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Free stargazing events in National Astronomy Week

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Free stargazing events in National Astronomy Week

11:59am Tuesday 4th February 2014 in News By Mark Tallentire, Reporter (Durham)

STARGAZERS are invited to join free events being staged as part of National Astronomy Week.

Durham Astronomical Society is hosting three public observing events in early March.

The first will be at Hardwick Park, Sedgefield, on Tuesday, March 4.

Skywatchers will move to Harehope Quarry, near Frosterley, on Thursday, March 6; and Rainton Meadows Nature Reserve, near Houghton-le-Spring, on Saturday, March 8.

The theme of the event is Jupiter and visitors will have the chance to see the solar systems largest planet through volunteers telescopes.

All events will run from 7pm to 9pm and are free. Donations to the society are welcome.

If the skies are cloudy, there will be a talk instead.

National Astronomy Week runs from March 1 to 8. For more information, visit astronomyweek.org.uk

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Free stargazing events in National Astronomy Week

Embry-Riddle reaches for the stars with $1M telescope | Video

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DAYTONA BEACH Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on Monday installed a $1 million telescope at its Daytona Beach campus, which gives the school bragging rights as home to Florida's largest university research telescope.

Officials hope the 16-foot-tall, 2-ton device will draw more students to the campus and to an astronomy major it plans to start offering later this year.

Embry-Riddle is among the colleges across the state and nation that have expanded astronomy programs as interest has grown in recent years.

Embry-Riddle student Tyler Parsotan, who was among those watching a crane lift the parts of the telescope into a new observatory Monday, said he can't wait to get his hands on the new equipment.

"I am absolutely ecstatic I have never had any type of opportunity like this before," said Parsotan, a junior majoring in space physics.

Embry-Riddle is eager to show off the telescope to the public, too. In the coming months, the private school, which has about 5,000 students in Daytona, will begin inviting community members to peer into space at comets, planets and other objects.

Terry Oswalt, chairman of Embry-Riddle's department of physical sciences, said students and the public will be able to see the surface of Mars, dozens of moons around Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. They can look into the Milky Way as well as the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, which is 25,000 light years away, and the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away.

"There is almost an unlimited number of projects you can do with a telescope of this quality and size," Oswalt said.

Until now, the University of Central Florida claimed to have the biggest telescope open to the public in Florida.

Embry-Riddle's telescope is 40 inches in diameter, meaning that it will collect more light and provide much brighter images than UCF's 20-inch telescope. The Orlando Science Center's main telescope has a 10-inch lens.

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Embry-Riddle reaches for the stars with $1M telescope | Video

Astronomers unite: Paynes Prairie hosts stargazing night

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Down a luminary-lit path in Paynes Prairie Saturday night, the Alachua Astronomy Club set up high-powered telescopes to show guests whichever constellation, nebula or planet they wanted to see.

More than 200 Gainesville residents gathered at the ninth annual stargazing event organized by the Friends of Paynes Prairie, a public charity group that raises money for the park.

Perran Ross, the groups president, said the profits from the $5 entry fee directly benefit the park.

We raise funds through events like this one and numerous other activities, he said, and we disburse those funds back to the prairie to help them with things like resource management facilities.

Despite cloudy weather, participants found ways to enjoy the evening, which included live music, a bonfire and a hayride through the park.

Gainesville resident Justin Telle, 10, listed all the things he liked about the event.

It was really cool. I liked the hayride and the camp with the horses, he said. I liked the music and the telescopes where you get to see Jupiter and the four moons. The hot chocolate and smores were really good.

Matt Bledsoe, a Paynes Prairie assistant park manager, said the event benefits not only benefits the park but also the community. It provides an avenue to fundraise for the park and educate those who attend.

Whether participants learned from the astronomy club or took a hayride to learn about park history, its a good partnership (among) the astronomy club, the Friends of Paynes Prairie and the park, Bledsoe said.

[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 2/3/2014 under the headline "Astronomers unite: Paynes Prairie hosts stargazing night"]

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Astronomers unite: Paynes Prairie hosts stargazing night

Highlights of the Night Sky – February 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video – Video

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Highlights of the Night Sky - February 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video
More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - what to look for in the night sky during February 2014. Please rate and comment, thanks! Cred...

By: CoconutScienceLab

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Highlights of the Night Sky - February 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video - Video

Green sky thinking: Astronomy’s dirty little secret

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Astronomy's carbon footprint is the strangest problem you've never thought about (Image: G. Hdepohl/ESO)

Astronomy produces a lot of carbon emissions, but it could be one of the greenest sciences if observatories harness their solar and wind resources

IF YOU were to draw up a list of the most pressing issues in science, it's unlikely that astronomy's carbon footprint would be on it. If it were, it would probably end up somewhere between effective male birth control and how to fold headphones to stop their wires getting tangled in your pocket.

Ueli Weilenmann, deputy director of La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, would disagree with that assessment. Recently, while grappling with the costs of running the place, he was shocked to discover the scale of the observatory's carbon emissions (see diagram). A bit of further digging revealed that the problem is not limited to Paranal: many other observatories exude more greenhouse gas than their size betrays.

This shouldn't be the case. By dint of their location, most observatories enjoy access to clean energy sources, but for various reasons they have been unable to exploit them. Now observatories all over the world are looking beyond obvious solutions, enlisting ingenious workarounds in their quest to go green. The possibilities for doing so run from the inspired to the mundane to the highly speculative. The potential carbon cutbacks won't save the world, but the people running these experiments are determined to prove that big science can be clean too.

The bigger telescopes get, the further they can peer into our universe, and the better the resulting images. But the barbed spiral galaxies and weather on distant exoplanets that have been captured by Paranal's Very Large Telescope (VLT) come at a high cost. Astronomy is an energy-intensive endeavour. "We are in a very isolated place and everything we do here has an associated energy cost," Weilenmann says. Paranal is so remote that even the water needs to be trucked in, not to mention food, staff and fuel.

The lion's share of the energy use, however, comes from running an instrument like the VLT and cooling its sensitive electronic equipment. Every day it sucks up 27 megawatt-hours of energy, or nearly 10 gigawatt-hours per year the annual consumption of 1000 US households.

But unlike those homes, Paranal is too far from the national grid to connect, so it must produce its own power. It does this using generators that burn butane. Fuel prices are volatile, and with observatories hardly swimming in cash, Weilenmann was investigating Paranal's energy use to try to keep expenses under control. It was then that he discovered its carbon footprint, 22,000 tonnes a year, equivalent to 46 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every peer-reviewed scientific paper produced there. It's equivalent to the emissions of a small town.

In a world where the energy budget of a data centre can rival that of a medium-sized city, those numbers won't raise many eyebrows, but for Weilenmann it was a matter of principle: the problem should not have existed in the first place. After all, the ideal locations for observatories happen to be green-energy sweet spots. "We never faced a situation where there was no sun and no wind for more than a day," says Rolf Chini of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Chini runs the observatory at Cerro Murphy which, like Paranal, sits on a peak in the Atacama desert, with 320 cloudless days a year on average and buffeted by strong winds.

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Green sky thinking: Astronomy's dirty little secret


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