APOD 4.3

Mars Near Opposition

April 8-14 is when Mars is between opposition and closest approach looping through the constellation Virgo opposite the Sun in the night sky. This clear image was captured with a high speed digital camera and a 16 inch diameter telescope from Assis, Brazil. Mars' north polar cap is at the top left of the image and there are water vapor clouds condensing in the cold atmosphere above Mars' volcanos. Mars will be about 1/100th the angular size of the Moon. I've never seen as detailed an image of Mars before so this image is pretty cool.

Contributions to the Understanding of Our Galaxy

Galileo - Found that Milky Way Galaxy was full of stars and not just nebulae.
Immaneul Kant - Observed spiral nebula, believed that the Milky Way was the universe and the galaxy had a disc shape.
William Herschel - Provided many measurements to estimate distances and position in the Milky Way.
Henrietta Leavitt - Period and luminosity relation.
Harlow Shapley -Used a new telescope and the RR Lyrids and Cepheids to measure the distances to the globular clusters and that we were not near the center of the galaxy.
Heber Curtis - Believed that the universe had separate islands in the sky and wasn't one conformed group galaxy.
Edwin Hubble - Able to measure stars in other galaxies and show that there were many other things out there.

APOD 4.2

Along the Western Veil

This image is the of the western part of the Veil Nebula and is toward the Cygnus constellation in the Earth's sky. The Veil Nebula is a large supernova remnant. The light from the original supernova explosion reached Earth about 5,000 years ago. The glowing filaments in the image are like long ripples of separated red atomic hydrogen and blue-green oxygen gas. The Veil Nebula is also known as the Cygnus Loop; it spans the distance of about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon. Parts of the Western Veil that are brighter are recognized as separate nebulae, such as Pickering's Triangle (NGC 6979) and the Witch's Broom (NGC 6960). This image just has a really awesome color and is very aesthetically pleasing.

APOD 4.1

Stephan's Quintet Plus One

This image of Stephan's Quintet was formulated with data from the Hubble Legacy Archive and the Subaru Telescope. Only 4 of the 5 galaxies are locked in a "cosmic dance", the closest galaxies being 300 million light years away. They all have distorted loops and tails spawning out of their shape due to gravitational tides. Stephan's quintet is within the boundaries of the Pegasus constellation. NGC 7320C is the galaxy that is all the way to the left that is the outlier. This is an incredible image because it shows a distance of 500 million light years and understates how large these galaxies truly are.

Astronomy Night Observations

On March 1st I attended the Astronomy Night from 7-9pm and it was one of the clearest night skies I have observed in the past month. I used the Sky Map app to observe winter/spring time constellations such as Orion, Taurus, Auriga, Canis Major, and Gemini. I was able to observe the Pleiades and the Hyades star clusters. We used the telescopes to observe different types of stars and Jupiter, which was incredibly bright in the night sky.

Pulsars and Neutron Stars

A neutron star is an imploded core of a massive star that occurs from a supernova. It is one of the ways of a high mass star to end its stellar evolution cycle. The typical mass of a neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. Neutron stars occur once a star uses up all of its fuel and sheds its outer layer and then collapses on itself. A pulsar is a neutron star that emits beams of radiation that sweeps through Earth's line of sight. The pulses of high energy that we can see from Earth comes from the misalignment of the neutron star's rotation and magnetic axis.

Vela Pulsar

Neutron Star

APOD 3.8

7 March 2014

 

This is Venus and the Milky Way rising in the early morning hours of March 1st. This picture was taken on the skyline of the beach at Sea Isle City, New Jersey. Venus lies just beyond the inner boundary of the habitable zone. Earth orbits well within the habitable zone of the solar system. The watery reflection of light from Venus is seen along the beach. This is a nice, serene photo that is just very peaceful about Venus rising in the morning.