The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year is one of the worlds top astrophotography competitions, and the 2020 shortlist offers a sublime selection of this years best entries, from some mind-bending close-ups of the suns surface to a series of magnificent Milky Way skyscapes.

The contest is run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, an iconic scientific institution founded nearly 400 years ago. There are eight key categories in the contest, spanning a broad spectrum of astrophotography styles, from skyscapes incorporating land perspectives, to more focused categories looking at galaxies and aurorae.

BEN BUSH

As with previous years, the contest illustrates the incredible skill and determination these photographers display to create these images. UK photographer Ben Bushs shot of an aurora over Icelands famous Vestrahorn is a great example. To get the perfect shot of the aurora reflecting over the water, Bush waded out into the freezing North Atlantic ocean in the middle of night.

Mathew Browne

Other shortlisted images highlight the patience and timing needed to compose the ideal frame. Matthew Browns shot of the Moon passing behind Londons Shard skyscraper is an example of a fleeting moment in time that took the photographer days to catch.

Kirsty Paton

The winning photographs will be revealed later in the year, sharing 10,000 in prize money.

Take a look through our gallery at more shortlisted images from this years contest.

Source: RMG

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Shining stars: The Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist - New Atlas

Everybody is curious to know about the universe but in the process of knowing it, we also learn and develop some superstitious beliefs. Shweta Kulkarni was also curious to know more about the universe but she channelled her interest in the right direction. That's how she was able to start the digital platform AstronEra. This 24-year-old, who is a Royal Astronomical Society fellow, tells us about her interest in the subject, "I was only 16 years old when my parents bought me my first telescope. I would show my friends the stars and other interesting things in the sky. They were really impressed with me. Gradually, I read more and learnt more about astronomythrough various platforms. When I was 18, I co-founded a non-profit organisation called Astron-SHK."

While educating youngsters about astronomy, she met several experts like Dr Govind Swarup, Professor Jayanth Narlikar and many others. That's when she got the idea to create astronomy-based videos, which eventually won her international fame. Shweta explains, "I wrote to the Department of Science and Technology about the lack of astronomical videos available for learners and our interest to create some of them. They gave us a grant of `2.5 lakh and we were able to produce five videos especially for the beginners in astronomy. We were invited to the International Astronomical Youth Camp held in the UK and were surprised to see that most of the people had already watched our videos. What they liked about them was the contribution of Indian scientists in the field of Astronomy."

With this newfound popularity for her videos, she decided to start AstronEra, an e-learning platform, in 2018. "Everybody has the right to learn about this subject and develop a scientific temperament, and AstronEra facilitates the same. This digital platform, incubated at IIMB'sNSRCEL, provides a wide range of astronomical courses for people of all agegroups." Currently, Shweta who is pursuing a BSc in Astronomy with Honours from theUniversity of Central Lancashire through distance learning, builds the content for these courses with the help of mentors and her friends who are also experts in the field. She explains, "There are different courses including space exploration, Hubble space telescope, a guide to buy a telescope, exploring the solar system, astronomy without a telescope and so on. As many students have shown an interest in studying Astronomy during the lockdown, we are offering most of these courses at half price. Over 2,000 students have taken up these courses so far."

Shweta also goes to government schools or schools in tribal regions to create awareness about the universe and various eclipses so that they don't follow superstitious beliefs. A few months ago, Shweta's team visited around 500 tribal schools in Maharashtra with a telescope and helped students observe the Moon. "They were surprised, happy and found it amazing. What more can I ask for? We also gave them two of our online courses for free which were translated to Marathi and Hindi. All I dream is to spread the knowledge of Astronomy and bring that interest for this subject among the youngsters," she concludes.

To know more about their interesting courses, you can checkastronera.org

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How this e-learning platform on Astronomy can answer all your questions about the universe - EdexLive

There are very many references to the Sun, Moon, stars, planets, meteors, etc., in Vedic literature before 1500 BCE. The Sun is the Lord of the universe, and the Moon shines by the Suns light. The Earth is described as a sphere.

Even casual observations of the sky would reveal that there are three clear time-markers in the sky, namely, a day, a lunar month and a year. All the major civilisations tried to understand the correlations among these time units. A verse in Rigveda says: The wheel (of time) formed with 12 spokes, revolves round the heavens, without wearing out. O Agni, on it are 720 sons (that is, days and nights).

So, a year has 12 months and 360 days. Later in Taittireeya Samhitaa, there is a clear mention of a solar year of 365 days. The names of the 12 months are given in this Samhitaa as: Madhu, Maadhava, Shukra, Shuci, Nabhas, Nabhasya, Isha, Urjaa, Sahas, Sahasya, Tapas and Tapasya. Now a lunar month is nearly 29.5 days, and 12 lunar months make 354 days. To align the lunar months and the solar year, there would be an extra intercalary month or adhika maasa called samsarpa in some years.

In the Rigveda, it is stated that God Varuna charted a broad path for the Sun in the sky. This obviously refers to the ecliptic, which is the path of the apparent motion of the Sun around the Earth in the sky, in the stellar background. It is inclined to the celestial equator, which is a large circle in the sky in the plane of Earths equator. This is depicted in the picture above.

Here S1, S3 are the equinoxes, S2 is the summer solstice, and S4 is the winter solstice. Vedic literature describes the apparent half-yearly northern (Uttaraayana; from S4 to S2), and southern (Dakshinaayana; from S2 to S4) motions of the Sun, and equinoxes in Taittireeya Samhitaa, Aitareya Braahmana and other texts.

The Moons sidereal period is nearly 27 days, and its path is only slightly inclined to the ecliptic. Then it is convenient to divide the ecliptic into 27 equal parts called nakshatras. This concept is essentially Indian, and the names of the 27 nakshatras, Ashvini, Bharani, ... Revati are also listed in the Taittireeya Samhitaa. The Samhitaa also refers to a five-year yuga cycle, wherein the Sun and the Moon return together at the same position in the sky after five years. All in all, there are rudiments of a calendar with 12 months in a year, inclusion of intercalary months appropriately, and 27 nakshatras as markers of the Moons movement. But it is not formulated mathematically and there are no clear rules.

It is in Vedaanga Jyotisha, ascribed to sage Lagadha, that we have a quantitative calendrical system, with a five-year yuga. One of the verses in it says: When the Sun and Moon occupy the same region of the zodiac together with the asterism of Vaasava (Shravishthaa), at that time begins the yuga, the synodic month of Maagha, the solar month called Tapas, the bright fortnight (of Maagha) and their northward course (Uttaraayana). So, winter solstice is at the beginning of Shravishthaa (Delfini) constellation. This corresponds to some time between 1370 BCE and 1150 BCE, though the text could have been composed a little later.

In the Vedaanga Jyotisha calendar, one has a yuga with five years, 60 solar months, 62 lunar months and 1,830 civil days. There are two adhikamaasas in five years. The concept of a tithi, which is 1/30 of a lunar month, is mentioned, perhaps for the first time. Vedaanga Jyotisha is the first text in India to give simple arithmetical algorithms in calendrical astronomy for finding tithi, nakshatra, the positions of the Sun and the Moon in the sky, and so on. There is nothing on planetary motion.

Compared to the actual value of 365.2564 days for a sidereal year, the Vedaanga Jyotisha value is 366 days. It has been suggested that this was for ease of calculations, with corrections introduced appropriately.

The Vedaanga Jyotisha gives a formula for the duration of day time (sunrise to sunset), according to which it is 12, 15 and 18 muhoortas, when the Sun is at the winter solstice, equinox and summer solstice respectively (one muhoorta is 48 minutes). The formula is reasonably correct for a latitude around 28.

The Kaatyaayana Sulbasutra (composed around 5th century BCE) describes the determination of the east and west directions from the shadows of a gnomon. Data for the annual and diurnal variations of a gnomon-shadow, given in Arthashastra and many Jaina and Buddhist texts around 300 BCE, seem to be based on observations. Recent research indicates that an eclipse cycle of nearly 18 years was in vogue even before the Vedaanga Jyotisha.

There is a long gap between 300 BCE and Aryabhateeya, the first extant text on full-fledged mathematical astronomy in India, composed in 499 CE. However, there were 18 siddhaantas earlier, five of which were summarised in Varaahamihiras Pancasiddhaantikaa composed around 520 CE. Exciting research on pre-Aryabhatan astronomy is going on.

M S Sriram

Theoretical Physicist & President,Prof. K.V. Sarma Research Foundation

(This is the fourth article in the series on Indias contributions to science and technology)

(sriram.physics@gmail.com)

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The wheel with 12 spokes: Astronomy in ancient India - The New Indian Express

Astronomers using NSFs Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in our Universe. Their new observations suggest that the Universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years. This estimate matches the one provided by the Standard Model of the Universe and measurements of the same light made by ESAs Planck satellite.

This new picture of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the oldest light in the Universe, was taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This covers a swath of the sky 50 times as wide as the Moon, representing a region of space 20 billion light-years across. The light, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, varies in polarization (represented here by redder or bluer colors). Image credit: ACT Collaboration.

The Standard Model, the one behind Jim Peebles Nobel Prize, comes through with flying colors, said Professor Lyman Page, an astrophysicist at Princeton University who was the ACTs principal investigator from 2004 to 2014.

This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, said Dr. Simone Aiola, a researcher at Flatiron Institute and Princeton University.

In 2019, astronomers measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the Universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested that a new model for the Universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

Now weve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree. It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable, Dr. Aiola said.

The age of the Universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number quantified by the Hubble constant.

The ACT measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 km per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc).

This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 km/s/Mpc by the Planck satellite team, but its slower than the 74 km/s/Mpc inferred from the measurements of galaxies.

We dont know if the tension is due to systematic effects or to something new that we have not figured out. Cosmology is as exciting as ever, Professor Page said.

I didnt have a particular preference for any specific value it was going to be interesting one way or another, said Dr. Steve Choi, a scientist at Cornell University and Princeton University.

We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the Universes oldest light.

The close agreement between the ACT and Planck results and the Standard Cosmological Model is bittersweet, Dr. Aiola said.

Its good to know that our model right now is robust, but it would have been nice to see a hint of something new.

Still, the disagreement with the 2019 study of the motions of galaxies maintains the possibility that unknown physics may be at play.

The Planck satellite measured the same light, but by measuring its polarization in higher fidelity, the new picture from ACT reveals more of the oldest patterns weve ever seen, said ACT principal investigator Professor Suzanne Staggs, of Princeton University.

The findings were published in a series of papers on the arXiv.org preprint server.

_____

Simone Aiola et al. 2020. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 Maps and Cosmological Parameters. arXiv: 2007.07288

Steve K. Choi et al. 2020. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz. arXiv: 2007.07289

Sigurd Naess et al. 2020. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: arcminute-resolution maps of 18,000 square degrees of the microwave sky from ACT 2008-2018 data combined with Planck. arXiv: 2007.07290

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Universe is 13.77 Billion Years Old, Astronomers Say | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

Astronomers are preparing to further study the atmospheres of planets discovered through NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, to identify the most promising exoplanetsplanets in solar systems beyond our own for habitability and signs of life.

Set to launch in late 2023, Twinkle is a space mission that will deliver unprecedented data via satellite telescope to astronomers about the elemental composition of exoplanet atmospheres. Vanderbilt and The Ohio State University have become Founding Members of the mission and will play a leading role in shaping the missions directives, targets, and survey operations.

We already have a decent estimate of the number of Earth-like planets with similar size, mass and bulk composition in our galaxy, but what we dont yet know is how common atmospheres like ours are on these planets, said Keivan Stassun, Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, who will lead Vanderbilts Team Twinkle. The Twinkle mission can bring answers to this burning question. The measurements that we will take will help us identify planets with atmospheres, and of those, which are breathable and livable.

Finding Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars with oxygen-rich atmospheres and an ozone layer in the upper atmosphere to protect life from being mutated by UV rays, like what we have on this planet, is no small feat. As a co-investigator of the TESS mission, Stassun has spent the last eight years developing, designing, launching and running the program. Following several successful discoveries of potentially habitable planets during the TESS mission, Stassun and his team are cautiously optimistic about the opportunity presented by Twinkle.

Stassun, together with the Twinkles other Founding Members, The Ohio State Universitys Scott Gaudi, Thomas Jefferson Professor for Discovery and Space Exploration and Ji Wang, assistant professor of astronomy, are assembling a hit list of target planets to study until the satellites launch. Once the satellite is in its sun-synchronous, low-Earth polar orbit, the team will collect and calibrate data, sitting at the computer screen with bated breath for the first signs of breathable atmospheres. The full data analysis will take a few years to process and will identify exciting opportunities for further science during the missions extended seven-year lifetime.

Twinkle is nimble, so we will be able to observe many candidates with multiple visits to the same target, said Wang. We also have a very competitive team here at Ohio State that can leverage NASAs James Webb Space Telescope mission to focus on a handful of the most promising targets identified for biosignature detection. Finding biosignatures on exoplanets represents one of our best chances of finding signs of life elsewhere.

With a core group of faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduates all engaged in cutting-edge research, the departments of astronomy at Ohio State and Vanderbilt have worked together to establish themselves as leaders in the study of exoplanets planets orbiting other stars and the search for life on these worlds, said Gaudi. As founding members of the Twinkle mission with our colleagues at Vanderbilt, we will further cement our departments as centers for the study and characterization of exoplanets.

Stassun, also director of the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation, is building his team that will be working on data visualization and analysis to include neurodiverse students through the Centers autism internship program. I have been convinced that applying the full diversity of the human mind is how were going to make progress and solve these exciting open questions, he commented.

In addition to atmospheric research of exoplanets, Twinkles broad-wavelength spectroscopic capabilities will also enable astronomers to study the surfaces of asteroids and nuclei of comets in our solar system. Beyond these core science cases, scientists can use Twinkle to monitor stellar activity and variability, observe protoplanetary disks around stars in various stages of planet formation, study brown dwarfs and shed new light on the planets and moons in our solar system.

Twinkle is the inaugural mission of Blue Skies Space Ltd., a company incorporated in England and Wales. Blue Skies Space was co-founded by Marcell Tessenyi, Giovanna Tinetti and Jonathan Tennyson, all academics working at University College London, to deliver independent satellites that address the global scientific communitys need for high-quality data from space.

Vanderbilts participation in the Twinkle Mission is funded through the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics (VIDA). Blue Skies Space is funded by a combination of private and public sources including the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and European Space Agency (ESA) which support the development of this innovative new model for delivering space science missions. The Ohio State Universitys participation is funded through the Universitys Thomas Jefferson Chair for Discovery and Space Exploration endowment.

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Vanderbilt, The Ohio State University are joint Founding Members of satellite mission Twinkle to find potentially habitable worlds around nearby stars...

"The heavens declare the glory"

NORTH CANTON July has been an auspicious month for stargazers like the Rev. David Ross, a lifelong of student of astronomy.

Hes been watching the Comet NEOWISE, which can be seen unaided in Northeast Ohio, just prior to sunrise. It will not return for 6,800 years.

On Sunday, the full moon, Jupiter and Saturn will align. On July 29, the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower will occur in the northeast skies.

"Theres always something interesting going on up there," he said.

Ross, a retired minister who co-pastors Simpson United Methodist Church in Plain Township with his wife, Barb, said the stars are a gift of Gods creation to provide humans with a sense of awe and wonder.

"I grew up in the 60s when the space program was all the rage," he said. "That just kind of stoked my interest over the years. Ive been able to enjoy building a telescope and taking pictures of comets, like Hale-Bopp."

In past years, Ross has done presentations on the Bethlehem Star.

"Certainly the Gospel mentions the Star of Bethlehem," he said. "Over the years, Ive come to appreciate, in terms of faith, the wonder of the world around us."

Ross cites theologians such as William Brown, who have noted that the Bibles "wisdom" literature - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job and others - contributes to the formation of character through extolling natures wonders.

"If youre able to open yourself up through the gift of creation and the strange things which humble us, thats an important element for building character," he said. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Ross recalls being in awe during the last solar eclipse, which he saw in Nashville.

"Its an uncanny feeling to see that. To think that people in earlier times and ages must have wondered what this is all about," he said. "In 2024, its going to be the full megillah. The line goes through Wooster and Cleveland, so we dont have to travel very far."

He noted that ancient people viewed comets as a bad omen. Prior to Comet NEOWISE, there were two others in March and April.

"I think the Lords trying to tell us something," he laughed. "Of course, hes always trying to tell us something. If it takes a comet to do that..."

Ross said he thinks the current pushback against science is a result of institutions being buffeted by scandals.

"So many institutions and authority figures have been undermined," he said. "Everybody seems to think they can go their own way and be their own authority. With the virus, I would have thought the science behind how we stay well would have been one the place where we put some trust.

"In church we pray for people who are sick, but hope the doctors do their best. Some challenge is appropriate, but we see what can happen if everything becomes a matter of opinion. It happened in Bible times when the prophets said, `Everyone went their own way. Its a recipe for chaos."

Ross said his favorite Scripture regarding astronomy is Psalm 19:

"The heavens declare the glory of God."

"C.S. Lewis said he thought those lines were some of the most beautiful written in the English language," he said. "Hes someone who had a real sense of how the stars and sky through the ages have spoken to religious people and nonreligious people."

Lewis "Narnia" series, he noted, makes use of stars and planets in their plots.

In 2014, the Star of Bethlehem Conference observed its 400th anniversary at University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The group was founded by Johannes Kepler, who wrote a theory contending there was an alignment of the planets.

"For me, its less the scientific search than the wonder," Ross said. "I got interested in Bethlehem Star from `Its a Wonderful Life."

The film opens on an image of a group of galaxies known as Stephans Quintet.

"(Director) Frank Capra had a lifelong interest in astronomy," Ross said. "He studied at what became Cal Tech. At the time, those galaxies were the definition of things to wonder about. Its key element of the storyline."

Last year, Ross spoke at festival in Seneca Falls, N.Y., which honors the film.

"Its not until George (Bailey) changes his perspective, its after that hes able to see the stars," Ross said. "Its after he comes back from the bridge that hes able to see the stars again."

Ross urges people to visit Stark County Wilderness Center Education Director Robin Gills Facebook page, which features information on stargazing.

"It doesnt take a group or gathering to enjoy astronomy," he said.

Reach Charita at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com

On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

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Pastor-astronomer: Recent solar events are gifts of awe - Suburbanite

July is a busy month for missions to Mars. Earth and Mars are now close enough in their orbits that a launch window is open. Three missions to Mars, one from NASA, one from China, and one from the United Arab Emirates, are to blast off soon.

The UAE space probe called Hope is to go first, on Monday, after bad weather scuttled last weeks launch dates. The probe is to be propelled on top of a Japanese H-IIA rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The goal is to put a weather satellite in orbit around Mars to study its atmosphere in hopes of finding the reason for the atmospheres large changes over the past millennia. Long ago, Mars could sustain liquid water on its surface. Today, it has a thin, dry atmosphere. The UAE has partnered with several universities in the U.S. to design a multi-wavelength spectrometer to study the seasonal weather cycles over several years.

China has divulged little about its plan to send up a rover and an orbiter in late July or early August in a mission named Tianwen, or Questions for Heaven.

Also in late July, NASA is to launch a new rover called Perseverance using an Atlas rocket. This rover will be the size of a small car, much larger than the little rovers sent many years ago and similar in size to the Curiosity rover that landed in 2012. Whats new is that Perseverance will have a drill that can cut into a rock to remove a core sample about the size of a pen. It will take the rock samples to a drop-off spot for possible retrieval by a future mission to Mars. A campaign has been started jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency to plan a mission to bring those samples back to Earth for analysis.

Now for the really cool part. Along with Perseverance, a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which has carbon-fiber blades and weighs about 4 pounds, will be sent to Mars. It will just be a technology demonstration, but if Ingenuity succeeds in flying, it will be the first drone to fly on another planet. The Martian air is thin. so the blades need to be long about 4 feet and will spin about eight times faster than those on a helicopter on Earth.

One problem is that, due to the time lag of several minutes in communications from Earth to Mars, Ingenuity must fly itself, using an onboard computer. When flying, it wont be controlled by a human but will rely on instructions programmed into its computer. Ingenuity has a wireless connection to Perseverance, which in turn communicates with an orbiting satellite that gets radio commands from Earth. Ingenuity also has a camera, enabling it to take overhead pictures that can be relayed back to us.

The goal of these missions is to find out whether microbial life once flourished on Mars. Clear evidence of past life on Mars has eluded us.

Ken Hicks is a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio University in Athens.

hicks@ohio.edu

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Astronomy: Probe, rover, helicopter to head to Mars this month - The Columbus Dispatch

A Long March 5 rocket takes off Thursday from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on Hainan Island with the Tianwen 1 Mars mission. Credit: Xinhua

A heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket propelled Chinas first Mars landing mission toward the red planet on Thursday after launching from a seaside spaceport on Hainan Island, the second of three international Mars probes expected to depart planet Earth this month.

Kicking off a nearly seven-month journey, Chinas Tianwen 1 spacecraft lifted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in southern Chinas Hainan province at 0441 GMT (12:41 p.m. Beijing time) on top of a Long March 5 rocket, the heaviest launcher in the countrys inventory.

A live video feed streamed by amateur spectators near the launch site showed the Long March 5 rocket climbing away from the Wenchang spaceport. Ten rocket engines fueled by kerosene and liquid hydrogen powered the 57-meter tall Long March 5 into a sunny midday sky, and the rocket quickly receded from view in the unofficial online video feed.

Chinese state media did not broadcast the mission live or publicize the exact launch time in advance, but airspace and maritime notices warning pilots and sailors to steer clear of downrange drop zones suggested the Long March 5 was scheduled to lift off Thursday.

Chinese authorities lifted the news blackout on the launch once the 5-tonne Tianwen 1 spacecraft was injected onto a trajectory toward Mars by the Long March 5s second stage. The China National Space Administration confirmed the Long March 5 rocket placed Tianwen 1 on the proper course toward Mars about 36 minutes after launch.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., the government-owned prime contractor for Chinas space programme, declared the launch a success in a statement.

Tianwen 1 is scheduled to arrive at Mars next February after a seven-month voyage. If successful, the mission will be Chinas first probe to enter orbit around another planet.

Two-to-three months later, the Tianwen 1 orbiter will release a lander to enter the Martian atmosphere and aim for a controlled touchdown in Utopia Planitia, a broad plain in Marss northern hemisphere. Once on the surface, the lander will lower a ramp and a 240-kilogramme rover will drive onto the surface.

If China pulls off those feats according to plan, they will make China the third country to perform a soft landing on Mars after the Soviet Union and the United States and the second country to drive a robotic rover on the Red Planet.

NASA has landed the only successful rovers on Mars to date.

The seemingly flawless launch Thursday by the Long March 5 rocket gives Chinas most powerful launcher an 80 percent success record after five flights. The Long March 5 failed on its second test flight in 2017, but has now logged three consecutive successes.

Tianwen 1 is Chinas next leap in Solar System exploration after a series of progressively complex robotic expeditions to the moon.

Most recently, China has landed two rovers on the Moon, including the first to explore the surface of the lunar far side. The next Chinese lunar mission, named Change 5, is scheduled for launch on a Long March 5 rocket late this year on a mission to return samples from the Moon.

China officially started development of the Mars mission in 2016.

It will be the countrys second attempt to reach Mars with a robotic probe, following the Yinghuo 1 orbiter, which was stranded in Earth orbit after launch as a piggyback payload on Russias failed Phobos-Grunt mission.

Benefiting from the engineering heritage of Chinas lunar exploration programme,the Chinese national strategy set Mars as the next target for planetary exploration, wrote Wan Weixing, chief scientist of Chinas Mars exploration programme, in a paper published this month by the science journal Nature Astronomy. Chinas first Mars mission is named Tianwen 1, and aims to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission.

Wan died in May after a long illness.

Chinese officials announced the Tianwen name for the countrys planetary missions in April. The name Tianwen comes from the work of ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan, meaning quest for heavenly truth, according to the China National Space Administration, or CNSA, the countrys space agency.

The countrys first Martian probe will conduct scientific investigations about the Martian soil, geological structure, environment, atmosphere, as well as water, CNSA said in a statement.

After reaching Mars in February, the Tianwen 1 spacecraft will initially enter a long-period capture orbit around the Red Planet. The orbiter will eventually settle in a loop around Mars ranging between 265 kilometres and nearly 12,000 kilometres over the Martian poles.

As soon as next April, the lander and rover modules will detach from the orbiter to begin a descent through the Martian atmosphere. Radar soundings from orbit have indicated the presence of a reservoir of ice containing as much water as Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, in the Utopia Planitia region targeted by Tianwen 1s lander.

The Tianwen 1 orbiter is designed to operate for at least one Martian year, or about two years on Earth. The solar-powered rover, fitted with six wheels for mobility, has a life expectancy of at least 90 days, Chinese officials said.

Chinese scientists say the Tianwen 1 mission will perform a global survey of Mars, measuring soil and rock composition, searching for signs of buried water ice, and studying the Martian magnetosphere and atmosphere. The orbiter and rover will also observe Martian weather and probe Marss internal structure.

The orbiters seven instruments include a:

The Tianwen 1 rover is cocooned inside a heat shield for a fiery descent to the Martian surface. After releasing from the orbiter mothership, the lander will enter the red planets atmosphere, deploy a parachute, then fire a braking rocket to slow down for landing.

Tianwen 1 is going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter, Wan wrote in Nature Astronomy. No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way. If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough.

Scientifically, Tianwen 1 is the most comprehensive mission to investigate the Martian morphology, geology, mineralogy, space environment, and soil and water-ice distribution.

The rovers six science payloads include a:

The rovers ground-penetrating radar would be one of the first science instruments of its kind to reach the surface of Mars. NASAs Perseverance rover carries a comparable instrument to scan subsurface layers of the Martian crust in search of water ice deposits.

Tianwen 1 is a Chinese-led project, but scientists and support teams from several countries have agreed to provide assistance on the mission.

Scientists from theInstitut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Plantologie, or IRAP, in France contributed to a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy instrument on the Tianwen 1 rover.

French scientists, with support from the French space agency CNES, provided guidance to their Chinese counterparts on the spectroscopy technique, which uses a laser to zap a pinhead-size portion of a rock, and a spectrometer to analyze the light given off by plasma generated by the lasers interaction with the rocks surface.

The technique allows an instrument to determine the chemical make-up of rocks on Mars.

The discussions between French and Chinese scientists were intended to maximize the quality of the data produced by the Tianwen 1 rover, according to Agnes Cousin, a planetary scientist at IRAP who worked with Chinese researchers developing the rovers instruments.

French scientists from the same research institute helped develop the ChemCam instrument on NASAs Curiosity rover and the SuperCam payload set for launch 30 July on NASAs Perseverance Mars rover. ChemCam and SuperCam use the same Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy technique as the Tianwen 1 rover.

Researchers from France provided a norite calibration target to fly on the Tianwen 1 rover. Its similar to a unit on NASAs Curiosity rover used to calibrate ChemCams measurements by turning the instrument on a target like the rock norite with a known composition.

The SuperCam instrument on NASAs Perseverance rover will us a different type rock as a calibration target, but Cousin said scientists at her lab in France will still be able to cross-calibrate measurements from Curiosity, Perseverance, and the Tianwen 1 rover.

Scientists from the Space Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences assisted in the development of the magnetometer on the Tianwen 1 orbiter and helped calibrate the flight instrument.

Argentina is home to a Chinese-owned deep space tracking antenna that will be used to communicate with Tianwen 1 after launch. The European Space Agency has agreed to provide communications time for Tianwen 1 on its own worldwide network of deep space tracking stations, and help with the probes navigation on the journey to Mars.

The launch of the Tianwen 1 Mars mission Thursday occurred less than four days after the launch of the Hope Mars probe developed by the United Arab Emirates, and a week before NASAs Perseverance Mars rover is scheduled for blastoff.

The ever-changing positions of the planets only allow for missions to make a direct trip from Earth to Mars once every 26 months or so. The Mars launch window opened this year in mid-July and extends until mid-August.

While NASA and US scientists are aiding the UAEs Hope Mars orbiter, NASA has no such role on Chinas Tianwen 1 mission. NASAs Deep Space Network, which provides tracking and communications coverage for numerous US and international space probes, has not been called up to support Tianwen 1s voyage to Mars.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated China on the successful launch Thursday.

With todays launch, China is on its way to join the community of international scientific explorers at Mars, Bridenstine tweeted. The United States, Europe, Russia, India, and soon the UAE will welcome you to Mars to embark on an exciting year of scientific discovery. Safe travels Tianwen-1!

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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China launches robotic mission to orbit, land, and drive on Mars - Astronomy Now Online

Citizen scientists recently helped direct astronomers to a pair of objects that straddle the line between planets and stars.

These newly-spotted substellar objects are brown dwarfs, which share many elements in common with stars. However, these gaseous bodies don't have enough mass to start nuclear fusion in their core, so they resemble planets more than stars.

The newfound brown dwarfs have very unusual compositions. They are the most planet-like brown dwarfs to be observed in the Milky Way's oldest populations of stars, NASA officials said in a statement. They also might help researchers learn more about planets outside the solar system.

Related: Best night sky events of July 2020 (stargazing maps)

The citizen scientists who spotted both objects were part of the ongoing NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. They were looking through spacecraft data from NASA's WISE and NEOWISE missions; both missions are chapters in the life of a single spacecraft called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.

And the objects that the collaboration recently found, now called WISE 1810 and WISE 0414, are weird.

When scientists studied them, they were surprised to see that these two brown dwarfs have very little iron compared to what's usually observed in brown dwarfs. This is a telltale sign that they are very old. The pair is estimated to be about 10 billion years old and to have a mass of about 75 times the mass of Jupiter, NASA said.

If these brown dwarfs formed with low levels of metal, so might ancient exoplanets. This could be a reason to search for old metal-poor exoplanets or alien worlds that orbit ancient metal-poor stars. Further research into this brown dwarf population could answer questions about how dependent the planet formation process is on the presence of metals.

A study accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.org details these findings. Its lead author is Adam Schneider from Arizona State Universitys School of Earth and Space Exploration in Tempe. Schneider first spotted WISE 1810 in 2016.

NASA representatives said Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has contributed to more than 1,600 brown dwarf discoveries.

Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Citizen scientists and astronomers find two strange, ancient brown dwarfs - Space.com

The Red Lake of Stars: Years ago, before over-fishing, Little Redfish Lake was called as such due to ... [+] the vast numbers of salmon turning the lake a red colour. The red colouration is no longer seen because of salmon, but the colour of sunsets and airglow during the night still turn the waters a vibrant red. It is these beautiful warm echoes of red, combined with the mirror-like reflections of the Sawtooth Mountains in the distance and the alignment of the Milky Way with the mountains that make Little Redfish Lake one of the most spectacular places the photographer has ever shot at night. The photographer recalls that we were fortunate enough that night to have the lakeshore to ourselves, just three of us, and a rather excited dog who tried his best not to run into our tripods! We spent the sunset here, waiting for the stars to come out and the Milky Way core to rise, marvelling at the red colour of the water.

Earlier this week I posted a selection of my favorites from a long list of shortlisted images from the newly-announced Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year2020 from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London.

I short-changed you. Although I tried my best to select the most intriguing and impressive images from each of the nine categories, there were just so many beautiful images that show-off my favorite night sky sights of allthe Milky Way and the aurorathat it deserves a second visit.

Besides, although astrophotography is growing as a hobby as cameras improve, that is a very wide category and includes many technical deep-sky close-ups using telescopes. For me, its all about nightscapes and astro-landscape photography; photos that showcase the night sky.

Since its now Milky Way-spotting season across the world (look to the south after midnight from a dark sky destination and youll see our galaxy arcing across the sky), here are all of the shortlisted images from the eye-catching Skyscapes category ... along with a sprinkling of other Milky Way and aurorae images from other categories.

Enjoy the celestial show!

Galactic Portal: On the photographers trip to Australia, he travelled to the coastal town of Kiama, ... [+] where he captured his first Milky Way image of the year his first Milky Way image taken from the Southern Hemisphere. Once the sun set, the photographer made his way into the cave and waited for a few hours for the core of the Milky Way to appear. Being unfamiliar with the southern sky, the photographer was surprised to also see Jupiter appear soon after.

Beyond the Fog: the photographer had to wait, drenched on a rickety bridge until the thick fog had ... [+] cleared. He was rewarded with noctilucent clouds in the sky, the outlines of which were reflected in the mirror of the calm river. The photographers patience paid off as he caught the last outline of the departing mesospheric storm.

Cold Night on the Yellowstone: In mid-March, shortly after the core of our galaxy is visible above ... [+] the horizon, it rises in the final hours of darkness before dawn. Shooting this panorama scene, while night-time fog hung low over riverside cottonwood trees and the distant mountains of the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness glowed from the light of countless stars, the photographer felt that he was able to capture a connectedness between this world and the one above a hint of changing seasons, and a sense that Nature continues to provide countless wonders for all willing to stop and look.

The Cave of the Wild Horses: Located in the heart of the desert in Southern Utah, the Cave of the ... [+] Wild Horses, with its copious wildlife, petroglyphs, rock varnish, and framed view of the summer Milky Way in its entrance, makes for a fairy-tale place to take astrophotographs. This photograph is one of the most complicated that the photographer has taken to date due to the location of the cave and the number of foreground images taken. Getting to the cave involves a long hike through the desert, over sandstone plateaus, through brush and desert sand. Upon reaching the cave, the photographer decided that she wanted to take a large panorama in order to preserve the feeling of looking out of the cave to the sky beyond.

The Red Lake of Stars: Years ago, before over-fishing, Little Redfish Lake was called as such due to ... [+] the vast numbers of salmon turning the lake a red colour. The red colouration is no longer seen because of salmon, but the colour of sunsets and airglow during the night still turn the waters a vibrant red. It is these beautiful warm echoes of red, combined with the mirror-like reflections of the Sawtooth Mountains in the distance and the alignment of the Milky Way with the mountains that make Little Redfish Lake one of the most spectacular places the photographer has ever shot at night. The photographer recalls that we were fortunate enough that night to have the lakeshore to ourselves, just three of us, and a rather excited dog who tried his best not to run into our tripods! We spent the sunset here, waiting for the stars to come out and the Milky Way core to rise, marvelling at the red colour of the water.

Something Old, Something New: The incredible site of the old Lithgow Blast Furnace has been restored ... [+] as a heritage icon in the area reflecting on the past history of the beginnings of the iron and steel industries in Australia. With some prior planning, visiting at night provides the mesmerising opportunity to capture the Galactic Core in the Milky Way as it passes overhead.

Stargazing Giant: this image is the view of the Milky Way rising above the Moai at Ahu Akivi. Ahu ... [+] Akivi is a particularly sacred place in Easter Island in the Valparaso Region of Chile, looking out towards the South Pacific Ocean. The site has seven moai, all of equal shape and size, and is also known as a celestial observatory that was set up around the 16th century. The shot highlights the central bulge of the Milky Way, the constellation Scorpio, as well as the planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Meeting: After a long hike and a little bit of climbing to the top of the mountain, the photographer ... [+] was able to see the Milky Way. He only had five minutes time to take the panorama shot before the clouds moved. The photographer and his friend are pictured standing on the edge, looking out at the sky and over the city of Fssen in Germany.

Beautiful Persian Gulf Nights: On one of the many hiking trails along Iran's coastline, the ... [+] photographer discovered this incredible lookout. The scale of the vista encouraged the photographer to capture a 360 degree panoramic image of the entire sky using 60 15-second exposures. The movement of the clouds meant that the photographer had a short time to capture the Milky Way. The photographer is pictured, enjoying the wonderland he stumbled across.

Milky Way and Meteor at Porthgwarra: Porthgwarra is a sheltered fishing cove in the west of Cornwall ... [+] and the U-shape of the narrow cove is perfect for framing the Milky Way. There was likely to be a boat in the cove but the photographer was very fortunate to find it perfectly positioned in the centre of the old slipway. The photographer shot several non-tracked sky exposures from the same tripod position to capture the cliffs and horizon (as these were blurred in the tracked shot) and in one, she was lucky enough to capture a meteor, which she copied into the final image. This is one of the photographers favourite locations in Cornwall and it was a magnificent night under the stars.

Geysir Aurora: Close to the Spring and Autumn Equinox, the Earth's magnetic field aligns with the ... [+] incoming solar wind to create a better chance for aurora activity. The photographer had been waiting for signs of solar storm near the equinox date hoping that the Russell-McPherron effect would kick in. During the last weekend in September it seemed there would be favourable terrestrial and space weather conditions, so the photographer travelled with a friend to Iceland. They were not disappointed. The northern lights danced all weekend, with clear skies every night. This shot shows the famous Geysir of Iceland preparing to blow with the aurora behind it.

Stokksnes Aurora: This image captures the stunning Stokksnes looking to the Vestrahorn and the most ... [+] powerful and beautiful night of aurora the photographer had ever seen. He travelled 1250 miles to try and capture his dream. In order to get the shot, the photographer ended up knee-deep in the North Atlantic in -6 degrees Celsius. The challenge was to capture the reflections in the water, on the black sand beach, and also not to over-expose the aurora. The photographer describes this as a truly awe-inspiring experience and one he feels blessed to have witnessed and captured on camera.

Northern Dragon's Eye:The photographer loves to travel, especially exploring the north and chasing ... [+] the Northern Lights. Trying to capture how ordinary things can take magical forms under the lights, the photographer selected and lit this rocky outcrop and waited for the aurora to work its magic.

Hamny Lights: After two weeks of storm, clouds and snow in the Lofoten Islands, the sky finally ... [+] cleared up, providing perfect conditions for hunting the northern lights. The photographer waited patiently in their car for the light show to begin and on the first sign of the aurora borealis in the sky, he set up his camera at this famous overlook of the idyllic fishing village Hamny. The image is a manual exposure blend consisting of one base image for the sky and foreground plus a total of seven bracketed images to balance the highlights and shadows in the fishing village and water.

Kynance Cove under the Milky Way: This image is only the photographer's second attempt at shooting ... [+] the Milky Way. It shows our galaxy over Kynance Cove in Cornwall, a beautiful spot with dark skis. It was taken on a cold, but fabulous night under the stars. As it was July, the sky was very blue, with full darkness only for about an hour. The foreground was taken at dusk and the sky is a stack of 4 images of 25 seconds taken later when the Milky Way appeared, the sky and foreground blended together in post processing.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Worlds Best Nightscape Photos: 15 Shortlisted Images For Astronomy Photographer Of The Year 2020 - Forbes

"The heavens declare the glory"

NORTH CANTON July has been an auspicious month for stargazers like the Rev. David Ross, a lifelong of student of astronomy.

Hes been watching the Comet NEOWISE, which can be seen unaided in Northeast Ohio, just prior to sunrise. It will not return for 6,800 years.

On Sunday, the full moon, Jupiter and Saturn will align. On July 29, the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower will occur in the northeast skies.

"Theres always something interesting going on up there," he said.

Ross, a retired minister who co-pastors Simpson United Methodist Church in Plain Township with his wife, Barb, said the stars are a gift of Gods creation to provide humans with a sense of awe and wonder.

"I grew up in the 60s when the space program was all the rage," he said. "That just kind of stoked my interest over the years. Ive been able to enjoy building a telescope and taking pictures of comets, like Hale-Bopp."

In past years, Ross has done presentations on the Bethlehem Star.

"Certainly the Gospel mentions the Star of Bethlehem," he said. "Over the years, Ive come to appreciate, in terms of faith, the wonder of the world around us."

Ross cites theologians such as William Brown, who have noted that the Bibles "wisdom" literature - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job and others - contributes to the formation of character through extolling natures wonders.

"If youre able to open yourself up through the gift of creation and the strange things which humble us, thats an important element for building character," he said. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Ross recalls being in awe during the last solar eclipse, which he saw in Nashville.

"Its an uncanny feeling to see that. To think that people in earlier times and ages must have wondered what this is all about," he said. "In 2024, its going to be the full megillah. The line goes through Wooster and Cleveland, so we dont have to travel very far."

He noted that ancient people viewed comets as a bad omen. Prior to Comet NEOWISE, there were two others in March and April.

"I think the Lords trying to tell us something," he laughed. "Of course, hes always trying to tell us something. If it takes a comet to do that..."

Ross said he thinks the current pushback against science is a result of institutions being buffeted by scandals.

"So many institutions and authority figures have been undermined," he said. "Everybody seems to think they can go their own way and be their own authority. With the virus, I would have thought the science behind how we stay well would have been one the place where we put some trust.

"In church we pray for people who are sick, but hope the doctors do their best. Some challenge is appropriate, but we see what can happen if everything becomes a matter of opinion. It happened in Bible times when the prophets said, `Everyone went their own way. Its a recipe for chaos."

Ross said his favorite Scripture regarding astronomy is Psalm 19:

"The heavens declare the glory of God."

"C.S. Lewis said he thought those lines were some of the most beautiful written in the English language," he said. "Hes someone who had a real sense of how the stars and sky through the ages have spoken to religious people and nonreligious people."

Lewis "Narnia" series, he noted, makes use of stars and planets in their plots.

In 2014, the Star of Bethlehem Conference observed its 400th anniversary at University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The group was founded by Johannes Kepler, who wrote a theory contending there was an alignment of the planets.

"For me, its less the scientific search than the wonder," Ross said. "I got interested in Bethlehem Star from `Its a Wonderful Life."

The film opens on an image of a group of galaxies known as Stephans Quintet.

"(Director) Frank Capra had a lifelong interest in astronomy," Ross said. "He studied at what became Cal Tech. At the time, those galaxies were the definition of things to wonder about. Its key element of the storyline."

Last year, Ross spoke at festival in Seneca Falls, N.Y., which honors the film.

"Its not until George (Bailey) changes his perspective, its after that hes able to see the stars," Ross said. "Its after he comes back from the bridge that hes able to see the stars again."

Ross urges people to visit Stark County Wilderness Center Education Director Robin Gills Facebook page, which features information on stargazing.

"It doesnt take a group or gathering to enjoy astronomy," he said.

Reach Charita at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com

On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

Original post:

Pastor-astronomer: Recent solar events are gifts of awe - Massillon Independent

Black holes don't glow - in fact, they're famous for doing the opposite. But if they're actively devouring material from the space around them, that material can blaze like a billion X-ray Suns.

And for the first time, astronomers have now seen that blaze mysteriously snuffed out, before gradually returning to brightness.

The supermassive black hole is a beast clocking in at 19 million solar masses, powering a galactic nucleus 275 million light-years away, in a galaxy called 1ES 1927+654.

Over a period of just 40 days, astronomers watched as its corona absolutely plummeted in brightness, before rising again to shine brighter than before.

"We expect that luminosity changes this big should vary on timescales of many thousands to millions of years," said physicist Erin Kara of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"But in this object, we saw it change by [a factor of] 10,000 over a year, and it even changed by a factor of 100 in eight hours, which is just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling."

There are several components to the area immediately around a black hole. There's the event horizon; that's the famous "point of no return", at which even light speed is not sufficient to attain escape velocity.An active black hole also has an accretion disc, a huge disc of material swirling into the object, like water circling a drain.

And just outside the event horizon of an active black hole, around the inner edge of the accretion disc, is the corona.

This is a region of scorchingly hot electrons thought to be powered by the black hole's magnetic field, acting like a synchrotron to accelerate the electrons to such high energies that they shine brightly in X-ray wavelengths.

Astronomers first noticed something strange occurring in 1ES 1927+654 in 2018, when the All-Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae (ASASSN) - an automated survey looking for bright flashes of light across the entire sky - caught an incredibly bright flare from the galaxy, 40 times its normal brightness.

This caught astronomers' attention, and they pointed a bunch of telescopes in the galaxy's direction to find out more. For a while, everything was pretty normal - but then, around 160 days after the flare, 1ES 1927+654's nucleus started to dim. Over a period of 40 days, the X-ray glow was totally snuffed out.

"After ASSASN saw it go through this huge crazy outburst, we watched as the corona disappeared," Kara said. "It became undetectable, which we have never seen before."

But then the brightness started to steadily climb again. By 300 days after the initial flare, the galaxy's nucleus was shining almost 20 times more brightly than it had been prior to the initial event.

"We just don't normally see variations like this in accreting black holes," said astrophysicist Claudio Ricci of Diego Portales University in Chile, and lead author of the study.

"It was so strange that at first we thought maybe there was something wrong with the data. When we saw it was real, it was very exciting. But we also had no idea what we were dealing with; no one we talked to had seen anything like this."

Astronomers are not entirely sure how black hole coronae are generated and powered. But if, as theorised, it has something to do with the black hole's magnetic fields, then the dramatic changes observed in 1ES 1927+654's black hole could have been caused by something disrupting those magnetic fields.

We know that black holes can change pretty rapidly when they capture and devour a star that ventures just a little too close. The star is torn apart in a process called tidal disruption, screaming a flare of bright light, before getting slurped beyond the event horizon to meet its mysterious fate.

And if a runaway star so happened to encounter 1ES 1927+654's black hole, the events could fit the observed changes in the X-ray radiation. First, the star is tidally disrupted, causing the initial flare. Then debris from the star could have temporarily disrupted the black hole's magnetic field, after which it rebuilt itself as the space around the black hole settled back into a more normal state.

And that could be an important clue for understanding the radius within which a magnetic field controls a black hole corona.

"What that tells us is that, if all the action is happening within that tidal disruption radius, that means the magnetic field configuration that's supporting the corona must be within that radius," Kara said.

"Which means that, for any normal corona, the magnetic fields within that radius are what's responsible for creating a corona."

If a star was responsible for the event, the team calculated that the tidal disruption had to have occurred within four light minutes of the black hole's centre, around half the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

But there could be some other reason for the light show.

We know that black hole coronae can vary in brightness, although generally that occurs on much longer timescales. It's possible that the extreme behaviour observed in 1ES 1927+654 is actually also pretty normal behaviour - we just haven't spotted it until now.

"This dataset has a lot of puzzles in it," Kara said. "But that's exciting, because it means we're learning something new about the universe. We think the star hypothesis is a good one, but I also think we're going to be analyzing this event for a long time."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Read more:

For The First Time Ever, Astronomers Have Witnessed a Black Hole 'Blink' - ScienceAlert

A new generation of optically "fast" telescopes, connected to compact high-resolution video cameras, is poised to disrupt amateur astronomy in a good way.

Such "video astrographs" can transform our lonely pursuit into a much more social hobby. These new scopes can also bring magnificent, colorful, magazine-quality astrophotography within reach of modest budgets even for those of us living near light-polluted cities.

Leading this new era of happy disruption: Celestron's Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA, pronounced "RAHZ'suh"). The RASA is purpose-built to capture wide, flat fields of starlight without introducing false color and without smearing or stretching any individual star's appearance (the dreaded "coma" problem).

It's called an "astrograph" because it's designed solely for photography. Think of it as a giant camera lens. You cannot use it for visual astronomy; there's no hole in which to plop an eyepiece! RASAs come in three aperture sizes. We looked at the most affordable RASA 8-inch (20 centimeters).

Related: Best telescopes for the money 2020 reviews and guide

The other heroes of this joyful revolution are new video cameras made by ZWO, Atik, QHY, Meade, Orion, Altair, Celestron and others. These compact, high-resolution cams easily fit onto the RASA's front plate, just where the image comes together ("prime focus"). Their compact, generally cylindrical bodies block very little of the view.

The RASA gathers light so quickly, it takes only a few seconds for software to begin to build a stunning image on a live video monitor. And the view continues to improve as the data build. For live video astronomy, it's best to use a color camera.

Buy Celestron RASA 8 on Amazon.com | $1,699.99

Capture wide-field, deep-sky images in seconds with Celestron's 8-inch Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph. The telescope has incredibly fast optics and an ultra-stable imaging system. It does not include a tripod and mounting system.

Aperture:203mm (8") |Focal Length:400mm (15.74") |Focal Ratio:f/2.0 |Length:628mm (24.7") |Weight:17 lbs. (7.7 kg) |Spectral range:390-800nm

Say the word "video" and most people think of something moving on a screen. But video astronomy is not about seeing motion in the sky. True, every star in the universe moves. Our own sun along with planet Earth is slashing through spacetime at about 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour. The fastest stars those booted out by supernova blasts or slung around by supermassive black holes rip along at more than 1,500 km/s. Our human eyesight evolved to catch motion: Threatening predators, enticing food, treacherous situations, sexy people. But most stars are so far from one another, they don't seem to move on time scales humans can easily notice. So why shoot starlight on video?

Video is a stream of still images. If you stack them up rather than stringing them out you can use software to build up the brightness, bring up the color, subtract out the self-noise of the camera. If the telescope is "fast," those images can quickly add up to a glorious ghost of stellar nebulosity, materializing on a monitor, right before your eyes: The births and deaths of stars revealed. Something deeply moving on a screen after all!

You'll frequently see a telescope described by its "f-number;" "f/11, f/6" and so forth. That's it's "focal ratio" it's the number you get if you divide the focal length (distance from the main mirror or lens to the point where the image comes into focus) by the aperture (diameter of the main mirror or lens).

The lower the f-number, the "faster" the telescope will collect light, so the brighter the image will be. But it also means the field of view will be wider and the magnification lower. Faster instruments are thus better for photographing big dim targets, like galaxies and nebulas, which tend to be more diffuse. Slower optics are better for small bright targets like planets, lunar features and star groups. The RASA, at f/2.2, is a speed demon, fuzzy object grabbing machine!

Long before the novel coronavirus washed across our planet, we amateur astronomers were experienced practitioners of social distancing, though not by choice or necessity. Astronomy has not exactly been the most communal of activities. One spends a long while setting up, plugging-in, aligning, calibrating, star-finding, pointing, focusing and fiddling. These require concentration, which means not interacting with people very much.

Even before we needed to keep 6 feet (2 meters) of distance from one another, it wasn't that easy to coax friends or family members out into the cold to wait their turn at the eyepiece. They were inclined to be nervous about damaging your expensive 'scope; self-conscious about the folks waiting behind them. They were often bent over and uncomfortable adapting their bodies to our oddly angled rigs. So, they usually took much less of a good long look than they really wanted. This was hardly conducive to collective enjoyment. What should have elicited a "WOW!" too often turned into a "meh."

Video astronomy also called "electronic-assisted astronomy" changes all that. A live monitor connected to the telescope, or a live feed to the Web, instantly brings back the fun. With the RASA, "a laptop, and a camera is all you need," Dylan O'Donnell told Space.com from his Byron Bay Observatory in eastern Australia. An internet marketer by day, and a topnotch astrophotographer by night, O'Donnell publishes the extremely helpful STAR STUFF YouTube channel.

"If you wish to use a portable device, like a phone or a tablet," he said, "the ZWO ASI Air (Wi-Fi camera controller), or an equivalent, can make portable astronomy a little bit easier than lugging around a computer." With such a rig and good internet connectivity, you can live-stream the wonder of the universe to many people isolated behind closed doors.

Even before we needed to keep 6 feet (2 meters) of distance from one another, it wasn't that easy to coax friends or family members out into the cold to wait their turn at the eyepiece. They were inclined to be nervous about damaging your expensive 'scope; self-conscious about the folks waiting behind them. They were often bent over and uncomfortable adapting their bodies to our oddly angled rigs. So, they usually took much less of a good long look than they really wanted. This was hardly conducive to collective enjoyment. What should have elicited a "WOW!" too often turned into a "meh."

Video astronomy also called "electronic-assisted astronomy" changes all that. A live monitor connected to the telescope, or a live feed to the Web, instantly brings back the fun. With the RASA, "a laptop, and a camera is all you need," Dylan O'Donnell told Space.com from his Byron Bay Observatory in eastern Australia. An internet marketer by day, and a topnotch astrophotographer by night, O'Donnell publishes the extremely helpful STAR STUFF YouTube channel.

"If you wish to use a portable device, like a phone or a tablet," he said, "the ZWO ASI Air (Wi-Fi camera controller), or an equivalent, can make portable astronomy a little bit easier than lugging around a computer." With such a rig and good internet connectivity, you can live-stream the wonder of the universe to many people isolated behind closed doors.

As a member of Team Celestron, O'Donnell was one of the first to put the RASA through real-world, gotta-get-the-shot demanding paces. "I have used the RASA for live video style astronomy and these f/2 scopes are perfect," he said. "Some software like SharpCap and [Howie Levine's] Astro Toaster can provide live stacking features, which will build up an image from short exposures fairly quickly on-screen, while removing the noise and making astronomya much quicker, more visceral experience. At outreach events this techniquecan be very impressive with a projector!"

Watch Dylan O'Donnell mount a camera on the RASA 8.

When we are able to congregate again, this formerly lonely, arcane hobby can quickly become an enjoyable shared experience like a cool concert or the big game on a wide screen. Just please check, if you're planning on doing this at a classic star party, that your bright monitor will be allowed. Don't you dare despoil the dark for visual observers!

Astronomical get-togethers don't have to exist only in real time and real space. Social media shifts the star party through the fourth dimension: Posting the proud astrophoto you just made by stacking and tweaking last night's imaging run is a wonderful conversation starter.

Beyond grabbing live images for a display, video astronomy on the RASA can also dredge ancient light waves from the abyss much faster than nearly every other telescope. To get the sharpest images of the deep sky, it's best to switch to a monochrome camera and capture one portion of the spectrum at a time ("narrowband imaging").

The RASA 8's relatively small aperture means you can't use big motorized filter wheels; you have to manually insert single filters along the optical path to your camera. But this can be very worthwhile if you live under light pollution; so-called notch filters and sky filters can subtract artificial light from your images of the sky.

If you grab a number of exposures in sets, each optimized for recording key wavelengths, your final stacked astrophoto can reveal structure in the universe that was invisible to the largest observatories on Earth 40 years ago.

Thanks to the RASA's optical speed, you can do in 2 hours what other instruments can barely manage over two nights. And such a system can get good images under surprisingly light-polluted locations near cities. O'Donnell's "RASA 8 First Light Review" video will show you just what's possible.

Even though the RASA is fast, you still need it to accurately track a point on the sky. That demands a motorized mount under computer control.

Start by performing the best polar alignment you can. Then, "you really want to be guiding and dithering if possible," O'Donnell said, "so you'll need a guide-scope and camera connected to your imaging computer."

To "dither" means to slightly nudge the telescope in a different random direction each time you start a new exposure. This makes it easy to find and kill bad pixels (from the camera's sensor), satellite streaks (there are soon to be many more of these!), or any other consistent artifacts when you stack the shots to make your final composite.

Beyond dither, there's drizzle. A technique originally developed to perfect the historic Hubble Deep Field images is now available to you, the amateur astrophotographer. Drizzling technically known as "variable pixel linear reconstruction" can be invoked at the image-processing stage to restore information lost to under-sampling (one can only expose for so long). Drizzling on your image data can correct small geometric distortions caused by variability in the optics; the astrograph and the camera are excellent, but not perfect:

"One of the reasons the RASA 8 works so well is because the sampling is so good for popular cameras," O'Donnell said. "However, as the field is so wide, stars appear quite small and may feel blocky." But dither (as you're shooting) and drizzle (as you're stacking) can repair the downside damage done by wide-field image capture. Watch O'Donnell break down the whole workflow into simple, easy steps in his video, "Taking Photos of Space."

RASA Optical Tube Assemblies (OTAs) just the telescope itself, no mount, no tripod of three different dimensions are currently available: The RASA 8-inch (20 cm) can be found for about $1,700. Stepping up to the RASA 11-inch (28 cm) will cost around $3,500. You can watch O'Donnell's RASA 11 review video here.

At the high end, Celestron has also developed the research-grade 36 cm (14-inch) aperture RASA targeted to institutions, companies and agencies involved in space surveillance. Many of these big RASAs work to monitor space junk that can damage communications data satellites. Others stalk comets and near-Earth asteroids. A few are at work examining galaxies and galactic clusters.

Buy Celestron RASA 8 on Amazon.com | $1,699.99

Capture wide-field, deep-sky images in seconds with Celestron's 8-inch Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph. The telescope has incredibly fast optics and an ultra-stable imaging system. It does not include a tripod and mounting system.

Aperture:203mm (8") |Focal Length:400mm (15.74") |Focal Ratio:f/2.0 |Length:628mm (24.7") |Weight:17 lbs. (7.7 kg) |Spectral range:390-800nm

Beyond price, the RASA 8 can claim two more advantages: It has a wider field of view than its siblings, letting you seize big celestial vistas, like the Orion Nebula, in a single frame. "That 400-millimeter focal length results in quite a wide field of view," O'Donnell told Space.com, "so unless you're looking at Andromeda, this telescope is less of a galaxy hunter and more of a big nebula monster!"

And the RASA 8 is also eminently transportable. The smaller 8-inch OTA can be used on a less expensive smaller mount, atop a more compact tripod; making it easier to get your rig out to dark-sky sites for better images or to travel your sky-sharing machine at star party locations.

The RASA 8's smaller size, though, limits the size of the camera you can fit to it. Your old DSLR is too big. So, probably, is a full-frame video sensor. In fact, the RASA 8 is pretty much limited to APS-C (Advanced Photo System type-C) cameras of the popular Micro Four Thirds format. But there are a lot of them to choose from

To pick the right camera for your needs, it's best to work with a qualified astronomy store. The area at which the RASA 8 can focus is quite tightly bound; your camera's sensor must be in that zone and only certain cameras will succeed. We worked with expert reseller David Barrett at High Point Scientific to configure our rig.

The vast majority of stars even most of those in our own galaxy can't be seen without a telescope collecting their light and a camera storing that light. Stare as you might into the night, you won't see what a "time exposure" can record. To see color and find structure in the cosmos, you must collect that light over time, storing it as a long-exposed image and, perhaps, stacking many such images. With a typical "optically slow" telescope, this can take many hours outside often over several nights and more inside, processing and tweaking at the computer. Astrophotography has, up until now, taken great patience and almost monastic meditation characteristics with which few of us are abundantly blessed.

Telescope optical designs each have differing capacities to gather photons (or particles of light) from far away. The faster a scope can grab them, the less Earth has time to rotate. The RASA can grab a basic monochrome ("black and white") image of any of the better known "fuzzies" (such as the Andromeda Galaxy or the Orion Nebula) in about a minute, with no need to guide the scope. A typical Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (SCT) of the same aperture will need at least 13 minutes to get a similar image. And the SCT will need to be precisely polar-aligned and actively tracking the whole time, as Earth noticeably rotates.

In camera terms, the RASA is like a lens rated at f/2.2. That's very "fast." Only the highest quality prime lenses used by cinematographers typically deliver that performance. By comparison, the average SCT or Richey-Chretien ("R-C" like the Hubble Space Telescope) works no faster than f/10. Telescope designers use a more precise T-number, which takes into account light stolen by internal structures. The RASA is a T/2.5 system; a typical SCT does no better than about T/11.

Magnification is not the RASA's strong suit. Each of the three RASAs is a wide-field light bucket, best for bagging large, dim objects like nebulas and large (nearby) galaxies, but also for discovering asteroids, comets and locating human-made space junk. It's not for planets. If you're interested in investigating for yourself if Jupiter's Great Red Spot is really shrinking, get hold of a good apochromatic refractor.

Related: Best telescopes for beginners 2020 guide

At first, the idea seems kludgy: You plop a blob of video camera in the middle of the front end of an expensive telescope, so it sticks out into the night like a narwhal's tusk. Add to that the insult of a couple of draped cables: data (video) and power. Aren't you obstructing the most vital part of the light-collector? Well, no, you're not. A hybrid "catadioptric" telescope takes light in around the ring of its big "corrector plate" at the front, then bounces it off a large mirror at the back. In the more familiar Schmidt Cassegrain (SCT) or Maksutov Cassegrain (Mak-Cas) telescopes, that light is bounced one more time, off a small secondary mirror, and exits through a hole in the primary mirror where your eyepiece lies waiting.

With no eyepiece, RASA has no need for such a hole. Part of the genius of the Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (and its ancestors, the Fastar and HyperStar camera retrofits) is to bring the image to prime focus after just one bounce. So that's where you put your camera. You can't put an eyepiece there; your head would block most of the aperture.

The back-shell of the RASA contains an electric fan and a separate flow-through vent-port to help bring the optics into thermal equilibrium with the world around them. Differences in temperature across the glass surfaces can play hob with your focus, making your star field look like it's printed on Silly Putty. The RASA's fan gets 12-volt power from a battery pack or your power tank; that's one of several cables you'll need to run.

You'll also need to cable the camera. Outside of smartphones, there aren't yet many small, wireless high-quality video cameras. Perhaps with 5G network sprouting up everywhere (soon!), demand for such a "little beastie" will develop. Until then, we'll have cables in our fields of view. Those wires will introduce diffraction spikes into your images. But if you dress your cables out at 90 degrees, you'll get that classic four-pointed spiky star effect, which a lot of viewers find pleasing.

As the Apollo 11 crew was headed for the moon, the first charge-coupled device (CCD) image chip was being developed at Bell Labs in New Jersey. CCDs soon replaced the fragile and finicky tubes in video cameras. I first saw one applied to a telescope in 1985, at the observatory complex on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Modern barrel CCD astrophotography cameras are spectacularly "quiet" (low visual noise), especially when actively cooled. But they suffer from occasional "hot" pixels (individual full-white errors of quantum accumulation). And they will sometimes "bloom" (introduce a shaped glow) across the frame. CCDs take wonderfully detailed images, but they take a while to do so.

Gaining on CCDs in quality and available at lower cost are CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) sensors. They tend to be noisier than CCDs. But that noise is of a different, more subtle character. And CMOS sensors can be made smaller than CCDs, with much higher pixel densities. The cameras in your phone are CMOS. CMOS logic is fast; a quicker exposure through a telescope means a lower chance that motion-tracking errors will build up to distort your celestial portraits.

If your main focus (a poor pun) is on planets, Earth's moon or the sun, you'd be well advised to look to a CMOS solution first. Just please note that wide-field OTAs like the RASA are not good at small targets. If you crave distant galaxies and have, perhaps, a bit more disposable income for your astrophotography hobby look into one of the higher end scientific CCD cameras, which operate at 16 bit-depth.

Whether CCD or CMOS, shooting stars with dedicated video cameras gives you the advantage of active cooling, which reduces electronic noise. Your old DSLR doesn't have a fan (and it's too big to use on the RASA 8 anyway.)

Starting in the 1930s, a few professional observatories built large telescopes with cameras inside them. Designed by the Estonian optician Bernhard Schmidt, these instruments boasted fast focal ratios and very wide-field views. But changing the film was cumbersome. And servicing the camera meant taking most of the telescope apart.

The ability of these "Schmidt cameras" to seize broad swaths of sky quickly enabled many asteroid discoveries, supernova surveys and captured the earliest clues to the existence of the attractive force of dark matter and repulsive force of dark energy.

Starting in the 1970s, many of these grand old instruments were upgraded with some of the first CCD detectors in place of the film cameras. At first, CCDs were very expensive; in many cases, custom made. (One of the largest Schmidt cameras, the 48-inch (1.2 m) Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, has been upgraded with five successive CCD generations.)

In the late 1970s, telescope manufacturers serving the amateur market began to offer Schmidt optical tubes with 35-mm film holders inside, advancing amateur astrophotography beyond the self-made, bespoke rig level.

As the new century approached, and CCDs further displaced film, Celestron introduced its Fastar camera, designed to retrofit stock Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes (SCTs). Owners would amputate the telescope's small secondary mirror, replacing it with the Fastar. This meant they could no longer observe by eye, but could concentrate starlight on the Fastar's 320-by-240-pixel CCD; quite primitive by today's 3,840-by-2,160-pixel ("4K") standards, but amazing for the time.

In the early 2000s, the owners of Starizona, an astronomy enthusiasts' store in Tucson, Arizona, propelled the hobby of astrophotography forward with the innovative HyperStar retrofit kits. Owners could now attach their new DSLR (Digital Single-lens Reflex camera), or small CCD video camera, to their SCT. Wide-field electronic images, garnered by fast telescopes with short focal lengths, were now possible. But only certain telescopes could be converted. Smaller apertures would be useless with big DSLR cameras hanging on the front, blocking light. And it wouldn't have made good business sense for Starizona to create a kit for every existing type and size SCT in service.

Around 2013, the Celestron Co. came to an internal consensus that a dedicated fast, wide, astrograph a telescope tube built specifically as a camera "lens" could open astrophotography to many more amateur observers. Pioneering designs by David Rowe, and innovative improvements from Mark Ackermann, challenged Celestron's engineers to bring an affordable mass-produced astrograph to market. Rowe and Ackermann were honored as the "R" and "A" in RASA. And the RASA 11 was born.

Driven by consumer demand for better digital cameras and imaging smartphones, video sensors continued shrinking even as they grew in pixels. This spawned the clutch of less-massive, purpose-built astrophotography cameras available today. With smaller bodies generally cylindrical in shape such cameras obscure less of the telescope's working area, making it possible for Celestron to offer the RASA design concept in a more affordable 8-inch aperture footprint.

Remember those grand old Schmidt tubes with the film cameras inside? Now, as video cameras contract, it's possible the next generation of consumer telescopes, beyond RASA, might put the camera back inside the tube, more or less permanently mounted. Ubiquitous 5G network connectivity could make the camera, the astrograph OTA and the computer-driven tracking mount all completely wireless.

Time will tell. In the meantime, fast (f/2) wide field telescopes like RASA, and compact, 4K video cameras are here now, producing wonderful images that are easy to post and distribute. Every one of us is a stakeholder in the universe. Help your friends to claim their share.

This article was prepared using the following equipment:

Follow the author @DavidSkyBrody. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Video astronomy: Bring the universe to your friends with Celestron's RASA 8 telescope - Space.com

Another instrument, the Solar and Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI), sent back shots of the zodiacal light, which occurs when sunlight reflects off dust particles in our solar system. Although these images dont signify a new discovery, taking them required SoloHI to tamp down the Suns glare to just a trillionth its actual brightness. By successfully completing the task, researchers are confident SoloHI can produce the image quality needed to study the solar wind (the instruments intended purpose) once the mission ramps up.

The Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) also beamed back high-resolution data showing the Suns intricate and powerful magnetic field. And in a first, PHI revealed a view of a local magnetic field on the Sun that was not visible from Earth at the time, exemplifying just one advantage of the spacecrafts intentionally tilted orbit.

The Suns magnetic field drives numerous internal processes, which can produce solar flares and other powerful outbursts. Such energetic solar events can affect us here on Earth, too from sparking stunning auroras to knocking out satellite communications and earthbound power grids. But by monitoring the Sun with spacecraft such as Solar Orbiter and the Parker Solar Probe, scientists should be able to better predict when Earth-affecting space weather will occur.

All in all, these first results show that we still have much to learn about our home star, as well as the forces that power its frequently finicky behavior. Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start, said project scientist Daniel Mller. We are all really excited about these first images but this is just the beginning.

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Solar Orbiter sends back the closest photos of the Sun ever taken - Astronomy Magazine

By Dorothy de Souza Guedes, for The Gazette

A lifelong interest in astronomy and outer space led Scott Bounds to pursue three degrees in physics. After a stint at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C., hes worked as a research scientist at the University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy for 21 years.

Yet he learned about the Eastern Iowa Observatory and Learning Center the way many locals do: His sons Cub Scout pack scheduled a visit.

Up until then, I didnt even know the observatory existed, Bounds said of the facility on the southern edge of Palisades-Kepler State Park near Mount Vernon.

When he visited the observatory that night about 10 years ago, he was floored by what he saw.

They took us out to this big 24-inch telescope, that, unless youre a fairly wealthy astronomy buff, youre not going to have anything like that, Bounds said. Thats what really wowed me.

He learned that the Linn County Conservation Department and a club, the Cedar Amateur Astronomers, ran the observatory. He joined the club almost immediately, Bounds said. And hes been involved ever since, currently serving as the clubs president for the second time and scouting program coordinator.

LIFELONG ASTRONOMY BUFF

A childhood interest in space was almost inevitable: Bounds grew up in Huntsville, Ala., also known as the Rocket City. Thats where NASA did much of the early rocket design work for the Apollo space missions.

He visited NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville at least twice a year, read science books and magazines, and owned a small telescope. In college, Bounds joined the astronomy club and considered studying astronomy in graduate school before sticking with physics.

But I always maintained an interest in astronomy, he said.

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Bounds moved to Iowa City in 1999. As a research scientist in the space physics realm the field that acclaimed UI scientist James Van Allen effectively started he builds instruments for spacecraft and rockets. His specialty is near-earth phenomena, such as aurora and radiation belts.

The UI Physics and Astronomy department has a couple of telescopes, but he never used them. At home, his backyard wasnt ideal for viewing the night sky. Years went by until his wife suggested he join their son on the Cub Scouts visit to the observatory.

Thats when Bounds found his home as an amateur astronomer.

For Bounds, part of the appeal of astronomy is the unknown.

What is out there? Where do we fit in this universe? he said. We can see the stars but cant go to them, at least not in our lifetime.

Cedar Amateur Astronomers started with a dozen members in 1979. The club now has more than 100 members. The group raised $700,000 to build an indoor learning center and create a permanent home for a two-ton, 1960s research telescope, donated by the University of Iowa, that club members refurbished and reassembled.

The club holds monthly meetings virtually since March because of the coronavirus and maintains the observatorys equipment and grounds. The club also organizes public events and hosts private tours for scouts, school field trips and other groups.

If you have an interest in astronomy, the club is a good stepping-off point, Bounds said. The club caters to any level of experience in amateur astronomy.

They learn from each other what equipment to buy and what not to buy. After becoming a club member, Bounds said he bought a telescope a 10-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain LX200. The downside of owning a telescope is having to set it up and align it before every use. The telescopes at the observatory are already set up and aligned.

You can just go up there and start using them almost immediately, Bounds said.

Grants secured by the club to build the Eastern Iowa Observatory and Learning Center came with a caveat: The club must open the facility and equipment to the public. And so it does.

The club schedules 12 public events each year, from March through November, including two each month in the summer. Typically, a speaker gives a 45-minute presentation on his or her area of expertise. For example, club member Carl Bracken organizes a Solar Day each July with daytime viewing of the sun.

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The astronomy clubs close relationship with the University of Iowa has played a vital role in the observatory having professional-grade equipment. The university donated the 24-inch Boller and Chivens Cassegrain professional-grade telescope used by researchers from the 1960s to the 90s.

The 4,600-square-foot observatory also has a 16-inch computer-controlled telescope and several portable telescopes. Members also bring and set up their own telescopes for visitors to look through. On cloudy nights, visitors can still go out to the telescopes and see how they work.

Theres a lot out there to see, to do. Its more than they expect, Bounds said. We try to keep everything in good shape, working order and very presentable.

The coronavirus pandemic hit just as the clubs 2020 schedule began. Public events were canceled and now, Bounds said, we are taking things month by month.

As soon as public events resume, they will be listed on the clubs website, cedar-astronomers.org/events.

If the skies are clear, we have the scopes up and operating, Bounds said. The club will be out there, operating telescopes until the last person leaves.

What: Eastern Iowa Observatory and Learning Center at Palisade-Dows Preserve

Who: Only open for public events and to Cedar Amateur Astronomers club members

Where: 1365 Ivanhoe Road, Ely (about halfway between Ely and Mount Vernon at the Palisades-Dows Preserve)

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Website: cedar-astronomers.org

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Eastern Iowa Observatory offers a chance to see the stars and so much more - The Gazette

Stars are hot bodies of glowing gas that begin their lives within a nebula of cold gas and dust that formed through gravitational and other forces that drew together enough material that the pressure was enough to produce nuclear fusion within their cores.

Their diameters range from the small Red Dwarfs, as small as 8 percent that of our sun, to the Hyper-Giants, with some being well over 1500 times as large. They vary widely in mass and temperature as well, masses ranging from 1/20 to over 60 solar masses, and with surface temperatures from 3,000 degrees to over 50,000 degrees Celsius. The colors of stars are determined by their temperatures, with the hottest being blue and the coolest red. Our Sun is a small star having a surface temperature of 5,500 degrees Celsius with its color appearing yellow. But, a stars lifetime, how they die, and what they become, depends on their mass only.

In the beginning, all stars are born in a region of high density Nebulae consisting of gas and dust, where they condense into huge globules which contract under their own gravity. The regions of condensing matter then begin to heat up from friction and compression, and start to glow forming proto-stars. If a proto-star contains enough matter to produce a central temperature of 15 million degrees Centigrade or more, then nuclear reactions (where Hydrogen fuses to form Helium) occur. At this point the star begins to release energy, stopping it from contracting further, which causes it to shine. It is now on a path called the Main Sequence Stage.

The very large stars, three solar masses and above, undergo the following: These stars shine steadily until the Hydrogen has fused to form Helium (taking only millions of years). The massive star then becomes a Red Supergiant, starting off with a Helium core surrounded by a shell of cooling, expanding gas. Over the next million years, or so, a series of nuclear reactions occur which produce a variety of different elements in shells around an Iron core. After the external radiation gives out and gravity takes over, the core collapses in a very short time, causing an explosion, a Supernova, in which a shock wave blows off the outer layers of the star. (These actual Supernovae can shine brighter than the entire galaxy for a period of weeks). If the core survives the explosion, and is 1.5 to 3 solar masses, it will contract to become a tiny, very dense, Neutron Star. If the core is greater than 3 solar masses, it will exceed the Neutron density pressure and contract to become a Black Hole.

Small Stars, about one and a half Solar Masses or less: A star of one solar mass, such as our Sun, will remain on the Main Sequence for about 10 billion years, until all of the Hydrogen has fused to form Helium. The Helium core will then start to contract further and reactions begin to occur in a shell around the core. The center is now hot enough for the Helium to fuse into Carbon. The outer layers begin to expand, cool and shine less brightly. This expanding star becomes a Red Giant. The remaining core (about 80 percent of the original star) is now in its final stages, where the core cools and dims to become a White Dwarf star.

Although we visibly see the very brightest, high mass stars in the evening sky, they live the shortest lives, some being only a few million years. The stars that live the longest are the small Red Dwarfs, many of which will live on for trillions of years, longer than the Universe has been in existence.

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Northern Arizona Astronomy: The lives of stars - Grand Canyon News

This radar image captured by NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in 1991 shows a corona, a large circular structure 120 miles in diameter, named Aine Corona.

When a star's mass is ejected during a supernova, it expands quickly. Eventually, it will slow and form a hot bubble of glowing gas. A white dwarf will emerge from this gas bubble and move across the galaxy.

The afterglow of short gamma ray burst that was detected 10 billion light-years away is shown here in a circle. This image was taken by the Gemini-North telescope.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7513, a barred spiral galaxy 60 million light-years away. Due to the expansion of the universe, the galaxy appears to be moving away from the Milky Way at an accelerate rate.

This artist's concept illustration shows what the luminous blue variable star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy may have looked like before it mysteriously disappeared.

This is an artist's illustration of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding disk of gas. Inside this disk are two smaller black holes orbiting one another. Researchers identified a flare of light suspected to have come from one such binary pair soon after they merged into a larger black hole.

This image, taken from a video, shows what happens as two objects of different masses merge together and create gravitational waves.

This is an artist's impression showing the detection of a repeating fast radio burst seen in blue, which is in orbit with an astrophysical object seen in pink.

Fast radio bursts, which make a splash by leaving their host galaxy in a bright burst of radio waves, helped detect "missing matter" in the universe.

A new type of explosion was found in a tiny galaxy 500 million light-years away from Earth. This type of explosion is referred to as a fast blue optical transient.

Astronomers have discovered a rare type of galaxy described as a "cosmic ring of fire." This artist's illustration shows the galaxy as it existed 11 billion years ago.

This is an artist's impression of the Wolfe Disk, a massive rotating disk galaxy in the early universe.

A bright yellow "twist" near the center of this image shows where a planet may be forming around the AB Aurigae star. The image was captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

This artist's illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1,000 light-years from Earth. This system includes one star (small orbit seen in blue) orbiting a newly discovered black hole (orbit in red), as well as a third star in a wider orbit (also in blue).

This illustration shows a star's core, known as a white dwarf, pulled into orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole rips off more material from the star and pulls it into a glowing disk of material around the black hole. Before its encounter with the black hole, the star was a red giant in the last stages of stellar evolution.

This artist's illustration shows the collision of two 125-mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away. The observation of the aftermath of this collision was once thought to be an exoplanet.

This is an artist's impression of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov as it travels through our solar system. New observations detected carbon monixide in the cometary tail as the sun heated the comet.

This rosette pattern is the orbit of a star, called S2, around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

This is an artist's illustration of SN2016aps, which astronomers believe is the brightest supernova ever observed.

This is an artist's illustration of a brown dwarf, or a "failed star" object, and its magnetic field. The brown dwarf's atmosphere and magnetic field rotate at different speeds, which allowed astronomers to determine wind speed on the object.

This artist's illustration shows an intermediate-mass black hole tearing into a star.

This is an artist's impression of a large star known as HD74423 and its much smaller red dwarf companion in a binary star system. The large star appears to pulsate on one side only, and it's being distorted by the gravitational pull of its companion star into a teardrop shape.

This is an artist's impression of two white dwarfs in the process of merging. While astronomers expected that this might cause a supernova, they have found an instance of two white dwarf stars that survived merging.

A combination of space and ground-based telescopes have found evidence for the biggest explosion seen in the universe. The explosion was created by a black hole located in the Ophiuchus cluster's central galaxy, which has blasted out jets and carved a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas.

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, has been undergoing unprecedented dimming. This image was taken in January using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

This new ALMA image shows the outcome of a stellar fight: a complex and stunning gas environment surrounding the binary star system HD101584.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured the Tarantula Nebula in two wavelengths of infrared light. The red represents hot gas, while the blue regions are interstellar dust.

A white dwarf, left, is pulling material off of a brown dwarf, right, about 3,000 light-years from Earth.

This image shows the orbits of the six G objects at the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated with a white cross. Stars, gas and dust are in the background.

After stars die, they expel their particles out into space, which form new stars in turn. In one case, stardust became embedded in a meteorite that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that stardust could flow from sources like the Egg Nebula to create the grains recovered from the meteorite, which landed in Australia.

The former North Star, Alpha Draconis or Thuban, is circled here in an image of the northern sky.

Galaxy UGC 2885, nicknamed the "Godzilla galaxy," may be the largest one in the local universe.

The host galaxy of a newly traced repeating fast radio burst acquired with the 8-meter Gemini-North telescope.

The Milky Way's central region was imaged using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

This is an artist's illustration of what MAMBO-9 would look like in visible light. The galaxy is very dusty and it has yet to build most of its stars. The two components show that the galaxy is in the process of merging.

Astronomers have found a white dwarf star surrounded by a gas disk created from an ice giant planet being torn apart by its gravity.

New measurements of the black hole at the center of the Holm 15A galaxy reveal it's 40 billion times more massive than our sun, making it the heaviest known black hole to be directly measured.

A close-up view of an interstellar comet passing through our solar system can be seen on the left. On the right, astronomers used an image of Earth for comparison.

The galaxy NGC 6240 hosts three supermassive black holes at its core.

Gamma-ray bursts are shown in this artist's illustration. They can be triggered by the collision or neutron stars or the explosion of a super massive star, collapsing into a black hole.

Two gaseous clouds resembling peacocks have been found in neighboring dwarf galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. In these images by the ALMA telescopes, red and green highlight molecular gas while blue shows ionized hydrogen gas.

An artist's impression of the Milky Way's big black hole flinging a star from the galaxy's center.

The Jack-o'-lantern Nebula is on the edge of the Milky Way. Radiation from the massive star at its center created spooky-looking gaps in the nebula that make it look like a carved pumpkin.

This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures two galaxies of equal size in a collision that appears to resemble a ghostly face. This observation was made on 19 June 2019 in visible light by the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

A new SPHERE/VLT image of Hygiea, which could be the Solar System's smallest dwarf planet yet. As an object in the main asteroid belt, Hygiea satisfies right away three of the four requirements to be classified as a dwarf planet: it orbits around the Sun, it is not a moon and, unlike a planet, it has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. The final requirement is that it have enough mass that its own gravity pulls it into a roughly spherical shape. This is what VLT observations have now revealed about Hygiea.

This is an artist's rendering of what a massive galaxy from the early universe might look like. The rendering shows that star formation in the galaxy is lighting up the surrounding gas. Image by James Josephides/Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Christina Williams/University of Arizona and Ivo Labbe/Swinburne.

This is an artist's illustration of gas and dust disk around the star HD 163296. Gaps in the disk are likely the location of baby planets that are forming.

This is a two-color composite image of comet 2I/Borisov captured by the Gemini North telescope on September 10.

This illustration shows a young, forming planet in a "baby-proof" star system.

Using a simulation, astronomers shed light on the faint gaseous filaments that comprise the cosmic web in a massive galaxy cluster.

The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera observed Saturn in June as the planet made its closest approach to Earth this year, at approximately 1.36 billion kilometers away.

An artist's impression of the massive bursts of ionizing radiation exploding from the center of the Milky Way and impacting the Magellanic Stream.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array captured this unprecedented image of two circumstellar disks, in which baby stars are growing, feeding off material from their surrounding birth disk.

This is an artist's illustration of what a Neptune-size moon would look like orbiting the gas giant exoplanet Kepler-1625b in a star system 8,000 light-years from Earth. It could be the first exomoon ever discovered.

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a cloud of gas and dust full of bubbles, which are inflated by wind and radiation from massive young stars. Each bubble is filled with hundreds to thousands of stars, which form from dense clouds of gas and dust.

This is an artist's impression of the path of the fast radio burst FRB 181112 traveling from a distant host galaxy to reach the Earth. It passed through the halo of a galaxy on the way.

After passing too close to a supermassive black hole, the star in this artist's conception is torn into a thin stream of gas, which is then pulled back around the black hole and slams into itself, creating a bright shock and ejecting more hot material.

Comparison of GJ 3512 to the Solar System and other nearby red-dwarf planetary systems. Planets around a solar-mass stars can grow until they start accreting gas and become giant planets such as Jupiter, in a few millions of years. But we thought that small stars such asProxima, TRAPPIST-1, Teegarderns star and GJ 3512, could not form Jupiter mass planets.

A collision of three galaxies has set three supermassive black holes on a crash course with each other in a system one billion light-years from Earth.

2I/Borisov is the first interstellar comet observed in our solar system and only the second observed interstellar visitor to our solar system.

KIC 8462852, also known as Boyajian's Star or Tabby's Star, is 1,000 light-years from us. It's 50% bigger than our sun and 1,000 degrees hotter. And it doesn't behave like any other star, dimming and brightening sporadically. Dust around the star, depicted here in an artist's illustration, may be the most likely cause of its strange behavior.

This is an artist's impression of a massive neutron star's pulse being delayed by the passage of a white dwarf star between the neutron star and Earth. Astronomers have detected the most massive neutron star to date due to this delay.

The European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope captured a stunning image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our nearest galactic neighbors. The near-infrared capability of the telescope showcases millions of individual stars.

Astronomers believe Comet C/2019 Q4 could be the second known interstellar visitor to our solar system. It was first spotted on August 30 and imaged by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Big Island on September 10, 2019.

A star known as S0-2, represented as the blue and green object in this artist's illustration, made its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way in 2018. This provided a test for Einstein's theory of general relativity.

This is a radio image of the Milky Way's galactic center. The radio bubbles discovered by MeerKAT extend vertically above and below the plane of the galaxy.

A kilanova was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, seen here next to the red arrow. Kilanovae are massive explosions that create heavy elements like gold and platinum.

This is an artist's depiction of a black hole about to swallow a neutron star. Detectors signaled this possible event on August 14.

This artist's illustration shows LHS 3844b, a rocky nearby exoplanet. It's 1.3 times the mass of Earth and orbits a cool M-dwarf star. The planet's surface is probably dark and covered in cooled volcanic material, and there is no detectable atmosphere.

An artist's concept of the explosion of a massive star within a dense stellar environment.

Galaxy NGC 5866 is 44 million light-years from Earth. It appears flat because we can only see its edge in this image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope took a dazzling new portrait of Jupiter, showcasing its vivid colors and swirling cloud features in the atmosphere.

This is an artist's impression of the ancient massive and distant galaxies observed with ALMA.

Glowing gas clouds and newborn stars make up the Seagull Nebula in one of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms.

An artist's concept of what the first stars looked like soon after the Big Bang.

Spiral galaxy NGC 2985 lies roughly over 70 million light years from our solar system in the constellation of Ursa Major.

Early in the history of the universe, the Milky Way galaxy collided with a dwarf galaxy, left, which helped form our galaxy's ring and structure as it's known today.

An artist's illustration of a thin disc embedded in a supermassive black hole at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 3147, 130 million light-years away.

Hubble captured this view of a spiral galaxy named NGC 972 that appears to be blooming with new star formation. The orange glow is created as hydrogen gas reacts to the intense light streaming outwards from nearby newborn stars.

This is jellyfish galaxy JO201.

The Eta Carinae star system, located 7,500 light-years from Earth, experienced a great explosion in 1838 and the Hubble Space Telescope is still capturing the aftermath. This new ultraviolet image reveals the warm glowing gas clouds that resemble fireworks.

'Oumuamua, the first observed interstellar visitor to our solar system, is shown in an artist's illustration.

This is an artist's rendering of ancient supernovae that bombarded Earth with cosmic energy millions of years ago.

An artist's impression of CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope finding a fast radio burst and determining its precise location.

The Whirlpool galaxy has been captured in different light wavelengths. On the left is a visible light image. The next image combines visible and infrared light, while the two on the right show different wavelengths of infrared light.

Electrically charged C60 molecules, in which 60 carbon atoms are arranged in a hollow sphere that resembles a soccer ball, was found by the Hubble Space Telescope in the interstellar medium between star systems.

These are magnified galaxies behind large galaxy clusters. The pink halos reveal the gas surrounding the distant galaxies and its structure. The gravitational lensing effect of the clusters multiplies the images of the galaxies.

This artist's illustration shows a blue quasar at the center of a galaxy.

The NICER detector on the International Space Station recorded 22 months of nighttime X-ray data to create this map of the entire sky.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this mosaic of the star-forming Cepheus C and Cepheus B regions.

Galaxy NGC 4485 collided with its larger galactic neighbor NGC 4490 millions of years ago, leading to the creation of new stars seen in the right side of the image.

Astronomers developed a mosaic of the distant universe, called the Hubble Legacy Field, that documents 16 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The image contains 200,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

A ground-based telescope's view of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy of our Milky Way. The inset was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows one of the star clusters in the galaxy.

One of the brightest planetary nebulae on the sky and first discovered in 1878, nebula NGC 7027 can be seen toward the constellation of the Swan.

The asteroid 6478 Gault is seen with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showing two narrow, comet-like tails of debris that tell us that the asteroid is slowly undergoing self-destruction. The bright streaks surrounding the asteroid are background stars. The Gault asteroid is located 214 million miles from the Sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The ghostly shell in this image is a supernova, and the glowing trail leading away from it is a pulsar.

Hidden in one of the darkest corners of the Orion constellation, this Cosmic Bat is spreading its hazy wings through interstellar space two thousand light-years away. It is illuminated by the young stars nestled in its coredespite being shrouded by opaque clouds of dust, their bright rays still illuminate the nebula.

In this illustration, several dust rings circle the sun. These rings form when planets' gravities tug dust grains into orbit around the sun. Recently, scientists have detected a dust ring at Mercury's orbit. Others hypothesize the source of Venus' dust ring is a group of never-before-detected co-orbital asteroids.

This is an artist's impression of globular star clusters surrounding the Milky Way.

An artist's impression of life on a planet in orbit around a binary star system, visible as two suns in the sky.

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Astronomers witness 'teenage' years of our universe in explosion - CNN

A new study just published shows that, within the past few hundred thousand years, its entirely possible that Betelgeuse ate and digested a whole other star.

This would explain at least one weird thing about it, and we know such stellar mergers can happen, so why not? Its the least strange thing Ive heard about Betelgeuse in the past couple of years anyway.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, a massive (roughly 15 times the Suns mass) star thats nearing the end of its short life. Stars like this live for only some millions of years, and Betelgeuse is already about 810 million years old, so it doesnt have much time left. Its already run out of hydrogen in its core to fuse to helium, and is likely fusing helium into carbon, with a thin shell of hydrogen fusing outside of that. This produces prodigious amounts of energy, and the outer layers have reacted to that by swelling hugely (like a hot air balloon getting an infusion of heat); Betelgeuse is well over a billion kilometers in diameter.

Stars like this should rotate extremely slowly. It probably didnt spin very quickly when it was younger and still fusing hydrogen into helium (we call these main sequence stars), and when it expanded into a supergiant it should spin even more slowly if you take a spinning object and increase its diameter itll slow its spin, the same (though opposite) effect as when an ice skater starts a spin and brings their arms in to increase their spin.

But heres the weird thing: Betelgeuse spins rapidly. At its equator it rotates at a speed of about 5 kilometers per second, over four times faster than the Sun does. Betelgeuse is huge, so it still takes decades to rotate once, but that equatorial speed is still anomalously high. It should be more like a few meters per second at most.

The new study looked into a possible answer: a binary merger, where Betelgeuse used to be two stars orbiting each other closely, but merged to form a single star.

This happens a lot. First of all, binary stars are pretty common; half of all stars are in a binary system. Some fraction of those are relatively close together, so they orbit each other relatively quickly. And some fraction of those involve a high-mass star and a lower mass one. Thats the key.

If the more massive star (called the primary star) is more than about 15 times the Sun's mass itll evolve quickly, using up its core hydrogen and evolving off the main sequence, expanding into a red supergiant. If another star orbits it, the primary could swell up so much it engulfs the smaller, secondary star that star will literally be inside the primary. As it orbits, itll feel drag from plowing through the primarys atmosphere, just like when you stick your hand out a moving cars window and you feel air resistance.

That drag will steal energy from the secondary stars orbital energy, and itll start to spiral down towards the primarys core. The orbital energy of the secondary gets transferred to the primarys atmosphere, spinning it up like an eggbeater in a bowl of eggs, and the primary will start to rotate faster.

In some cases that in-spiral may take only five days (!!), or it could take a few thousand years. Either way it happens very quickly compared to the lifetime of either star. As the secondary drops down the gravity of the primarys dense core will start to tear the secondary star apart through tidal forces. Eventually the star is disrupted completely. The hydrogen in the ex-secondary then streams down to the primarys core, where it can be used as fuel, increasing the stars energy output and causing it to swell further.

This is what the new study found! They ran some simulations of massive primary stars (from 15 to 17 times the Suns mass) orbited by a smaller star (from 14 times the Suns mass) to see how the systems evolve. They found that in many cases they can reproduce Betelgeuses rapid rotation, and that it will continue to rotate rapidly like this for hundreds of thousands of years.

Given that Betelgeuse will probably go supernova in 100,000 years, that timescale sounds about right. So if Betelgeuse did start out as a binary, it likely ate its companion just a couple of hundred thousand years ago. If you think Betelgeuse is acting strangely now, imagine how it must have looked back then!

It also makes me wonder. Betelgeuse pulsates, brightening and dimming on a 420-day cycle. This is an upper atmospheric issue (the core is probably not the cause) and I wonder if dropping an entire star into it might have something to do with starting this cycle in the first place. I dont think this would have much to do with the recent extraordinary dimming of Betelgeuse directly, though. Weve seen it go through lots of normal variations before, so this most recent one probably has other (still not entirely understood) causes.

The scientists in the study are working on more complete models of what happens when the binary merger occurs, so itll be interesting to see what they find. It makes me wonder how many other stars we see in the sky have done this. Its funny to think that stars we see and are familiar with may have such auto-gormandizing histories and makes it clear theres still much to learn and understand about Betelgeuse.

Tip o' the dew shield to AstroBites.

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Bad Astronomy | Betelgeuse may have merged with a ssaller star - SYFY WIRE

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Throughout history, ancient peoples have witnessed meteor showers in awe and attributed special meaning to them. Sometimes they saw these blazing streaks of light as signs that doomsday was nigh; others posit that the star mentioned in the birth of Jesus was actually a comet.

These days, we mostly see meteors for what they are in the eyes of science space debris hitting Earth's atmosphere at suicidal speed. Sometimes, there are just a few strikes here and there. Full-on meteor showers, however, feature dozens or hundreds of glorious streaks per hour.

In many cases, you can't simply step out onto the sidewalk to see meteors, perhaps due to light pollution or physical obstructions like trees or buildings. But if you take the time to select a prime viewing spot, you may be in for the astronomical treat of a lifetime. Picking the best location might take a bit of homework on your part. Here are some tips to get you started, courtesy of two astronomers we talked with.

"Meteors streaming into Earth's atmosphere are best seen after midnight when Earth itself is turned 'into the meteor stream,'" Paul A. Delaney, an astronomy professor at York University, in Toronto, says by email. "As Earth orbits the sun, at any given moment, half of the Earth is 'facing' in the direction of its orbital travel. As Earth spins on its axis, any spot on the surface at local midnight begins to rotate into this forward-facing half of Earth."

With that in mind, he says you'll get your best view of meteors from midnight to 6 a.m. local time. Before that, only the higher altitude meteors will be seen from the ground. If you remember just one thing about meteor viewing, this is it.

The next step in finding a primo meteor shower viewing location? Locating a pitch-black spot.

"It is here you can see many of the fainter meteors," says David Leake, director of the William M. Staerkel Planetarium at Parkland College in Illinois via email. "You don't want to be chased off private property, but if you can find a spot away from direct lighting and away from city light pollution, that's best."

Light pollution refers to excessive light that seeps into the sky from our civilized towns and cities (as seen in this light pollution map). It obscures many of the night sky's natural features, such as the Milky Way, to a degree that many lifelong city dwellers have never glimpsed it.

Meteor showers are no exception. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you may have to venture miles and miles away from the city's orange glow to see meteors in their full glory. You can use websites to find dark places near you.

If that's not option, you can always try closer to home.

"Maybe a nearby forest preserve or park is offering a meteor-watching event," says Leake. He also recommends checking with your local astronomy club for organized viewing activities.

Be sure to use red LED flashlights to preserve your night vision. It can take a half-hour or longer for your eyes to readjust to the dark night skies after you've been exposed to bright white light.

Think you've pinpointed a good, dark viewing location on a map? When you're perusing dark sky map, here's a pro tip: Keep the direction of any nearby cities in mind relative to the location of the celestial event you're hoping to see because even in places that are certified as dark sky areas, you may see the telltale orange glow of cities on the horizon.

If that glow happens to be in the same direction as your meteor shower, it could impact your viewing. And it will almost certainly impact any astro-photography you're hoping to do.

You might also want to get on higher ground.

"Elevation can help," says Leake. "The greater your altitude, the less dust and water vapor you are looking through and the more stars you will see. I would rate darkness over elevation, though, if you have to make a choice."

You don't need fancy equipment to watch a meteor shower. It's more about being prepared to stay out in the wee hours of the morning, with appropriately warm clothes and any other creature comforts you prefer. A reclining lawn chair that folds all the way back will allow you to see as much of the sky as possible without wrecking your neck. You can lie on a blanket in a pinch.

Above all, keep it simple.

"Too many times amateur astronomers are out using their telescopes, trying to figure out what to look at, changing eyepieces, aligning optics, focusing, etc.," says Leake. "Sometimes we forget to just look up! For a meteor shower, you need no equipment but maybe a lawn chair."

While you're watching pieces of space debris smash themselves into oblivion, appreciate the violence of the calamities you're witnessing.

"Meteors are pieces of the universe literally raining down onto the Earth," says Delaney. "They are a wonderful spectacle. They reveal how much material is actually in space and while most of the material is small stuff, occasionally we encounter a larger rock that could potentially be very dangerous to life on Earth (think dinosaur extinction)."

Thus, he says, meteor showers remind us of the shooting gallery in which Earth moves through continuously and how important it should be for astronomers and governments to be on the lookout in space for dangerous rocks.

Light-filled American cities like Los Angeles or New York City aren't great for astronomy events. But there are plenty of darker areas throughout America that are perfect. Here are a few choice spots, according to Accuweather.

See the article here:

Astronomers Tell You How and Where to Best View Meteor Showers - HowStuffWorks

NASA wants to go to the moon, and astrophysicists want their instruments to ride along, too.

The details are still in flux, as scientists are figuring out what makes the most sense given the scientific and logistical constraints of the moon. But they're confident that NASA's current priorities at the moon offer benefits that would support their goals. The agency's priorities are embodied by the Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the moon in 2024 in a sustainable, long-term way that offers a future for science as well as exploration.

"Heavy launch capability, astronauts, serviceability, in-space assembly all of those things are things that we care deeply about," Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy said during the Lunar Surface Science Virtual Workshop held on May 28. "And they are a core part of the return to the moon initiative."

Related: NASA sees inspiration parallels between Apollo and Artemis moonshots

A few telescopes have already operated on the moon. NASA's Apollo 16 mission in 1972 carried an ultraviolet telescope that astronaut John Young used to image nebulas, stars and Earth's atmosphere. China's Chang'e-3 mission, which landed on the moon in 2013, also carried an ultraviolet telescope.

But the moon is generally new territory for telescopes, Hammel said, and the details of how astrophysicists might tap into the Artemis program remain to be determined. One important distinction may be between telescopes on the moon and telescopes at the moon. That's because even terrestrial dust is a problem for delicate astronomy equipment and lunar dust is a whole lot more aggravating than its Earthly counterpart.

That said, it's not impossible to picture telescopes thriving on the lunar surface, Hammel said. She pointed to a volcanic mountain at the heart of Hawaii Island, Maunakea. Today, it's known for the dozen astronomy facilities perched on the mountain's summit, where the atmosphere is still and observing conditions are favorable. But in the 1960s, it was a key training site for Apollo-era astronauts practicing moonwalks and geology.

"Maunakea was a proving ground for [the] lunar exploration program," Hammel said. "If we've learned nothing over the past 50 years we have learned how to build telescopes in that kind of an environment." Those lessons, she said, may be applicable for any instruments that do need to be placed on the lunar surface.

Besides, astronomers have learned a lot about launching telescopes into space since the days of that first lunar telescope. Ground-based and space-based telescopes alike have improved exponentially. Consider the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, which, as future lunar-orbiting telescopes could do, has relied on visits from astronauts to refresh its equipment as it aged.

And although a launch to the moon would require smaller instruments than astronomers on the surface of Earth can employ, the frequent visits to the moon that are meant to be the trademark of the Artemis program would suggest that scientists could send larger telescopes than they have to date.

So assuming that scientists can send more mass, keep instruments fresher with maintenance from astronauts, and sort out the dust challenges, what sort of instruments might they send?

Astronomers have plenty of ideas for what they could do with radio telescopes on the moon because such instruments face a major constraint on Earth. The constant barrage of radio signals we generate with our bevy of electronic equipment on the surface and in orbit wreaks havoc on radio observations made from Earth, and the far side of the moon is the only place in the solar system safe from those signals.

That interference means scientists have spent decades imagining the potential of radio observatories on the far side. Such instruments could see into the earliest days of the universe or listen for signals produced by a hypothetical extraterrestrial techno-civilization, for example.

But for other wavelengths, lunar possibilities are a bit less obvious, particularly with only the precedent of a couple ultraviolet instruments to work from, Hammel said. "One reason we have a lot of back and forth about putting telescopes to the moon [is that] the state of the art on the ground, on Earth, and in space has advanced so far during the last 50 years that it's difficult for us to imagine what we would put on the surface in the UV [ultraviolet] and optical and near infrared," Hammel said. "It's difficult to imagine what we would need to build there."

One compelling opportunity, she noted, would be to look back at Earth from the moon as practice for studying worlds beyond our solar system. Exoplanets are compelling scientific targets, but at such great distances scientists struggle to grasp the details of these worlds and interpret what they might look like up close.

"It won't matter that it's a small telescope, because exoplanets, we can't really resolve them anyway," Hammel said. "Being able to study the Earth in multiple phases, multiple wavelengths, over very long time durations, and short time durations, will give us really powerful information for understanding Earth-like exoplanets."

Hammel said ultraviolet observations in general are tantalizing, since such wavelengths can't be studied from Earth's surface. The same atmosphere that protects life on Earth from being fried by ultraviolet radiation also prevents ground-based telescopes from studying astronomical ultraviolet radiation. But there's no atmosphere to interfere on the moon.

Although astrophysicists are still piecing together the details of what lunar observatories could look like, the community is already on board the Artemis program. The first two robotic science freight loads that commercial companies will deliver to the lunar surface as part of the program, which will launch next year, include two astrophysics projects, including a radio astronomy experiment.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Astronomers want to get in on NASA's push to the moon - Space.com