Monthly Archives: May 2017

On Friday evening, youll have the opportunity to see a few of our neighboring planets as well as the moon and the sunon through the lens of 20 expensive telescopes that you and I cannot afford. Fortunately, the D.C. area astronomers are willing to share, as they do every year at the annual Astronomy Night on the Mall.

The event is free Friday from 6 to 11 p.m. All you have to do is show up on the northeast grounds of the Washington Monument. Youll see a lot of telescopes with lines of people trailing behind them. Each scope is usually trained on a specificspace object another planet, the moon, maybe a nearby comet.

The event will offerspace geeks hands-on activities, demonstrations, hand-outs, posters, banners, and videos; a planetarium show with a portable blow-up dome, speakers from scientific and educational organization, and a chance to mingle with astronomers.

The event is organized and hosted by Hofstra Universityalong with volunteers from all of the big science organizations the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the International Dark Sky Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club and the American Geophysical Union. Scientists from these groups will be on hand tooffer demonstrations and discussion.

This is theeighth annual Mall event that organizer Don Lubowich, astronomy outreach coordinator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., has assembled.

Rain location: School Without Walls High School, 2130 G St. NW.

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Space geeks: Astronomy Night on the Mall is Friday and it's free - Washington Post

Astronomers from around the world, including South Africa, will attempt to study the rings of an exoplanet orbiting a star 63.4 light years away from earth.

The international programme, being conducted between April 2017 and January 2018, would have astronomers observing Beta Pictoris, the second brightest star in the constellation Pictor.

Beta Pictoris is a star visible to the naked eye that has a large planet orbiting around it, explained Dr Steve Crawford from the South African Large Telescope (SALT), who spoke about South Africas involvement in the 200-day observation at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Observatory, Cape Town, on Saturday.

This year the planet is expected to pass nearly in front of the star. If there are rings around the planet, we will have an excellent chance to detect them with how closely the planet is passing in front of the star.

According to Crawford, Beta Pictoris was still a young star and could give astronomers a glimpse of what the early solar system may have been like.

In particular, this might give us a chance to study how moons form around a planet which is a process that is not very well understood yet, explained Crawford.

In 1981, the brightness of Beta Pictoris diminished, which made astronomers think there must have been a huge object passing in front of the star, then the giant planet Pictoris b, was discovered in 2008.

We are hosting one of the telescopes at the Sutherland Observatory of the SAAO, said Crawford.

A small robotic all-sky monitor with two camera systems, named the Beta Pictoris b Ring project, would be dedicated to looking at Beta Pictoris at SAAO, in Sutherland, in the Northern Cape.

The b Ring monitor would take images, which would be analysed on a set of computers. If a change in brightness was detected, it would allow the triggering of a host of observations using larger telescopes and more advanced instrumentation to study the details of the suspected ring system in-depth.

University of Cape Town PhD student, Blaine Lomberg, would be responsible for the SALT spectroscopic follow-up if anything was detected.

If we detect a change in the flux coming from Beta Pictoris, it would trigger follow-up observations from a number of different observatories including SALT.

We are hoping to use the follow-up observations to determine the characteristics of the rings, like what they are composed of, said Crawford.

Crawford further explained that the area immediately around the vicinity of the planet would only take 2.5 days to cross in front of the star, but the total area where rings might be detected would take 270 days to pass in front of the star.

So we want to monitor over a full year to see if we detect any other changes due to the planet transiting the star, said Crawford.

The project was being led by Matt Kenworthy from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and the team also included a United States group that would be installing another monitoring station in Australia.

According to the National Aeronautical and Space Administration in the United States, more than 3,000 exoplanets (planets outside the solar system) have been discovered since 1988.

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South Africa participates in international astronomy programme - Creamer Media's Engineering News

A national tour discussing the upcoming total solar eclipse will stop in Council Bluffs and several other southwest Iowa communities in the coming several days.

Kevin Manning, an astronomer and former NASA consultant, will speak at the Council Bluffs Public Library on Thursday at 7 p.m. as part of a tour called Look Up to the Stars.

Elsewhere in The Nonpareils area, Manning will visit public libraries in Clarinda at 7 p.m. today, Sidney at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Glenwood at 2 p.m. Thursday, Shenandoah at 6 p.m. Saturday and Atlantic at 7 p.m. Monday, according to the tours website, lookuptothestars.com, as well as library websites.

After that, the tour departs for Illinois and Indiana.

A release from the Council Bluffs library states that Manning worked as a consultant on the Chandra X-Ray Observatory with NASA and is a passionate science educator.

Come experience an educational and entertaining exploration of the universe, the stars and other celestial wonders, as well as a refreshingly large perspective gained by looking up at the sky, the library said in the release.

Following Mannings presentation, weather permitting, an outdoor star viewing with a custom-designed telescope will be offered.

The event is free and open to the public.

The program, The Universe & An All American Total Solar Eclipse, explores eclipses and other celestial events using positional astronomy to determine the location of objects in the sky at a particular date, time and location, according to the tours website.

A total eclipse of the sun will take place Aug. 21, with Iowa except for a tiny sliver of Fremont County that will be in totality experiencing a partial eclipse.

Another eclipse-related opportunity is coming up next week when the University of Nebraska at Omahas David Kriegler will present a public lecture June 10 at 6 p.m. and June 11 at 2 p.m. at the Durham Science Building.

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Astronomy tour to visit several SWI libraries next week - The Daily Nonpareil

Lia Halloran's exhibit "Your Body is a Space That Sees Us" features paintings and cyanotypes of cosmic objects in round frames. This is the largest piece in the exhibit, and is more than 10 feet wide.

Visual artist Lia Halloran's newest exhibit, "Your Body is a Space That Sees Us," features large-scale paintings of astronomical objects that were photographed and catalogued by women working at the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s.

Those women, along with their male colleagues, took thousands of photographs, catalogued and characterized the cosmic objects therein, and changed the landscape of space science. Despite the impact their work had on the world, those women were left out of history for many decades, a fate suffered by many female scientists that is now being somewhat remedied.

Halloran's exhibit is partly about remembering those forgotten histories. It's a reminder that these women existed; that they took up physical space while they also literally uncovered new territory in outer space. [Walk Through "Your Body is a Space That Sees Us" Exhibit (Photos)]

"It's almost like a roll call; it's like saying they were there," Halloran told Space.com at the Luis de Jesus Los Angeles art gallery, where the work was previously on display. "This experience of the history of astronomy is theirs, is ours, is yours, and it is about kind of a physical experience. It's not just something that's at a distance."

The original painting of the Small Magellanic Cloud by Lia Halloran, in honor of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, an astronomer who studied variable stars in the cloud.

If those women are the "your" in the title of Halloran's exhibit "Your Body is a Space That Sees Us" then who is the "us"? Is the title spoken by the universe? Or is it the women who are talking to the current generation, calling on them to remember forgotten histories? Either way, the title calls out to the people who view Halloran's works; they are also bodies that fill a space as they observe the world around them. Observing the natural world requires a person's physical presence someone has to look through the telescope and photograph the sky. Those physical acts are what begin to illuminate the conceptual landscape; to identify new islands in a vast, unexplored ocean of knowledge.

The Harvard College Observatory's Astronomical Photographic Plate Collection contains over 500,000 photographs of sections of the night sky, captured by astronomers between 1882 and 1992. A large portion of those photographs were taken by female astronomers who worked at the observatory in the last 1800s. Led by astronomer Thomas Pickering, the women were at one point given the derogatory group title "Pickering's Harem." Later, the nickname changed to the "Harvard Computers," a name created at a time when computers were people and not machines.

The work of the Harvard Computers and some of the group's most influential members is detailed in the book "The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars" (Viking, 2016) by Dava Sobel. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Halloran visited Harvard and received access to the photographic plate collection around the time that Sobel was investigating the history of the people who created it. Halloran said she and Sobel began conversing as they both dug through the plate collection and the stories surrounding it.

There were three particularly influential astronomers who came out of this Harvard group: Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who figured out a way to measure distances to far-off objects and laid the groundwork for Edwin Hubble to discover that the universe is expanding; Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who showed that hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe; and Annie Jump Cannon, who came up with a classification system for stars that is still used today.

But Halloran said the works are meant to reflect the entire history of female astronomers, including Hypatia, an astronomer who lived in Greece around A.D. 415, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who identified the first pulsar but did not share the Nobel Prize in physics that was awarded for that discovery.

Your Body is a Space That Sees: The Magellanic Cloud from Lia Halloran on Vimeo.

For the exhibit, Halloran selected a few plates created by members of the Harvard Computers, and did paintings of these photographs. At the gallery, Halloran showed me one of the pieces that depicts the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. Halloran painted hundreds of dots representing stars.

"As much as I can, I try to represent the [stellar] density," she said. "I'm not gridding it out, so if someone were to compare this with the actual image, they wouldn't find the exact number of stars [in the painting], but the density would be equivalent."

Halloran uses a type of paint that is "highly volatile," meaning it doesn't settle on the paper until the liquid in it evaporates. The effect is similar to how coffee rings dry on paper the solids that float around in the liquid move to the outer edge of the ring, so that edge is usually darker than the inner edge.

Similarly, in Halloran's paintings, a single dot of the paint isn't a solid circle; instead, the coloring moves to the outside of the dot, creating an ombr effect all by itself. Broad, sweeping brush strokes around the edges of the panting look like the curling patterns of a gas cloud or smoke rising from a fire. These monochrome paintings are simpler versions of actual telescopic images, and the works capture the serenity of a star-filled sky and the fluid movement of cosmic structures. They may inspire a Zen-like trance in the observer.

But many of the pieces in the gallery are not just paintings; creating them involves another, much more complicated step. In the gallery, Halloran and I stand before two square pieces that both show a dense cluster of stars. One of them looks as though she used blue paint on white paper, while the other looks as though it was done with white paint on blue paper. Halloran is pointing to one and then the other, saying, "This is that." I think she must mean she's painted the same object twice, but after a few confused minutes I realize she's being literal. The piece that looks as though it was done with blue paint is actually a negative of the other painting.

The image on the right is a cyanotype of the painting on the left. Cyanotyping creates a negative image of the original, similar to how photographs are made from film.

To achieve this effect, Halloran did her original paintings on a semitransparent paper, which was then placed on top of watercolor paper inside a darkroom, and brushed over with a light-sensitive paint, a process called cyanotyping. When the sandwiched works are brought out of the darkroom and into the light, the light-sensitive paint creates a negative of the original painting, so that where the original was white the new one is dark, hence the new pieces looking like photo negatives of the originals. (In the past, cyanotyping was used to make copies of drawings.) The video above shows how Halloran and colleagues carried out this process.

Halloran assures me I'm not the only person who didn't immediately understand the connection between these pieces. But that's part of engaging her audience, she told me; it's her way of pushing them to more actively engage with the works, and to "have an experience."

"I like that you look at this and you dont totally know what you're looking at," she said. "I like that there's something that makes you stay a little longer. You have to explore a little bit, to dig deep, to get in there. And that can be frustrating for the viewer. But I want them to have to have a dedicated look, and take time. [The art works] evolve and they give a little more the longer you take with them."

Another way that the pieces engage with the viewer is how they are framed: the starry landscapes are bordered by round frames, which give the impression that the viewer is looking down the tube of a telescope its a reminder that the viewer's body occupies a space that sees these starry scenes. Halloran and I walk over to one of the largest pieces in the exhibit, which has a horizontal oval frame.

"When I hung this up in my studio the first time I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm in a spaceship and I'm looking through this porthole!'" she said. "I didn't intend for that. But they become experiential and not just a large version of another image."

Some of the more vertically oriented oval frames even look like mirrors. Either way, they highlight the act of observation, not just by long-dead astronomers but by the people standing in the gallery.

The cyanotyping that Halloran uses to create her works is similar to how photographs are developed, and serves as one more link to the Harvard Computers. The photographic plates are extremely fragile and would have been somewhat labor-intensive to make, but they allowed astronomers of the day to study a huge number of night-sky objects in detail, and to catalogue and characterize them without having to look into a telescope.

Two cyanotype works appear in Lia Halloran's exhibit "Your Body is a Space That Sees Us."

"It was really important that to me that, these aren't just images from history, but the process itself sort of reflects that history," Halloran said.

The Harvard plate collection has also provided a historical record of cosmic objects unlike anything else that exists in astronomy. Astronomers in the 21st century have used the plates to look for objects that have moved across the sky in the last 100 years or so. The background stars are so distant that even over the course of a century, they will appear to be in the same place relative to each other. But nearer objects like asteroids or objects in the Kuiper Belt (the region of the solar system beyond Neptune) could move relative to those background stars over decades or centuries; therefore, by comparing two images of the same patch of sky, taken 50 or 100 years apart, astronomers could identify those moving, nearby bodies.

In another 100 years, scientists will have plenty of digitized sky observations to comb through, but for now, the glass plates are a rare gift to modern astronomers. Halloran thinks that's a contribution that's worth remembering, and worth honoring through art.

Follow Calla Cofield@callacofield.Follow us@Spacedotcom,FacebookandGoogle+. Original article onSpace.com.

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Artist's Stunning New Exhibit Celebrates Harvard's 'Hidden' Female Astronomers - Space.com

Why a solar eclipse happens isnt exactly a mysterious concept. Astronomers have been studying the celestial events for centuries, and the science behind them is well-documented.

The science behind solar eclipse-chasing crowd sizes, on the other hand, can be as cloudy as a late August day on the Oregon Coast.

How many people are going to descend on Central Oregon to watch the moon block out the sun at 10:19 a.m. Aug. 21 has been the million-dollar question since local officials started preparing for the event more than a year ago, said Lysa Vattimo, who was hired by the city of Madras in 2016 to oversee local eclipse planning.

Its what everybody is dying to know, Vattimo said.

Predictions of how many visitors will show up vary, but the states Office of Emergency Management forecasts that about 1 million people will come to Oregon to watch the eclipse an estimate it based very broadly, OEM Emergency Planner Erik Rau said, on the number of campsites, hotel rooms, permitted events and an additional number as a percentage of the state population.

Its such a tricky number to try and get to because we really dont know, said OEM spokesperson Paula Negele.

Closer to home, local officials estimates fall closer to 200,000 total eclipse visitors for Jefferson, Crook and Deschutes counties.

But the truth is, Vattimo said, trying to figure out the size of the eclipse crowds is more akin to astrology than astronomy.

People dont really like the crystal-ball theory, but thats basically what it is looking into a crystal ball, she said.

Its up to each county in the state to figure out their respective eclipse crowd estimates as time permits, Rau wrote in an email to The Bulletin, noting that estimating those numbers is very challenging.

The few case studies available for regional eclipse tourism (Travel Salem researched an eclipse from Cairns, Australia in 2012) arent useful in providing specific numbers, but did confirm that large numbers of people will make an effort to travel in order to view an eclipse, he wrote in the email.

One way to do the math

In Central Oregon, a tri-county incident-management team was put together to oversee eclipse-related events, and it came up with a visitor number 204,000 that local officials can work with. Mike Ryan, the emergency services manager for Crook County who helps oversee the regional team, went over the formula the team managers used to reach its estimated visitor total.

I used to be able to recite it from memory, but all the numbers keep changing, he said, shuffling through papers to find the formula.

According to Ryan, the incident-management team starts with the number of potential visitors who could attend private, regional events based on event permit attendance caps.

Then it adds in the number of hotel rooms in Central Oregon multiplied by a factor of 2.3 to account for how many people will probably be staying in the hotel rooms, Ryan explained.

Lets say there are 30 rooms, and 10 have two people in the room; 10 have three, and 10 have four. Ryan said, trailing off. Basically it takes into consideration a couple or a couple plus 1 or 2 or 3 or 4.

Finally, Ryan said, throw in the total number of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service campsites multiplied by a factor of four or eight BLM sites allow eight people to camp; USFS sites allow four as well as 10 percent of the tri-county population, 21,000.

Twenty-one thousand is the visiting friends and family or people that are renting a room or an RV from someone, he said, adding that the management team predicts another 100,000 or so people will drive to the area for one day only. So 204,000 is the total number of visitors. I usually clarify that by saying these numbers could be low or high.

Another method

Demonstrating the inexact science behind eclipse crowd estimates, Vattimo, whos in charge of predicting how many eclipse chasers will come to Madras, conducts her math a little differently from Ryan. Using a formula she came up with, Vattimo recently upped her original local forecast that around 75,000 people would come to Madras to watch the eclipse by more than 25,000 people. She reports her new estimate, about 102,000, with an air of cautious confidence. After all, she said, her formula was given the OK by the states Office of Emergency Management.

They told me thats probably a really good approach to use, probably, Vattimo said, referring to her formula, which she proceeded to break down.

According to Vattimo, she takes the number of hotel rooms in Madras, plus the total number of campsites she knows about at privately run events around town. Then she adds the number of owner-occupied single-family homes in Madras and the citys total population to the mix. She multiplies the total by four the approximate number of people she assumes will be visiting the citys residents.

Not everyone will have four people, but down the street someone will have 16, Vattimo said, explaining why she multiplies by four a factor Ryan said he considers maybe a little too high.

Finally, Vattimo said she adds in 10 percent of Deschutes Countys population to account for the number of people she thinks will be traveling north to escape Bends inferior solar eclipse viewing experience.

There you have it 102,000, she said. I just went with it; I had to have something to give the public safety and public works departments. I was tired of hearing all these big numbers thrown out there; it sounded like people were pulling numbers out of the sky.

Reporter: 541-617-7829,

awest@bendbulletin.com

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Predicting eclipse crowds: More astrology than astronomy - Bend Bulletin

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) was launched back in June 2008 to study the Moon. It was created with two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) and the Wide Angle Camera to capture high-resolution images of the Moons surface.

While these high-tech cameras were typically sending back beautiful and clear images, scientists were puzzled on October 13, 2014 when the LRO sent back an unclear jittery image.

Mark Robinson, professor and principle investigator of LROC, said the poor quality of the image was likely caused by a brief, violent collision to the left NAC. The team ran through a list of what could have caused the disruption, but there were no issues with the spacecraft and Robinson said those types of issues would have also impacted the right NAC.

The only logical explanation, Robinson said in a press release, is that the NAC was hit by a meteoroid.

To verify this theory, the LROC team used a computer model that was created during LROCs development a vibration table that was used to simulate a launch, a test that the cameras passed to prove stability.

They reproduced the distortions from the image received and determined that the left NAC was hit by an 0.8 mm meteoroid with a density of 2.7 grams/cm3 going at a velocity of about 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) per second.

The meteoroid was traveling much faster than a speeding bullet, Robinson said. In this case, LROC did not dodge a speeding bullet, but rather survived a speeding bullet!

Not only is it rare for an instrument to survive such a collision, but according to Robinson its incredibly rare for the camera to capture the event. Luckily, the meteoroid didnt cause any serious damage to the instruments.

Since the impact presented no technical problems for the health and safety of the instrument, the team is only now announcing this event as a fascinating example of how engineering data can be used, in ways not previously anticipated, to understand what is happing to the spacecraft over 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) from the Earth, said John Keller, LRO project scientist from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.

Read more from the original source:

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was hit by a meteoroid and lived - Astronomy Magazine