There is considerable action in the Gunnison Valley skies these days – some predictable and some less so. Since most humans I know tend to prefer predictability we’ll begin with the Lyrid meteor showers.
The Lyrids are visible between April 16 and April 26 each year. They usually peak on the evenings of April 21 and 22 around midnight when the constellation Lyra breaks the eastern horizon moving higher in the night sky. This is the time when the Earth is moving head on into the path of the meteors giving the best results for meteor watching.
On the less predictable side, we had some major solar activity kick up last week. I check the space weather online every day at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center website: www.swpc.noaa.gov, and cross-reference it with the terrestrial weather patterns that we experience here on the surface. The sun plays an amazing and under-appreciated part in our local climate. It is a part that humans on Earth, despite the best efforts of the narcissists and megalomaniacs, have absolutely no control over whatsoever and that we can only partly predict.
The sun goes through a solar cycle of high-energy and low energy outputs that span approximately 22 years. So, every 11 years we expect a solar maximum and over the following 11 years we expect a solar minimum. However, this is not an exact process. In fact, the sun has been excessively calm over the last several years, more so than predicted. Earlier this year the sun kicked up its activity and this previous week precipitated the most sustained geomagnetic storm activity in years.
The Earth is shielded from the blistering radiation of the sun by our magnetosphere, if it wasn’t we would not exist here. As the energy of the sun alters so our magnetosphere alters. Like hurricanes and tornadoes, geomagnetic storms are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with a G1 storm being the weakest and a G5 storm being the strongest. A storm of G3 or stronger can have the effect of pushing the aurora borealis down into lower latitudes offering a chance to see the northern lights from our Colorado repose. Several years ago I observed the northern lights as I was driving home from Denver. The atmosphere over the Maroon Bells glowed red, so red that I thought there was a major forest fire just to our north. This past week there were sustained geomagnetic storms for the first time in years reaching a power of G3. Did anyone notice the sky glowing last week?
The United Nations-designated Year of Astronomy is winding to a close. Hanukkah begins this week on Friday December 11 at sundown and runs for 8 nights. Christmas falls the following week and right in between we have the winter solstice December 21. There are any of a number of events and festivals that occur on any calendar near the winter solstice from around the world. The change of the seasons is a world-unifying event, at least, for those still in any kind of touch with the world.
I tried to research unifying constellations and asterisms that have to do with the end of the year holidays and found it difficult to find any connections other than the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice. Further research on the winter solstice shows that it is probably the most celebrated and observed time of year around the entire world, regardless of theology or geography.
Monday, December 21 at 8:47 AM Mountain Standard Time the north half of the Earth will be tipped away from the sun at its most extreme. Each year this instance in time signifies at once the shortest northern hemisphere daylight and the movement of the Earth’s tilt back towards the rebirth and warmth of spring and summer. It is universally, though most times subconsciously, an understanding of the simultaneous end and the beginning of the seasons.
The marvelous story of Christ is heavily steeped in symbolism of this nature through his birth, growth, repression/execution and rebirth. Hanukkah, or the Festival of Lights, commemorates the revolutionary uprising against the brutal repression of Jewish tradition back in 200 BCE. While Hanukkah is not an out and out observance of the astral plain one can see a parallel grand theme of the nature of birth, growth, repression, revolution and growth that mirrors the nature of the Earth’s annual travels around the sun. In fact, this theme is found all over the world in literature, art, theology throughout time. It is unifying in this regard.
Whatever the constellations may be doing we are all a part of this planet and are together in observing its’ motions through space and time. I can’t imagine a better reason to celebrate or participate in the holidays.
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 12th 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.
No astronomer can see it. No scientist has proven its existence. The majority consensus suggests that dark matter comprises the vast majority of the universe. Dark matter remains hypothetical but most scientists in the world are scrambling for the glory of describing it, kind of like clerics and God. Am I the only one observing the elevation of the illogical in the name of science here?
In 1933 Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology used the virial theorem to calculate that observed galactic motions did not equate to the expected mass. He then made the assumption that there must be much more mass in the system that cannot be directly observed: dark matter.
There are a few big problems with this type of an analytical leap. The first is that the virial theorem is a generalizing calculus function. It allows a given amount of energy for a given amount of potential force bound space. Unfortunately, generalizing calculus functions given incomplete variables, much like prejudicial generalizations in life, yield misleading if not outright bogus results. The exponential result of such miscalculations can be professionally embarrassing. The second problem is that the virial theorem itself is not a proof and certainly not a law, therefore it is questionable as to its’ validity and efficacy, especially considering the unknown mechanics of space and time, i.e. gravity. Gravity is an incomplete variable; its force knows no bounds. It is everywhere and nowhere, like dark matter.
Major engineering efforts are being employed right now, from NASA’s Fermi space telescope to the recently back-online CERN Large Hadron Collider, to probe the energies of macro and micro space and observe and verify the existence or nature of dark matter.
It is great scientific reasoning to question longstanding assumptions when modern theories are found lacking and the illogical is employed to fill in the gaps. There is little difference between purported science and conjectural theology when we are not allowed to question the fundamental assumptions and redress them. Debasement of our collective knowledge is the result. Questioning the fundamentals becomes necessary.
Gravity breaks down in the face of quantum physics. Einstein could not completely figure it out. No one has. Perhaps it is time to admit that a better model of the mechanics of the cosmos is necessary, one that readily intuits the nature of celestial mechanics rather than making it up ad hoc.
The fun is streaming non-stop for enthusiasts of astronomy these days. This week the Leonid meteor shower is raging in conjunction with the new Moon. Estimates for the 2009 meteor event range upwards to 500 meteors an hour as the Earth finishes its annual pass through the tail of the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Beginning around midnight this week look for the rising constellation of Leo and follow it across the sky into the dawn for the best chance to catch the most meteor activity.
As if 500 meteors/hour slamming into and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t exciting enough, this week results are in from the NASA Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS experiment that crashed a satellite into a crater at the pole of the Moon to observe the spectroscopic results from the kicked up particulate. There is now evidence of more water on the surface of the Moon than previous direct observations have shown yet it is still relatively little.
More water on the Moon makes human habitation much more feasible. The question is: what is human habitation of the Moon good for? There are two main reasons; exploitative mining and/or establishing a launch site for deeper space exploration. More valuable to scientists than water on the Moon is Helium-3, which is super-rare on Earth, and exists on the Moon in relative abundance compared to Earth. Helium-3 is a stable element that is exceptionally valuable in nuclear technology. It allows a reaction to occur without turning components of a nuclear reactor radioactive, which is great for nuclear energy on Earth. Helium-3 is also optimal for use in nuclear fusion weaponry, hydrogen bombs, because it is stable and will not decay.
Nuclear weapons have shelf lives because they rely on radioactive elements that decay rendering them impotent over time. Helium-3 use in nuclear weaponry would mean that a nuclear weapon would have infinite shelf life (given infinite longevity of all other variables, which is improbable). Many scientists are not ignorant to the fact that every piece of technology that can be used for good can also be used for evil. Many scientists are or choose to ignore that fact for shortsighted personal gains. Habitation of the Moon and subsequent mining could potentially result in human kinds’ rapid exploration of deeper space and safer nuclear energy on Earth or it could result in more efficient weapons of destruction to wield over Earth. My observation is that for every helpful technology produced there is also produced an equal and opposite danger.
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’ scientifictheory 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 ofintelligence 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 75th birthday had he not deceased in 1996. Dr. Sagan was a heavily awardedpioneer 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.
Perhaps it is stating the overly obvious, but not all space related phenomena need be observed at night. This past October 8 observers imaged a high altitude fireball explosion over Indonesia sometime before mid day. The event had an estimated kinetic output of roughly 40,000 tons of TNT. That is roughly triple the energetic discharge of the Little Boy nuclear weapon deployed by the United States over Hiroshima, Japan.
There was no impact or catastrophic fallout from this Indonesianincident but there have been other similar events that have led to significant altering of the Earth’s environment. The most powerful recentoccurrence was the Tunguska Event which occurred 3-6 miles over Siberia in 1908. The energy output of this event is estimated at 10-15 megatons of TNT or roughly 1/3 the power of the most powerful man made nuclear explosion, the 50 megaton Russian hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba. To keep things in perspective,and our egos in check, when a star goes supernova it releases something like 10 octillion or 1028 megatons of TNT. These are nuclear energies we can barely comprehend, let alone engineer.
The first recorded professional expedition to the Tunguska site did not arrive until more than 10 years later due to its remote location and the war torn nature of Russia at the time. The witnesses observed no impact crater and 30 miles of scorched trees knocked down from a central location. Hypotheses for this event range from the feasible large meteoric air burst to a traveling black hole to a crash landed alien UFO. As there are no reliable eye-witness accounts we must rely on the most plausible scientific inference of a meteoric air burst event over which we have no control. These types of powerful atmospheric events occur all too frequently as we go about our insulated and self important lives. Observations like these serve to remind those of us that might marvel at humanity’s mastery over nature and other men that we are far more passive in relation to the greater cosmic energy pathways.
Image Courtesy of Barrett Web Coordinator @ Creative Commons
Telescopic astronomy is a new science. This year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the telescope to resolve the moons of Jupiter. However, any surface telescope has at best half of 24 hours in a day to use a telescope for the night skies, halving the time to about 200 years. If we take into account that the Moon obscures a great portion of the night sky for 2 weeks of every month then we can split that time frame again to roughly 100 years. Plus, weather is rarely optimal for viewing the whole sky radically cutting the amount of time again. The result is that despite the +/- 400 year history of the telescope we have only had a fraction of time that a telescope from the surface of the Earth can be used practically. Our eye on the Universe is only beginning to crack open.
Despite what we have scientifically cataloged, our understandings of what we are actually looking at are rather rudimentary in many respects. One of the more striking things about astronomy is the variation in the calculated distances to the majority of astronomical objects. Referencing various astronomy sources will give any number of calculated distances. The reason is the extreme newness of the art of astronomical comprehension. It takes several years of observations of any one object to begin to complete the calculations that give us our most basic distances. And then, everything that we might observe is generally in motion. This appreciation is empowering to would-be astronomers and humbling to the professionals. The night sky has been admired by the naked eye and observed for millenia yet much of our better understandings of astronomy and cosmology haven’t strayed far from their roots of philosophy and poetry.
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 13th – 15th.
It is the second week of August again and for astronomers and sky watchers around the world that means it is time to look to the night skies for the Perseid Meteor showers.
On July 30 the Earth began its pass through the dusty trail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The meteor show from Comet Swift-Tuttle has been observed for over 2000 years though the origin of the meteors was unknown for sure until 1992. In fact, Comet Swift-Tuttle has been calculated to be on a collision course with either the Earth or the Moon. Sleep tight for now kids as it has not been calculated to strike us this millennium.
Meteors can be seen throughout the month of August but the peak of intensity for the Perseid meteor showers will be sometime on August 11th or 12th. As the Moon will be waning from its August 5th fullness the best bet for observing the show will be to catch them before the Moon rises. That puts the time for best viewing in the Gunnison Valley at around 11:00 PM, weather permitting.
The Perseids get their name from the constellation Perseus which is their radiant. The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky but if you were to trace the tails backward on their line of travel they would all appear to originate from the constellation Perseus. Constellation Perseus, which has been rising around midnight, can be found in our north eastern skies. This means approximately the direction of Crested Butte Mountain from the town of Crested Butte. It could be quite a show of meteors seeming to emanate from the peak of our centerpiece Gunnison Valley mountain.
More water on the Moon makes human habitation much more feasible. The question is: what is human habitation of the Moon good for? There are two main reasons; exploitative mining and/or establishing a launch site for deeper space exploration. More valuable to scientists than water on the Moon is 
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. 