Monthly Archives: September 2021

Photographer Shuchang Dong has just been announced as the Overall Winner of the Royal Observatory Greenwichs title Astronomy Photographer of the Year 13, with his astounding image of the annular solar eclipse, The Golden Ring.

The beauty of simplicity and the technical excellence of Dongs image spellbound the judges. The photograph depicts the annular solar eclipse that occurred on 21 June 2020 in a powerful and atmospheric composition. Competition judge Lszl Francsics said: Perfection and simplicity lead to a winner image. A true masterpiece.

Winning images from other categories and special prizes include the mesmerising Aurora dance taken from the bridge of a ship by the Third Officer Dmitrii Rybalka (Russia), Venus rising over the rocky horizon of the Moon by Nicolas Lefaudeux (France), a poignant star trail image taken during lockdown by Deepal Ratnayaka (UK), and the outstanding image of the Space X Falcon 9 rocket passing the Moon by Paul Eckhardt (USA).

15-year-old Zhipu Wang (China) is taking home the top prize in the Young Competition category for his astonishing composition of the Sun, the Moon and the planets of the Solar System.

BBC Sky at Night Magazines Art Editor Steve Marsh, who is also a judge for the competition, said of this years contest: The incredibly talented global community of astronomers has once again shown us just what they are capable of. From stunning new takes on our own Solar System to new views of our Galaxy and the wider Universe and poignant reflections of our place in the cosmos.

An exhibition of winning photographs opening at the National Maritime Museum on 18 September 2021. Take a look through some of the fabulous winning images in our special gallery:

On 21 June 2020 there was an annular solar eclipse and the photographer made sure not to miss it. He decided to go to Ali in Tibet to shoot it because it has year-round sunny weather. However, during the annular eclipse, there were dark clouds all over the sky. The anticipation was high but within a minute of the annular eclipse, the sunshine pierced through the clouds and the photographer was lucky to capture that moment. Afterwards the Sun disappeared again.Photo by Shuchang Dong/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Check out our 2021 solar eclipse gallery here.

As Third Officer, the photographer was keeping watch that night on the bridge of the ship when he noticed in the sky a tiny white band approaching like a snake. He had a feeling that there was something in the air, that something great would happen and instantly knew that this was what he was waiting for. He took his camera, went to the bridge wing, took position and started waiting. A few minutes later, the sky was full of bright green lights dancing in darkness and shining over everything on their way. Photograph taken on the approach to the Kara Strait, Russia, 30 November 2020. Photo by Dmitrii Rybalka/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

With the UK being in full lockdown and travel restricted for many months due to the pandemic, astrophotography became the photographers focus. This photo sums up the year 2020, cramped but hopeful. The photographers six-year-old daughter, who is always very interested in the photoshoots, was around during the set up. Sat by the door, she was showing the stars appearing one by one in the sky to her soft toy Max, and this gave the photographer the perfect opportunity to get her in the frame which complimented the message behind the photo. Photographed atWindsor, Berkshire, UK, 20 & 21 January 2021.Photo by Deepal Ratnayaka/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The California Nebula, otherwise known as NGC 1499, was captured over seven nights in 2021 using broadband and narrowband filters, with a total integration time of 16.1 hours. This emission nebula is around 100 light-years long and 1,000 light years away from Earth. It is named California Nebula because it appears to resemble the outline of the US State of California. The raw data was pre-processed and the stars were removed using a tool called Starnet, then later replaced during post-processing with the more naturally coloured stars from the RGB (red, green, blue) data. While the colours in this image are not the true colours, the narrowband filters reveal much more of the hidden gasses not visible in a broadband image. Photographed atWhitewater, Colorado, USA, 1631 January, 6 and 28 February, 2 March 2021.Photo by Terry Hancock/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The smouldering crescent Moon floats in an ocean blue atmosphere above quiet, glowing dunes of sand and the red of the sunset has faded into the blue twilight. The photographer hiked deep into the dunes and eventually found the foreground he had imagined for this shot. Once everything was assembled, he looked up and there hung a shining sliver of a crescent moon outlining its dark but visible face. This HDR/perspective blend integrates four images, all shot that evening with the same lens, and from the same tripod location. The images were combined in Photoshop and together they effectively replicate the sublime scene the photographer witnessed that evening. Photographed atDeath Valley National Park, California, USA, 25 February 2020.Photo by Jeffrey Lovelace/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

An expanse of cosmic dust, stars and nebulae along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy form a magnificent ring in this image. The panorama covers the entire galaxy visible from planet Earth. It is an ambitious 360 mosaic that took the photographer two years to complete. Northern hemisphere sites in China and southern hemisphere sites in New Zealand were used to collect the image data. Like a glowing jewel set in the Milky Way ring, the bulge of the galactic centre is at the very top. The bright planet Jupiter is the beacon just above the central bulge and to the left of the red giant star Antares. Along the plane and almost 180 from the galactic centre at the bottom of the ring is the area around Orion. The ring of the Milky Way encompasses two notable galaxies in the southern skies, the Magellanic Clouds. Photographed atSichuan, Qinghai, China, and Lake Pukaki, New Zealand, January to February 2020 and August 2020January 2021. Photo by Zhong Wu/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

High clouds on Jupiter create intricate and beautiful shapes that swirl all over the planet. In order to get a colour image when there are only three colour channels (red, green, blue), some sort of filter-to-channel mapping must be done. PixInsight was used for the rest of the processing: custom white balance, deconvolution and wavelet transformation for detail enhancement, contrast and saturation curves. The areas corresponding to the poles were too bright and distracting so they were darkened by colour masking. Photo by Sergio Diaz Ruiz/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The Cassini missions brought back some astounding imagery of our Solar System. The photographer used a selection of the CICLOPS teams photographs of Saturn to create this piece. The patterns formed by Saturn, its rings and its moons are truly magnificent. The photographs have echoes of architecture, nature, art and design, and are just as artistically inspirational as they are crucial for scientific study. The photographer edited several spectacular images before ordering the photographs into a grid pattern and assembled them in this particular way to have remnants of familiar and stable imagery, but in a fractured and disrupted way with undertones of science fiction symbolism. Photo by Leonardo Di Maggio/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Check out some more of our great image galleries:

This is an image of the Sun, the Moon and the planets of the Solar System (except Earth) taken during the year of the rat in China. In this special year, the photographer felt very lucky to produce the images of these celestial bodies and for a student who has only practiced astrophotography for one year it was a great accomplishment. Photographed atYongtai, Fujian, China, 14 August 2020 to 21 January 2021.Photo by Zhipu Wang/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Four hours before the Falcon 9 launch, the photographer downloaded the Photo Pills app, subscribed to flightclub.io and started an intensive research to understand both applications and pinpoint a location where the flight arc would overlap the Moon. When the photographer arrived at the launch location, he was blocked by a gate and ended up on a different dark road with trees blocking the launch pad. After making a quick calculation, he parked and ran a hundred feet in the dark and then the sky lit up as Falcon 9 soared straight up, tilted over, and aimed right at the Moon. Photographed atTitusville, Florida, USA, 4 February 2021.Photo by Paul Eckhardt/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

In a perspective reminiscent of the Apollo missions, the lunar horizon is crowned with a planet crescent. However, this is not Earth rising above the Moon captured by a probe orbiting our satellite, but Venus just before it gets occulted by the Moon, as observed from Earth in daylight on 19 June 2020. The rocky horizon of the Moon appears very dark in contrast with the gleaming crescent of the planet enshrouded by white clouds. Photographed atForges-les-Bains, le-de-France, France, 19 June 2020.Photo by Nicolas Lefaudeux/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The photographer was shooting with two other friends on that cold January evening. They werent planning to capture meteors but distant galaxies and nebulas. After setting up the camera to shoot the Leo Triplet galaxies, the photographer and his friends saw a bright green meteor burning right before their eyes as it tore through Earths atmosphere. They were all in awe of witnessing a fireball meteor. After they caught their breath, one of the friends mentioned that the photographers camera was pointing in the comets direction, but the photographer thought there was no way he could have caught it as he had zoomed all the way in. Once he checked his camera there it was, perfectly framed. The photographer had made a mistake and the lens wasnt zoomed in, making the perfect composition for the meteor. This incredible image was a happy accident. Photographed atCook Station, Missouri, USA, 19 January 2021.Photo by Frank Kuszaj/Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Check out some more of our great galleries:

See the article here:

Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year in pictures - BBC Focus Magazine

Soar Together @ Air and Space is a monthly family program from the National Air and Space Museum. Through live events and interactive activities you can do anytime, your family can explore a different air and space topic every month.

In September, well help you and your family get ready to gaze at the stars and enjoy all the sky has to offer. Through activities and live programs, your family will learn the basics of observing the sky, including how to prepare for observing, what amazing celestial objects you can find with just your eyes, and how to share that experience with each other. No matter where you are, or whether you're a beginner or a pro, you can use the following steps to feel prepared to look up and explore.

Observing the sky is a wonderful way to connect with nature and see amazing things! Participating in astronomy does not require any special equipment or skills, but there are some simple ways to ensure it will be a satisfying experience.

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Soar Together @ Air and Space: Astronomy Anywhere! - National Air and Space Museum

Antony Hewish, a pioneer of radio astronomy and a discoverer of a surprising class of stars known as pulsars, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, died on Monday. He was 97.

His death was announced by the University of Cambridge in England, where he had taught for many years. The announcement did not say where he died.

Pulsars, or pulsating radio stars, are the embers of massive stars that have exploded as supernovas. Dr. Hewish built a radio telescope that, though designed for other purposes, happened to have just the right properties to detect rapidly varying radio waves the signature emission of pulsars.

He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics with another radio astronomer, Martin Ryle, his longtime friend and collaborator at Cambridge. But the Nobel committees citation of Dr. Hewish, for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars, attracted criticism. The astronomer Fred Hoyle noted that the signals from the first two pulsars had in fact been detected and analyzed by Jocelyn Bell, a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate student who was working on the new telescope. Dr. Hewish was her supervisor and doctoral thesis adviser.

Her finding was kept secret for six months while her superiors were busily pinching the discovery from the girl, or that was what it amounted to, Dr. Hoyle wrote in a letter to The Times of London.

Other astronomers noted that Ms. Bells assigned task had been to plot twinkling radio sources, but that she had noticed and pursued a different kind of signal.

Jocelyn was a jolly good girl, but she was just doing her job, Dr. Hewish told an interviewer for the journal Science after Dr. Hoyles criticisms became public in 1975. She noticed this source was doing this thing. If she hadnt noticed it, she would have been negligent.

Antony Hewish was born in the small seaside town of Fowey, in Cornwall, England, on May 11, 1924. His father was a banker. He started studying science at Cambridge in 1942 but was diverted during World War II to a Royal Aircraft Establishment research team, to work on designing ways to jam the radar of German fighter planes at night.

The leader of the team was Dr. Ryle, who after the end of the war began a distinguished career in developing radio astronomy at Cambridge. Dr. Hewish joined his group and became interested in determining which of the several thousand radio-emitting galaxies that Dr. Ryle had discovered were quasars.

Quasars, now known to be supermassive black holes, were at that time recognized as point sources of radio waves, as opposed to broad sources like radio galaxies. Quasars radio signals flicker in intensity as they pass through the solar wind. Dr. Hewish designed a special kind of radio telescope to detect those twinklings, which was completed in 1967.

He set Ms. Bell to scan the recordings produced by his telescope, and to distinguish the true stellar twinklings from artificial sources of interference, like pirate radio stations or aircraft altimeters.

The telescope churned out about 400 feet of paper charts for each full coverage of the sky. In October 1967, Ms. Bell noticed a blip, occupying half an inch, that seemed neither human-made nor stellar. She remembered that she had seen a blip with the same shape in a recording from almost 24 hours earlier. Further analysis showed that the blips consisted of highly regular pulses, just over a second apart.

The extreme regularity of the pulses pointed to some kind of manufactured source. But Dr. Hewish then established that the source was appearing not every 24 hours, but every 23 hours 56 minutes. It was keeping pace with the rotation of the stars, not Earth, and so it must have been extraterrestrial.

Astronomers are well aware that if there is intelligent life beyond Earth, they will probably be the first to know about it. This sidereal beacon with its precisely timed signal was so unexpected that no explanation could be ruled out, including the possibility that it was an intentional signal.

Only partly in jest, the source was named LGM-1, for little green men. Dr. Hewish later said in an interview that for a period of two months he believed it was possible that the signal might be coming from aliens.

While her elders were debating how they could publish the discovery without having any idea what it was, Ms. Bell made a decisive finding. She detected a second such source, this one emitting regular pulses but at a different rate. It seemed unlikely that two sets of extraterrestrials would be signaling Earth at different frequencies, so the source was more likely a new kind of star.

Dr. Hewish confirmed that there was no Doppler shift in the signal, as would be expected if the source were on a planet circling its sun. (The Doppler shift is the phenomenon that makes a train whistle, for example, appear to change in frequency as it passes an observer.)

The discovery of pulsars, kept a closely guarded secret by the Cambridge radio astronomy group, was published in the journal Nature on Feb. 24, 1968. By scientific convention, when a student makes a discovery that a professors intellect and instruments had made possible, the students name is put first on the authorship line and the professors last, with other helpers in between.

If this convention had been followed, Ms. Bell and Dr. Hewish would have been presented as joint discoverers of the remarkable new stars. But the Nature paper listed Dr. Hewish as the first author, followed by Ms. Bell, then several minor contributors. The implication, persuasive to the Nobel committee, was that Dr. Hewish had been the sole discoverer. (Dr. Ryle, who shared that years Nobel, was cited for his development of revolutionary radio telescopes that paved the way for the discovery of pulsars.)

Unlike the Nobel committee, the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia awarded a prize for the discovery of pulsars to Ms. Bell and Dr. Hewish jointly in 1973. That judgment was followed by most other accounts. In 2018, Ms. Bell, by then Dr. Bell Burnell, was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her work on pulsars. (The foundation that sponsors the prize was established by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, among others.)

Dr. Hewish was professor of radio astronomy at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge from 1971 to 1989 and head of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge, founded by Dr. Ryle, from 1982 to 1988.

Survivors include his wife, Marjorie, whom he married in 1950.

Mathew Brownstein contributed reporting.

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Antony Hewish, Astronomer Honored for the Discovery of Pulsars, Dies at 97 - The New York Times

A man whose career is all about explaining science will make a presentation about the importance of communicating science at Nanaimo Astronomy Societys first meeting of the fall.

Matthew S. Williams will present Why Science Communication Matters on Thursday, Sept. 23, when he will explore why a science communicators job of making science accessible to the general public has become ever more important in a time when misinformation and data fatigue are making it increasingly difficult to sift fact from fiction.

In addition to making scientific concepts more easily digestible, its also the science communicators responsibility to be a trusted source who can make important information more engaging, according to a press release from the society.

Williams lives on the Island and is a regular contributor to space and astronomy news site Universe Today and to Interesting Engineering and is director of media communication for Mars City Design. He is also author of The Formist Series of hard science fiction works The Cronian Incident, The Jovian Manifesto and The Frost Line Factor.

Williams is co-author of podcast series The Martian Dispatches, which will premire on Space Channel this fall. In 2022 he and co-author Paul Patton will release The Fermi Paradox, a book that explores the mysteries of why humanity has yet to make contact with alien life.

His articles have also appeared in Phys.org, HeroX, Popular Mechanics, Business Insider, Gizmodo, I09, ScienceAlert, Knowridge Science Report and Real Clear Science.

Williams, who presented to the Nanaimo Astronomy Society in 2016 about Mars colonization and in 2017 about exploring ocean worlds in the Solar System, will give his talk following Nanaimo Astronomy Societys annual general meeting.

The societys meeting, via Zoom, runs 7-9 p.m. Non-members are welcome to attend one NAS meeting for free. Non-members interested in Williamss presentation are asked to e-mail info@nanaimoastronomy.com.

For more information, visit http://www.nanaimoastronomy.com.

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Nanaimo Astronomy Society's first meeting of the fall focuses on science communication Nanaimo News Bulletin - Nanaimo Bulletin

'Oumuamua, the cigar-shaped object from another solar system that whizzed through our own in 2017, continuesto perplex astronomers. Its inexplicable properties have prompted some to propose that the object was an alien craft of some sort, while other astronomers are steadfast in their insistence that it had natural origins.

Now, there's a new chapter in the saga of this mysterious 650-foot-long tube-shaped object. Earlier this year, researchers at Arizona State University published a new study claiming to "resolve" the mystery surrounding 'Oumuamua (pronounced "oh moo ah moo ah").

Published inJournal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the researchers statedin a pair ofpapers that 'Oumuamua was likely a nitrogen ice ball, perhaps from a planet like Pluto yet in another solar system not an artificially made light-sail spacecraft, comet, or interstellar ball of dust, as some researchers have previously suggested. Nitrogen, the primary component of Earth's atmosphere, occurs primarily as a gas on our home planet; yet in very cold conditions, it can freeze and become solid or liquid. The frigid surface of Pluto, for instance, contains a substantial amount of nitrogen ice.

'Oumuamua's characteristics, the Arizona State University researchers argued, suggested the strange object boresimilarities to the surface of Pluto.

"This research is exciting in that we've probably resolved the mystery of what 'Oumuamua is and we can reasonably identify it as a chunk of an 'exo-Pluto,' a Pluto-like planet in another solar system," said Steven Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and an author of the new study,in March 2021. "Until now, we've had no way to know if other solar systems have Pluto-like planets, but now we have seen a chunk of one pass by Earth."

Previously in 2020, in a separate paper published by a different group of scientists, researchers argued that 'Oumuamua was actually a hydrogen iceberg a similar proposal to the nitrogen iceberg theory of the Arizona State researchers.

But if you thought thescientific world was closing the book on'Oumuamua or at the very least coming to peace with the idea that the interstellar object was of natural origin (and not alien made) not everyone agrees with the Arizona State researchers. Multiple papers co-authored by Harvard physicistAvi Loeb have argued that it is unlikely that 'Oumuamua was a hydrogen iceberg, or a nitrogen one for that matter.

In a series of co-authored papers and a book, Loeb believes the most likely explanation is that Oumuamua was artificially made perhapssome sort of light sail made by an alien civilization.

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"I would say that the [idea it is of] artificial origin appears to me is quite likely and it should definitely be considered in the future," Loeb told Salon. "Of course, what we want to do is find more objects of that same type, and then catch them early enough on the approach to us so that we can send a spacecraft that will intercept the trajectory and take a close up photograph."

Loeb'slatest co-authored paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, argues'Oumuamua definitively was nota piece of a Pluto-like exoplanet or a glob of hydrogen ice. To disprove this, Loeb and his fellow researchers calculatedhow cosmic rays background radiation that constantly permeates empty space would have slowly caused such an "iceberg"to evaporate over millions of years of travel. If 'Oumuamua were comprised of such exotic ice, Loeb and his co-authors calculate that significantcosmic ray erosion would have whittled it down during its journey.

Simply put, Loeb doesn't believe there's enough hydrogen or nitrogen in nearby planets that could have accumulated to being 'Oumuamua's hypothetical original size.

Loeb stressed that we have never seen something like a hydrogen or a nitrogen "iceberg" drifting through space. If 'Oumuamura were such a thing, it would have to have originated from very nearby to avoid evaporating due to erosion.

"Those environments need to be close enough to us, or at least closer than a percent of the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, because otherwise these chunks would entirely evaporate," Loeb said. "The solar system or whatever produces them must be a very different environment."

Loeb does not rule out a natural (non-alien)origin for 'Oumuamua, but said that the numbers don't add up for something that was made of nitrogen.

"Arguing that it's a nitrogenous base to me, now that we did this calculation of the cosmic rays evaporating it makes it very unlikely," he added.

Indeed,the clash over theories of 'Oumuamua's composition and origins arecausing some tension among astrophysicists.

Part of the debate, as Loeb alludes to, stems from observations of the object's odd behavior when it was first discovered in October 2017. Back then,a postdoctoral researcher named Robert Weryk at the University of Hawaii was sifting through the data stream from the Pan-STARRS astronomical survey of the sky when he noticed an unexpected object. It appeared to be highly elongated, like a stick, with a long axis 10 times longer than its short axis unprecedented for an asteroid.

Upon a further analysis, researchers found that it appeared that 'Oumuamua received an unexpected "push" from the sun as it left our solar system as though it had a mirror or a sail of some kind that it was using for propulsion. The manner of its push resembled what one might see from a solar sail spacecraft, a type of proposed interstellar probe propulsion that humans actually tested with an experimental probe in 2010.

In any case, no one had ever seen anything 'Oumuamua at the time that it was first observed. Some scientists hypothesized that 'Oumuamua swung towards our solar system as a result of a gravitational slingshot of a binary star system; others postulatedthat it might be an odd comet, though no tail was evident. Thus the search began to collect and analyze as much data as possible before it left our solar system.

Loeb, who wrote a book about 'Oumuamua entitled "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,'' continues to believe that the only possible explanation (unless the data was wrongly collected) is that Oumuamua was something akin to a light sailspacecraft created by an extraterrestrial civilization.

Loeb's idea has understandably sent shockwaves through the scientific community and stoked controversy. Mostastronomers coalescedaround the idea that 'Oumuamua was of natural origin, rather than artificial.

In an interview, Desch told Salon Loeb's most recent paper was yet another "attack" on any explanation that 'Oumuamua was a naturally made object.

"We took great pains to make sure we were comprehensive about all the data that existed and we took into account everything . . .we're careful about it, and went through the peer review process, and I stand by our work," Desch said, adding that Loeb's paper doesn't include findings that suggest cosmic ray erosion is slower than they suggest in their calculations. "I can tell you that the experiments say [cosmic ray erosion] is a lot slower than he's saying in fact we cited those experiments and in this case they are just basically are saying, 'well, all of the energy of the cosmic rays can be used to erode the ice, but the experiments show that that's just not true.'"

Desch emphasized: "If you took a chunk of Pluto and you knocked it off and made it go by the sun, it would look, move and behave exactly as this object did."

Over the last couple of years, Loeb has been encouraging the scientific community to change and be more "open-minded to change." In Loeb's perspective, the idea that'Oumuamua was artificially made has notbeen as widely embraced as the various ideas that it is of natural origin.

Desch said that most astronomers believe there are aliens out there, but do not believethat 'Oumuamua wasn't a sign of extraterrestrial life.

"If you ask almost any astrophysicist, 'Do you think there are aliens out there?' Almost 100% would say, 'somewhere in the universe, it's a really big place but [it's] really hard for them to get here,'" Desch said. "But this thing? No, this is a snowball."

Loeb rebuffed Desch's "snowball" theory for 'Oumuamua's properties.

"We did the calculations from first principles," Loeb said of his research. "[Desch]underestimated the evaporation by cosmic rays in his paper."

More here:

The once-sedate astronomy world is quarreling over whether 'Oumuamua was an alien craft - Salon

Uzbekistan has embarked on a journey to identify, catalogue and showcase all art objects reflecting the country's cultural heritage that are scattered around the world. Once at the centre of the Great Silk Road, Uzbekistan has an important cultural inheritance.

The most recent meeting from the initiative, named Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections, brought together around 350 scientists from all over the world and was the key event of Uzbekistans Cultural Heritage Week.

The first true-to-the-original facsimile copy of the manuscript of Images of the Fixed Stars was also presented at the initiative. The book is the work of one of the most famous Muslim astronomers of all time, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, and it was commissioned by the special order of Mirzo Ulugbek, better known as Ulugh Beg, a Timurid dynasty (Sunni Muslim) sultan. Ulugh Beg was also a respected astronomer and mathematician.

The ancient manuscript, which has now been turned into a book, has historical significance because of several reasons: it is living proof of the centuries-old fascination of the firmament, the golden age of Islamic science, and the antiquity of the Arabic tradition in astronomy, to name a few.

The book is hailed as a masterpiece of Central Asian art: it has 74 fascinating miniatures of constellations executed using the finest technique. It also marks the trend where illustrated manuscripts were increasingly produced and is one of the oldest surviving treatises of its kind. The manuscript contains miniature illustrations depicting the sultan in the form of the constellation Cepheus.

Beyond its artistic value, the book also holds enormous scientific importance. The work, containing 48 constellations known as the Fixed Stars, is based on knowledge of the stars transmitted by the Greeks but includes the principles of ancient Arab astronomy for the first time.

Before Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, the first known attempts to describe the starry sky were done by the Greeks. By Ptolemy (100-160), to be precise, who was an ancient philosopher, mathematician and astronomer from Alexandria. His writings were regarded as the standard scientific work on celestial science up to the early modern age. His most important work was Almagest a systematic guide to mathematical astronomy, which was the main reference for centuries until Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi came on the scene.

Al-Sufis work on the fixed stars was based on the Almagest by Ptolemy, but he corrects various statements and supplements them with his own empirical conclusions. He took all the star names mentioned in Ptolemys catalogue of stars and merged them with the ones mentioned in Arabic literature.

In his observations, Al-Sufi added the earliest known descriptions and illustrations of the Andromeda Galaxy and also the first recorded mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud - the first galaxies other than the Milky Way to be observed from planet Earth.

In the astronomer's book, all the mythological figures representing the constellations are depicted as seen in the sky but also as seen from space. And thanks to this, his work served for many centuries as the most important guide to the stars both in the Islamic and also Christian world.

The original manuscript for the book of the Images of the Fixed Stars did not survive, however, thanks to the Islamic manuscript tradition, Al-Sufis work lived on in copies that were made after.

The contemporary facsimile version being presented at the Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections is the result of Uzbekistans goal to use advanced scientific technologies in the preservation of historical exhibits and manuscripts.

Dozens of other books devoted to Uzbek works have already been published as part of the initiative. And there is also work in progress on the digitisation and publication of facsimile copies of outstanding works preserved in libraries around the world.

UNESCO representatives have praised Uzbekistan for its initiative to preserve the rich historical and cultural heritage of the country. Renato Ramrez, Deputy Director-General for Culture of UNESCO said Uzbekistan was, in this matter an example for many countries. Research is a way of transferring not only academic knowledge but also knowledge for our children and new generations.

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Images of the Fixed Stars: Ancient astronomy manuscript resurrected by Uzbek heritage initiative - Euronews

The ConversationSep 20, 2021 13:15:57 IST

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to head to space on Dec. 18, 2021. With it, astronomers hope to find the first galaxies to form in the universe, will search for Earthlike atmospheres around other planets and accomplish many other scientific goals.

I am an astronomer and the principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera or NIRCam for short aboard the Webb telescope. I have participated in the development and testing for both my camera and the telescope as a whole.

he James Webb Space Telescope is the biggest orbital telescope ever built and is scheduled to be launched into space on Dec. 18, 2021. NASA/Desiree Stover,

To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a fragile piece of equipment like this to space is no simple task. There have been many challenges my colleagues and I have had to overcome to design, test and soon launch and align the most powerful space telescope ever built.

The Webb telescope has a mirror over 20 feet across, a tennis-court sized sun shade to block solar radiation and four separate camera and sensor systems to collect the data.

It works kind of like a satellite dish. Light from a star or galaxy will enter the mouth of the telescope and bounce off the primary mirror toward the four sensors: NIRCam, which takes images in the near infrared; the Near Infrared Spectrograph, which can split the light from a selection of sources into their constituent colors and measures the strength of each; the Mid-Infrared Instrument, which takes images and measures wavelengths in the middle infrared; and the Near Infrared Imaging Slitless Spectrograph, which splits and measures the light of anything scientists point the satellite at.

This design will allow scientists to study how stars form in the Milky Way and the atmospheres of planets outside the Solar System. It may even be possible to figure out the composition of these atmospheres.

Ever since Edwin Hubble proved that distant galaxies are just like the Milky Way, astronomers have asked: How old are the oldest galaxies? How did they first form? And how have they changed over time? The Webb telescope was originally dubbed the First Light Machine because it is designed to answer these very questions.

The NIRCam, seen here, will measure infrared light from extremely distant and old galaxies. NASA/Chris Gunn,

One of the main goals of the telescope is to study distant galaxies close to the edge of observable universe. It takes billions of years for the light from these galaxies to cross the universe and reach Earth. I estimate that images my colleagues and I will collect with NIRCam could show protogalaxies that formed a mere 300 million years after the Big Bang when they were just 2% of their current age.

Finding the first aggregations of stars that formed after the Big Bang is a daunting task for a simple reason: These protogalaxies are very far away and so appear to be very faint.

Webbs mirror is made of 18 separate segments and can collect more than six times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope mirror. Distant objects also appear to be very small, so the telescope must be able to focus the light as tightly as possible.

The telescope also has to cope with another complication: Since the universe is expanding, the galaxies that scientists will study with the Webb telescope are moving away from Earth, and the Doppler effect comes into play. Just like the pitch of an ambulances siren shifts down and becomes deeper when it passes and starts moving away from you, the wavelength of light from distant galaxies shifts down from visible light to infrared light.

Webb detects infrared light it is essentially a giant heat telescope. To see faint galaxies in infrared light, the telescope needs to be exceptionally cold or else all it would see would be its own infrared radiation. This is where the heat shield comes in. The shield is made of a thin plastic coated with aluminum. It is five layers thick and measures 46.5 feet (17.2 meters) by 69.5 feet (21.2 meters) and will keep the mirror and sensors at minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 234 Celsius).

The Webb telescope is an incredible feat of engineering, but how does one get such a thing safely to space and guarantee that it will work?

The James Webb Space Telescope will orbit a million miles from Earth about 4,500 times more distant than the International Space Station and much too far to be serviced by astronauts.

Over the past 12 years, the team has tested the telescope and instruments, shaken them to simulate the rocket launch and tested them again. Everything has been cooled and tested under the extreme operating conditions of orbit. I will never forget when my team was in Houston testing the NIRCam using a chamber designed for the Apollo lunar rover. It was the first time that my camera detected light that had bounced off the telescopes mirror, and we couldnt have been happier even though Hurricane Harvey was fighting us outside.

After testing came the rehearsals. The telescope will be controlled remotely by commands sent over a radio link. But because the telescope will be so far away it takes six seconds for a signal to go one way there is no real-time control. So for the past three years, my team and I have been going to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and running rehearsal missions on a simulator covering everything from launch to routine science operations. The team even has practiced dealing with potential problems that the test organizers throw at us and cutely call anomalies.

n order to detect the most distant and oldest galaxies, the telescope needs to be huge and kept extremely cold. NASA/Chris Gunn,

The Webb team will continue to rehearse and practice until the launch date in December, but our work is far from done after Webb is folded and loaded into the rocket.

We need to wait 35 days after launch for the parts to cool before beginning alignment. After the mirror unfolds, NIRCam will snap sequences of high-resolution images of the individual mirror segments. The telescope team will analyze the images and tell motors to adjust the segments in steps measured in billionths of a meter. Once the motors move the mirrors into position, we will confirm that telescope alignment is perfect. This task is so mission critical that there are two identical copies of NIRCam on board if one fails, the other can take over the alignment job.

This alignment and checkout process should take six months. When finished, Webb will begin collecting data. After 20 years of work, astronomers will at last have a telescope able to peer into the farthest, most distant reaches of the universe.

Marcia Rieke, Regents Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Astronomer on James Webb telescope team explains how and why we are sending a giant telescope to space? - Firstpost

The first four space adventurers of the Insperation4 mission landed last night in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida after spending three days in space aboard SpaceXs Crew Dragon shuttle, successfully completing the first orbital mission in history without professional astronauts. The ditching happened on time, just after 7 PM local time. Four large parachutes slowed the descent of the capsule, which was quickly recovered from the SpaceX ship. Passengers will then be flown by helicopter to the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle blasted off with a Falcon 9 rocket on September 15.

The missions stated goal was to make a breakthrough in the democratization of space, demonstrating that the universe was accessible even to crews who had not been selected and trained in years. The four newbies billionaire Jared Isaacman, who chartered the mission, and three other Americans spent three days in Earth orbit, past the International Space Station (ISS), at an altitude of up to 590 kilometers. They broke orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour, and they traveled around the world more than 15 times a day.

This is the third time Elon Musk, who has become a giant in the space sector in a few years, has returned a human to Earth: during previous missions on behalf of NASA, six astronauts had already suffered a crash on the same shuttle, in their case after Accommodation at the International Space Station.

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SpaceX, the Four Space Adventurers - Space and Astronomy are back on Earth - News Net Nebraska

Ceres at opposition on November 27. Now begins the best time in 2021 to observe it. Heres a Dawn spacecraft view of Ceres in false color. Those bright spots on the dwarf planets surface caused a stir when Dawn first spied them on approach to Ceres in 2015. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA.

Ceres was the first asteroid discovered, in 1801. The International Astronomical Union reclassified it and Pluto as dwarf planets in 2006. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Its the only world in the asteroid belt with enough mass and therefore enough self-gravity to pull itself into the shape of a ball. So Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, or even inside the orbit of Neptune, for that matter. In 2021, Ceres will be at opposition opposite the sun in our sky on November 27. At that time, itll rise at sunset and set at sunrise. Its coming up later at night now (mid-September), but will be rising earlier. Now is the beginning of the best time in 2021 to view Ceres.

Ceres is about 600 miles (1,000 km) across, or about 1/4 the size of our moon. With its size wedged somewhere between an asteroid and a planet, Ceres was a target for study by the Dawn spacecraft.

Dawn arrived at Ceres in 2015. The spacecraft caused a stir while approaching Ceres, when it began to capture images of bright spots on the dwarf planets surface. People joked that the spots looked like alien headlights. But they turned out to be salt deposits from salty water inside the planet. Dawn also found a 2.5-mile (4,000-meter) high mountain named Ahuna Mons.

If you have a telescope or good binoculars, now is the time to start watching Ceres. Note that the name asteroid means starlike. From Earth, Ceres looks like a star. But because its so close to us, it can be seen to move in front of the stars from night to night.

So dust off your binoculars or telescope and head to a dark-sky site to see Ceres. The brightness of astronomical objects is measured in something called magnitude, with lower numbers indicating brighter objects. From a location free of light pollution, you can see objects down to about magnitude 6. Right now (September), Ceres shines around magnitude 8. But Ceres at its brightest in 2021 (late November) will shine around magnitude 7. So you can see youll need optical aid to bag this unique object. Ceres is brightening as it nears opposition!

Ceres is now moving in front of the constellation Taurus the Bull. Itll remain in front of Taurus between now (mid-September 2021) and the time of its opposition (November 27, 2021). In fact, Ceres will spend much of fall 2021 cutting across the V-shaped Hyades star cluster in Taurus. Itll be near the bright reddish-orange star Aldebaran, brightest star in Taurus.

November 6-7 might be the date in 2021 that Ceres is easiest to find. Magnitude 7.5 Ceres will be just 10 arcminutes from Aldebaran in Taurus around then. That distance on our skys dome 10 arcminutes is about 1/3 the width of a full moon. Its about 1/6 the width of your pinky held at arms length. Either way, if you focus binoculars or a telescope on Aldebaran, the point of light just to the northeast of the star will be Ceres.

Ceres orbits our sun at a greater distance than Earth. Its average distance from the sun is about 2.77 times that of the Earth. And so Ceres brightness doesnt vary much throughout the year. Being small, far away and dim, it requires at least binoculars to spot and even then it only appears as a point of light like a distant star.

Ceres does us no favors in terms of its reflectivity. Objects have a measurement called albedo, which is a number between 0 and 1 for how black or white they are. Very reflective fresh snow or ice can have an albedo of 0.8 or 0.9. Our neighboring planet Venus is often said to appear bright to us because its thick cloud cover reflects so much sunlight. Venus has an albedo of 0.65. On the other hand, low-albedo objects absorb most sunlight and are quite dark. Charcoal and fresh asphalt both score a 0.04 for their albedo. Ceres albedo is 0.07. Its practically hiding in the dark against the blackness of space.

Ceres may be the brightest dwarf planet, but only because it lies within the asteroid belt, the zone of solar system debris between Mars and Jupiter. Plutos albedo is 0.30 and Eris is 0.86, one of the highest albedos in the solar system. Ceres is only about three times farther from the sun than Earth. Compare that to Pluto, which is 40 times farther from the sun than Earth. And Eris is a whopping 68 times farther from the sun.

Bottom line: With Ceres at opposition November 27, the dwarf planet is closest to Earth and therefore brightest, making it a great time to observe. Ceres will be near Aldebaran around November 6 and 7.

Kelly Kizer Whitt has been a science writer specializing in astronomy for more than two decades. She began her career at Astronomy Magazine, and she has made regular contributions to AstronomyToday and the Sierra Club, among other outlets. Her childrens picture book, Solar System Forecast, was published in 2012. She has also written a young adult dystopian novel titled A Different Sky. When she is not reading or writing about astronomy and staring up at the stars, she enjoys traveling to the national parks, creating crossword puzzles, running, tennis, and paddleboarding. Kelly lives with her family in Wisconsin.

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Ceres at Opposition on November 27 - EarthSky

If theres one thing you learn when you study astronomy, its do NOT screw around with black holes.

100 million light years from Earth lies a galaxy called NGC 5813. Its part of a small galaxy group, a collection of a few dozen other galaxies. When viewed in visible light NGC 5813 looks like any other elliptical galaxy: An elongated puffball with a few hundred billion stars in it.

But it has a supermassive black hole in its heart, one that tips the cosmic scales at 700 million times the mass of the Sun. When you pack hundreds of millions of times the mass of a star into a volume smaller than our solar system youre dealing with tremendous, mind-crushing forces, phenomena powerful enough to create chaos on a vast scale.

Matter falling into the maw of this monster forms a flat, swirling disk, heated to millions of degrees. Magnetic fields wrap up like tornadoes, ripping material away from the disk and accelerating it to nearly the speed of light above and below the disk. These jets, as astronomers call them, are events of incredible power.

For example: There is a thin gas that fills the space between the galaxies in the group. In the past, and even now, the black hole in NGC 5813 has had epic, colossal eruptions, creating jets that have blasted outward and plowed through that gas. Over the past 100 million years this has happened three times, the twin jets punching into the gas and creating enormous cavities in it.

Deep images taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory show on just how large a scale this has occurred.

That image shows the hot gas surrounding NGC 5813, which would normally look fairly featureless. However, you can see three sets of cavities blown into the gas. The inner ones make the gas look like a figure-8, although one about 20,000 light years end-to-end. The next set outwards is twice that size, and the ones at the outer edge are about 100,000 light years away from the center thats nearly the size of our Milky Way galaxy.

The inner two pairs were known from earlier observations, but this extraordinarily deep X-ray image a total of about 630,000 seconds, a solid week shows the outer pair for the first time.

How much energy does it take to create such structures? The total power needed for the outer two pairs is something like the energy emitted from an entire galaxy for one hundred thousand years. Each. Thats equivalent to the energy the Sun emits for a hundred quadrillion years.

Again, each.

The inner cavities are interesting. In their research paper about this, astronomers calculate that the power needed to make them is only about one-tenth as much as the outer ones. Assuming each eruptive event from the black hole is equal (a decent idea) then that means this event is still ongoing, and were seeing it relatively early on.

What they think is happening here is that a relatively short-lived event caused the black hole to create the jets, which then slam into the gas, creating immense shock waves thousands of light years across, which in turn heat the gas hugely. This creates the cavity, which is hotter and less dense than the gas around it so it rises, that is, moves away from the black hole. That means the oldest cavities are the ones farthest out.

Not surprisingly, this can have ramifications for the entire galaxy. For example, gas in the galaxy can collapse to form stars, but only if its cool enough. If its too hot the pressure from the gas overcomes its own internal gravity.

Looking at the temperature and density of the gas in NGC 5813, the astronomers calculate that the heat pumped into it from the jets easily balances the rate at which the gas naturally tries to cool, which means this gas cannot collapse to form stars. It will stay hot and turbulent for as long as the black hole keeps episodically erupting.

Again, Ill remind you that this is all powered by a single object smaller than our solar system. Yet it can disrupt everything around it on a galactic scale.

The Milky Way has a black hole in its center, too. Called Sgr A* (Sagittarius A star), its only about 4 million solar masses, seriously underweight for a galaxy our size. That means it probably cant perform stunts like NGC 5813s black hole, at least not on this scale. At the moment its not actively feeding anyway, so were safe for now. And even if it were to start gobbling down matter and erupting, its unlikely to be anything this powerful.

Still, studying galaxies like NGC 5813 will help us understand how black holes interact with their environment and what kind of feedback they provide into their host galaxies. We know that these supermassive black holes play a critical role as galaxies are born, grow, and change over the eons, so studying them is important in our understanding of the greater Universe.

But sometimes, when I see Sagittarius rising over the horizon, I cast my eye toward the Milky Ways center that lies in that direction, and wonder about our own black hole. Did it once blast out soul-numbing amounts of energy, creating jets and cavities and X-ray emission visible from hundreds of millions of light years away?

The answer is almost certainly yes, but it was long, long ago. And for that Im happy.

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A supermassive black hole that can't stop erupting - SYFY WIRE