-7796 Tele Vue (Page 2) TeleVue.com 845-469-4551

REAL ESTATE New Mexico Southern Skies (Pages 66, 67) NMSouthernSkies.com 219-746-3132

SOFTWARE

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Oceanside Photo & Telescope (Pages 64, 68) Optcorp.com 800-483-6287 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 Woodland Hills (Pages 60, 75) WHTelescopes.com 818-347-2270

Hands On Optics (Pages 64, 90) HandsonOptics.com 866-726-7371

High Point Scientific (Pages 12, 34) HighPointScientific.com 800-266-9590

Astronomics (Pages 63, 81, 83) Astronomics.com 800-422-7876 | 405-364-0858

Celestron (Pages 4, 5, 55, 96) Celestron.com 310-328-9560

Dealer Locator

FILTERS

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Cyanogen (Page 15) Cyanogen.com 613-225-2732 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 Software Bisque (Page 95) Bisque.com 303-278-4478

EYEPIECES

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Explore Scientific (Page 19) ExploreScientific.com 888-599-7597 Meade (Pages 7, 35) Meade.com 800-919-4047 | 949-451-1450 Orion (Pages 17, 69) OrionTelescopes.com 800-447-1001 | 831-763-7000 Sky-Watcher USA (Page 21) SkyWatcherUSA.com 888-880-0485 Tele Vue (Page 2) TeleVue.com 845-469-4551

FOCUSERS

To advertise on this page, please contact Lester Stockman at 617-758-0253, or [email protected]

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Index to Advertisers Adirondack Astronomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Metamorphosis Jewelry Design . . . . . . . . . . 89

Adorama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59, 73

New Mexico Southern Skies. . . . . . . . . .66, 67

Apogee Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Oberwerk Corp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Ash Manufacturing Co., Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Observa-Dome Laboratories . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Astro Haven Enterprises. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Oceanside Photo & Telescope . . . . . . . .64, 68

Astro-Physics, Inc.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Orion Telescopes & Binoculars . . . . . . .17, 69

Astrodon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Peterson Engineering Corp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

AstroHawk Corp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

PlaneWave Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Astronomics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63, 83

PreciseParts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Astronomy Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Quantum Scientific Imaging, Inc. . . . . . . . . 58

Atik Cameras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Santa Barbara Instrument Group . . . . . . . . . 3

Bob’s Knobs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Celestron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4, 5, 55, 96 CNC Parts Supply, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Cyanogen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 DiscMounts, Inc.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Don Lago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Dream Cellular, LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Edmund Scientific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Equatorial Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Explore Scientific LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Finger Lakes Instrumentation, LLC . . . . . . . 70 Fishcamp Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Foster Systems, LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

IN THE NEXT ISSUE

Scope City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 ScopeStuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 SCS Astro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Moon Mapper

Sirius Observatories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter returned stunning high-def movies of the Moon’s surface.

Skies Unlimited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Sky & Telescope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60, 83 Sky-Watcher USA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Lunar Impact

Skyhound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft hit the Moon right on target. But was water detected?

Software Bisque. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 SpacialInfo Tech, LLC/RITI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Digging Out the Details

Star GPS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Starizona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Technical Innovations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83, 88

A novel deconvolution technique helps you sharpen your astrophotos without adding noise.

Tele Vue Optics, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Weather Forecasting Tips

Hubble Optics Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Teletechnika . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Hutech Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The Imaging Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Internet resources can tell you whether to go out tonight to observe.

International Dark-Sky Association . . . . . . . 90

The Observatory, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

iOptron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

The Teaching Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

JMI Telescopes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Travel Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Kendrick Astro Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

TravelQuest International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Khan Scope Centre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

University Optics, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Kitt Peak National Observatory . . . . . . . . . . 73

Van Slyke Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Knightware. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

William Optics Co., Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Lumicon International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Willmann-Bell, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87, 89

Meade Instruments Corp. . . . . . . . . . . . .7, 35

Woodland Hills Telescopes . . . . . . . . . .60, 75

Goto USA, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Hands On Optics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64, 90 High Point Scientific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12, 34 Hotech Corp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

worldmags

Starlight Xpress, Ltd.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Stellarvue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Swinburne University of Technology . . . . . . 52

TOP: JAXA / NHK ; BOTTOM: KEN CRAWFORD

Glatter Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

SkyandTelescope.com 800-253-0245

On newsstands January 5th!

Sk yandTelescope.com

January 2010

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Focal Point

Jacob Haqq-Misra & Seth D. Baum

Where Have All the Aliens Gone? The problem of sustainability may explain the absence of extraterrestrials. civilization that deploys colonists to 10 planets, each of which expands to another 10 new planets, will quickly colonize the entire galaxy. This premise is based on observations of the human population, such as our growth from about 1 million

DAN PAGE

For ages, humanit y has looked to the skies and pondered whether intelligent life ever developed elsewhere. In 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi made a back-of-theenvelope calculation to estimate the time required for a technological civilization to spread throughout our galaxy. Fermi realized that a civilization expanding exponentially at even 1% of light speed could colonize the entire galaxy in just 10 million years. Following his reasoning, we now know that the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 10 billion years old, whereas life on Earth arose around 4 billion years ago. Plenty of time has elapsed for intelligent life to develop elsewhere. So if any technological extraterrestrial society exists, then they should have visited us by now. Known today as the Fermi paradox, this apparent contradiction between observations and expectations raises the question: Where are they? Many explanations have been proposed to account for the conspicuous absence of extraterrestrials. Perhaps life as found on Earth may be a cosmic anomaly that only arises once or twice in an entire galaxy. A more cynical perspective maintains that civilizations inevitably destroy themselves, facing nuclear winter rather than interstellar domination. Then again, members of an extraterrestrial galactic club could already be observing us, following a Prime Directive to remain hidden until they deem us worthy of contact. We revisited Fermi’s original assumption that civilizations spread exponentially throughout the galaxy. For example, a 94 January 2010 worldmags

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to nearly 7 billion people over the last 10,000 years. But we are now learning that, despite the seeming vastness of Earth’s resources, this rapid expansion frequently proves unsustainable because it consumes resources faster than they are replenished. If growth outstrips resources, human

civilization may collapse. This could also explain the absence of extraterrestrials: despite the seeming vastness of the galaxy, perhaps exponential expansion is also unsustainable on a galactic scale. If this Sustainability Solution explains the paradox, then rapidly expanding civilizations face severe issues upon complete colonization of the galaxy. With no new available resources and no room left to grow, unsustainably growing galactic civilizations may inevitably collapse. Because this process occurs over millions of years — compared to the multi-billion-year history of the Milky Way — if any extraterrestrial civilization successfully expanded through the galaxy, we would not have seen any signs of them. Their rise and fall would have been too quick for us to notice. We may be able to detect the aftermath of their expansion and collapse, but such “civilization graveyards” would escape our notice much more easily than the civilizations themselves. The galaxy may be fi lled with sustainably living extraterrestrials that grow within the carrying capacity of their environment, expanding too slowly to have yet reached Earth. But if unsustainable rapid growth led to the demise of past galactic civilizations, then perhaps the challenge rests with human civilization to become responsible consumers and ensure our own longterm survival. ✦ Jacob Haqq-Misra is a Ph.D. candidate in meteorology and astrobiology at Penn State University. Seth Baum is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Penn State University.

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Take it from the man. It’s time to get serious.

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†(NCUJWRITCFGCDNGJCPFEQPVTQNWRFCVG[QWT VGNGUEQRG¶UQRGTCVKPIUQHVYCTGXKCVJGKPVGTPGV †#NN0GZ5VCT5'OQFGNUCTG)25EQORCVKDNGCPF EQOGYKVJCPCWZKNKCT[RQTVHQTWUGYKVJCFFKVKQPCN CEEGUUQTKGU †+PVGTPCNDCVVGT[EQORCTVOGPVVQRTGXGPVEQTFYTCR FWTKPIWUG †+PENWFGU0GZ4GOQVG‰VGNGUEQRGEQPVTQNUQHVYCTGHQT CFXCPEGFEQPVTQNQH[QWTVGNGUEQRGXKCEQORWVGT †³6*'5-;‰´2NCPGVCTKWOUQHVYCTG±YKVJQDLGEV FCVCDCUGRTKPVCDNGUM[OCRUCPFGPJCPEGFKOCIGU







†(QTOQTGKPHQTOCVKQPQPVJG0GZ5VCT5'XKUKV YYYEGNGUVTQPEQOUG

 5 'VGNGUEQRGUHGCVWTG%GNGUVTQP¶UTGPQYPGFQRVKECNU[UVGOUCPFEQOG UVCPFCTFYKVJQWTRTGOKWO5VCT$TKIJV‰:.6%QCVKPIU

ITEM#

MODEL

 (NCUJWRITCFGCDNGJCPFEQPVTQNEQPVCKPUCFCVCDCUGQHPGCTN[ EGNGUVKCNQDLGEVUCPFCFXCPEGFUQHVYCTGHGCVWTGUKPENWFKPI5M[#NKIP +FGPVKH[/QFG7UGTFG¿PCDNG*QTK\QP.KOKVUCPF2TGEKUG)Q6Q

   

0GZ5VCT5' 0GZ5VCT5' 0GZ5VCT5' 0GZ5VCT5'

 &GUKIPGF(QT2QTVCDKNKV[YKVJJGCXKGUVOQFGNQPN[NDUURGPFOQTG VKOGQDUGTXKPIYKVJVJGUGNKIJVYGKIJVCPFGCU[VQUGVWRVGNGUEQRGU

worldmags

 Q126%QTR±±YYYQRVEQTREQO Q#FQTCOC±±YYYCFQTCOCEQO

4GDCVGCXCKNCDNGVQ75CPF%CPCFCEWUVQOGTUQPN[4GDCVGKURC[CDNGKP %CPCFKCPFQNNCTUHQTTGUKFGPVUQH%CPCFC

Q*CPFU1P1RVKEU±±YYYJCPFUQPQRVKEUEQO Q*KIJ2QKPV5EKGPVK¿E±±YYYJKIJRQKPVUEKGPVK¿EEQO Q6GNGUEQRGUEQO±±YYYVGNGUEQRGUEQO

2TKEGKUUWIIGUVGFTGVCKNKP75&QNNCTU2TKEKPIUWDLGEVVQEJCPIGYKVJQWVPQVKEG&QGUPQVKPENWFGUJKRRKPIQTVCZ

PRICING 1PN[ CHVGT4GDCVG 1PN[ CHVGT4GDCVG 1PN[ CHVGT4GDCVG 1PN[ CHVGT4GDCVG

Q5EQRG%KV[±±YYYUEQRGEKV[EQO Q#UVTQPQOKEU±±YYYCUVTQPQOKEUEQO Q1RVKEU2NCPGV±±YYYQRVKEURNCPGVEQO