Did you ever wonder what you were looking at on some cold, dark, clear night? Did you ever wonder if anything “special” was going to happen in the night sky in the next few days?  In fact, the 2010 Sky Guide has all the night sky information you could want plus even events that happen during the day!

This document is very detailed and yet under 40 pages long.  You get a calendar for each month of the year noting the special highlights.  There are articles on a bunch of topics such as:

• Some terms to know
  The Sun
• Eclipses
• The Earth
• The Moon
• The Planets
• Minor Planets
• Comets
• Meteors
• Variable stars
• Spaceflight
• Lunar eclipses

And to wrap it up, there are details of web sites that give you more in-depth information.

This is an invaluable resource for simply dipping into and reading all about activity out there in space or planning what to look out for over the year.

Its a real credit to John Flannery of  South Dublin Astronomical Society - he spends a lot of time compiling this and then provides it completely free of charge!

Download it here: http://www.irishastronomy.org/skyguide2010/Sky_Guide_2010_by_John_Flannery.pdf

Enjoy!

Dave

MESSENGER’s third and final flyby of the planet Mercury gives scientists, for the first time, an almost complete view of the planet’s surface and provides new scientific findings about this relatively unknown planet.

The Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging spacecraft, known as MESSENGER, flew by Mercury on Sept. 29. The probe completed a critical gravity assist to remain on course to enter into orbit around Mercury in 2011. Despite shutting down temporarily because of a power system switchover during a solar eclipse, the spacecraft’s cameras and instruments collected high-resolution and color images unveiling another 6 percent of the planet’s surface never before seen at close range.

Approximately 98 percent of Mercury’s surface now has been imaged by NASA spacecraft. After MESSENGER goes into orbit around Mercury, it will see the polar regions, which are the only unobserved areas of the planet.

Many new features were revealed during the third flyby, including a region with a bright area surrounding an irregular depression, suspected to be volcanic in origin. Other images revealed a double-ring impact basin approximately 180 miles across. The basin is similar to a feature scientists call the Raditladi basin, which was viewed during the probe’s first flyby of Mercury in January 2008.

One of the spacecraft’s instruments conducted its most extensive observations to date of Mercury’s exosphere, or thin atmosphere, during this encounter. The flyby allowed for the first detailed scans over Mercury’s north and south poles. The probe also has begun to reveal how Mercury’s atmosphere varies with its distance from the sun.

The spacecraft has completed nearly three-quarters of its 4.9-billion-mile journey to enter orbit around Mercury. The full trip will include more than 15 trips around the sun. In addition to flying by Mercury, the spacecraft flew past Earth in August 2005 and Venus in October 2006 and June 2007.

For more details and images, click here.

Clear skies!

Dave

Mars Rover

NASA’s Mars rover Spirit is suffering a new bout of amnesia. The 6-year-old rover’s latest memory lapse came more than six months after a series of four other amnesia events earlier this year. During the events, the plucky rover failed to record science observations in the part of its flash computer memory that stores information overnight when other systems are powered down.

“We still don’t have information about what causes these amnesia events,” said rover project manager John Callas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in an update.

Aside from the memory glitch, the rover is in good health and communicating with Earth but the rover has been mired in deep sand since April, unable to move.

An independent team of robotics experts is currently reviewing recent NASA tests that used a ground-based version of Spirit to come up with escape plan for the stuck rover on Mars. NASA has mounted a “Free Spirit” campaign to come up with ways to free its beloved rover.

NASA launched Spirit and its robotic twin Opportunity in 2003 on a mission to explore Mars. The rovers landed in different parts of the planet in January 2004 and spent more than five years roving across Mars and uncovering clues to the planet’s watery past.

While engineers try to free Spirit, its robotic twin Opportunity is headed toward a giant Martian crater called Endeavour. Earlier this month, Opportunity spotted a Martian meteorite dubbed Shelter Island on the heels of another space rock find — called Block Island — in September. The rover used its onboard instruments to study both meteorites.

Initially built for a 90-day mission, the two rovers have received repeated life extensions. Spirit is the older of the two rovers and has spent five years and nine months exploring Mars.

A space rock explosion earlier this month over an island region of Indonesia is now being viewed as perhaps the biggest object to tangle with the Earth in more than a decade.

On Oct. 8, reports from Indonesia told of a loud air blast around 11 a.m. local time. One report indicated a bright fireball, accompanied by an explosion and lingering dust cloud, as the origin of the air blast.

According to experts at the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office in Pasadena, Calif. – Don Yeomans, Paul Chodas, Steve Chesley – the blast is thought to be due to the atmospheric entry of an asteroid more than 30 feet (10 meters) in diameter. Due to atmospheric pressure, the object is thought to have detonated in the atmosphere, yielding an energy release of about 50 kilotons (the equivalent of 100,000 pounds of TNT explosives).

Although the Indonesian object was large and the resulting atmospheric explosion may have been the equivalent of several Hiroshima bombs, it is not unexpected for our planet to be hit every decade or so by such an object.

The body was large enough that some of the current Spaceguard Survey telescopes might have detected it a couple of days before it hit, were it coming from the night sky. But it struck during daytime and probably could not have been seen by those telescopes.

The Jewel Box

This image is a “close-up” view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 4755, or the Jewel Box cluster. Several very bright, pale blue supergiant stars, a solitary ruby-red supergiant and a variety of other brilliantly coloured stars are visible in the image, as well as many much fainter ones, often with intriguing colours. The huge variety in brightness exists because the brighter stars are 15 to 20 times the mass of the Sun, while the dim points are less than half the mass of the Sun. This is the first image of an open galactic cluster with imaging extending from the far ultraviolet to the near-infrared.

Gamma Ray Burst

Astronomers have seen the furthest back in time ever, measuring light from a star that exploded 13 billion years ago, just after the dawn of the universe. They traced a gamma-ray burst called GRB 090423 to see the light from the massive star that died 630 million years after the Big Bang that brought the universe into being.

The redshift of the object was measured at about 8.2. Redshift is the distortion of light as it travels across space and time and is often likened to the sound of a train rising and falling as it approaches and passes the listener. This extreme redshift — the highest ever recorded — shows the burst occurred when the universe was less than 5 percent of its current age.

Gamma ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. They are believed to be associated with the formation of stellar-sized black holes or rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars during cataclysmic events such as the collapse of a massive star or the coalescence of two compact stellar objects. In this case, the star’s death long ago was bright enough to outshine even galaxies and will help scientists understand what happened in the early days of the universe.

The image above shows what might happen to a nearby planet.

IYA 2009

Well, the last few days have seen a big increase in the number of events planned over Ireland in celebration of International Year of Astronomy.

Gaililean nights started yesterday (Thursday) and will go on for for the next few days. There are events all over Ireland so there should be something nearby.  I know the weather isn’t being very co-operative but we seem to be getting *some* clear spells at the moment (in between the showers!).

So, if you’re looking for something different to do this weekend,why not find your nearest event and pay it a visit - you’ll be able to look through binoculars, even telescopes - and all for free!

Rather than list out the events here, you can go to this web site and see them for yourself. All the details you’ll need are there - dates, times and contact details.

As ever, make sure you wrap up warm!

Clear skies

Dave

An extrasolar planet?

European astronomers from the European Southern Observatory in Chile, South America, announced they’ve found 32 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. They believe their find means that 40% or more of Sun-like stars have such planets.  That’s a lot of planets in our own galaxy!

The planets range from about five times the size of Earth to about five times the size of Jupiter and that’s not all - they are promising more discovery announcements later this year.

We now know of about 400 exoplanets - most of them much larger than Earth. Astronomers are keen to find Earthlike planets as these are the most likely to harbour life. What happens if we find it is an interesting question…

Carpe Noctem!

Dave

Celbridge Observatory

No, this isn’t about The Matrix…

As an insight into the kind of work I do at Celbridge Observatory, I thought I’d share what I was doing last night.  This may not be a good idea because I only managed to grab 4 hours of sleep.  However, we’ll give it a go.

After checking out weather reports and the visual and infra-red satellite images (all freely available on the net) I realised we were in for a really good clear night. A bonus - no moon!  The light from the moon swamps the CCD imager attached to the telescope with light and severely limits the work that can be done.

The observatory was prepared for imaging - this involves removing the rolling shed cover, tarpaulins and then powering up all the equipment, heating up the optics (to avoid dew forming) and calibrating the pointing accuracy of the observatory.

Next job is to suss out what neeeds imaging.  That involves a (virtual) trip to the IAU Minor Planet Center.  They have a list of NEO’s (Near Earth Objects) that need to be measured (in terms of their position) so we can calculate their orbits and then figure out if there is any chance they may impact Earth (either now or into the future).  I picked one particular object that was favourably positioned for Ireland, was not moving too quickly and was bright enough for the camera to capture.

Next, I programmed the Observatory computer to follow the asteroid and take a series of images over a period of time.  Once the program was started, it was time for a well earned cup of coffee - the telescope just does its stuff without me needing to do anything more.

Now the hard work.  The images have been taken (in this case, I had 15 of them) and are ready for processing.  I calibrate each image using special software, align them all up and then “blink” them.  Its like watching a movie.  I’m looking for a moving object - asteroids move faster than the background stars so if its bright enough, you can see it flit across the image.

Success!  There it was - bang in the middle of each image.  Next step then is to measure the position of the object in each image using special software.  Once the measurements are taken, a report is compiled of all the data and this is simply emailed to the IAU MPC.  Their orbit computers (real people, funnily enough!) then work out if the data is accurate -  if so, they publish it.

Once the email has gone, that’s my job done - at least for that particular object. Of course,I can then check if there are any further suitable candidates and hunt some more NEO’s.

The object I was following last night and early this morning was real and enough data was collected (by Celbridge and other observatories) to give the object a designation. So, it is now called 2009TK12.

You can see an orbit diagram of the object here.

And this is the published data from the IAU MPC (you can see Celbridge Observatory listed)

So, that’s another good night’s work come to an end. Celbridge Observatory has provided data that helps us figure out the orbits of these NEO’s and we can then check to see if it has our name on it - hopefully not!  If it does, then, well, that’s a subject for another blog.

I’ll just remind you that one of the project ideas include NEO work - if you fancy doing a project along these lines, let me know. 

For now, I need to get a well deserved coffee and perhaps forty winks…

Carpe Noctem!

Dave