Aylesbury Astronomical Society
Registered Charity Number 276313
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AYLESBURY ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
What’s Up?! February 2011
Aylesbury Astronomical Society Newsletter Issue No. 514
Newsletter and website
Please forward any contributions for insertion to the Editor. (See link at end.)
Newsletters will be forwarded by email to as many members as possible saving postage, printing and, you can usually have this newsletter sooner. Please forward your email address to the Editor (details at end) not all email addresses seem to be accurate.
I appreciate that many still prefer a hard copy which will still be available.
Please tick your name at the monthly meetings to prevent me posting hard copies if already received.
Visit the AAS web site at www.aylesbury-astronomy.org.uk and if you have any comments or suggestions, email the Webmaster.
OBSERVING:
Observing nights Friday 11th Feb and Friday 25th Feb – please check with a committee member before attending.
Visitors to Observatory:
9th & 16th March (TBC), Pitstone & Ivinghoe Cubs.
11th or 25th March, Young Farmers.
The Winchendon Observatory is available at any time to keyholders. Keys are available from Steve Edwards, 01296 427098 or steven.l.edwards@ntlworld.com.
We ask that you check clashes with visiting groups (or come to help!) and attend with at least one other person in case of mishap.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
All at 7.30 pm Scout Hut, Oakfield Road, Aylesbury unless otherwise stated.
Monday 7th Feb: Simon Leach “What goes up should stay up providing it got up there in the first place”!
Monday 7th March: Speaker to be confirmed.
Monday 4th April: This meeting may move to Winchendon Observatory on Friday 8th April. Watch this space!
May 9th: AGM.
Monday 6th June: Visiting Speaker to be confirmed.
Saturday 9th July: BBQ at Winchendon Observatory.
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?
The Moon: 3rd – new moon; 11th – first quarter; 18th - full; 24th - last quarter.
The Moon will be close to: Jupiter on the 6th & 7th; Saturn on 21st & 22nd; Venus on 28th.
Mercury is unlikely to be seen this month it is in superior conjunction (same side as the Sun) on the 25th.
Venus is moving back towards the Sun and as the angle of the ecliptic changes and becoming much lower in the pre-dawn south-east sky. Very bright at around magnitude -4 so very easy to spot if you are up and around walking the cat.
Mars reaches inferior conjunction with the Sun on the 4th, so will not be seen this month.
Jupiter is now sinking low into the western evening sky. So not many more chances left to watch the re-development of the South Equatorial Band.
Saturn is visible after midnight in Virgo in the south west of the night sky. Saturn will be at its highest pre-dawn. The “white storm” has not yet abated.
Uranus & Neptune are both becoming more difficult to see in the western sky after sunset
Ursa Major and Leo are prominent in this month’s night sky and this area is a great galaxy hunting area. Speaking of hunters, Orion is also in good view and if you fire the arrow backwards from the bow, this line goes above the star Sirius in Canis Major. The name comes from a well-known tennis player who often said, “Can’t you see Sirius?!” Sirius is actually a double star system at a distance of 2.6 parsecs *, a mere stone’s throw away – one reason for its apparent brightness. Sirius is twice as big as our Sun and at magnitude -1.46, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Sirius B was a large angry red giant which blew up some 120 m years ago, now content as a white dwarf.
Sirius is also known colloquially as the "Dog Star", reflecting its prominence in its constellation, Canis Major (Big Dog). The heliacal rising of Sirius marked the flooding of the Nile in Ancient Egypt and the "dog days" of summer for the ancient Greeks, while to the Polynesians it marked winter and was an important star for navigation around the Pacific Ocean.
The Algol variable star which can be followed with your naked eye fades from its usual magnitude of 2.1 to 3.4 at the following times: 10th 03.42; 13th 00.06; 15th 20.54.
* The parsec (parallax of one arcsecond; symbol: pc) is the length of the “long side” of a triangle where the side opposite to an angle of one second of arc (ie. 1/3600 of a degree) is 1 astronomical unit in length (150 m km). 1 pc equals 31 trillion (31×1012) kilometres (about 19 trillion miles), 206 265 AU, or about 3.26 light-years. (Yes, I had to look this up too!)
Should you be travelling to sunnier climate in lower latitudes, look out for Centaurus just south of Libra which is just visible in southern Europe in April-May. Centaurus contains the Alpha Centauri system, a triple star system consisting of a bright binary star to which the much fainter red dwarf Proxima Centauri is gravitationally bound; Proxima is the nearest known star to the Sun. In addition to Alpha Centauri (the 4th brightest star in the sky), a second first magnitude star, Hadar, is part of Centaurus.
One of the stars in Centaurus (BPM 37093) is a white dwarf whose carbon atoms are thought to have formed a crystalline structure. Since diamond also consists of carbon arranged in a crystalline lattice (though of a different configuration), scientists have nicknamed this star "Lucy" after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
It’s life Kepler but only as we know it
Astronomers have identified some 54 new planets where conditions may be suitable for life of which 5 of the candidates are Earth-sized. The finds include a unique sextet of planets around a single star and 170 further solar systems. The Kepler space telescope has now found more than 1200 exoplanets.
The Kepler telescope has been staring into a small, fixed patch of the sky in the direction of Cygnus and Lyra. It looks for the minuscule dimming of starlight as fine as 0.001% as a planet passes between us and the star. These "candidates" are usually then confirmed by ground-based observations.
In just its first few months of operation, Kepler has spotted 68 Earth-sized candidates, 288 so-called "super-Earths" that are up to twice Earth's size, 662 that are Neptune-sized, and 184 that are even larger but no little green men or women as yet.
THE KEPLER SPACE TELESCOPE
This week, the team confirmed a solar system of 6 large exoplanets tightly circling an 8 billion year old star, Kepler-11, that lies about 2000 light-years away.
"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki, who heads Kepler's science programme at Nasa's Ames Research Center. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water."
The bountiful nature of the data from just a few months of observing time from Kepler makes profound suggestions about the preponderance of exoplanets in general, and about the existence of multiple planets around single stars in particular. "Even in first four months of Kepler data, a rich population of multiples appeared, and we recognised this was going to be a very important discovery," said David Latham, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Resources: Astronomy Web Sites
Starguide:
www.topastronomer.com/StarCharts/Planisphere.aspx
This is quite good for novices like me. Planet guide above suggests looking for Saturn after midnight in Virgo. Go to this site, put in 1 am and the sky is shown for your latitude giving Virgo towards the south west.
Made in Britain?
http://www.theastronomer.org/index.html
This appears to be a British web site (where the net is swamped with American ones)! I have not yet taken the time to trawl all through this – let me know what you think.
What a shower!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteor_showers
Obviously this is automatically out of date but this web site shows we are constantly bombarded by inter-stellar debris. Happy wishes.
Resources: Cheap telescope at Aldi
At the time of going to press, there is a £20 “spotter scope” for sale in Aldi. This Optus 20-60 x 60 is technically a monocular or half a binocular. The lenses are coated, at this price it probably is not prismatic but if you just wanted something to roll around in the back of the car for those odd moments or take on holiday, this might suit. Also useful for bird/animal watching. The table-top stand is not so good.
Note this is information, not a recommendation. By the time I’ve had the chance to really try it out, it will probably won’ t be available.
CONTACTS www.aylesbury-astronomy.org.uk
Chairman:
Ralph Campbell 81 Narbeth Drive, AYLESBURY, HP20 1NY 01296 421328 chairman@aylesbury-astronomy.org.uk
Secretary:
Sue Macdonald 107 Willis Road, Haddenham, AYLESBURY, HP17 8HG 01844 299031 secretary@aylesbury-astronomy.org.uk
Editor:
Simon Leach 28 Vicarage Road, Winslow, Bucks, MK18 3BE 01296 713061 editor@aylesbury-astronomy.org.uk
