Saturn animation

It has been awhile since I posted here and I apologize for that. Life interrupts a good deal of my best intentions - as you will find out as you grow up and grow older Junior. I just hope that your interest in the night sky will not wane in the process. Building on what you know at age twelve is a lot easier than trying to build on your knowledge at age 52 - not impossible just harder.

Here is a link to a great Saturn animation I found that might interest you. It was compiled over a six year period.

Mars, finally

I will never stop marveling at what new technology can bring. For you, it is as natural as waking up. The latest comes from Google Earth, which your dad should download for you here.

Here is what it will shows of Mars. Yes, Mars!


And if the clouds ever clear, you need to check this out this weekend. And tell me about when I get here next week..

Tripping the Light Fantastic

As you look at those stars on the night sky, you should always keep in mind that what you are seeing is what happened a long time ago. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, geniuses such as Einstein and Isaac Newton and even further back to ancient Greeks and Persians wondered about light. For a really long time, it was believed that light could travel at any speed through space because, in those days, before telescopes, ancient stargazers believed that there was nothing to block the light. So they thought it could speed up and slow down.

But now we know differently. Space is not as empty as everyone once believed and the speed of light is one of those amazing things that stays the same, no matter what. This is a good thing if you think about it for a second. Because light can be counted on to behave the same near earth as it does billions of miles away, we can make predictions about what to expect.

Consider this image, done to simulate exactly how fast light travels from the Earth to the Moon. It takes 1.25555 seconds. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to get to us.

I remember you telling me what you learned when you did that project on Einstein a couple of years back. You told me that light traveled 186,242.4 miles a second. How fast is that? Suppose you were shine a light from Bend to New York on the other side of the United States. That beam of light would travel back and forth 60 times in a second.

This galaxy is the farthest light has traveled, measured by Hubble at 13 billion light years away. The universe was only a billion years old when this galaxy (on the right) began to send its light out, so long ago, the earth wasn't even here yet. Because that is so fast, it is almost impossible to imagine. Look at your Mom across the room. What you are seeing is not what you think. It actually happened 20 billionth of second ago. Now imagine that our Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. In terms of galaxies, that's not very large. But it does require a very large imagination to try and picture that king of event.

This is the closest galaxy to us at 42,000 light years away.

Never to be Seen Again

The last time I wrote, we were talking about the amazing things that the Hubble telescope had seen in its time in space. Often referred to as the people's telescope, the Space Shuttle not only successfully grabbed the telescope in space - with all kinds of really dangerous space junk floating around - but repaired it. When they were done, they simply released it. It will never be seen by humans again.

Here are the pictures of that mission.

A Fresh Look at Deep Space

This past week, the last space shuttle mission visited one of the most exciting accomplishments in modern science, the Hubble Telescope. Unlike the ground based telescope you use, this look into space does not have all of the interference of light (remember how I explained that light from the city takes some of what you are looking at and makes it harder to see) and the stuff floating around the upper atmosphere (the layers of air and gases that protect our planet from harmful rays from the sun). The views without these problems are simply awesome.

The mission these astronauts were given was basically a repair and replace job. There were several systems that had broken down over the years and need to be fixed. But even more importantly was the job of replacing the 16 year old camera.

Among the new camera’s features is the ability to record images in the normally invisible ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelength bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as in visible light. The infrared capability extends Hubble’s reach into the past because the expansion of the universe stretches the wavelengths of light from distant galaxies to longer, redder wavelengths.

Light comes in waves, some you can see and others you cannot. This new camera can see what your eyes would not. Ultraviolet (UV) light has shorter wavelengths than visible light. Though these waves are invisible to the human eye, some insects, like bumblebees, can see them! So can Hubble. This is a look at how this telescope sees things in space differently than the human eye.

Scientists have divided the ultraviolet part of the spectrum into three regions: the near ultraviolet, the far ultraviolet, and the extreme ultraviolet. The three regions are distinguished by how energetic the ultraviolet radiation is, and by the "wavelength" of the ultraviolet light, which is related to energy.

The near ultraviolet, abbreviated NUV, is the light closest to optical or visible light. The extreme ultraviolet, abbreviated EUV, is the ultraviolet light closest to X-rays, and is the most energetic of the three types. The far ultraviolet, abbreviated FUV, lies between the near and extreme ultraviolet regions. It is the least explored of the three regions. FUV is what Hubble, with its new camera will be able to see.

Our Sun emits light at all the different wavelengths in electromagnetic spectrum, but it is ultraviolet waves that are responsible for causing our sunburns.

The telescope was named after Edwin Hubble, who took many photographs through 100 inch reflecting Hooker telescope, proving they was lots of stuff beyond our own galaxy, and determining the existence of several other galaxies such as our own milky way, which had until then been believed to be the universe.

Hubble had also devised a classification system for the various galaxies he observed, sorting them by content, distance, shape, and brightness; it was then he noticed redshifts in the emission of light from the galaxies. What he saw was that these galaxies were moving away from each other at a steady rate equal to the distance between them. From these observation, he was able to formulate Hubble's Law in 1929, helping astronomers determine the age of the universe, and proving that the universe was expanding.

Hubble once said: "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."


Below are pictures taken by this telescope.

What We Take for Granted

You have grown up with the internet, making this discussion of the night sky over Bend, your hometown possible from three hours drive away. And you are growing up in a time when what should seem fantastic, just because it was just a few short years ago for people like your Dad and even more so for me, seems almost ordinary.

Today, because I know your night sky will have one too many clouds in it, we will talk about a special space craft visiting place I know I'll never visit - but you might someday! Cassini spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn to begin the first in-depth, up-close study of the ringed planet and its domain (moons and rings and such). It has been in this orbit for over four years and now is doing some additional sightseeing.

This part of the extended mission called the Cassini Equinox Mission.

"We're looking at a string of remarkable discoveries -- about Saturn's magnificent rings, its amazing moons, its dynamic magnetosphere (how it acts like a giant magnet holding the rings and the moons where they are) and about Titan's surface and atmosphere," says Dr. Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist. Can you imagine a job where you get to do this everyday?

Dr Spilker went on to say, "Some of the mission highlights so far include discovering that Titan has Earth-like processes and that the small moon Enceladus (which Cassini flew past at only thirty miles from the surface)has a hot-spot at its southern pole, jets on the surface that spew out ice crystals and evidence of liquid water beneath its surface."

Cassini's observations of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved. They now believe Titan possesses many parallels to Earth, including lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and possibly volcanoes.

The spray of icy particles from the surface jets collectively forms a towering plume three times taller than the width of Enceladus. It is now thought that the plume feeds particles into Saturn's most expansive ring, the E ring. Already in the extended mission, the spacecraft has come as close as 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the moon's surface.

The extraordinary results from the Cassini spacecraft and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which plunged through Titan's dense, smoggy atmosphere to its surface, have generated hundreds of scientific articles and been the subject of special issues of the world’s most important scientific journals.

This picture of Saturn was taken on April 27, 2009 and received on Earth April 28th, 2009. The camera was pointing toward SATURN at approximately 987,316 kilometers away.

The first four years of the Cassini-Huygens saga brought a new dimension of understanding of the complex and diverse Saturn system. The two year Cassini Equinox Mission is expected to be just as exciting. During the extended mission the spacecraft will make 60 additional orbits of Saturn, including 26 flybys of Titan, seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene. Investigations of Saturn's rings, the planet itself and new places within Saturn's magnetosphere await.

Why is it called Cassini?

It could have been a star!

Few of us think of a planets as much more than rocks n space, round, with orbits around a sun. Jupiter, our largest planet needed just a little more mass to be a star. But what is mass?

Mass on earth is easy to figure out. Simply weigh it. Because gravity is even, when one thing weighs more, it has more mass. Size has nothing to do with it. If you blow up a balloon to be larger than your brother's head, Martin's head will still weigh more. So when we talk about Jupiter needing a little more mass, if it was eighty times more dense, it would have had enough of the stuff to make it a solar system.

At last count, Jupiter has 49 moons. Galileo, who discovered it using a primitive telescope thought the moons he saw were stars. (Here is a list of the names of Jupiter's moons) As cool as it looks, it would not be a very nice place to visit. The gravity would squash you. It is 20,000 times that of earth!

Made up of ammonia gas and beneath that hydrogen that, because of that gravity, has turned to liquid. And deep inside Jupiter, at the very center is a solid core. In fact, the core of Jupiter is one big, earth sized magnet.

One of its moons, Io, is the most volcanically active objects in our solar system. Ganymede is also the largest moon in our solar system.

I hope you get to see it.

Here are some other things you should be looking for on a clear night during the month of May.