Astronomy Meeting tonight at HFCC for FAAC club and visitors

Well it's about that time of the month 3rd Thursday for the FAAC Astronomy Club meeting at HFCC in Dearborn Michigan.  

It is held in the conference center near the UAW offices in the front auditorium area.  We are actually in the smaller conference room, not the larger auditorium.  People who show up for that meeting can park in the staff parking lot near the front conference center and enter in through the back door.  Just tell the guard if the gate is closed that your visiting and attending the Astronomy Club meeting.  I can't recall the main topic of this months meeting and will post this before I spend time looking it up.  It was some astronomy subject that should prove to be interesting to astronomers.  Usually the meeting has two subjects.  They have a longer subject and a shorter tech talk subject.  They also have introductions and members often comment on what they observed or did that involved astronomy briefly at the beginning of the meeting.   There is also usually Pizza and Pop beverages and a donation box which members will often put some donation, which often offsets the cost of the pizza with a little extra money for the purpose of furthering astronomy through a scholarship donation or equipment fund for the club. 

Been spending a little bit of time editing video and reading about computer editing programs for video and the Macintosh today.


Comet PanStarrs will be showing up next month and hopefully will provide interesting views after the middle of the month of March.  I plan on doing some observing of the comet, but much of this will likely be in other locations which we should announce.  This for low horizon viewing.  It will actually be visible before sunset and also before the sun rises later in the month of March, due to it's position in the sky (north of the sun later in the month).  Objects north of the sun toward the north pole in certain positions (distances from the sun) will become more "circumpolar" in their nature, that is to say they are more visible.  Objects near the celestial north pole are always visible from northern latitudes.  Like the north star.  They would be always visible even in the daylight if the sun wasn't making the sky so bright.   If we look up in the morning we can see the north star before the sun rises.  If we look up at night we can see the north star after the sun sets.  It's always visible due to the rotation of the earth and the way the earth is pointed at it for those of us high enough above the equator.  Objects slightly north of the sun but close to the sun's position, may rise slightly before the sun and set slightly after the sun.  Think of it as a long string stretching down from the north star with the sun swinging fixed on that string, this is a very basic example.  If a knot was up on the string some distance from the sun and between the north star and the sun, that knot would be visible before the sun swung up into view and after the sun swung down below the horizon.  The closer the knot would be toward the north star, the earlier and later we'd see it in front of or behind the sun.  If the knot or in our case a comet was close enough to the north star above a certain angle it might remain in the sky visible during the entire night.   For a comet to glow it needs to reflect sunlight.  As comet Panstarrs L4 moves away from the sun it will get dimmer and dimmer and it will start to move toward a path that takes it closer to the north star.   But it will become so dim only large telescopes with long exposure photographs will be able to see it.  When it's visible it will be closer to the sun and hopefully we'll see a nice long tail and coma display.   This comet has likely been traveling from the Ort cloud for millions of years and it will take 110,000 years for it to return to that cloud after it passes the sun.  It's orbit will be such that it will pass the sun and then travel out never to return.




 DONATED COMPUTER to be setup.

Tim Campbell donated a Mac Mini to the school system for HJRO.  The plan is to have it run Windows and our current software and also a Macintosh OSX operating system.  This should allow streaming of video from the observatory for certain projects, mostly school related.

We may have this computer setup fairly soon at HJRO.  We'll have to go through all the setup issues over time and probably will spend a few days out there setting up and testing the system.  I'm not sure when the setup will happen.  At first, they will be installing VM ware on a donated Mac Mini.  More details on that computer later in a different post.

Been under the weather a little lately.

Been dealing with a lot of pain and ear aches which keep me out of the cold weather lately. This has kept me from opening up as much as some would probably like to see the observatory open.

I ran into a club member the other day at the library in Lincoln Park. He asked me how the weather was and what the predictions were.

I didn't know and hadn't looked.

I ended up picking up an income tax form, then going out to a warm coffee house to edit video in the evening. Afterward, at around 9pm I saw the sky was clear, but still haze and clouds were in the lower horizons while I was returning home. The weather felt to me like it was a lot colder than 30 degrees. I imagined that it was almost zero before getting in my car, but this was probably due to my fighting a cold or some bug. Since I didn't feel very well I just returned home, stopping at a store on the way to pick up a few needed items.

Later in the evening I looked at my phone. Two members called me. One being James who was at the library. The other being Art. My phone was on vibrate so I didn't hear or feel it when it went off. So I missed their calls.

I think Art just wanted to chat a bit, we've been playing phone tag a bit. I think James wanted to know if HJRO was open. Well it's cold out and I've been under the weather as well, so unless someone else opened up HJRO it probably was closed.

In other news I actually stopped by HJRO Friday during the day to meet and witness some debugging and plans that they have to upgrade the computer system. I was there about 50 minutes and left to eat dinner. It was interesting to see the plans and hear part of the things going on there. We had a half dozen people in the observatory Friday.

We may have a better setup, at least that is the plan and that may allow us to stream live feeds from the observatory I'm the future. That has been a plan and a goal, but I'm not sure if those feeds will involve much more than feeds to the classroom which still would be a wonderful thing.

We've done a few test feeds but not to the classroom in the past. We used goto meeting or a Remote desktop client for those feeds and tests. They worked well. Goto meeting actually works really well, but we don't have a license for it and I don't pay for a subscription any more. I used to have one that I bought for my use at work, and it was something I had in my toolkit for work, but since I retired I don't have that any more.

Greg


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Sunday night I briefly visited HJRO and took some test photos, AVI movies

Conditions were bitter cold conditions.

I tried to take some photos via AVI files and backyard EOS through my canon t1i mounted on the c14.

The photos of Jupiter were not very good. Photos of the moon look okay, but the conditions were not very good out in the sky when I was out, and the sky quickly deteriorated.

The sidewalk and parking lot had a lot of slippery ice which was also dangerous to walk on. I almost fell when walking toward the observatory. With conditions being so bad as far as seeing and cold and slippery, I'm glad I didn't invite visitors out.

Jupiter didn't even look good through a 25mm eyepiece which usually shows a pretty decent image of Jupiter. If conditions were much better for observing I'd probably try to stay out there more and would have put out an announcement post. As things went, I'm glad I didn't post and freeze waiting for visitors. I left after being there for about 40 minutes and clouds moved in at that time ruining further observing opportunities.

Here's a photo generated from Registax and one of the AVI movie files I captured last night.

This shows a slice of the moon. It's a pretty good representation of the detail one probably could see last night. I noticed a lot of jumping around and distortion of the image of the moon when looking through the camera's finder. The image produced here with Registax 6 was better than the still image you would have seen looking through the telescope. This image looks significantly better than the image one might have seen live and more shadow detail is present over more of the moon in this picture than was present in the Live image.

I'd expect to get images four or more times better if the night offered really good viewing last night.




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Watch the asteroid via NASA feed on the internet.

Heres a link.

Broadcast starts at 2pm eastern standard time.


http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2



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A quick drawing to explain the unusual and likely impossible path of a small body from the asteroid flying ahead hitting Russia

Note this is a crude drawing showing what the paths would have to be like.

What is the chance that a small object would be flying ahead of 2012 DA14 and being pulled back into the earths gravitational field and flying back toward the earth from a northern direction to impact Russia?

We can say it was smaller, so it might be effected differently by the earths gravitational field, perhaps because it's on a slightly different path. But keep in mind it would have to be captured and turned by the earths gravitational field and also it's traveling quite fast at nearly Mach 8 to begin with. What is the chance that a Mach 8 bullet the size of a small car could travel past the earth, get pulled back into the earths gravitational field and careen down toward the earth at 30,000 miles per hour?

It's likely impossible.

It's much more likely that an object traveling at 6000 miles an hour in space was plowed into by the earth as it's rotating around the sun at 24,000 miles an hour. Or something that was just flying at the earth at 30,000 more more miles per hour and just ran into it.

Objects running into the earth during the early evening have to travel faster than the earth to catch up with it. Objects traveling into the earth after midnight and before noon may be an object that the earth is running into as it revolves around the sun. If the Russian meteorite hit in the morning, it may have been traveling at merely 6000 miles per hour. If it hit past noon and toward midnight, it had to be traveling 24,000 miles per hour plus it's speed. If it was traveling at 54,000 miles an hour, that's faster than the orbital speed of 2012 Da14. Traveling faster means it would not be taking the same path around the sun. If its not taking the same path, it's not in the same orbit and not a piece of the same object. So it's likely that the Russian meteorite is not a part of asteroid 2012DA14


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NASA link about the asteroid.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/asteroidflyby.html


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HJRO will not be open for the 2012 da14 asteroid flyby. Check out NASA website.

First in response to some questions some may be asking, we will not be open tonight to see the asteroid flyby. This because of clouds and snow predictions. The asteroid passes close by the earth in the southern hemisphere and we won't see it when it is brighter and closer to the earth. The asteroid will only be about magnitude 11 which is faint and requires a large telescope of 8 inches or more in mirror or front glass objective size. It will look like a very faint star and be moving. Because of the poor weather and tracking difficulties it's unlikely we would catch a glimpse of it between mostly cloudy skies and with snow, it's just not worth the time to sit outside and not really see anything.

It's better to watch the NASA live feed showing the asteroid from a clear location, than to sit inside a cold observatory and look at a telescope that can't see anything due to bad weather tonight.

The following is not a link to the NASA website, I'll include it in another post.

This is a link to a video of the explosion from a meteo/meteorite that hit Russia today.

This Meteor or meteorite blew up in the atmosphere. Many including the Europeon Space Agency claim this has no relationship to the asteroid flyby, because it happened about a million kilometers ahead of the actual asteroid. And it likely came in from a different trajectory.

There of course could be a slight chance that this meteorite was related to the asteroid, sounds a lot like some sci fi movie script, doesn't it.

There are thousands of objects, actually many more likely millions flying around in our solar system. They are mostly small items piece of rock or ice often left over from a comet and they often enter into the earth's atmosphere causing a bright light as the meteor burns up in the upper atmosphere. Almost every other day high in space above the atmosphere a meteor large enough to setup a 1 megaton explosion blows up. These are so high and so small even though they blow up we don't notice them. We may see a shooting star. If it travels all the way to the ground it will perhaps leave pieces or even form a small crater. We actually have dust from many meteorites called micrometeorite dust that covers the planet. This dust accumulates and becomes mixed with the soils, and also washed into the oceans and rivers over time with the natural decay and erosion of the soil.

There is of course a slight chance, maybe a very small one, and more would have to be known about the trajectory of the Russian meteorite to know if it's related to the asteroid. It's seems like a interesting circumstance that this meteorite would fall a day before the close flyby.

Objects in space can be bound to each other in gravity and fly by in pairs, if they are large objects and have enough gravity to have some other object enter into a stable orbit. The 150 foot asteroid, doesn't have enough gravity to have some small rock very far away bound to it with gravity. So how could the two be related?

If the asteroid was created many years ago from some larger item being struck or broken apart, it could perhaps be flying in an orbit and some other piece might be flying along in almost the same orbit. It's probably unlikely that a small piece would be flying along the same orbital path, but we have situations where many objects get trapped in the same orbit by a strong gravitational field, the rings of Saturn would be an example of many objects in a fairly close orbit, but this is around a large object. So imagine that this or some other collision caused a chunk of the asteroid that was smaller to be flying around and somehow, almost by a kind of miracle, this piece happened to be in essentially the same orbit. But it would have to be traveling in this case ahead of the path of the asteroid and fly slightly differently of course. It being smaller may be affected slightly differently than the asteroid, being perhaps a piece of it flying ahead of it. The biggest problem with this theory however is that smaller piece, would be traveling ahead of the asteroid and flying in pretty much the same orbital path. The Asteroid is going to fly by us from below and behind the earth from the south pole it will fly up and past the earth, traveling in an inclined orbit up toward what we would see as the little dipper and Polaris. An object taking that path would hit the southern part of the globe, which is something like Africa, India or Perhaps Australia, the Indian ocean or Antarctica. The meteor traveling in front of 2012 DA14 in order to hit Russia would have to fly past the equator and curve and fly into the earth, being bent like a gravitational cue ball to hit in the northern hemisphere. It's unlikely that this happened. If the piece of rock was smaller, which we know the Russian strike was, it might be deflected by the earths gravity more, but remember to be deflected more it would have to be lighter and traveling at a slower speed to be curved more by gravity. If it's hitting us at 30,000 miles an hour, that's a lot of speed and velocity. A faster bullet travels flatter through gravity on earth in the atmosphere. A faster object traveling by the earth or near the earth will deflect less if it's traveling faster. Objects of course can speed up by gravity, but the earths atmosphere will slow them down.

Until we know more about it's path, we could not say where it was and how it entered the atmosphere. I have doubts that it would be from the Asteroid and deflect into Russia. And knowing the path, the ESA would probably have a much better idea of the possibility of that happening than I would.

But to play the devils advocate for a moment and say now could this happen. Well a smaller rock would be deflected more. The earth is traveling at a high speed so if it was lying in the path of the earth it could be struck by the earth and it moving slowly could be something the earth ran into. If the earth ran into it and it was an After midnight meteor, then it would likely be something from a different direction than the Asteroid and unrelated. What if it was floating by and in advance of the asteroid and off to the side and passed the earth a night or two before? Would it be in a path in front of the earth and the earth run into it? The answer is no, it would be traveling faster than the earth and in an inclined orbit, so it would have passed the earth and kept moving along a slightly different path of the asteroid. This is difficult to explain. If the path was from south to north and it was traveling in a kind of fast curve and came up from around the earth's south pole and swung into the earth, with a curved trajectory, it might be from the same path or nearly the same path.

One of the things that makes asteroids and minor planets different from major ones, is minor planets cannot clear the path and obit of other material that is floating around in the same orbital ring or path. 2012 Da14 is not a large asteroid or planet, so it definitely would not be pulling in other particles and material rocks and debris that would be in it's orbit. So it could have other objects in it's orbital path in front or behind it. Not gravitationally bound but circumstantially in the same path, kind of like pellets from a shotgun blast flying in the same direction.

It's important to realize however that this is a fairly stable orbit and close to the same as the orbit of the earth, so this object has been flying around for a long time. This means, as as pointed out to me by a fellow Faac member, a Tim Campbell, it's probably not composed of ice. If it was the ice would have melted long ago. So 2012 da14 is probably a solid object. And recall that gravity and velocity will be effected by the other objects. What is the chance of a small object flying around and taking the same path of gravity as other larger objects? It may not be very likely.

Both objects are rather small and both are without a lot of mass, so there is a chance that they could be in the same orbit. It's very slight.

It will be interesting to find out if more analysis can be used to prove the Russian meteorite is not related to 2012 DA14. Over the next few weeks we should hear a lot more about this.

It's a good thing that they were only hit by this small meteorite, had they been hit with 2012da14, the results would have been more like being hit with an atomic bomb.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/15/stunning-amateur-videos-of-the-russian-meteorite-explosion/

As you can see in the video link above, the sounds from the sonic booms were still pretty scary and of course they cause damage. Every boom represents another Mach or speed multiple past the speed of sound. There were several booms, it was traveling a lot faster than Mach 2.






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The observatory would be open tonight around 7:30pm maybe a little earlier

I have a few errands ti run today and may open up around 7pm.

We should be open from 7pm until about 9pm, but visitors may want to wait until 7:30 giving us some time to set up and insure our scope is aiming and responding well to computer commands.

I plan on having it open for a couple hours. I don't want to be out there to long if nobody shows up.

Weather forecasts predict a hour of clouds around 11pm or so anyway, so that would cut early evening observing short.


Jupiter should be nice tonight as it's in a nice high southern position in the early evenings.

Mercury might be visible from the observatory just after sunset, near and above the high schools chimney, but this from a position near the observatory and I won't have it open near sunset.

You'd probably need binoculars to see mercury after sunset due to the amount of sky glow. About 30 minutes after sunset it would be about ten degrees above the western horizon.

There are plenty of other objects to see tonight. Two favorites and popular targets being M42 and Jupiter.

There are quite a few open clusters that can be easy to see with our telescopes as well.




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viewing Mercury and Mars at Sunset.

Four Faac members viewing two planets which were close together on February 9th.

Facing away toward the sunset is Rick Arzadon, James French, Steve Uitti and Tim Dey.

We were using wide field setups. Which included the BT-80 binoculars, 10 by 50 binoculars, my homebuilt f4 four inch reflector, and Big Bertha a ten inch f5.35 newtonian with a 60mm eyepiece.

The views through the big telescope and the BT-80 binoculars were qt nearly the same power 26x.

Nobody noticed the 3/4 phase of Mercury during our viewing.

Later we looked at the ISS, International Space Station as it passed overhead.

This photo was taken with a Canon EOS t1i. The inset photo was an focal handheld shot of Mercury and Mars taken through the bt80 binocular. The focal shot is blurred q bit from movement as it was handheld. The wide field shot only shows the brighter Mercury.

Click on the photo to see a larger version of it and zoom in to see the area where the planets were last night.



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Eight slides for presentation at HJRO

Here are some slides I tried to trow together for a repeating presentation at HJRO tonight.

They were in a keynote iPad presentation, but the iPad was having issues when I tried to run it at the table tonight during the middle school science night.

More info on the science night may follow later after the slides.




The larger tube which was 9 feet long is stored at a mystery location now, disposed of but rescued or stored by a FAAC member





The solar image on the right looks yellow, because I processed it and changed the color to give it that yellow color feel. But it actually looks like the orange sun we see in the upper left photo through the telescope.







Pluto really looks just like a faint star from our vantage point.




Yes I know, Andromeda is much better looking, with better photographing setups and exposures, we are getting mostly the core and missing much of the detail in this photo.




Different power photographs of the moon. All using the Canon EOS t1i the larger ones through the c14 at HJRO. The smaller moon and Jupiter through the Meade refractor at HJRO.




A nice turnout from a star party presentation in 2010




Some of the regulars at HJRO in the wide angle photo. That photo was taken with equipment that Brian and Tim C own in our club, not my Canon EOS. Mars and the Beehive cluster in the last photograph. Taken through the Meade refractor at HJRO.


As you can see I can throw together a pretty nice multiple picture slide show with keynote. Keynote on the Mac works a lot better than on my iPad however. I'll remember to use keynote or power point on the regular computer next time..

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