Courtesy: Torsten Bronger

It is easy early evening sky gazing these days. We have a full moon this week to contend with so there are really only a few very bright objects that we can focus in on.

Over Crested Butte to the east we have the bright and obvious Pleiades smudging a large white spot on the cosmic darkness right after dark. My wife and I were admiring it from our elitist star gazing hot tub last week*. She asked me what the very bright red star trailing the Pleiades over the horizon was and I said that I did not know. Now, “I don’t know” can be the most powerful statement a scientist can make, as long as it is followed up with research to try to ascertain the knowledge.

So I followed up. And I checked the handy interactive sky chart at SkyandTelescope.com. It is a valuable tool for the aspiring astronomer to chart and learn the motions of the local night sky. It is free and asks for your zip code and whether or not daylight savings time is being observed. It then provides an hour-by-hour clickable projection of our night sky in motion: planets, Moon, significant stars and constellations.

The Sky & Telescope interactive sky chart informed me that the star in question was Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus, the bull. It turns out that Aldebaran is the 12^th brightest star in the night sky found roughly on the bull’s eye of Taurus.  The ESA Hipparcos satellite has it placed at a distance of about 65 light years from our Sun. There are significant and diverse cultural associations from ancient times affiliated with it. And Aldebaran is Arabic for “the follower” because it appears to follow the Pleiades. Duh -apparently.

I observe that curiosity and humility are the best foundations for acquisition and retention of knowledge. The field of astronomy is exceptionally curious and humbling. There is so much information that no single brain can contain and compute it all.  No way. Asking questions, seeking information and sharing the results is of more value than any other personal physical conquest or metaphysical construction of pretentious pride. I could be ashamed for not having known such basic astronomy knowledge. Instead I’d rather share what I have learned and will not now forget. Probably.

*To join the Elitist Hot Tub Astronomical Society (EHTAS) you know where to find me, or maybe not.

Image Courtesy Enrique Cornejo

Night after night the stars etch their way through the darkness and for what? People sky watch for a number of reasons, from the vague and aesthetic to the specific and scientific. Ultimately, all the reasons stem from an attempt at understanding, a shot at improving our personal intelligence.

The word intelligence is derived from Latin intelligere, “to understand.”  Beyond this vague notion the term intelligence is exceedingly ill defined upon scrutiny. The Creationist camp has readily adopted the pseudoscientific notion of intelligent design in opposition of Charles Darwins’ scientific theory of evolution. I don’t want to break anyone’s mind but the first theory of general intelligence was put forth by Francis Galton who was heavily influenced by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin. Even still, specific definition of intelligence remains a chimerical entity.

One deep thinker on the notion of intelligence was the great popularizer of astronomy Dr. Carl Sagan. Monday, November 9 marked what would have been his 75^th birthday had he not deceased in 1996.  Dr. Sagan was a heavily awarded pioneer in the field of exobiology and engineered the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, better known as SETI, back in the 1970’s. Carl wrote a book called the Dragons of Eden, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, wherein he attempted an outline of the evolution of human intelligence. It was a remarkable task because if you search hard enough through all of the fields of science and knowledge you will discover that there is no universal theory of mind. There are many theories of the mind of course, but none that have received scientific validation. I repeat, none. This is a gaping abyss of scientific ignorance that has been unaddressed for far too long in the world. Despite all of our glorious technical, scientific and medical advances, we do not fundamentally understand our selves.

Our individual human minds are everywhere we go every second of our lives, but apparently our understanding of it, our intelligence, is nowhere. Who is to say whose theories are right or wrong in such a world?

Is there undetected intelligence around far away stars? Is there intelligence around our own star? One has to wonder, and look to the sky.

Look to the southern night skies of Crested Butte these days to see Jupiter burning over the West Elks in the evenings, like a belated birthday candle for the pioneering astrochemist genius Dr. Carl Sagan.

As we looked to the northeast skies last week to catch the Perseid meteor showers we found the constellation of Perseus rising between 11PM and 12AM over Crested Butte Mountain. Within the constellation Perseus we have a distinctively bright star known as Algol. Algol translates from Arabic to “head of the ghoul” referring to the position of the decapitated head of Medusa that Perseus is renowned for having taken in Greek mythology. This particular star is referred to as the Demon Star or the Blinking Demon in English, Satan’s Head in Hebrew, Spectre’s Head in Latin and in China it is known as the Fifth Star of the Mausoleum or more morbidly as ‘piled up corpses’. It appears that around the world and throughout time Algol is not affiliated with happiness and health.

Algol is actually a triple star system and its apparent magnitude, or relative brightness, is variable depending upon which star is eclipsing the other two at the moment. Studies of Algol have presented astronomers with the Algol Paradox of stellar evolution. The theory of stellar evolution posits that stars in the same relative astronomical area formed at approximately the same time. However, when we observe binary star systems we generally see two distinctively dynamic styles of stars moving in very near relationship to each other. The paradox is the apparent lack of resolution between the two different pieces of information. The Algol Paradox was resolved through the discovery of stellar mass transfer. As a star system begins to spin around itself in outer space it transfers energy and therefore mass between the component stars therefore changing them dynamically and often radically depending upon the particular variables in the system.

To find Algol in the constellation Perseus, look to the north east skies of Crested Butte at about midnight. It will be traveling in the general area of sky and in a parallel arc with the waning slice of the Moon on the nights of August 13^th – 15^th.

Gunnison Valley Observatory staff hosted the Crested Butte Cub Scouts and visited the Gunnison 4^th grade classes last week. The good news is that the minds of our young are exceptionally inquisitive and open which are the two fundamental ethics of good scientific method.

The more astute minds in the classes were curious about the nature of black holes, and with good reason. These phenomena represent the frontier of our cosmological understandings despite being used as the plot device for the latest Star Trek film. While we can’t actually see black holes we can observe their functioning by using a broad spectrum of energy detection techniques. These new and enhanced methods have led to the discovery of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, about 27,000 light years away, and the hypothesis of a supermassive black hole therein named Sagittarius A.

Observe the location of the black hole in the center of our own galaxy in Crested Butte’s southern night sky during the summer months along the visible dust lane of the Milky Way between the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio. Viewers should look to the north of where the spout of the Sagittarius teapot dips into the Milky Way. These constellations are visible in the early morning hours in our southern skies right now. It won’t be until the middle of July that they will become visible after sunset for evening viewing.

Courtesy NASA

This week features the Lyrid meteor showers for the insomniacs and early risers. The Lyrids appear to radiate from the constellation Lyra, or Harp. Lyra is located by looking for the bright bluish star Vega as it rises from the north east horizon over Crested Butte Mountain. While Vega is a prominent star throughout summer nights it is only now spinning back into our visible horizon at around 1:00 AM and moving to the center of the sky until sunrise meaning meteor shower viewing is optimal between these times.

Still, there is a better chance of catching meteors incinerate at 50 miles up this week than there has been over the past 3 months. The Earth has just completed a move through a region in its orbit that is relatively clear of debris. However, the Earth’s orbit will now take us on a direct collision course with fragments from the tail of the Comet Thatcher over the 10 day period of April 16 – 26, peaking around April 22.

The Lyrids were documented over 2600 years ago in China. The average number of meteors to expect per hour ranges from between 5 and 20. There have been meteor counts as high as 90 to 100 per hour in addition to fireball sightings when larger comet collateral interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere.