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What's the cat constellation? Lynx? Leo Major? Leo Minor? All three actually, giving the cat family some permanence among the stars. So, in honor of cats in space, I present the space cats here at thespacewriter.com in honor of Friday Cat Blogging!
Pixel, named for the Cat Who Walked through Walls
Miranda, named for one of the Uranian moons.
Lazarus Long, "Laz" for short. Named for a famous Heinlein character.
So, I have this theory that cats will rule the spaceways someday. They seem made for space travel, as long as you make sure there's enough cat food (and, of course, a sandbox) for their needs. Those are things I thought about when I wrote Larry Cat In Space (one of the most popular planetarium shows I've done 28-plus years of doing this). We got the cat some food for his journey, but sort of forgot about the sandbox. Next time we'll do better!
I was going through my filing cabinets recently and found a series of letters I got back in the late 1980s from a young woman in Zimbabwe. I'm not sure how she found me, but she wrote to ask me how she could become an astronaut. All her life, she wrote, she loved the stars. She used to go out and make up her own constellations, in addition to the stories her people (the Shona) told about the stars. Once she even sent me several pages of drawings she made of the night sky, the stars all connected with lines to show me her constellations.
I sent her some astronomy books and encouraged her to keep studying science as long as she could. She didn't have a lot of hope that she'd be allowed to study astronomy since her country needed doctors and computer programmers and more "practical" scientists before it needed astronomers. Eventually we lost track of each other, and in the years since, Zimbabwe has fallen onto very hard times under its current government. So, I don't know what happened to my friend. I hope that she has been able to persevere and study science, and that she looks out at the stars and still does her astronomy. And, now that I think about her again, I'm going to do a little searching out of Shona and Zimbabwean understanding of the stars and the cosmos.
We went to a planetarium meeting this past week. There are several each year in various parts of the world, and this one was in Florida in Cape Canaveral. As you might expect, the talk of the meeting was all about planetarium presentations and techniques, along with a good smattering of other topics. We also had a chance to see a Delta rocket launch, carrying a satellite into space. I do like seeing launches!
Delta launch, June 21, 2006. By Carolyn Collins Petersen.
We also went out to the Kennedy Space Center for a tour and presentation, and had a chance to see the space shuttle Discovery being readied for its July 1 launch. It was the closest I'd been to a shuttle since the time we went and did some onsite photography in the Orbiter Processing Facility in the late 1980s and stood directly underneath a shuttle to take pics of the tiles.
Space shuttle Discovery on the pad, June 22, 2006 By Carolyn Collins Petersen.
One of our guest speakers this past week (and our speaker list included people from KSC and JPL, as well), was Phil Plait, known to many as the Bad Astronomer. His website (Bad Astronomy) is a great place to read about astronomy, space science, and the crazy theories and ideas that people come up with and claim as "science." Phil's an old friend and I thoroughly enjoyed his talk on Friday night. If you ever get a chance to hear him, make the time.
I left the meeting wondering what our next steps in space will be. Interestingly the history of planetariums in the U.S. is tied quite closely to the rise of the Space Age. These unique round rooms are changing though, just as our space exploration is morphing into something possibly unrecognizable. Shrinking funding hampers the vision we need to continue space exploration at levels once promised by our first achievements in space. The same thing happens to planetariums, which are also morphing before our eyes. Sure, we're still going to space, sort of. We're exploring Mars with robots and learning amazing things with Hubble Space Telescope (although with the possible loss of the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the "who knows if we'll ever send the last servicing mission to HST" attitude among some mission planners, it's hard to tell what HST's future is now, even though it is still equipped with other working instruments.)
And sure, we're still building planetariums, sort of. But many are closing down, just as NASA is having to choose between funding science and building out the space stations. No easy choices, there, either. New theaters are coming equipped with fulldome video, which forces many other, new choices on planetarium professionals. It's a changing world, and this week's meetings brought the changes in two of my interests—planetarium facilities and the U.S. space agency—into sharp focus.
One of the most fascinating things about astronomy is the incredibly rich diversity of objects we can study in the universe. Take galaxies, for example. These collections of stars fall into so many types, based on the shapes they have, that astronomers are continually sorting them into ever-finer "bins." When I was first in school, we learned there were three basic galaxy types: spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars. Today, as we study more and more galaxies, we find that these gross distinctions do hold up, but within each category there are many variations, and what appear to be some transitional states between different types.
Spirals are pretty much what their name sounds like: roughly circular-shaped collections of stars, gas, and dust with arms spiraling in to a central core. We live in a spiral galaxy, and more than half of all galaxies observed are spirals. One of the most notable things (among many) about spirals is that they are studded with stellar birthplaces. Some spirals, including our Milky Way, also have black holes at their hearts.
When you look at a spiral galaxy in a full view, you can see the arm structure. In this image of M101, a spiral that lies about 26 million light-years away from us, you can also see soft, fuzzy looking regions in the spiral arms. These are clouds of gas and dust where stars form.
The other main type of galaxy is the elliptical. These are the ones that don't have spiral arms and not a lot of other structure.They are simply large, oblong collections of stars with densely packed central bulges. Some have supermassive black holes at their hearts.
The big question, which does not have a simple answer, is how do galaxies get to be spirals or ellipticals? (We'll leave out irregulars for now. They need their own entry sometime.) Does one type become another type in a sort of galactic evolution scenario? Is there a kind of galaxy that is somewhere between spirals and ellipticals?
The answers are far from complete. One scenario has spirals merging over billions of years to become ellipticals. It's a complex one, and observations are giving support to the idea, because astronomers are finding galaxies in many stages of merger, and some of the resulting interactions seem to be making galaxies that look just like ellipticals. And, mergers are an important way that galaxies are assembled. Our own Milky Way is still "collecting" other galaxies smaller than itself in a case of cosmic cannibalism.
There ARE galaxies that look like they're stuck somewhere between being a spiral or an elliptical. These are the lenticulars. They have disks like spirals, but their central bulges are more like ellipticals. If you view one edge-on, as we see in this Hubble Space Telescope image, it looks like a spiral viewed from the edge.
There is an intriguing element to this galaxy, and that's the dust lane that seems to divide it in half. NGC 5866 also has a substantial collection of young blue stars in its disk, with older, redder stars at its heart. The only thing it doesn't seem to have is spiral arms. But, those blue stars tell us that the galaxy has recently undergone episodes of star birth. Coupled with the fact that the disk is slightly warped, we have the possibility that this galaxy might have had some sort of gravitational interaction with another one (or more) a long time ago. That would explain the bursts of starbirth and the warped disk.
But why no arms? Did it once have them, along with rich regions of starbirth? If so, what happened to the gas and stars that used to be in the galaxy disk? If an interaction is the culprit, then it would have stripped out the gas and stars and somehow affected the structure of the galaxy. And that would give us with the edgy galaxy we see today. Stay tuned!
Here in the northern hemisphere the most northerly point of the Sun's path across the sky is rapidly approaching. June 21 marks the longest day and the shortest night of the year. This same day brings the shortest day of winter for you folks in the southern hemisphere, with the longest night to follow. I've noticed the change of the day length more directly lately, since the sunset point is now almost directly aligned with one of the windows in my office and if I'm working after dinner (which I almost always am), it's shining right in my eyes.
So, solstice is the latin word for "sun still." It doesn't mean the Sun literally stops in the sky. It couldn't, since the Sun's apparent motion across the sky is caused by the Earth's turning on its axis. It only LOOKS like the Sun is crossing from East to West each day.
If you watch the sunrise and sunset points each day for a year, you'll notice that the Sun rises and sets farther and farther north from December 21 to June 21, and then rises and sets farther and farther north from June 21 to December 21 (if you're in the northern hemisphere). On December 21 and June 21, the Sun seems to pause in its southern and northern migrations. Those are the solstice times.
Why the north-south migration? Again, it's the motion of the Earth that makes it look like the Sun is wandering north-south. There's a cool little movie here that shows how the tilt of our planet's equatorial plane with respect to the Sun is responsible for the change of seasons. It also affects which part of the Earth is tilted toward the Sun throughout the year.
Now, it's no coincidence that some of the best parties of the year are held around the solstices. In ancient times, the winter solstice was the darkest, coldest time of year, and people held parties (or performed ceremonies) to mark the time and hope for a new year to begin (with its promise of warmth and life). At the summer solstice, people partied because the weather was good, crops were growing, food was plentiful. We still celebrate at both solstices today (and some religions have ceremonies and rituals at these times, too). I like to think of these times as celebrations of motion in the universe—motions of our planet around the Sun and on its axis. And every planet does this, so every planet has solstices, each in its own way.
Modern folks aren't so tuned to the change of seasons as the ancients were. But, we can still go outside each day and make notes of sunrise and sunset positions throughout the year. And, there's still time to party at summer and winter solstice, just like our ancestors did. So, if you're in the northern hemisphere, take time out on the 21st of June to celebrate the longest day of the year. If you're south of the equator, here's hoping you're warm, safe, and looking forward to the spring and summertime weather you'll be enjoying while we have autumn and winter later this year.
Parkes Radio Telescope (photo by John Sarkissian, CSIRO Parkes Observatory)
Later this year I'm going to a meeting in Australia, and while there we'll be taking a tour of some of the country's prominent astronomy facilities. One of them is the venerable Parkes Observatory, famous from the 2000 movie The Dish It is a great movie, by the way. One of the few that brings the world of science to the small screen without resorting to swooshing spacecraft bombing each other at faster-than-light speeds. (Nothing wrong with science fiction, I happen to like it a lot myself, but sometimes I like to see things that show the science I know and love, too.)
I'm especially interested in the radio telescopes of Australia, since I may be working on a radio astronomy media project over the next couple of years, and want to see as many as possible. Such facilities are fascinating places and I've been to a few over the years. Why, there's one not far from my house in Massachusetts, called Haystack Observatory, and they are who I'll be working with on my media project.
Another place I have visited a few times over the years is the Very Large Array, in Socorro, New Mexico. It was featured in the movie Contact along with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which I haven't been to, but hope to see someday).
Now, in The Dish, the Parkes radio telescope is shown as it was used in 1969 to relay video from the Moon's surface during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Of course, the telescope has a longer history than that. Among other things, it has been used to do the Parkes Continuum Surveys, finding and cataloguing various radio sources in the sky. It is currently being used to study pulsars and many other radio sources continually. So, aside from the brief moment of fame this telescope gained in the late 60s, it has been online as an astronomy observatory for many decades.
Haystack Observatory is also a multi-decade achiever in radio astronomy, geodesy (the study of what's going on with the planet we live on by using radio measurements of the stars), and atmospheric sciences. This observatory's ongoing mission should provide a rich field from which I can mine for my project.
Finally, VLA and Arecibo are also major contenders in the radio astronomy world. They continually track such sources as pulsars, black holes, and activities at the cores of galaxies. The way they were portrayed in the movie Contact, as search agents for extraterrestrial signals from aliens, is mostly a movie fiction. Arecibo was used some years back to beam a signal out to space, and data from Arecibo is scanned by the Seti@home folks for signals that might be from other civilizations. But, trust me, there's nobody sitting at VLA with a headset on listening for signals. That's a nice drama point, though. I happen to think that the better drama lies in the solid achievements these facilities have made to our understanding of the cosmos. And, I look forward to many more years of discoveries from all of the world's radio astronomy facilities!
What with Blogger being up and down the past few days, it has been difficult to get on and write an entry. Things seem to have settled down, so here I am again.
I've been thinking about the past year's worth of work I've done for Griffith Observatory, now that it's almost all done but the shouting. We have a few clean-up details to do with the exhibits, but my part of the project is just about done. If you go to the Griffith Observatory web site, you'll see the latest pictures of the exhibits being put into place. It's amazing to see the place taking shape, and the words I so carefully crafted going up on the walls and exhibit panels.
I've had a lot of people ask me what the project has been like, and I've been invited to write an article or two on the process of writing exhibits such as these. As soon as the project is completely off my desk, I'll settle in to write those articles. For now, though, I can say a few things about the experience. As I think over the whole process, I have a lot of very good memories of accomplishment, many memories of hard work, sometimes frustration, sometimes complete madness. It was fun, it took every skill I had to pull off the writing, and it taught me so much and gave me so many new experiences. We got through it and even though not everything is finished yet, it will be soon. And it's turning out beautifully.
For most of my writing—from books to documentaries to stories to software documentation for planetarium products—I have to get inside the mind of the reader/user/viewer and figure out what story I want them to get from the product I'm creating. For Griffith, I had an additional "role" to take on as writer—the "voice" of the observatory. And make no mistake, the Voice WAS and IS a role. It was not the voice of any one person, not even me. It was a construct I created in my mind, with a LOT of input from others, and that voice is what helped me tell the story of astronomy in th exhibits.
In a way, I suppose that creating that role of the Voice was not much different from the process an actor goes through to understand a character's part in a performance. As it happened I WAS taking some acting classes during the time I was writing for Griffith, and many of the preparations I made for classwork were quite similar to what I did to create the Voice.
So, when this fall rolls around and Griffith Observatory re-opens, and we go out for the opening, I'll be anxiously waiting around the halls, hoping that the Voice I created (with the help of so many artists, scientists, and others) is doing its job, bringing astronomy to the huge universe of people who will be visiting Griffith Observatory over the next decades. While it won't be just ME up there on the walls, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that the words I worked so hard to create will come to life with the help of the Voice.
Well this is cool. It appears that Saturn's moon Enceladus has tipped over on its side sometime in the recent past. It didn't happen last week, but sometime after the moon formed and was reasonably stable, something happened to cause it to roll over. It probably wasn't collision with something else, but more likely was due to the motion of material inside this moon. That would have rearranged the mass distribution (that is, where the mass is located) inside, and caused it to tip over. The result is that a warm, low-density blob of material is now currently at Enceladus's south pole. Now, you'd expect the south pole to be the coldest place on Enceladus, but it's not, and this temperature anomaly in Cassini's data is what clued scientists into the unusual explanation.
Enceladus has always been considered something of an unusual place in the Saturnian system (which has its share of odd moons, including Titan). It is continually heated due to the gravitationally caused tidal stretching and squeezing as it orbits Saturn. The heat has to escape from the core somehow, and as it does it expands and rises toward the surface. This causes the surface to expand, and since the surface is icy cold, it cracks under the stress from the upwelling material. It's a continual squeeze play that changes the surface all the time.
I remember the first time I saw Enceladus in a picture sent back by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. It was astonishing to see an icy world with such evidence of activity underneath. Only at the time, nobody was sure what we'd see. Now that Cassini is giving us more views over a long time period, it's clear that this moon is far from a frozen, dead world. In the words of many a bad science fiction character, geologically speaking, "It's alive!!!"
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Adot's Notblog A fellow traveler blogger and astronomy enthusiast!
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