Thursday, March 31, 2011
The Night Sky 3/18/11
So I was out the other night with my buddy and we were kind of looking for something to do. I remembered that I had my star charts in my vehicle as they always are and we brought them out and.... looked up. I'm so glad it happened to be a clear night. Very lucky indeed. We saw Orion of course. His belt as distinct as ever. We saw some planes. We saw the moon, waxing crescent, you see. We saw Taurus the Bull and the Hyades and the Pleiades. We saw Monoceros, I think. And Auriga. It was really nice.
APOD 3.8
Hey, I reeeaaalllllyyyy like Boston. I like to think of my dear friend who is living there right now. He was looking at this exact moon rise! And what a moon rise it is! On March 19, the moon was at its perigee. It was 14% larger and 30% brighter than a normal moon. I too happened to see the moon on this night and it was quite impressive. The "Supermoon" as it was affectionately termed was very big. The shot was taken from Prospect Hill in Waltham, Massachusetts, roughly 10 miles from the Boston skyline. Just to the left of the orange lunar disk is the distinctive control tower at Boston's Logan International Airport. Topped by lights, the tall, twin towers of the cable-stayed Zakim Bridge spanning the Charles River are also included in the scene
APOD 3.7
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110328.html
Time-Lapse Auroras Over Norway
So, Norway is very lucky to get to experience all these auroras. I have done many-a post about auroras in the past. They're quite inspiring. Many times the auroras are green, as high energy particles strike the Earth's atmosphere, causing the air to glow as electrons recombine with their oxygen hosts. Other colors are occasionally noticeable as atmospheric nitrogen also becomes affected. In later sequences the Moon and rising stars are also visible. This time lapse was sweeeettt.
Time-Lapse Auroras Over Norway
So, Norway is very lucky to get to experience all these auroras. I have done many-a post about auroras in the past. They're quite inspiring. Many times the auroras are green, as high energy particles strike the Earth's atmosphere, causing the air to glow as electrons recombine with their oxygen hosts. Other colors are occasionally noticeable as atmospheric nitrogen also becomes affected. In later sequences the Moon and rising stars are also visible. This time lapse was sweeeettt.
APOD 3.6
Yeah! Mercury and Jupiter! How cool! NASA reports that there will probably become good views of Mercury this spring as it approaches the northern hemisphere where the ecliptic plane makes a steep angle with the western horizon. This photo was taken off of Froson, an island in Northern Sweden. I'm enjoying looking up at Venus every morning. Planets are so bright and cool.
Monday, March 7, 2011
APOD 3.5
This image makes me think of a Star Wars paraphenalia tee shirt. That's why I chose it. I like Star Wars. All right, so it's not a tee shirt design. It's actually M78 being reflected by some clouds. The dust absorbs light and also reflects it. M78 is about five lightyears across and belongs to the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The cloud itself is between 1,500 and 1,600 light-years away and is hundreds of light-years across. The nebula is important because of the sheer size as it spreads several degrees from Orion's Belt to his sword. That's the hilt of Orion's sword! Neat-o!
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Quarter 3 Astronomer Project -- Henrietta Leavitt
Astronomer Project -- Henrietta Leavitt
Hennrietta Swan Leavitt was born on July 4, 1868 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Congregational church minister George Roswell Leavitt and his wife Henrietta Swan (Kendrick). As a young girl, her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Oberlin College and then graduated in 1892 from the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women, now known as Radcliffe College. In her senior year of college, Leavitt took her first astronomy course, earning an A- and cementing her interest in the subject. Pursuing the subject, she began graduate work at Harvard University, accepting a position as one of Edward Charles Pickering's computers in the Harvard College Observatory, working for $0.30 an hour. Pickering hired a number of women to measure and catalog the brightness of stars in the observatory's photographic plate collection. Tedious and menial work, Pickering sought to fill the role with women, thus earning his observatory the name "Pickering's Harem." Women in the early 1900's were not allowed to look through telescopes and were not given freedom to work theory. So, even though Henrietta Leavitt had the potential and the knowledge, she was not permitted to maximize her full possibilites.
She was chiefly in charge of cataloguing variable stars, stars whose brightness weakens and strengthens in a recognizable pattern. Studying the Magellanic Clouds, neighbor galaxies to the Milky Way, she discovered 1,777 variable stars. In 1908 she published her results in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, noting that a few of the variables showed a pattern: brighter ones appeared to have longer periods. After further investigation, Leavitt was able to classify certain stars as Cepheid variables, stars with a well defined relationship between luminosity and pulsation period. "A straight line can be readily drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to maxima and minima," Leavitt wrote of her study "thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variable and their periods". Based on the period-luminosity variable, Leavitt determined Cepheid Scale Distances which have been used to determine absolute magnitude beyond the realm of parallax measurements. Prior to her discovery, it was not known that there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way, because the distances were to great for parallax. Upon her discovery, Edwin Hubble detected the Andromeda Galaxy and the scientific community confirmed that the universe was much bigger than just the Milky Way.
Had Henrietta been allowed the opportunity to pursue her discovery further and had she not died of cancer in 1921, she surely would have contributed greatly to the measurement of the cosmos. Paperwork for her Nobel Prize began in 1924 without knowledge that she had died three years earlier. Hubble himself posits that Leavitt deserved a Nobel. Leavitt was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Association of University Women, the American Astronomical and Astrophysical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an honorary member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Her early passing was seen as a tragedy by her colleagues for reasons that went beyond her scientific achievements.
Hennrietta Swan Leavitt was born on July 4, 1868 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Congregational church minister George Roswell Leavitt and his wife Henrietta Swan (Kendrick). As a young girl, her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Oberlin College and then graduated in 1892 from the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women, now known as Radcliffe College. In her senior year of college, Leavitt took her first astronomy course, earning an A- and cementing her interest in the subject. Pursuing the subject, she began graduate work at Harvard University, accepting a position as one of Edward Charles Pickering's computers in the Harvard College Observatory, working for $0.30 an hour. Pickering hired a number of women to measure and catalog the brightness of stars in the observatory's photographic plate collection. Tedious and menial work, Pickering sought to fill the role with women, thus earning his observatory the name "Pickering's Harem." Women in the early 1900's were not allowed to look through telescopes and were not given freedom to work theory. So, even though Henrietta Leavitt had the potential and the knowledge, she was not permitted to maximize her full possibilites.
She was chiefly in charge of cataloguing variable stars, stars whose brightness weakens and strengthens in a recognizable pattern. Studying the Magellanic Clouds, neighbor galaxies to the Milky Way, she discovered 1,777 variable stars. In 1908 she published her results in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, noting that a few of the variables showed a pattern: brighter ones appeared to have longer periods. After further investigation, Leavitt was able to classify certain stars as Cepheid variables, stars with a well defined relationship between luminosity and pulsation period. "A straight line can be readily drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to maxima and minima," Leavitt wrote of her study "thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variable and their periods". Based on the period-luminosity variable, Leavitt determined Cepheid Scale Distances which have been used to determine absolute magnitude beyond the realm of parallax measurements. Prior to her discovery, it was not known that there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way, because the distances were to great for parallax. Upon her discovery, Edwin Hubble detected the Andromeda Galaxy and the scientific community confirmed that the universe was much bigger than just the Milky Way.
Had Henrietta been allowed the opportunity to pursue her discovery further and had she not died of cancer in 1921, she surely would have contributed greatly to the measurement of the cosmos. Paperwork for her Nobel Prize began in 1924 without knowledge that she had died three years earlier. Hubble himself posits that Leavitt deserved a Nobel. Leavitt was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Association of University Women, the American Astronomical and Astrophysical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an honorary member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Her early passing was seen as a tragedy by her colleagues for reasons that went beyond her scientific achievements.
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Works Pertaining to Henrietta Leavitt that I Intend to Use on my Quarter 3 Astronomer Project
"A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Henrietta Leavitt." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/baleav.html.
Dictionary of Science Biography. C. Gillispie, editor Charles Scribner's Sons. 1981.
Dictionary of Science Biography. C. Gillispie, editor Charles Scribner's Sons. 1981.
"Henrietta Leavitt Biography | BookRags.com." BookRags.com | Study Guides, Lesson Plans, Book Summaries and More. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. <http://www.bookrags.com/biography/henrietta-leavitt-wop/>.
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