Monarch Mania

I visited the Anita B Gorman Discovery Center today to attend the Monarch Mania event, devoted to the butterfly of that name. The event featured stations positioned around the center grounds with activities for visitors of all ages. The life cycle of the Monarch butterfly was covered in its different phases. A banding project was also being carried out, with small stickers being attached under the wing of each butterfly to establish their migratory route. Visitors could also catch butterflies and other insects with nets for closer inspection at one of the stations. Captured insects were subsequently released unharmed.

A highlight of the event for me was meeting Betsy Betros, author of a terrific book about butterflies — A Photographic Field Guide to the Butterflies in the Kansas City Region (A Local Color Nature Series book). Betsy worked on the book for four years, did most of the photography herself, and even designed and prepared the layout and all the text of the 407 page guide. Wow!

Betsy helped me identify the two skippers shown in the image of an Ironweed plant (Vernonia baldwinii I took at the Heart of America Star Party on September 4. The one on the right is most likely a Sachem (Atalopedes compestris) female and the one on the left is a Peck’s Skipper (Polites peckius). Betsy also told me about the Idalia Society, a Kansas City butterfly club. Needless to say, I left with a copy of Betsy’s book under my arm. (And a few other books, too.)

Here is a link to my Picasa album from the HOASP.

Another Addition to the Backyard Bird List

Well I have obviously fallen short on my 2009 resolution to write at least one blog post a week, having let two months slide by since my last post. Yikes! So this is going to be something of a compilation.

Yesterday afternoon I stepped outside and noticed what I took to be a flock of geese flying overhead at first glance. But they were awfully low and their wings looked odd. It dawned on my they were gulls. At least three dozen, of them, in fact, flying in formation. A quick call to birding guru, Mark McKellar, at the Backyard Bird Center, helped me identify them as Franklin's Gulls. Mark says that Franklin's are the type that fly in formation like geese.

They were gone in an instant, so needless to say, no picture. Here, however, is a picture I took at 6:09 am on September 16 from our backyard showing a conjunction of the moon with Venus in the eastern sky.


This is actually a handheld image. I didn't even use a tripod. These digital point and shoot cameras are amazing. (Mine is a Canon S2 IS.) The trick for something like this is to set the ISO speed at something reasonably fast, 200 or 400 ISO, and then significantly underexpose the image.

Here is a fun picture I took of bees on a flower in our neighbor's yard a few days after the conjunction. We sort of skipped October and zoomed right into November in Kansas City, this fall, with temps quickly following into the 40s during the day. Not too many opportunities for fall flower pictures now!


Here is a picture of Basie and me taken in the last few weeks -- on Elly's birthday camping trip to Pomme de Terre state park. Pomme de Terre has become our favorite state park this year (the Pittsburgh side!), followed closely by Arrow Rock state park.


The sunsets were beautiful during our visit.


Here is Basie, enjoying the sunset in his preferred snoozing orientation...

Outstanding in Its Field

Yes it has been a heck of a long time since my last blog post, but rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated. I thought it would be a good idea to write a post and head off any Jeff Goldblum style Google hoaxes! :-)

I decided to upgrade the OS on my computer, with predictably disastrous results. When I finally got that fixed, everything had to be reloaded, of course, and I couldn't find my Adobe Elements DVD for the longest time. All is well, now. Or at least functional.

This is my 22-inch Dob. Technically not in its own field, but in Ron Abbott's field at his Land of Oz observatory. We had a great night of observing last Saturday. Dave Hudgins and Bently Ousley joined in on the fun. Rumor has it Dave will be appearing in full Galileo regalia at the July ASKC meeting tomorrow night, telescope in hand. Watch this blog for pictures of the action.

Here is a picture of Ron himself on the morning after our observing session.

Back from Arizona

Questions have been raised, both on and off my blog, as to why it has been so long since my last post. A major reason is that I took a trip to Arizona last week to do some astronomy with friends in the Saguaro Astronomy Club. We observed from a site in the Sonora Desert. It was a great week! I put 3,029 miles on the RV. Lots of pictures in my Picasa album from the trip.

Lunar Eclipse, February 20, 2008

With temperatures just above zero degrees, and clouds forecast to come in early, I was wavering about getting out a telescope to watch the lunar eclipse tonight. BUT, then I saw my next door neighbor Joan getting out her Orion XT-6 and walked over to chat with her for a few minutes. Since my Tele Vue 101 is always set up and ready to go, and can be carried out the door in seconds, I decided to brave the weather and give it a try. I did put on my Baffin Technologies icepack boots (guaranteed against frostbite to 150 degrees below zero :-) ).

We had some fine views, and I even took pictures through the 101 with a 17mm Nagler and my Canon S2 IS, which I just held up to the eyepiece. I experimented with various aperature and shutter speed combos to get a nice balance. This was a one second exposure at f2.7 with an ISO setting of 200. It was taken just before totality, which is why one edge has a whitish rim. The moon was accompanied by Saturn and Regulus, which made for a fine show. When the sky darkened as the moon neared totality, stars across the sky became more brilliant, which was a bit of magic.

The clouds were coming in fast by 9:15 PM and by 9:30 the sky was clouded over and the show was finished. So we didn't get to see that much of the totality, but it was still a beautiful display. Well worth braving the cold.

We won't have another lunar eclipse until December 2010 I guess, so I'm glad we got to see this one.

Galileo's Glassworks

Elly brought home Galileo’s Glassworks by Eileen Reeves this evening, a gift to me from John Haymon, the book buyer at the Nelson-Atkins Museum Store. John has a rare skill for selecting wonderful books, which is evident after perusing the book selection at the store for only a few moments. I was pleased and charmed by his gesture.

Eileen Reeves is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her book concerns the period between the invention of the telescope, in the Hague in 1608, and Galileo’s acquaintance with the instrument ten months later. Reeves “explores how and why information about the telescope was transmitted, suppressed, or misconstrued...and, more generally, shows how documents typically outside the scope [pun intended?] of early modern natural philosophy — medieval romances, travel literature, and idle speculations — relate to two crucial events in the history of science.” Sounds like fun!

Emerson’s Science-Baffling Star

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all tings find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we now not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed.

Emerson’s use of this lovely metaphor, his “science-baffling star,” to portray the divine element which he believes all people possess and which can manifest itself if only we will trust our inner nature, occurs in his essay “Self-Reliance,” which was published in a collection titled Essays: First Series in 1841. The essays are based on lectures given by Emerson during the preceding years.

Although one can enjoy and appreciate this passage purely in its own context, it is fun to know the star Emerson most likely had in mind can be observed on summer and fall evenings from northern latitudes.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessell, a German astronomer, announced in 1838 that he had succeeded in measuring the stellar parallax of 61 Cygni using an extremely precise Fraunhofer 16-centimeter heliometer. Bessell was able to determine the distance, 11.4 light years, through mathematical computations on his parallax determination of 2/3s of an arc-second. 61 Cygni thus became the first star whose distance was accurately measured, a task that baffled scientists for centuries.

Parallax can be understood quite simply by holding one’s finger at arm’s length and sighting along it at the background while keeping one eye closed. After the initial sighting, open your second eye and close the first. Your finger will appear to have moved in relation to the background. This occurs because the distance between your eyes forms a triangle with its apex at your finger tip. Using math, the length of your arm can be determined by knowing the precise distance between your eyes (the triangle’s baseline) and measuring the apparent shift of your finger against the background, which establishes the angle of the triangle’s apex (your finger’s parallax). Of course, one’s arm can easily and more simply be measured by other means. The distance to a star cannot.

In the wake of Copernicus and Kepler, astronomers realized they could establish an enormous baseline, the width of the Earth’s orbit, by taking measurements six months appart of a star in relation to background stars. In fact, early arguments in favor of a geocentric solar system (i.e. the Earth being the center of the universe), included the point that stellar parallax had not been detected. If the Earth truly moved, it should be found. What the geocentric proponents did not count on was the vast distance of the stars, which makes the apparent shift of even the closest stars quite tiny indeed.

By Bessell’s day the heliocentric solar system had long since been established and the orbital elements of the planets had actually been worked out so the size of the Earth’s orbit was known. Still, one had to choose an appropriate star to measure. This was done using another form of stellar motion known as “proper” motion. Some stars, being closer to our own solar system than others, are seen to move over time in relation to more distant stars. That is, the motion would not be cyclic during the course of one year (resulting from Earth’s motion) but would actually be due to the motion of the star itself. The stars with the highest proper motion could be assumed to be the closest to us and the most likely to exhibit stellar parallax. 61 Cygni had the highest proper motion of any star known at that time — 5 arc-seconds annually — and was therefore of considerable interest to astronomers.

Successfully measuring its parallax, the equivallent of measuring the size of a small coin at several miles, was a major feat of technical innovation and design.

61 Cygni, can be found in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, whose primary asterism is commonly described as the “Northern Cross.” It is actually a double star consisting of two k spectrum red dwarfs which can be separated with a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope. They present a beautiful chrome orange color in telescopes, and are of interest not only because of their historical significance but because they are the coolest and least luminous dwarf stars visible to the naked eye (from a dark sky site). They can be readily observed with a small telescope from urban areas despite light pollution.

For more on 61 Cygni, see James B. Kaler’s The Hundred Greatest Stars. 61 Cygni is entry 87. Alan W. Hirshfeld’s book, Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos, tells the tale of the quest to find the distance of the stars.

IC 5217 PN, Lacerta

“...and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future.”

I tried to spot this planetary with my 22-Inch Dob from the ASKC dark sky site when I was out with Rob Esson last weekend but couldn’t pick it out. The object is small, 6-7 arc seconds depending on the reference one checks. It looks stellar at low to moderate magnifcations and requires high magnification to differentiate from nearby stars. The seeing wasn’t terrific Friday night, either. In a large scope, stars appear swollen in less-than-ideal seeing conditions. This surely compounded the problem.

I decided to have another go from my backyard in midtown Kansas City using my XT-8 Dob, aided by several hyper-accurate star charts I made using MegaStar. The object’s visual magnitude is generally given as 11.5, easily within the reach of an 8-inch scope under urban skies. Here is one of the two finder charts, this is a wider view showing stars to 10.4 magnitude.

The eyepiece circles in this chart corespond to a 17mm Nagler Type 4 with a Paracorr coma corrector in an 8-inch f6 reflector. One of the excellent features of star-charting software is the ability to accurately depict the field of view seen with a specifc scope and eyepiece. The fields can even be mirror-reversed if necessary to show what is seen in an SCT or a refractor with a star diagonal (a critical navigation aid). The chart simplifies star hopping from an easily located star or object to a more challenging object like IC 5217.

Here is the second, more detailed chart. This shows the view in the same 17mm Type 4 eyepiece, but at a larger scale and with stars to 13 magnitude.


With these charts I was easily able to locate the planetary, even under urban skies. I used a 2-inch UHC filter to "blink" the planetary. This involves holding the filter in front of the eyepiece and then shifting it aside. The filter attenuates light from stars, making them seem fainter while the planetary is made to seem brighter. The technique is a valuable aid for confirming the identity of small planetary nebula. I also swapped in a 5mm Nagler Type 6 eyepiece, which provides a magnification of 280x with the XT-8 and Paracorr. At high magnification, in averted vision, the planetary could just be seen as non-stellar. That is, it had a tiny disk compared with stars in the field, which appeared as pinpoints.

Standard charts like the Sky Atlas 2000 and even the Uranometria don’t show faint enough stars to pinpoint objects like this, which is where custom charts really shine (if you’ll pardon the expression). Such observations are doubly fun because they can be made as easily from a backyard in the middle of the city as from a dark sky site in the country. And whereas a dark sky site trip requires hours of travel time, set up time, etc., making it all but impossible most nights, backyard observing can be easily done any clear night. It takes only minutes to set up an 8-inch Dob.

I went out around 9:30 PM, after Elly and I had a relaxed evening, fixing dinner together and watching a BBC mystery beforehand. I was back inside and going to bed by 10:30. In less than an hour of observing time, I saw not only this planetary, but another challenging planetary in Cassiopeia (IC 1747 near Epsilon Cassiopeia – more on that in my next astronomy post), comet 17P Holmes, Eta Persii (a fine double in Perseus), NGC 7789 and M52, open clusters in Cassiopeia, and the Dumbell Nebula, a planetary nebula in Perseus (M72), generally considered to be one of the more challenging Messier objects, but quite easy to observe compared with IC 5217.

IC 5217 is said to have a diameter of 15 arc-seconds in the Uranometria 2000 Deep Sky Field Guide by Cragin and Bonanno. This is obviously a mistake. The object I observed was much closer to the 6 or 7 arc seconds reported in other references.

Stalwart Observing Companion

Rob Esson (at left), one of my favorite observing companions, and I finally made it out for a night under the stars. I can't recall the last time we observed together. Rob travels in his job and is often out of the country. It has been several years at any rate. We went to the ASKC dark sky site near Butler, Missouri and had a pleasant evening even though the observing conditions were not the greatest.

Rob brought his bino chair and was working on the Astronomy League's deep sky binocular program. I set up the 22-inch dob and was looking at whatever came to mind. We had particularly memorable views of comet 17P Holmes, which Rob dubbed the "celestial jellyfish," aptly describing its odd, uncomet-like appearance. We also had fine views of the Veil Nebula in Cygnus and the Orion Nebula, both of which look fabu in the big scope. Oh, and we also looked at one of Rob's favorite Caldwell objects -- NGC 891, a faint but impressive edge-on spiral galaxy in Andromeda.

The skies were murky off and on during the night and became increasingly so after 11:30 PM. The seeing wasn't terrific either. I made a brief, abortive attempt to look at the Horsehead Nebula, an object I have not observed before. The seeing conditions simply weren't good enough. Earlier in the evening, however, I did observe the Cocoon Nebula, a famously elusive object which I have only seen once before and that time rated it an extremely difficult observation. With the 22-inch and a UHC filter it is easy to see even under less than ideal conditions. It reportedly responds well to a Hydrogen Beta filter, an item on my astronomy accesory shortlist.

We knocked off around 2:30 AM, got up at 8:00 AM, packed up, and left the DSS around 10. On our way toward Butler, we saw a flock of 18 wild turkeys, the most either of us have seen before. Some of them were surprisingly large. We shot a number of pictures with Rob's digital SLR. I'll post a few on my blog when he sends them to me. We stopped for breakfast at a diner in Butler on our way back to Kansas City.

Comet 17P/Holmes

David Hudgins sent out an email on Wednesday mentioning that an extremely faint comet, 17P/Holmes, had suddenly increased in brightness from around 17th magnitude (too faint for most amateur telescopes) to around 2.5 magnitudes -- about a million times brighter. The comet, in Perseus, could now be seen with the naked eye despite the nearly full moon. This is an extraordinary change.

I set up my 8-inch Orion XT Dob that evening and had a terrific view of the comet. I made the following sketch in my journal.



Here is a retouched version I made with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0. I inversed the image and made some color and level adjustments. I also replaced the original field ring with a better circle. Jeremy Perez has an excellent digitzing tutorial for adjusting eyepiece sketches on his Belt of Venus blog. And he has also co-authored a cool book published by Springer titled Astronomical Sketching.



Here is a plot I made of the same field using MegaStar. When I sketch objects I mark down all the brighter stars in the field -- say down to 9th magnitude. I try to capture any distinctive star patterns that will help me locate and orient the field in MegaStar. I also mark a few faint stars at the limit of averted vision. My key for this is F (faint but not hard to see), VF (very faint in averted), and VVF (challenging in averted -- only seen part of the time).

The MegaStar chart shows many more 11th magnitude stars than the few I included. I set the magnitude filter in MegaStar to 11.2 after determining that the effective limiting magnitude for this observation was just under 11. Fainter stars can be seen with an 8-inch scope, even from an urban sky. But the moon was nearly full. Also, this was a low power view. Fainter stars can be seen at higher magnification. See the detail at upper right of the journal entry, which was seen with a 7mm Nagler Type 6 at around 200x. All three 11 magnitude stars near the comet were easily visible.

Astronomy Down Under

Here is a story Rob Esson, one of my astronomy buddies, sent via email. Rob travels quite a bit for his job, and visits Australia regularly. He is also from the "otherside of the pond" and indulges in occasional bits of "we don't speak the same language" humor. All very amusing, naturally. You should imagine this story told in a sort of nasally British accent...

Gentlemen: sorry I couldn't join y'all, but let me share a story-ette with you. A week ago last Saturday night I was a couple of hundred miles west of Sydney in the Outback observing through an 18in Obsession (see image -- chap is Lachlan MacDonald of the Astronomy Society of New South Wales). There are, as you know, three fantabulous Globulars in the sky - Omega Centauri, M13, and 47 Tucanae. We were looking at 47 Tuc with a 26mm Nagler when t'other guy there Tony says "Some people see colours in 47 Tuc at high magnification - lets find out what you see" (of course, had he been American, he would have said 'colors'), So we switched eyepieces to one of the old 12mm Naglers (remember the double barrelled ones that you can use as 1.25in or 2in?). I look through and say "Well, I can't see any obvious color, and it doesn't seem to have as good definition at the higher magnification". Lachlan then takes a look and concurs, saying "It's actually a pretty shitty view", and shines his red light onto the objective to check for dew - but no go. Tony also looks and agrees that the definition is poorer ... until it dawns on him that ... yes, we'd left the translucent plastic lens cap on the other end, and we were STILL able to see the globular, AND some degree of definition. After taking the cap off, well, words fail me (gold and blue were my colors, Lachlan agreed, and Tony saw salmon pink - but maybe it was the wine) - but that should give you just some sort of clue as to how amazing 47 Tuc is that it can even penetrate a lens cap and look reasonable!

Rob

(c) 2007 Rob Esson Productions. All rights reserved.

Crescent Moon

I stepped out in our backyard yesterday evening to check the sky, considering a possible urban astronomy session, and was surprised to find a beautiful waxing crescent moon visible through the western trees. The new moon was only a few days ago.

I took a snapshot and am pleased with the result. Mare Crisium and the prominent crater, Cleomedes, can be seen in the image.

I did break out one of my scopes later in the evening and observed from 10 until about 1:30 in the morning, logging some challenging planetary nebulae in Aquila and Cygnus. I'm pondering whether to start a blog devoted to astronomy observations.