Real DX: Hubble's EXTRA Deep Field

http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2012/09/26/nasas-hubble-space-telescope-takes-deepest-image-of-the-universe-to-date/

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Poor Conditions: SFI 89. Venus Transit Hero

There's today's image from SOHO.  Pretty barren.  That's why conditions on the HF bands are so poor today.

While looking for this I came across this account of Venus Transit Heroism:

 In the days of heroic astronomy, Chappe d'Autoroches not only risked his life twice to obtain critical, new knowledge from transits of Venus, but gave his life to help others in dire need. Here is his tale from the h2g2 web site in an article entitled "Forgotten Male Astronomers:" A French expedition led by Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Autoroche (1728 - 69) went to Tobolsk, Siberia, to record the 1761 Venus transit. The team survived a treacherous river crossing and a lengthy journey through difficult, boggy conditions, eventually arriving at their destination just six days before the transit was due. Just before the transit, Jean-Baptiste was attacked by some of the locals, who believed he had caused unusually severe spring floods by interfering with the Sun. Cossack guards managed to save the team of astronomers, who eventually managed to make good observations of the Venus transit.

The French Academy were so pleased with the success of his mission that they engaged Jean-Baptiste to record the next expected Venus transit, due in 1769. He specified that he would travel anywhere in the world as long as the temperature wouldn't be below freezing. Tragically, when Jean-Baptiste and his team arrived at Vera Cruz in Mexico, they found themselves in the middle of a plague [yellow fever] epidemic. Instead of moving on to a safer place, the team decided to remain and help care for the sick villagers.

Even though he was mortally ill, Jean-Baptiste managed to record astronomical observations to establish the latitude and longitude of the site. These recordings were vital for the calculations of the astronomers back home in France, and were made with an astonishing accuracy, given the hazardous conditions in which the data were gathered. The observations they made provided some of the best data of the 1769 transit. Jean-Baptiste died of a fever just after the transit, aged 41 years.

A longer and more detailed version of these events can be found here: www.americanscientist.org

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"The Journey to Palomar"

This is a wonderful documentary that will definitely appeal to SolderSmoke listeners.  Check out Jim Gunn working on the electronics for the CCD cameras that they attached to the 200 inch 'scope (described in Preston's "First Light").  


Once again, sorry if readers outside the U.S. have trouble with this link.  I hope you all can find other ways to see this video.  


http://www.hulu.com/watch/76165

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SolderSmoke Book Review: "The Day We Found the Universe"

    I find myself reading a lot of books about telescopes and cosmology.  I guess this is related to the desire to pull weak DX signals out of the noise. And I like the descriptions of the gear used to pull info out of the star light.  These are, after all, big antennas.   

    I really enjoyed this book by MIT's Marcia Bartusiak. She describes humanity's effort to find our place in the cosmos.  As she points out, the conventional wisdom seems to be that until Edwin Hubble came along everyone thought that the Milky Way was the universe.  As it turns out, it is not that simple -- going back to the time of Kant, there were scientists who suspected that the nebula that were showing up in telescopes were in fact "island universes."  Bartusiak takes us through the ups and downs of this idea, and in the course of the book provides some really great descriptions of the astronomers involved in the struggle to understand the nebulae.  Most of them were great people.  Others, well, not so great.  George Ellery Hale comes out as one of the heroes, and Bartusiak seeks to refute the notion that Hale was schizophrenic -- he was clearly suffering from depression, but Bartusiak says that the story about him being advised by a "little elf" was just an oft-repeated myth. Edwin Hubble gets a decidedly mixed review.   

My guess is that the title was selected by the publishing company's marketeers, and I think it was a poor choice:  the whole point of the book was that we didn't find the universe in one day.  It took a lot longer than that!      

Anyway, if you are looking for a good summer read, I recommend this book.  You can get a copy through the link above. 

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Transit of Venus

Yesterday afternoon at around 5:55 pm local time I was pedaling along the Washington and Old Dominion bike trail, on my way home from work.  I was pedaling a little faster than normal because I wanted to try to see the transit of Venus.  I came across a group of amateur astronomers who had set up their scopes alongside the trail -- they were nervously looking at their watches and the clouds.  I told them that I was going to set up my scope too.  "Hurry up!  You'll miss it! It starts at 6:04!" I pedaled even faster.   


The cloud cover was fairly thick, but just as I pulled into my driveway, the clouds broke and sunshine filled the front yard.  I quickly set up the 'scope and got the sun in the field of view.  First I saw sunspots  -- lots of them.   Then, sure enough, off near the rim was the unmistakeable shadow of Venus.  Billy took the picture (above) with his I-phone 4.   The neighbors and all the kids in the neighborhood came over and  had a look.  It was all very cool.  Mission accomplished. 


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Ponderosa Knack! Bonanza Astronomy!

I loved this episode, and I think most of you guys will too. I was alerted to it by an article by famed comet hunter David Levy. Wow! I never would have thought that in a 1962 episode of the cowboy show Bonanza, we would find amateur astronomy and experiments to determine the speed of sound and the speed of light. Amazing. There is no radio in this so it is not really The Knack, but young Mr. Michelson (yes, the Nobel Prize winner) does set up a shack-like workshop and he is trying to measure c. So this is all very Knack-like. There is also a very nice moral to this story, a moral that is related to our notion of an International Brotherhood of Electrical Wizards.
Three cheers for Ben Cartwright!

You can find the episode here. It runs for 48 minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPRGV0HbMk

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Saturn and Titan

One of the rewards of being an amateur astronomer is that from time to time you get to discover on your own astronomical facts that were actually discovered centuries ago. Like the orbital period of Titan. About ten days ago I reported on my early morning observations of Saturn. Titan was in the far right of my field of view. Then, a week later I looked again and saw that Titan was now in the far left of the field of view. It looked like it it had gone to the opposite end of its orbital track in about a week. I checked and, sure enough, Titan takes about 15 earth days to complete an orbit. Neat.

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The Giant Magellan Telescope

Wow, seven 28 foot mirrors! They just started blasting away the top of a mountain in Chile to make room for this magnificent 'scope. More details here: http://www.gmto.org/index.html
For those of you who are looking, they have some job openings (link at the bottom of their site).

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SETI Live!

Wow, this is really very interesting. The Allen Telescope Array (seen above) is back in operation and they are looking for on-line volunteers to analyze the signals that are streaming in. But unlike the now-familiar SETI-AT-HOME screensaver system, in SETI Live, they want you to personally evaluate signals -- very recent signals -- from the Allen Array. You'll be looking at waterfall displays similar to what we see with SDR rigs. They want you to mark and classify the signals and then upload your work. They are trying to screen out terrestrial sigs, man-made satellites, etc.

This is just the thing for those days when the solar flux is low and 17 meters is dead!

Check it out: http://setilive.org/

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Planets Galore!

Good times for astronomy in Northern Virginia. The temperature is freakishly high, and daylight savings time has pushed the darkness into my early-morning shack time. My telescope troubles are sorted out, and I just discovered that with my current contact lens prescription, my right eye is much better for telescope work than the left. (Who knew!) I found an excellent and inspirational book on astronomy: "The Four Percent Universe." And this morning, while fooling around with my Stellarium program, I noticed that Saturn is high in the South-West before dawn. Coffee cup in hand I went out and was rewarded with a spectacular view of the ringed planet. I could even see one of the divisions between the rings. Titan was also visible. Last night Maria and I were looking at Mars. I can make out the ice cap and (vaguely) some the big valley features. No canals.

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Mars in Opposition

Jupiter and Venus are getting all the media attention because they happen to appear close in the sky, but Mars is the real object to see this month. It is in opposition (see diagram). This happens every two years. Last time we were out in the Sabine Hills north of Rome (sniff, sniff).

I cleaned the 6 inch mirror on my Dobsonian telescope a while back, and when I put the whole thing back together, something wasn't quite right. I was getting dim and blurry views. So yesterday I went into telescope maintenance mode and, as the Brits would say, got it all sorted.

I was out looking at Mars last night. The view is not nearly as spectacular as the image above, but it is very nice. But I can't see much of the northern polar cap -- it is, after all, summer time in the Martian Northern Hemisphere.


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Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D

This is about 2 years old, but somehow I missed it. It is really beautiful, and it helps keep things in perspective.

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SolderSmoke Podcast #139

December 3, 2011

http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke139.mp3

Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Billy's Birthday (on the range!)

Astro-Knack: CCD camera in the telescope. Solar astronomy.

Winter approaches: Shack heating by Heath, Halli, Hammarlund and Drake.

2B troubles on 17 meters.

Rig Re-Cycling: Rebuilding 17 meter rigs from the last solar cycle.

Azores DSB re-build: Oscillator troubles then adding a JBOT.

Manhattan style construction and the need for urban renewal.

Book Review: Steve Jobs. (Woz has the Knack!)

MAILBAG

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Backyard Solar Astronomy

Over the weekend I took a break from JBOT amplifiers and did something I've been meaning to do for a long time: solar astronomy. I pulled out my old 4.5 inch Tasco reflector telescope and aimed it at old sol. I know, I know, this can be dangerous, but we were careful -- note that Billy is standing on the other side of the business end of the telescope. In his hands is the paper onto which we projected the solar image. I'd always wondered how I would get the sun into the telescope's field of view without risking my eyesight by using the finder scope. This turned out to be no trouble at all: I just looked at the shadow cast by the tube of the telescope and --using the shadow as my guide -- moved the tube until it was lined up with the sun. We snapped a picture of our results. I think our crude effort compared very favorably with the picture from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. You can see the same sunspots in each image (ours is reversed because we were using a reflector). These images are from 12 November 2011.

Our picture

NASA's picture

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Bringing some Knack into Astro-Photography

I've been meaning to do this for a long time. It is a neat little project that allows for a quick and satisfying mixture of electronics and astronomy. It has been described on the web many times: Take an old web cam (preferably one of the old eyeball-looking devices) and remove the lens (I found it very cool to expose the charge coupled device).
Take a plastic 35 mm film container (hurry, while supplies last!) and chop off the bottom. Tape the container to the sans-lens webcam. Here's the fun part: Insert 35 mm container and webcam into the focuser of your telescope. Bring laptop out to the telescope and take digital pictures with your telescope.
I used Billy's old Asus eeepc and a very simple program called Cheese. (There has got to be something better for this kind of work.) But my results were very good. Last night I got images of Jupter and two of its moons. This morning I got some great shots of our moon.
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Listening for Sputniks, Watching a Satellite

I felt like a junior high school kid yesterday, rushing into the shack, firing up the old rigs, anxious to tune in some special stations. It was Sputnik Anniversary Day! 15 meters was still in pretty good shape at 2315 UTC. On the trusty Drake 2-B I could hear W1AW's code practice session a bit above the Sputnik frequency of 21.060 MHz. All of a sudden WA5TCZ was booming in, calling CQ Sputnik! OM Darron later e-mailed and let me know that he wasn't running a replica rig -- like me, he was looking for them.

This morning, inspired by all this space activity, I pulled out my newly cleaned and collimated telescope and took a tour of the skies of Northern Virginia. Jupiter is very bright in the East (I could see the Galilean moons in my finder scope!) Mars is in the West, but is too far away for any detail to be seen in my 'scope -- it is just a little red disk. I had to go out into the street to position the 'scope for the great nebula in Orion. At 1023UTC the International Space Station flew over -- I watched it disappear into the sunrise. A good morning indeed.

I have a suggestion: Can the Sputnik event be extended through the weekend to give more people the chance to tune in these magnificent rigs?

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Google, Supernovas... and DRAKES

I liked this ad for Google, but I now have the urge to decapitate my garden shed. Check out dad's Drake gear. Late in the clip you can see some beam antennas on a tower near the house.

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Jupiter In the Morning

Jupiter is high in the early morning sky now, and the weather is starting to cool off a bit here. Here is the configuration of the Galilean moons that I saw on September 11. This is from the Sky&Telescope on-line Jovian moon display.

I've even been able to do some "sidewalk astronomy" in the style of guru John Dobson: I have the telescope set up on my driveway, and I offer the pre-dawn dog walkers a look at Jupiter and Galileo's moons. They are always very pleased. It is a nice way to start the day!

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Pale Blue Dot

I'm reading Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot." I found this beautiful video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

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Take a look through the Chromoscope!

On this site you start out with a 360 degree image of the Earth's night sky. You move around using the mouse and you can zoom in and out. (I've zoomed in a bit on Orion in the image above.) Then the fun begins: You can look at the sky in different frequency ranges -- from radio to gamma ray. Very nice: http://www.chromoscope.net/

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