The Occult

Astronomy, at times, can be like a sport. It’s fun to watch what’s going on day after day, reading the magazines and web sites for all the current events in astronomy. Big things happen nearly every day. That includes new images brought in from satellites and telescopes, new discoveries about the nature of planets and stars and other objects, as well as breakthroughs and just every day small progress in the tools and techniques used to make these discoveries.

One of the best places to keep up with current events in astronomy is NASA’s web site. Not only does NASA make a lot of the news, but it constantly keeps its site updated with news of the latest and greatest about space and objects within it. A quick look at NASA’s web site in mid November revealed some pretty big current events in astronomy.

One of the most important current events in astronomy NASA discussed in November was the late month launch of the shuttle Endeavour. It’s mission was to re-supply and repair the International Space Station. This included a number of space walks to perform routine maintenance on the outside of the station. Such space walks aren’t only immediately important for the goals they accomplish, but important in the development of techniques and experiences that apply to future missions. While some might argue that the space station is more space related than necessarily astronomy related, there is a lot of science going on there, including observations of outer space which definitely falls under the heading of astronomy.

Another of the current events in astronomy discussed by NASA in November was a staggering discovery made by the Hubble Telescope. For the first time in history, a telescope took a visible light image of a planet orbiting another star. The effort dates way back to the 1980’s when NASA’s IRAS, an infrared telescope, discovered dust around the star. That was a tell tale sign that planets might orbit this star located about 25 light years away from our own little planet.

This one, still one of the current events in astronomy, is all about the past. NASA announced details of a Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project designed to restore images of the moon taken by five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that visited the moon in 1966 and 1967. Much of the data was removed from the tape drives in the 1980’s, but stored as analogue images and only partially restored. NASA has already released some of these restored historic images.

Astronomy is a huge field. Current events in astronomy could cover volumes each day. Keep looking into the universe!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

The study of space objects such as planets, galaxies and stars is Astronomy. It’s important science, but for many people an enjoyable hobby. That’s why when a web site or magazine offers an astronomy picture of the day it’s likely to garner a great deal of attention. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.

NASA of course is a primary source for an astronomy picture of the day. Their web site, nasa.gov, presents a new photo every day. It also has a multimedia center with video and images. These could be great sources for a person to create their own site that offers a new image each day. On November 5, 2008, NASA’s picture of the day was a close view of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It was taken by the Cassini space craft as it passed about 1,700 kilometers from the surface. The image is so detailed that features about the size of a bus are viewable. One interesting feature of the ice on Enceladus is that it reflects 99% of the light that falls onto it. Talk about snow blind. The moon is so interesting that Cassini will continue to fly by for more images later in its mission.

NASA maintains an archive of all the astronomy photos of the day dating all the way back to June 16 of 1995. That image was of Earth as if it had the density of a neutron star. The image is a computer generation. The most interesting feature is that the constellation Orion is visible twice. The reason is that a Neutron star is so dense that light, even from behind the star, is visible as it is pulled around by the intense gravity. This distortion causes double images of some objects.

September 8, 1995 brought a very interesting image of the central part of our own Milky Way galaxy from the NASA COBE Satellite. This image would normally not be visible because the dust in the galaxy obscures it in the visible spectrum. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced the amazing image of our very symmetrical galaxy.

January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001 shared the same image, a drawing really, of the universe as defined in the last millennium. The reason both dates shared this image is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium. In reality January 1, 2001 was the beginning of millennium #3. NASA decided to just go with both. The image found at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html shows the progression of our picture of the universe from orbs that rotate around the Earth all the way to the big bang event creating an ever expanding cosmos.

NASA has a lot more days with their own astronomy picture of the day. Visit the web site, NASA.gov, to see them.

Recent astronomy articles appear all over the Internet and in magazines dedicated to the science and the hobby. When new images are taken, people write about it. When space agencies announce missions, people write. Every new discovery and piece of information generates a tremendous amount of discussion. Here’s just some of the most recent astronomy articles.

Something as simple as bumpy space dust generated a great deal of interest and a lot of the recent astronomy articles. Why is this important? Scientists have long known that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. But hydrogen has to bond to form the larger molecules observed in the universe. In the cold of space it takes the right medium to complete the bond. Bumpy molecules provide that medium, so now scientists have verified a theory on how hydrogen forms molecules in space. Bumpy dusty, who would have thought it.

One of Saturn’s moons is called the ?Death Star.? It looks like the Star Wars space station, with a huge crater on one side. In August 2008 it became a subject of many recent astronomy articles when the Cassini spacecraft passed near the moon, Mimas. Some stunning images and a lot of new data resulted. And, of course, many people read all about it. One hope scientists have is that this new data will reveal information about the number of crater creating objects fly through the Saturn system. This can give new insight into how busy our solar system is as far as impact capable objects, as well as reveal the true extent of how other planets, like Saturn, serve as object scrubbers in our solar system.

It’s long been known that dark matter exists in the universe. It contributes to the expansion of the universe, but scientists don’t really know how. In 2008 a number of the recent astronomy articles were dedicated to the search for and analysis of dark matter. SNAP, the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe, was planned to help solve dark matter by examining many distant supernovae. Dark matter makes up about 70% of the matter in the universe, so learning about it is important.

Before our sun was really a star it was a condensing mass of space matter called a protosun. But scientists wondered if this protosun emitted any heat or light or a solar wind enough to effect the formation of life on Earth. Recent astronomy articles answer this question with a resounding yes. Scientists have used new techniques to discover that the protosun did indeed emit ultraviolet and other particles in an early form of the solar wind. These emissions helped form life on Earth even before the sun was a sun.

For any astronomy enthusiast it’s important to keep up on recent astronomy articles.

For many people astronomy is an interesting science filled with many astronomy fun facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the makeup of distant planets is recorded. All of this information can be recalled to entertain and enlighten people.

The Sun is a great source of astronomy fun facts. Our own star that supplies our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody knows for certain. It’s that the Earth orbits the sun in an elliptical, uneven, orbit. The distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

The sun is only average size for a star, yet it’s size is another terrific source of astronomy fun facts. As average as it is it accounts for about 98% of all the matter in the solar system. Even with Jupiter on our side, we’re still a measly 2% of non ?the sun? stuff. It would take about 100 Earths to make it across this average sun. The solar wind produced by the sun extends to about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the sun from the sun. In other words those solar winds go out about 50 AU’s, with an AU being the distance from the Earth to the sun. That’s amazing.

What about astronomy fun facts that don’t have to do with the sun? How about the moon? It’s the only non-Earth object upon which man has walked. And one human man actually traveled to the moon but never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker loved the moon but was rejected as an astronaut. After his death he was cremated and his ashes scattered over the moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

There are more astronomy fun facts about the moon. It’s the site of what may become the oldest footprint. Neil Armstrong’s ?giant leap for mankind? left a print in the moon dust that will like still be there in 10 million years. Many people, in fact about 13% of those asked in 1988, still believe the moon is made of cheese. And finally the suits worn by the moon walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the moon. Talk about an instant diet.

Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close neighbors. Looking at stars is like looking into the past. Some of the stars we see today in the night sky are so far away that light takes a million years to reach us from them. Some of those stars you see may really be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present. There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is staggering.

Astronomy fun facts can go on forever. But this article can’t. So get out there and learn about astronomy.

Astronomy in general is a huge subject, as vast as the universe it describes. Star astronomy is just one part of the overall science and hobby. There are ample phenomenon and objects in just our own solar system to keep someone bust for an entire life time. Many people decide, then, to specialize, to focus their attention on the brightest objects that are often the first space objects that peak people’s interest in astronomy ? the stars.

Star astronomy begins about 94 million miles from Earth, with our own sun. Its heat is staggering when the amount of heat the earth receives from it over that great distance is realized. Our own sun contains just over 98% of the total mass in the solar system. That’s compared to all the planets, moons, space rocks and other material. It would take 109 Earths to span the sun’s disk, and over 1.3 million Earths would fit within the sun. The heat is generated from a nuclear reaction in the sun’s core where the pressure is 340 billion times the pressure on Earth and temperatures reach 27,000,000F. That would burn a pizza in a second.

Since it’s so close to Earth, relatively compared to other suns, the Sun is the most thoroughly studied star. It’s about 250,000 times closer to Earth than the next known star. But the interesting part of star astronomy is there’s so much to work with beyond our own solar system. From the Earth about 5,000 stars, every one in our own Milky Way galaxy, can be seen with the naked eye. With telescopes many more of the over 1 x 10^22 stars in the universe (that’s an estimate) can be seen. By the way, that’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. In fact, even a small telescope opens the eyes of an amateur star astronomy enthusiast to hundreds of thousands of stars. Imagine that! Larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain an estimated total of over 200 billion stars. It’s a project of generations just to count each one.

Star astronomy experts have now proven that many other stars have planets. They know this first through measuring the wobble caused to stars by planets and other objects orbiting them. And in late 2008 astronomers finally took the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars, and even of entire solar systems. That means yet another step taken towards verifying the existence of other intelligent life out there somewhere in the universe.

Will Vulcans or Klingons visit us tomorrow? Probably not. But star astronomy and its study of our own Sun and all the stars in the universe will continue. Maybe it also continues somewhere on another planet!