Mission 14: Three Astronomical Treats for Naked Eyes, Binoculars, and Telescopes

Mission Objectives: Bright Stars, Constellation, Open Cluster, Nebula

Equipment: Free star map, Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Related Missions: Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster

Introduction: I’m in Oklahoma for the holidays. My best observation here so far didn’t require any optical aid at all. Remember last month when I was skunked in my quest to view the young crescent moon within 40 hours of new? On Thursday, December 17, the night after I got into town, I saw the 38-hour-old crescent moon in the western twilight over Oklahoma City, thus fulfilling the last requirement I had left for the Astronomical League’s Lunar Club. I e-mailed in my completed log sheets on Saturday.

Instead of bringing a little scope with me, I borrowed back the one I had loaned to my brother. It’s a Synta MC90, another 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain, but unlike my other little Mak it’s a short focal length, widefield scope. I got it out last night to show my nieces the waxing crescent moon, Jupiter, and the Pleiades.

Instructions: Speaking of the Pleiades, they’re one of the best astronomical treats for a clear winter evening. Finding them is easy: look to the east after dark, and find a little knot of stars that looks a bit like a cooking pan. This is not the Little Dipper, although you’d be surprised at how many people think so on first spotting it. If you have a hard time finding the Pleiades, look for the 3/M/W of Cassiopeia, head past the Double Cluster to Perseus, and follow the lower of the two sweeping lines of stars that make up that constellation; the cluster is just off the end of the line. The Pleiades are pretty to the naked eye and probably best in binoculars. All but the widest-field scopes will have a hard time putting the whole cluster in the eyepiece, and even if you manage it, it’s prettier if you can see the cluster as a cluster, with a little open space around it. So this is one of those times that–in my opinion–binoculars trump a telescope.

If you have found the Pleiades, drop straight down (east) to find a V-shaped association of stars. These are the Hyades, another open cluster, in the constellation Taurus. One leg of the V is anchored by a big red giant star, Aldebaran, whose color is obvious even to the naked eye. You can pan around the Hyades with a scope if you like, but the cluster is so big that it really demands binoculars; binos fall right into the sweet spot of putting a lot more stars in your eyes without overly narrowing the view or getting you lost.

From the Pleiades, on to the Hyades, and farther on east you come to Orion, the most magnificent constellation in the sky. Find the three bright stars in a line that form his belt, and then three dimmer stars in another line that form the sword hanging from the belt. The middle of the three stars in the sword is not a single star at all. Rather it is M42,  the Great Nebula in Orion, a vast cloud of gas and dust, dozens of light years across, which is illuminated by the bright young stars burning within.

M42 is what I call a total object: like the moon, it looks good no matter what you use to look at it, and the more you look, the better it gets. With the naked eye, the nebula it is a faintly fuzzy star at the heart of a striking and majestic constellation. With binoculars, you’ll see a bit of nebulosity set amidst the rich starfields of Orion’s sword. In a small telescope, the full glory of the nebula starts to unfold, with glowing streamers of gas and dust spread out like an eagle’s wings. The central star will split apart into a group of four, called the Trapezium. Pour on more aperture and magnification and the view just keeps getting better. If the skies are clear and steady you may pick up a couple more stars in the Trapezium, and the surrounding clouds of gas and dust will start to look like clouds, with delicate knots and swirls.

And on it goes. You are not going to exhaust M42, not in a lifetime of observing. People with telescopes that require large trailers for transport, who have seen M42 literally thousands of times in their observing careers, still gaze into the heart of the nebula for minutes and even hours at a time. The bigger the scope, the darker the skies, the longer you look, the more there is to see.

But, hey, don’t think that if you don’t have a monster scope it’s not worth looking. Remember, M42 is a total object; it looks good at any scale. If the thought of setting up a scope in the cold and dark does not appeal, at least pop outside for a five minute session with binoculars. Make it a present to yourself.

Happy holidays!

The persistence of mystery

Wired has a story about the hexagonal storm around Saturn’s north pole.

I love it. Things like this, the methane that comes and goes on Mars, the disequilibrium in Venus’s atmosphere, and transient lunar phenomena, are useful reminders that the other worlds of the solar system are, in fact, worlds. Our plumbing of the mysteries of these worlds, even for so comforting and familiar an object as the moon, is not even really started. There are plenty of physical processes here on Earth that are not well understood, so we should feel pride, but no comfort, that we have sent a handful of probes and gotten a little dust on the boots of our astronauts and the wheels of our rovers. Just think how much we’ll know after a geologist has spent as much time on Mars as Spirit and Opportunity. On one hand, our knowledge then will dwarf our knowledge now; on the other, our exploration of Mars will then be just beginning in earnest.

In Cosmos, Carl Sagan said, “How lucky we are to live in this time, the first moment in human history when we are, in fact, visiting other worlds.” I’m on board with that.

Hat tip to Mike.

Mission 13: Pegasus to Andromeda

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Galaxy

Equipment: Sky map, Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 5 minutes

Related Missions: Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster

Instructions: Go outside after dark, look up high in the east, and find a big square of stars surrounding a whole lot of nuthin’. That’s the Great Square of Pegasus. If it doesn’t jump out at you, punch it up in Stellarium, print out  a free sky map, or follow the other middle leg of the Cassiopeia W, the one that doesn’t point to the Double Cluster.

The Great Square of Pegasus isn’t all in Pegasus; the star at the northeast corner actually belongs to the neighboring constellation of Andromeda. But the square is such a handy signpost that most people ignore the official constellation boundaries as set out by the International Astronomical Union.

That northeast corner star is the anchor for two almost identical chains of stars, one of which looks like a fainter copy of the other. Go from the second star in the brighter chain to the second star in the dimmer one, and then on in the same direction for an equal distance, and you’ll come to M31,  the Great Nebula in Andromeda.

M31 was named Back In The Day when the term “nebula” was used for any hazy patch in the sky. These days “nebula” means an interstellar cloud of gas and dust, any one of the many that litter the arms of spiral galaxies. They come in lots of flavors, which I won’t cover here; the important thing is that nebulae are comparatively tiny parts of galaxies.

M31, or the Andromeda Galaxy, is not just a galaxy; for stargazers in the northern hemisphere, it’s THE galaxy. From a dark site you can see it with the naked eye, and in fact at two million light years away, it is the most distant object that can be easily observed without optical aid (I qualified that with “easily” because there are a handful of more distant galaxies that can also be seen with the Mark 1 eyeball; pick up the current issue of Astronomy magazine and check out Stephen O’Meara’s column to learn more).

In binoculars, the Andromeda Galaxy looks like a pretty oval haze with a bright core. As you go from binoculars to small telescope to big telescopes, the amount of visible detail increases but the field of view usually decreases, and it can be hard or impossible to fit the whole thing into the field of view of a long focal-length telescope. Think of that, a galaxy so big and so close you can’t see it all with most scopes! It’s so close that people with monster Dobs regularly amuse themselves by picking out its globular clusters, whereas small-scope folks like me find the globs in our own galaxy to be plenty challenging.

The very, very small version of Rob Gendlers' very, very large M31 mosaic.

If you want to see M31 in all its glory, you must get over to Rob Gendler’s site and check out the stupendously huge mosaics on his galaxies page. One of his images has a resolution of 21,904 x 14,454 pixels and at least as of 2009 was the highest resolution image ever made of a spiral galaxy, period.

You may also know that the Andromeda Galaxy is destined to collide with our own Milky Way in a few billion years, setting off massive bouts of star formation as the two repeatedly pass through each other and eventually merge into something bigger and stranger, probably an elliptical but possibly a super-spiral or even a ring galaxy. Should be a pretty good show for whoever is around to see it.

Don’t wait up though. M31 is high overhead in the early evening and pretty good viewing until the wee hours. Go check it out.

Friday pretty picture two-fer

First up, check out this awesome polar ring galaxy from APOD:

Ring galaxies are weird beasts to begin with, with a giant ring of stars, gas, and dust around a central core instead of the usual spiral arms. Polar ring galaxies are even weirder, in that the ring is offset from the axis of the central disk. Think about what it would be like to live on a planet in such a galaxy: depending on where the planet was located and the season, there might be two “milky ways” of light arching over the night sky.

And speaking of the Milky Way, check out these awesome posters celebrating the view of the night sky from the US National Parks. The posters were created by Dr. Tyler Nordgren, who toured the national parks a couple of years ago to document the night sky and educate people about light pollution. I got to see him speak at an SBVAA meeting last year, and I’m looking forward to his forthcoming astrophotography book, which will chronicle his experiences on his national park tour.

Hubble Advent Calendar!

This giant, beautiful Space Thing is Really Out There.

Once again, the Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is doing a Hubble advent calendar. Every day between now and Christmas, you’ll get another brain-exploding picture of some unspeakably huge and distant space thing. Point your browsers here.

Mission 12: Nova in Eridanus

Mission Objectives: Bright Stars, Constellation, Nova

Equipment: Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Introduction: One of the cool things about this hobby is that the sky is not unchanging. Although we can’t predict when new goodies like bright comets and novae will occur, they do come around with fair regularity. Two years ago, when I was just getting into amateur astronomy, comet 17P/Holmes suddenly blew up to naked eye visibility. I just got an AstroAlert from Sky & Telescope about a nova in the constellation Eridanus, close to the bright star Rigel in Orion.

Introduction: This is one you can’t do immediately after dark. But neither will you have to stay up obscenely late or get up obscenely early. By 9:00 or 10:00 PM, Orion should be far enough above the horizon to make this a cinch.

The first step is to locate the constellation Orion. Orion is the most striking and instantly recognizable of all constellations, so it’s just a matter of looking southeast at the right time. Find the straight line of three stars between bright red Betelgeuse and even brighter Rigel, and you’ve got it. Lots of good deep sky targets in Orion, including the incomparable Great Nebula, M42, but those are missions for other evenings.

Once you’ve located Orion, you’ll have to star-hop to the nova. From Rigel, you can follow the arc of bright stars that marks the eastern end of the constellation Eridanus (green arrow). From the third star in the chain, drop down (south) to two close stars that mark the head of the stick figure shown on these charts. Alternatively, look south of Orion to find the stars that form the outline of Lepus, the Hare, and line up the stars forming the bunny’s shoulder and the top of its head to get to the stick figure’s left foot (orange arrow).

A word about these charts: they were generated by the AAVSO, or American Association of Variable Star Observers, which has a gizmo for generating finder charts for practically all of the variable stars one might want to hunt down visually. I added the colored arrows, and the stick figure is just an asterism–a chance alignment of star–that I noticed and found useful. Star hopping is subject to individual preference, so if this way of getting there doens’t work for you, generate your own finder charts and find your own way. I don’t say that to be flip or callous; sitting down with a red flashlight, some blank finder charts, and a telescope and finding (and drawing) your own asterisms is very satisfying and a great way to learn your way around the sky.

Another thing about the charts: many stars have a two or three digit number next to them. These are not identification numbers but magnitudes, so that variable star observers can determine the brightness of their target star by comparing it to other stars in the same field. Following standard practice, the decimal points are eliminated on the charts so they can’t be confused with stars. A star with the number 81 next to it shines with a magnitude of 8.1, too faint for the naked eye but within easy reach of binoculars.

Back to the stick figure. Note that stars marking the head, heart, left hand, and left foot all have close companions, which should help you distinguish them from all the other stars out there. Once you’re sure you’ve got it, find a chain of three fainter stars trending southeast from the stick figure’s left hand. Nova Eridani 2009 forms a triangle with the outermost stars in that chain. Right now it’s shining around magnitude 8.4, so it should be almost identical in brightness to the star just below it marked 81. Don’t confuse them!

Also notice that the charts are all shown with north to the top and east to the left, just as this part of the sky looks to the naked eye, binoculars, and right angle correct image (RACI) finderscopes. Straight-through finderscopes, straight-through refractors, and Newtonian reflectors will show the sky rotated by 180 degrees. No problem, just rotate the chart upside down and keep on truckin’. Refractors and cassegrain scopes using a star diagonal will show the sky rightside up, but flipped left to right. You can either flip the image ahead of time in an image-processing program, or do it mentally in your head, or–the oldest and easiest method–turn the chart over and shine a flashlight through from the other side.

So what’s going on out there? Novae are giant thermonuclear explosions that occur when a white dwarf star accumulates enough hydrogen on its surface to undergo a chain reaction. Usually the hydrogen is slurped off the surface of a companion star, perhaps a red giant. This can happen over and over again; most novae probably “go off” once every 1000 to 100,000 years, and a few like RS Ophiuchi go off every few decades.

This explosion of hydrogen on the surface of the star is in stark contrast to a Type 1a supernova, which also involves a white dwarf accreting matter from a companion. In those supernovae, the white dwarfs accumulate enough matter to approach the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.38 solar masses, at which point carbon fusion starts in their cores, followed by oxygen fusion, followed by total destabilization of the star. The star detonates in an explosion 5 billion times as bright as the sun, with a shock wave that travels at 3% of the speed of light. Neat trick, but needless to say, one that a star can only pull off once.

Fortunately for us, Nova Eridani 2009 isn’t going anywhere. However, it will dim over the coming months, so get out there and see something new.

For more info, see the Sky & Tel writeup and the AAVSO updates here, here, and here.

Mission 11: Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Open Cluster, Bright Star

Equipment: Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 3 minutes

Instructions: Go outside after dark, face northeast, and look for the sideways W. If you’re not sure which W is which, take a free sky map. The W is Cassiopeia, which lies right smack in the middle of the winter Milky Way.

Cassiopeia is a deep sky wonderland in binoculars and telescopes. There are more star clusters than you can shake a stick at–a decent portable sky atlas will show a dozen or more. Even without an atlas, it’s an awesome area to scan around in with optics of any size.

I have a confession, though. Almost every time I go out to observe in the winter, I give Cassiopeia a quick once-over and then leave. Why? Because there’s an even better pair of clusters lurking over the border of the neighboring constellation, Perseus, and Cassiopeia is such a good pointer that you might think it was put there for that purpose. Follow the inner leg of the shallow half of the W about 2/3 of the way to the next bright star, and you’ll find the Double Cluster, NGC 869 and 884. Keep in mind the effect of sky rotation–by 8:30 PM, Cassiopeia is an M centered over the North Star, and by midnight it’s a sigma to the northwest. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The Double Cluster is one of the finest objects in the night sky, and almost always makes it onto lists with names like “Top 10 Telescopic Targets”. I’m not going to show you any pictures of the clusters themselves, because this is one place where pictures simply don’t do justice. You’ll have to get out under the night sky and see for yourself.

Once you’ve had your mind blown by the Double Cluster, keep on cruising in the same direction and follow the chain of bright stars to Mirphak, or Alpha Persei, the brightest star in the constellation Perseus. Mirphak is surrounded by a broad field of stars called the Alpha Persei association; it is too big to fit in the field of view of most telescopes (except possibly fast focal ratio, widefield scopes like the Astroscan), but is instead one of the best binocular targets in the entire sky. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Mission 10: The Great Glob

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Globular cluster

Equipment: Sky map, Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 5 minutes

Related Missions: Summer Triangle

Introduction: This is a weird time of year. The classic “summer” constellations are still visible right after sunset, and by bedtime the winter constellations–especially Orion–are already coming over the eastern horizon. Of course the globe of the sky is (relatively) unchanging and you can see an angular span of the same width on any night of the year. Nothing is actually accelerated right now. It only feels odd because of the associations these stars have for me. Say “Hercules” and I think warm summer evenings and junebugs. The Pleiades, on the other hand, conjure up memories of gloves, stocking hats, and the crystaline quality of the air on a cold winter’s night. And yet you can see these things on opposite sides of the sky at the same time!

Owing to my long hiatus this fall, I let a few of the great summer objects almost get away from me. Meanwhile, a host of excellent autumn targets are high overhead even at dusk. So we’ve got no time to waste.

Instructions: Find Vega in the western sky right after sunset, and then look below it to find the back-to-back trapezoids that make up the body of Hercules. I strongly recommend taking a planisphere or sky map, such as one of the free seasonal ones here or here. If you’re like me, you can look at the map indoors, fix the points and relationships in your mind’s eye, go outside and instantly get lost. Hercules doesn’t have any first magnitude stars to help you orient, and there are far too many medium-brightness stars, so the number of possible trapezoids you can construct is large. This is where the directions I can give break down; there is just no substitute for having the map in your hand, especially since the free ones are so good these days. See how many of the stars west of Vega you can see with the naked eye, and then draw a trail that will guide you from Vega down to where you need to go. The path you find will be the one that makes the most sense to you.

You’ll know for sure when you’ve got the right trapezoids, because 2/3 of the way along the western edge of the northern trapezoid is a fuzzy ball. This is M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. If you are under super dark skies you might just make it out with the naked eye as a dim and blurry star. Under all but the worst city lights, you can sweep between the two boundary stars and pick it up in binoculars. In 10×50s it is an attractive ball of fuzz, and in 15×70s it is a slightly larger, brighter, and more appealing ball of fuzz. In a small telescope some of M13’s 100,000 stars start to resolve, like a spill of very fine sugar on black velvet. In a big telescope, like my friend’s 16-incher, it is almost overwhelming; the eyepiece is so full of stars that it gets to be too much for the eye–and the mind–to take in. I found myself repeatedly looking away to give myself a break. That’s good stargazing.

Like M22 in Sagittarius and all other known globular clusters, M13 is old, and I mean old even for astronomy, where a five-billion-year-old star like the sun is something of a youngster. Even if all you have to see it with is binoculars, there is something special about tickling your retinas with the light of 100,000 twelve-billion-year-old suns.

Photo from APOD.

Mission 9: The Mote in God’s Eye

Mission Objectives: Bright star, Exoplanet

Equipment: Naked eye

Required Time: 1 minute

Related Missions: Hail to the King

Instructions: Go outside after sunset, face south, and find Jupiter. South and east (or down and left) of Jupiter is a bright star called Fomalhaut. Fomalhaut is the only bright star in that part of the sky, so there’s little chance you’ll confuse it with anything else. It’s not a double star, doesn’t have a striking color, and isn’t part of a striking pattern (it’s also pretty far south, at roughly the same elevation as Sagittarius, so if you’re at high latitudes, good luck). Its attractions are entirely cerebral.

Fomalhaut is special because it has an extrasolar planet, Fomalhaut b, which was the first extrasolar planet to be imaged directly by an optical telescope. What’s all that mean? People had been detecting extrasolar planets for years, by measuring the wobble they induced in their parent stars, or measuring the light drop in their parent stars as the exoplanets pass in front of them, and the spectra of exoplanets had even been obtained, but Fomalhaut b was the first to have its picture taken. The Hubble image itself is cool; it looks like the Eye of Sauron.

Now, as of this writing 405 explanets have been found, with more coming almost every month, especially now that the Kepler telescope is up and running. But most of these orbit stars that are very dim as seen from Earth. Fomalhaut rocks because it’s obvious. You can point it out to someone and say, “That star has a planet, and we have taken pictures of it.”

Hubble image at top from NASA, artist’s reconstruction above from the Joint Astronomy Centre. Apologies to Niven and Pournelle for nicking their title.

Al-most the-ere

Well, I did get out of bed this morning and catch the very, very old crescent moon. It was just a white sliver hanging in the sky below Venus, like the very edge of a cosmic thumbnail.

One more to go: the waxing crescent moon within 40 hours of new. Tomorrow night will be too soon, and Wednesday night will be too late, so if I’m going to finish the Lunar Club this month, Tuesday is my only hope. If there are clouds to the west, or if the vast stew of atmospheric sludge over LA is too dense, I’ll be thwarted.

Fingers firmly crossed.

The waning gibbous moon from a little over a week ago, photographed through my 15x70 binoculars.