Chairman’s announcements

The chairman welcomed members and guests to the November meeting.

A Celestron telescope of some vintage has been donated to the society. Currently, the telescope is being renovated, mould removed from the tube and optics, to be used at EAS Observing Sessions.

Sky Notes for November

Astronomical Dark now begins before 7pm.

Mars is the only feasible planet for observing this month and there are two periodic comets, one the target of last year’s Rosetta mission, that will be visible towards the end of November. See  Sky Notes.

Observing Evening

Check for the  Observing Evening,  page for the next member’s evening.

Dark Sky accreditation for the Lake District

Johanna Korndorfer presented a talk on the work of Friends of the Lake District to gain internationally recognised ‘Dark Skies Reserve’ status for the Lake District National Park.

Concepts of Dark Sky Accreditation were introduced together with the implications for and actions to be potentially taken by authorities. In particular, ‘Core’ dark areas in the Lake District and surrounding ‘Buffer’ zones, where light pollution will impact the Core, need to be identified. Members were asked if they wished to help measure the sky darkness using light meters loaned to them by Friends of the Lake District.

An extensive Q&A followed querying the implications for towns and rural communities.

An illustrated talk on Hyabusa2

After a speaker cancellation, David Glass valiantly presented a talk on the progress of the probe Hayabusa 2, now in orbit around Type C (low metal mostly rock) asteroid Ryugu.

Of particular interest:

Of the multiple propulsion systems, the  Ion drive thrusters, with a force of micro-Newtons that consume a small amount of fuel over long periods, are deployed to adjust the inter-planetary transition orbit. The Ion Thrusters consume far less fuel than conventional thrusters.

Hayabusa 2 will launch a number of deployable modules designed to land on Ryugu and bounce up to 15 times between measurements and experiments.

A Small Carry-On Impactor weighing 2 kg will be ‘fired’ at a selected area of Ryugu to create a crater, while the main module hides behind the asteroid, where the sub-soil will be revealed as a target site for material sampling.

Hayabusa 2 will retrieve samples from the target crater and two other sites and then return a capsule of samples back to Earth.

Member’s Astrophotographs

Finally, a member presented some recent astrophotographs taken in the Kendal area.

 

Chairman’s announcements

The chairman welcomed members and guests to the October meeting and commented on the result of a recent feedback survey on how the club was meeting its expectations; news items and sky-notes were well received by respondents and lectures were reckoned to be set at a level “about right” for most of the audience.

Sky Notes for October

Mid October the skies are astronomically dark at 8:15. A general roundup was made of the many objects to be seen in the October sky. Lots going on!

Observing Evening

If the observing evening was not organised this weekend then it may be prudent to wait until around the 31st October when the skies were dark at 6:45 pm. Members were again reminded to check the web page,  Observing Evening, on this site and not to travel to an observing evening unless the red text had changed to blue!

Astronomical News

Tess

This exoplanet detecting satellite is now fully operational and monitors the change in luminosity of nearby stars that may indicate planets. Proving to be very capable data is now being received from Tess that is characteristic of planets passing in front of stars. Further updates to follow.

Hyabusa2

David Glass explained the intricacies of this fascinating Japanese project that involves instrumentation landing on the asteroid termed Ryuga. Of interest to early solar system research, this operation will aim to capture material from the asteroid and return it to Earth for further analysis. For a detailed but (mostly) understandable description, see: Hayabusa 2

Further News

A recent photograph of Opportunity on Mars that has now lost contact with its project team.

Analysed data from ESA`s Gaia surveyor has narrowed down where the interstellar traveller Oumuamua may have come from. The database combined with trajectory science has narrowed the source of Oumuamua to 4 stars within our galaxy.

Bright objects on Ceres have now been associated with mud deposits. New research has indicated water and rock have erupted and may be responsible for the bright surface detail on the surface of Ceres.

Guest speaker: Prof. Lionel Wilson of Lancaster University who spoke on recent ideas on the volcanic history of the Moon

An interesting talk on the ancient volcanic lava flows on the moon and how there may be lessons to learn with Earth`s volcanism both in the past and in the future!

IMP`s and RMDS were discussed at length. These are Irregular Mare Patches and Ring Moat Dome structures. 70 IMPs have been discovered 19 of which are around obvious vents. The recent research indicates there may be consequences for the Earth because we may be due a major basalt eruption on a scale of an extinction event.

The far side of the moon has a crust that is 60% thicker than the nearside that faces Earth. Most volcanism occurred on the nearside face of the moon and occurred more than 1 billion years ago.

Eruptions on the moon form dome shapes because there is no atmosphere. Sinuous rilles (look like rivers) form due to the thermomechanical erosion of the surface of the moon and can extend for several kilometres; the turbidity of the lava flow and a high lava discharge rate are key features in their formation.

Ring-Moat Dome Structures (RMDS) are a newly discovered feature on the lunar surface; low domes surrounded by a shallow cavity or moat. Large-scale lava flows are now thought to have occurred on timescales much more rapid than previously thought.

Theoretical models were discussed regarding their construction and magmatic foams were highlighted as a possible precursor. Over 2000 of these structures (RMDS) have been identified.

For further details see the recent Geophysical Research Letter: –  Newly Discovered Ring-Moat Dome Structures in the Lunar Maria

Chairman’s announcements

The chairman welcomed the Dark Skies Project Officer for the Friends of the Lake District and asked for volunteers to be a liaison to work for dark Sky Accreditation. A communication from Ullswater Yacht Club who are looking to open their grounds for the use of members. Members were notified of UCLAN public lectures in Lancaster and Preston during October 2018. Members asked to finalise their requests to visit Alston Observatory after the next meeting on Tuesday 2nd October.

Astronomical News

Two news roundups were given by two members. Galaxy news links:

• Galaxy evolution hiatus 1: Milky Ways second life
• Galaxy evolution hiatus 2: Earliest galaxies found ‘on our cosmic doorstep’
• Earliest/most distant/ largest redshift galaxy record broken after 20 years

Solar Orbiters:

• Parker Solar Orbiter
• ESA Solar Orbiter

Miscellaneous items

• Sun Spot Cycle 25?
• Ice confirmed at Moon’s Poles
• Mars-encircling dust storm settles

More Astronomical News

• New Horizons approaching Kuiper Belt Objects
• Japan’s Hayabusa2 landing site on an asteroid
• OSIRIS-REx ‘s first images of asteroid Bennu
• Nasa’s chemical sniffer retires
• First mass eruption from a star that’s not the sun  

The Ecliptic

Arising from question Why Mars farther than other planets from Ecliptic last year. Planetary orbits are inclined to the ecliptic plane by up to 6° (maximum reached by the planet Mercury). The Ecliptic coordinate system, Celestial equator, Ecliptic and Celestial poles were covered as well as equinoxes.

Not to be confused with the orbit shape ‘ecliptic’ the word comes from the fact that when the moon crosses the ecliptic we experience an eclipse.

Sky Notes for September

From the Ecliptic the meeting was focused to the constellations near to the Zenith, where starlight travels through the minimum depth of atmosphere to the telescope. By the middle of September, we will be experiencing 7 hours of Astronomical Dark from 9 PM. See  Sky Notes in particular.

Guest speaker, Stuart Atkinson Famous Fake Astrophotos

Stuart gave an entertaining but informative talk that also warned of the dangers of false attribution of astrophotographs taken by members. Since the advent of digital cameras and post-processing software images are not only easy to fake, as opposed to the valid enhancement of target features. In addition, the internet has released a Pandora’s Box where the distribution fake images become impossible to control. Images were illustrated from obvious Artistic impressions being passed off as factual to the deliberate stealing of images. For the latter, defences were outlined such as ‘Watermark’ signing to the proven method of introducing errors.

Chairman’s reports

This Saturday, 11th August the Perseid meteor shower will occur on a moonless night. However, the forecast at the moment is poor.

Astronomical News

• Members may still join arrangements for a second visit to Alston Observatory is being organised for Tuesday 2nd October
• The NASA Parker Solar Probe is due to be launched this Saturday 11th August. The probe will fly into the solar corona and will investigate the Solar wind and the heating of the solar corona to very high temperatures.
• A pair of images of Neptune illustrated the gain in using new Adaptive Optics by the VLT. The images demonstrate that the VLT with the latest adaptive optics can be competitive with the Hubble Space Telescope. The new technology is also applicable to the future 40m-class telescopes (e.g. the E-ELT) and is essential to get the best out of these new assets.
• The MeerKAT interferometric radio telescope in South Africa can now produce science images. An image of the centre of the Milky Way was shown, which reveals new detail of unexplained filaments in the region.

Orbital Physics and Spacecraft Manoeuvring

A member gave an Illustrated talk and demonstration to explain an orbit: throw hard enough until your ball goes over the horizon and continues to fall towards the planet at the same rate as the ground ‘falls away’ due to the curvature of the planet resulting in a circular orbit. The problem of manoeuvring without changing orbits was illustrated with the failed docking scheduled for Gemini 4 before their first spacewalk. From a distance, increasing speed by the trailing vehicle changes the vehicle’s trajectory into a higher and more elliptical orbit.

Olber’s Paradox

  Why is the night sky dark?   A member’s talk described the paradox attributed to  Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers ( 1758–1840).  Given an infinite number of stars that compensate intensity decrease with distance, the night sky should light. Although the Big Bang specifies that the material in the universe is finite, there are more than enough galaxies to cover one per a pixel on telescopes in the foreseeable future making the paradox still valid. The currently the solution accepted is that space is expanding: thus, cooling radiation and shifting radiation towards the red and radio. Other explanations are also mooted.

Explanatory solution addendum added by a member:

Infinite or not, the universe is of a size that means that even travelling as fast as they do, photons from some distant stars have yet to reach us. There will certainly be some redshift arising from the expansion of the universe, but this effect can be ignored by recasting the paradox in terms of radiation generally, rather than the much smaller visible spectrum. So irrespective of wavelength, the paradox is why there is not an infinite bath of radiation. The “fractal” explanation is a way round the homogeneous assumption inherent in the paradox, and as in the talk, the fractal calculations of the universe diverge from the required dimension. So I think we’re left with the “it hasn’t reached us yet” solution. And, of course, it never will reach us – but that’s a different talk.

Telescope Mount Alignment

The types of astronomical telescope mounts were explained by a member:  Altazimuth  and  Equatorial . Current ‘GoTo’ software offers the opportunity to iterate polar re-alignment. How accurately does the polar alignment need to be for time exposure photography? After much work and many calculations , our member discovered that the error reported by the software, for the polar misalignment, may be used as the drift across the image in 24 hours. Hence the rate of drift can be quickly calculated. The pixel coverage for a given camera together with the focal length of the system can be used to determine the sky coverage per pixel, eg 2 arc seconds/pixel. The rate of drift can then be used to determine the time to drift across one pixel (or maybe more) to find the maximum exposure time for the reported polar alignment error. In summary, tolerance for the error in polar alignment can be calculated beforehand. The telescope polar alignment procedure can then cease when within the desired tolerance.  

Chairman’s reports and sky notes

See Sky Notes. In particular:

• There will be no actual astronomical darkness until August as the sun skims under our South Lakes horizon.
• Venus, just after about 10:30 PM, is at the bright magnitude -4 above the western horizon near the crescent moon on the 16th June.
• Jupiter is visible from sunset to sunrise, starting low in the south-east.
• Saturn will rise with the full moon late in the month.

Astronomical News

Links to the items raised:

• Methane Ice dunes on Pluto
• Alan Bean biography
• Apollo 12 Flight Journal includes MP3s, transcripts and inserted explanations and  summaries
• Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity 2nd Powered Test Flight
• ESA Solar Orbiter
• ALMA detects most early signs of oxygen in the universe
• Hubble detects supernova blink into a Black Hole
• New Fundamental Particle? – possible Dark Energy explanation
• Amateur astronomer detects Supernova

Variable star photometry

One of our members presented results taken over two nights of measuring the light detected from two stars, using a QHY163c CMOS astro camera connected to a 10″ telescope, compared to the light received from nearby comparison stars of known magnitude – the technique known as differential photometry. The first star was a well known contact binary star system V523Cas (with a magnitude change of ~0.9 magnitudes) which acted as a useful and successful testbed for the photometry system. The low noise permitted the second study – the attempt to detect the transit of planet across the face of a distant star from a Kendal backyard. An online search (http://var2.astro.cz/ETD/predictions.php) on the next clear night, 10 December 2017, suggested the excitingly labeled XO-6b with a relatively large magnitude change of 0.013 magnitudes. This 10 magnitude star, 270 light years away, was measured over an evening of deteriorating conditions. The sky conditions deteriorated so badly that all stars dimmed by 50%! Nevertheless, comparisons with light levels from neighbouring stars indicated a 1.2% diminution of the light from the target star. The diminution is caused by an exoplanet, twice the size of Jupiter at 8% of Earth’s orbit radius, that transits the star approximately every four days. The timing and dip in brightness occurred at both the right time and expected size.          

Telescope Night (outside)

The second half of the evening was spent outside in the Museum grounds under a blue sky. Members and guests milled around asking questions and demonstrating their own telescopes, mounts and software.

Guest speaker: Professor Ian Robson “Confessions of an Astronomer”

Professor Ian Robson gave a light-hearted talk covering his career in astronomy from a telescope on the top of Queen Mary University above a London street in the 1960’s to the top of a snow-drifted Mauna Kea, Hawaii – including frequent, confessional asides. Some aspects may have been expected, such as bids for project finance and student and graduate applications on a professor’s desk. Less expected were the thousands of air miles accumulated over a lifetime in astronomy.

Prof Robson has written a book demonstrating the connections between observations and theory: Active Galactic Nuclei

Member’s Talks

Sky and Society Notes for May

See Sky Notes. In particular:

• Venus at the bright magnitude -3.9 in the evening presents a three-parts, waxing gibbous phase visible in small telescopes.
• Jupiter is visible from sunset, starting low in the south east.
• Full astronomical darkness will not occur again until August.

Major night sky imaging proposal

The society has been offered the opportunity to participate in a world wide public outreach project using the Las Cumbres Global Telescope Network. Our choice of target is likely to be the Hyades cluster in Taurus. Of significance to EAS, the displaced positions of Hyades stars were those measured by Sir Arthur Eddington during the 1919 Solar Eclipse  confirming Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

FollowLCO_Global

Kendal Outreach

Volunteers to present are just about enough to hold the proposed Solar System in Kendal event on Saturday 18th August.

The Constellation of the Month

Our regular member’s presentation of Constellation of the Month featured the low, summer constellation of Virgo. Leo was also included.

Astronomical News

NASA successfully launched their Insight Mission a week ago to arrive on Mars in two months time. Over the following Mars-year (approximately 1.5 Earth years) the mission lander will probe the surface with a seismometer and then wait to measure the vibrations from any subsequent seismic events.

The upper atmosphere of an exoplanet (WASP-107b) has been analysed using the light filtered through it during a transit, revealing the (not unexpected) presence of Helium. Work to test the method on Earth’s atmosphere (Yan et al. 2014) proved that atmospheric compositions can be studied in this way and that significant biomarkers (oxygen, water, NO2) can be detected. They analysed the light that passed through Earth’s atmosphere and bounced off the moon during a lunar eclipse.

The universe expands with distance at a rate which is given by the Hubble Constant – or are there two Hubble Constants? 68 km/sec or 73 km/sec – or, even, both. Measurements have been made using the structure of the early Universe and using ‘standard candles’ in galaxies as in our February guest speaker’s research. The values obtained by the two methods appear to be different, and the chance that the difference is a fluke is currently less than 0.01%. This is nearly at ‘discovery’ level but not quite. If the difference is true, it may point the way to new physics or an overhaul of cosmological models. In the words of our member: ‘Over to the Cosmologists to sort this one out’.

Sky and Society Notes for April

See Sky Notes in particular.

Major night sky imaging proposal

The society has been offered a one-hour imaging session of an astronomical object of their choice on the  Las Cumbres Global Telescope Network . The offer has come from Carl Pennypacker, one of the teams whose studies of supernovae led them to infer in 1998 the existence of dark energy driving the expansion of the universe.    The society is keen to involve any members who wish to engage with this imaging project, including local schools if appropriate.  We have until December to choose an object and conduct the imaging. Please get in touch here if you would like to be part of this project, or if you have any suggestions for imaging targets.

UCLAN lecture

The meeting was reminded that the upcoming event at UCLAN in Preston:  The Jeremiah Horrocks Spring Lecture Comets, Asteroids and Impacts. Should we worry and what can we do? Tuesday 15th May 2018 – 6:30 pm.

Kendal outreach

More volunteers are required for a few hours during the proposed Solar System in Kendal  event on Saturday 18th August.

Other events

The next Member’s Observing evening will be in autumn when dark nights return.

The next public Moonwatch will be on Saturday 24th November

Member’s photographs

One member demonstrated an impressive difference in colour hues using  Pixinsight on the Horsehead Nebula  Not cheap software package but highly recommended for colour correction using a star catalogue. Now listed on our Links page under  Software used by members

Astronomical News

The farthest star ever detected has been imaged by the Hubble telescope, a Blue Giant in a galaxy nine billion light years distant:  Hubble Uncovers the Farthest Star Ever Seen. Forget the  Kepler space mission , a  recent paper  encourages more enthusiastic, if not radical, members to use their standard DLSR cameras to join in the search for exoplanets.

Guest speaker Robert Ince  “Widefield and time-lapse astrophotography”

After answering to a professional career migrating from explosives to his lifetime interest in Astronomy, Robert Ince illustrated his personal revival of astrophotography with a camera only – without his 12″ telescope. Beginning with landscapes with star backgrounds and star trails, the talk progressed through driven exposures, including time-lapse video and panning sequences, to the use of filters.  Robert described in detail his post-exposure processing using a wide range of software. A number of useful links were listed:

• Adobe Lightroom – free for a trial period
• StarStaX
• Startrails – free, Microsoft only
• Sequator – free, Microsoft only

The links above are now on our  Software used by members