Astronomy.com blog : Daniel Pendick, observing

The quiet Sun

Daniel Pendick — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:23:00 GMT

Last summer, my colleague Michael Bakich, a senior editor at Astronomy, kindly gave me a special filter that fits on the front of my 4-inch Celestron NexStar, thus allowing me to observe the Sun without turning my eyeball into a poached egg.

I looked at the Sun with the new setup. Nada. Nothing!

Thanks to this cool graphic just released by NASA, it’s clear why the Sun is so, well, boring to look at lately. We are in a deep “solar minimum,” a period in the 11 (or so) year sunspot cycle where things are as quiet as an umbrella shop on a sunny day.

Dramatic statistic time: As of March 31, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent). For more details, check out this well-done little report from Science@NASA.

Image credit: NASA/MSFC/Hathaway

Caught: a satellite on amateur astronomer’s first video?

Daniel Pendick — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:05:00 GMT

Check out this video from Astronomy reader Robert Massey of Fort Worth, Texas. Look to the top left of the grouping of four bright stars, at about the 11 o’clock position. A blob appears to move to the left.

The video shows an object — a satellite or perhaps an asteroid? — tumbling through the field of view of Massey’s Meade 12-inch LX200 telescope. At the time he was observing M42, the Orion Nebula.

In his own words: “I have been behind a telescope for a little over a year. I recently bought an LX200 and started taking video with it. On March 2nd at 8:17 p.m., I was looking at Orion and saw an object flying though the pic. I hit record and looked up to see nothing. The video shows the item tumbling. I’m just wondering if this is normal or may be of interest. Thanks.”

I received that e-mail last week. Intrigued, I asked him to send me the video clip. At first I didn’t see anything and started to wonder if Massey was mistaking electronic noise in the camera for something real. He sent a lightened version of the clip to me and, sure enough, there is something in the sky.

Like I said, maybe a satellite or an asteroid. Who knows? The coolest thing about this incident is how it closes the sometimes-invisible circuit between the magazine and our readers.

Massey got interested in telescope video because of an article we ran in November 2008 on amateur astronomy with a web cam. He hot-glued a web cam onto a piece of tubing to adapt it to his telescope. He used free software available on the Web to run it.

Massey’s no engineer, but he knows how to fit tubes together — he’s a plumber. He bought his first scope only a year ago at a thrift store. “I like galaxies the most,” he said, “but have not been able to photograph them well yet. I’m planning to get out to a dark-sky location soon and try again. But nebulae, planets, and planetary nebulae are my other interests.”

For now, with his new LX200 and a backyard that is “not all that dark,” Massey is exploring the universe. We are glad to have been of assistance.

Frozen-finger astronomy in the North Country

Daniel Pendick — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:02:00 GMT

Did you see the gorgeous moonset Friday night (February 27)? A slender crescent Moon — “horns” pointing upward — set along with Venus close by. Earthshine illuminated the body of the Moon above the horns. Someone once told me this is called “the new Moon in the cradle of the old.”

If you looked at Venus with a small telescope or binoculars, you would have noticed that the planet was, like the Moon, a delicate crescent. In the east, Saturn rose after dark, and Comet Lulin was still visible in Leo the Lion.

This weekend I saw these astronomical beauties from the north country of Wisconsin. I was up near Crivetz, which is north of Green Bay a few hours’ drive from my home in Milwaukee. My friend David Niec, a Milwaukee-based artist, was up at his family’s cottage on Lake Pickerel to paint.

Dave has an interesting specialty. He paints outdoors in the dark — by moonlight and by starlight. His only source of artificial illumination is a small wind-up flashlight that he cranks up when he needs to aim his brush at a certain color on his painting palette.

Oh, did I mention he paints outdoors at night in the depths of the North Country winter?

Friday night, the mercury was just sinking below zero when we set out to catch the moonset. I was fairly warm through the moonset. Dave daubed rich blues and blacks to create the background of the sky and the tree line in the west. He then dipped into lighter colors to paint the Moon and Venus.

He works quickly, racing to beat the Moon to the trees. The paintings are quick sketches or studies — works in progress that he finishes throughout the year, after the snow, freezing temperatures, and spooky stillness of the North Country transitions to crickets, the whine of outboard motor and leafy tree lines.

Dave isn’t interested so much in warmth and leafy tree lines. He paints the shadows of moonlight that play through the trees and over the snow. He paints the glow of the northern lights and the impossibly dense starry sky. His work beautifully captures the almost eerie stillness of the north woods in winter, broken only by the distant buzz of snowmobiles and the yelps of coyotes.

After moonset, we headed inside to warm up a bit and eat dinner. Soon it was time to head back out to paint the stars. I humped my Celestron NexStar — an autoguided 4-inch Cassegrain telescope — out through the snow, knee-deep in some spots, and set it up on a stout aluminum tripod on the frozen lake. My gloves were inadequate, so by the time I got the tripod leveled, numbness had already started to set in.

Going through the procedure to track the sky using the telescope’s computer seemed hopeless — too much button pushing with numb fingers, and the liquid crystal display on the autoguide control was already unreadable due to the cold. At minimum, you need to get a fix on two different guide stars for the telescope to track accurately.

Numb but undeterred for the moment, I observed the Orion Nebula (M42), struggling to keep it centered in the eyepiece using the telescope hand controller. I’d seen this nebula before as a fuzzy patch through binoculars, but never at higher magnification in a good telescope.

I saw the little trapezoid of bright young stars at the nebula’s heart — the Trapezium — for the first time. I felt a little rush of boyish excitement. “Wow,” I said, lacking the exact adjective to describe the sight in my eyepiece.

But each touch on the plastic buttons to aim the scope chilled my fingertips more, even through gloves.

Meanwhile, Dave flitted between gazing into the sky with binoculars and daubing stars onto the rigid masonite board perched on his easel.

Dave is used to the cold and sometimes stays out for half the night. His torn, paint-smeared woolen clothing and thick insulated boots say “hobo,” but Dave is the most determined and hard-working artist I have ever met. He has sacrificed a lot of comfort and security in his daytime life for the privilege of being able to paint the night sky.

Finally defeated by the plunging mercury, I cut and ran after midnight. Back at the cottage, my fingertips ached as they thawed.

The next night, it was warmer: 14° Fahrenheit. Toting the Celestron again, I followed Dave deep into the woods to paint the moonset through the silhouettes of hemlock and pine trees. Then he led me about a quarter mile up a snow-covered streambed to a spot where the Moon was still perched above a spiky tree line.

He picked this spot because it allowed a perspective on the Moon looking down the frozen stream. I recognized the view from paintings of his I’ve seen in art galleries and strewn throughout his house and studio in various stages of completion.

With the warmer temperature, still air, and warmer gloves, I was able to set the autoguide and get a long, good look at the Orion Nebula and the slender crescent Venus — also a first-time sight for this novice observer. I observed Saturn, too, and the fuzzy face of Comet Lulin.

For about an hour, it was pure stargazing magic and worth every second of the stumbling, snowy hike. Despite the ever-present light pollution — even up in the North Country of Wisconsin — the night sky stretched darker and wider than I’d seen it in years.

I got back to the cottage at 11 p.m., my shoulder throbbing from carrying the weight of the telescope and tripod through knee-deep snow. I started to nod off within an hour, but Dave was suiting up to go out and paint stars again. After 15 years of this routine, it’s just another cold starry night for him and an endless series of deep-blue canvasses waiting for the Moon and stars.

All images courtesy of Dave Niec.

Here comes Galaxy Zoo 2

Daniel Pendick — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:03:00 GMT

It’s not every day you get a mysterious new celestial object named after you. But that’s what happened to Hanny van Arkel (pictured below), a primary schoolteacher from The Netherlands. And all she had to do was point and click.

Van Arkel discovered a glowing green gaseous object, which scientists dubbed “Hanny’s Voorwerp” (Dutch for “Hanny’s object,” pictured at right). It was an early success from the Galaxy Zoo project, one of the biggest-ever collaborations between scientists and citizens. Participants are volunteers, like van Arkel, who have used the web site www.galaxyzoo.org (now located at zoo1.galazyzoo.org) to analyze celestial objects from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

The project started up in 2007. In 2008, Galaxy Zoo produced results with real scientific value. Now here comes Galaxy Zoo 2, which debuts today (February 16) at www.galaxyzoo.org.

In the first phase of Galaxy Zoo, project scientists chose 1 million galaxy images from the SDSS database and asked people to decide whether a galaxy was spiral or elliptical and which way it was rotating. The new Galaxy Zoo asks them to look in more detail at 250,000 of the brightest galaxies and spot strange and unusual characteristics.

Galaxy Zoo hoped to recruit 30,000 volunteers. But after only a year, more than 150,000 people from all over the world had signed up. In the last 18 months, armchair astronomers have submitted 80 million different classifications of 1 million objects. Some single-handedly notched tens of thousands of contributions.

Ultimately, the project’s power lies in the human mind’s natural software. “The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern-recognition tasks like this,” says Kevin Schawinski, an astronomer at Yale University who helped create Galaxy Zoo.

Dozens of research projects are in progress using Galaxy Zoo data. One can only wonder what kind of strange cosmic voorwerps await discovery by the next crop of Hanny van Arkels.

Planetary conjunction reflection and pictures

Daniel Pendick — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:33:00 GMT

Astronomy magazine’s offices are located in an office park off I-94 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I’m one of the lucky people here blessed with a corner window that provides a pretty wide view of the sky.

In summer, I watch wicked thunderstorm systems scudding due east on their way to die over Lake Michigan. During early evenings — when you can sometimes find some of us in our offices dotting i’s and crossing t’s on the latest astronomical discoveries — pastel sunsets drape the sky.

But today I see snow, fine little flakes of it blowing by like confetti. Yes, it’s snow season in the Midwest. The snow started last night — just in time to slam the curtain closed (for us anyways) on the spectacular conjunction of Jupiter, Venus, and the elegant crescent Moon. Did you see it?

Color me green with envy. Saturday night, I was making dinner plans with a friend. She suggested Café Hollander on Milwaukee’s East Side, just blocks from the high bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan. Great! I tell her we can shoot over to the lakeshore first to see the conjunction.

Within an hour, it seemed, the sky transitioned from “perfectly clear” to “chilly and overcast,” which is the Midwestern season that precedes “snow.” Driving toward the lake on the way home, I saw . . . nada. Gray.

There’s always hope. Next week, “snow” may transform into “REALLY cold and overcast.” But sometimes “really cold but clear” sneaks in for a few tantalizing days. Last year, I used such a night to show a couple of kids Saturn’s rings for the first time in their lives. It hung there in the still, cold, clear air, like a toy planet hung from a string.

If you saw the conjunction — or if you see it tonight — let us know. Send photos, like those from Astronomy Contributing Editor Phil Harrington we're displaying to the right. And don’t mind that green guy in the corner.

Q&A with Stephen J. O’Meara about his new binocular book

Daniel Pendick — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:26:00 GMT

This month, Cambridge University Press published Astronomy columnist Stephen James O’Meara’s latest book for stargazers, Observing the Night Sky with Binoculars. The book — billed as “a simple guide to the heavens” — is for beginners. This is a new direction for Steve, who has published several guides to observing deep-sky objects with telescopes. I asked him why he wrote the book and how readers could benefit from it.

Pendick: How did this book come about? When and how did you get the idea?

O’Meara: It happened after I completed my research-intensive Deep-Sky Companion trilogy (The Messier Objects, Caldwell Objects, and Hidden Treasures), followed by the extensive Herschel 400 Observing Guide. These are all deep-sky works largely to challenge telescope users.

I became aware of the need for a simple book to help pure novices get into our hobby. It's something I've always wanted to do, but I didn't get fired up to write the book until I learned that a friend of mine in Boston had bought a pair of binoculars and was trying to learn the night sky.

He was struggling with some basic concepts, and he would call and e-mail me with questions. I was enjoying helping him so much, that I thought I'd take what I was teaching him and share the knowledge.

Pendick: Yes, I noticed the book bills itself as a “simple guide to the heavens.” Is this book for the true novice — somebody just making their first attempt to explore the skies with binoculars?

O’Meara: Yes, the book takes readers by the hand and helps them to learn the night sky first with the naked eye, then with binoculars. It's what I did when I was 6 years old. The approach is quite novel, in that I start out by teaching readers the basics by first getting them oriented, then by using the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) as a naked-eye and binocular proving ground. The Big Dipper asterism is not only bright and obvious, even under city lights, but it is circumpolar, so it never sets from mid-northern latitudes or higher.

After learning the basics, the reader can then go to the month they want to begin observing, and learn the brightest stars and constellations hugging the north-south meridian. It's a very simple and slow process (what's the rush?) that first targets a bright star, then the constellation it belongs to. I then have the readers explore the constellation for some of its brightest binocular wonders. The idea is that repetition leads to familiarization.

When finished, they can use the bright star or constellation they just learned as a platform from which they can then move on to other stars and constellations.

Pendick: Would you recommend that people who want to start stargazing first do the naked eye work and graduate to binoculars before buying a telescope?

O’Meara: Absolutely! Telescopes are great. I love them! But I also know how to use them and where to point them. I know the sky, so my telescope and I are a team.

I didn't start out with a telescope. I learned the stars from a star wheel that appeared on the back of a Kellog's Corn Flakes Box when I was 6. I then augmented this journey with an old pair of 7x35 binoculars that my father had in the closet and never used.

Only then — once I learned the sky, once I knew my way around the sky, once I learned about deep-sky objects in certain constellations and explored them with binoculars — did I acquire a telescope.

So, yes, I firmly believe that the first step for any beginner is to start off by learning the basics, working with something simple (like a star wheel and a pair of handheld binoculars), and "meeting" the stars, one by one. It's like a party up there, and it's easy to get lost in the crowd. So I like to take it slow. It's a very Zen approach.

That's why I think this book will be of great help. It takes that casual approach to learning the night sky that's both fun and informative. Step by step the person increases his or her finding skills and knowledge. And with that skill and knowledge comes self-fulfillment. As I like to say, you can spend an hour running through the Louvre, but in the end what did you see? What did you experience? What did you learn?

Once I introduce the reader to, say, a star and its constellation, I tell some stories about [the targets]. I try to engage their interest. The binocular challenges I include in the book will certainly test the interest level of the observer. If he or she is not excited about a wide-field binocular view, well, then maybe he or she may find the narrow field of view in a telescope even more disappointing. Those that endure in this hobby can well appreciate both the naked-eye and binocular sky, as well as the telescopic view. All of them are alluring in their own ways. That's why this hobby is so great!

Stephen James O'Meara's Observing the Night Sky with Binoculars: A Simple Guide to the Heavens is on sale now at Amazon.com and other booksellers. Let him know what you think of it at someara@interpac.net.