Astronomy
Astronomy... and space exploration
(updated Sat. Sep. 23, 2017)
Astronomy: noun
the study of objects and matter outside the earth’s atmosphere and of their physical and chemical properties.
Source: Merriam-Webster / https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/astronomy
Astronomy:
An awesome branch of science and religion through which we see a glimpse of how God created the universe... and through which we can better understand how, in so vast a universe we can still feel so loved... He made us in His likeness, to be here on Earth, in the middle of this vast universe... because He loves us.
While we may sometimes feel “small and insignificant,” we need to remember that we are, each and every single one of us, infinitely loved.
This page provides a LOT of information
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-some great resources to learn more about astronomy
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-some photos and links to great astronomical places our family has visited...
which ultimately leads to... -
-The story of how Edwin Hubble built on the efforts of several other astronomers to define the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, and how that led to Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre to deduce that that such expansion must have had a singular beginning and that beginning could only gave started by God, through the Big Bang.
Science and religion are quite complimentary.
(many people in this world may try to inform you otherwise...)
Just a few of many sources that support this point are:
God and the Mystery of the Universe /
What Science Can Teach Us About God
(by Vatican Astronomer Brother Guy Consomagno, S.J., Ph.D. and George Coyne):
Asteroids, Stars and the Love of God
(by Vatican Astronomer Brother Guy Consomagno, S.J., Ph.D. and George Coyne):
The Universe Participates in the Mystery of God
(by Vatican Astronomer Brother Guy Consomagno, S.J., Ph.D. and George Coyne):
The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican
(published by OSV / Our Sunday Visitor):
http://www.amazon.com/The-Heavens-Proclaim-Astronomy-Vatican/dp/1592766455
More about how the Catholic Church supports science:
http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2016/nuns-instrumental-in-vatican-celestial-survey.cfm
Astronomy SmartPhone App - Distant Suns
There are many fine smartphone apps, which move with you to show the stars and planets and other objects in the sky.
The one I use, Distant Suns, is one of the oldest apps out there.
“Years and years ago, somewhere in the middle of 1985, I got a great idea for a little astronomy program for my new Commodore Amiga 1000. I prototyped it first as a 22 line basic program, and the proceeded to spend the next two decades “polishing it up a little.”
“It has won the hearts of many users, and I still get email from time to time saying that Distant Suns was someone’s favorite program when they were in a) High School b) on their honeymoon, c) in prison.
“After deciding that it was time to put the little bugger out to pasture along came this iPhone thing and I realized that this was the platform I’ve been waiting for all along, as I had always wanted to carry the universe around in my shirt pocket. So I dusted off the code and launched into the latest incarnation of Distant Suns. I have already received some emails from some long time fans thanking me for keeping it going.”
source: http://distantsuns.com/about/
Distant Suns works for Apple iPhones (iOS) and Android.
Some of the many features of Distant Suns include:
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-Compass: move your phone and the sky on the phone adjusts to show you what the phone is pointing to
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-Tap the screen for a second and it will let you move a pointer over the stars, which then tells you the name and other details about it
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-Red mode - by changing the display to be red, your eyes can transition better from the screen to the sky with less loss of night vision
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-Drawings of the constellations... not just lines between the stars but drawings of the mythological characters, the animals, the objects, etc.
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-much more
I highly recommend it... pay the extra few dollars for the Max version!
Link: Distant Suns phone app, iPhone and Android.
Astronomy / Space Websites
Astronomy magazine:
Astronomy for Kids:
Missouri Skies, by Astronomer Dan Bush, in Albany (NW), MO:
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My Astronomy Merit Badge (BSA / Boy Scouts):
http://vanvooren.us/MeritBadges/Astronomy_Merit_Badge.html
My Astronomy Merit Badge (BSA / Boy Scouts):
http://vanvooren.us/MeritBadges/Space_Exploration_Merit_Badge.html
Family Astronomy / Telescope visits
The last few years we’ve been fortunate to visit
telescopes and other astronomical places of interest.
They include:
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-The Kennedy Space Center (2009)
- Adler Planetarium, Chicago (2009)
- Schwartz Observatory at UM-St. Louis (2010)
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-Palomar Observatory, San Diego County (spring, 2010)
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-Seeing the Big Dipper, “upside down” at 5m in Zion National Park (Oct., 2010)
- Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, AZ (Oct., 2010)
- Marshfield, MO - birthplace of Edwin Hubble (2011)
Visiting the Kennedy Space Center
We took an extended weekend trip to visit family, and to see the Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral), in 2009.
Main Page:
https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com
The crew of the space shuttle Endeavour was flying Shuttle Mission STS-127 during our visit:
See also... International Space Station tracking page:
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/
Our family, at Kennedy Space Center, 2009
(the Discovery mission patch is from when we visited growing up, back in 1984)
Adler Planetarium
We visited Chicago for the Fourth of July weekend in 2010.
We visited Shed’s Aquarium, The Hancock tower, and the Adler Planetarium, which is located on the Chicago Lake Michigan lakeshore.
While the Hubble Telescope gets most of the visibility, NASA has launched several space telescopes, including the X-ray Chandra Telescope and IR / Infrared Spitzer Telescope.
The Spitzer Telescope captured a very large view of the Milky Way, our galaxy, in Infrared wavelengths - http://www.astro.wisc.edu/sirtf/. The image was first introduced at a meeting in St. Louis in 2008, and Adler had a fulll-sized version of it when we visited in 2010.
Visiting the UM-St. Louis Schwartz Observatory
The UMSL / University of Missouri - St. Louis Physics Department has a 14” telescope that is available for public viewing via the monthly public open houses (groups can schedule visits, too).
Matt and I visited one warm Saturday night in July and were very impressed by what we saw through the telescope:
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-the details of the lunar craters we saw along the terminator (line between light(day)/dark(night)
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-Saturn’s rings & two moons - Titan and Rhea
Reminder: red lights are used to see at night because they let our eyes adjust back to the dark skies more quickly than other color lights.
Thank you, Shane & Dr. Gibb for being such courteous and informative hosts. We look to see you again soon!
Palomar Observatory - San Diego County
Our family, at the Palomar Observatory, 2010 - this is outside the dome housing the 200” reflector.
We have visited southern California, especially San Diego / La Jolla, on many occasions. Several times, when driving between Orange County and San Diego, we had seen glimpses of the Palomar Observatory far off in the distance. In 2010 we finally had a chance to visit, on a drive from Palm Desert / Palm Springs to Carlsbad.
I did not know much about Palomar before we started planning that visit.
To help learn more, I read the book “The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telecope”:
While the use of the word “perfect” is a clear exaggeration, the story is an insightful one... persistence / perseverance...
A few of the interesting facts about Palomar that I learned from the book, and our family’s visit, include:
Palomar...
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-... was built by George Ellery Hale... over 20+ years
Hale... -
-... first built the 60” refractor telescope at Yerkes Observatory, which is still the largest in the world.
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-... then built the 60” and 100” reflector telescopes at Mount Wilson Observatory, outside Los Angeles
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-Edwin Hubble used the 100” telescope to help define the Hubble Constant... more on that below...
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-... built, and used, the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory for his own scientific observations
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-... built the 200” reflector telescope at Palomar Observatory
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-... designing the telescope started in the late 1920s, ground was broken in 1935, both before WWII, slowed by the war, and completed in the late 1940s... first light was disappointing, and they came back a few hours later that night, and after the telescope adjusted to the night temperatures, they observed Hubble’s Variable Nebula on January 26, 1949.
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-source: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/history.html
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-... is the largest ever single-piece-of-glass telescope ever built... Russia did build one a little bigger, but it cracked and does not work; larger telescopes made since Palomar then are made of smaller pieces of glass that are adjusted by computers and small motors to gather light into a single focus.
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-it took the Corning Glass Works in Corning, NY to determine the right American ingenuity needed to determine how to make the incredibly large primary mirror using their Pyrex glass, in a process that took 10 months to heat and melt and then cool the corning glass, and even separate from delays in the polishing process, the polishing of the mirror took years. source: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/history.html#mirror
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-... helped determine the size and age of the universe... Walter Baade “discovered the existence of two populations of Cepheid variables. Objects of intrinsic brightness, his observations of these populations allowed him to recalculate the distance scale previously established by Edwin Hubble and, in so doing, also to double our understanding of the size of the known universe.”
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-... was used by Maarten Schmidt and others to discover quasars in 1963.
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-... helped confirm the existence of brown dwarfs in 1994.
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-The 200” telescope is also supported by the 48” and 60” telescopes in observing the skies- http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/telescopes.html
We almost missed seeing the telescope inside the dome, but Matt helped us find the docents, who took us inside for a quick view under the 19-foot single piece of glass.
Additional thoughts about Palomar...
and the Andromeda Galaxy...
Built in the 30s and 40s.
Helped us understand the size of the universe...
it’s amazing to realize that as recently
as the end of World War II
galaxies were still thought to only be just
large balls of gas within our own galaxy...
it took observations with Palomar to confirm that
Andromeda is its own galaxy, and not a gas cloud in our own galaxy...
(Yes, this was the desktop background image in Apple’s Mac OS 10.7)
We’ve come a long way since then...
in 2015, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) captured the largest image it ever assembled. This “sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, The Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It's like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view -- over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.“
You can download your own copy of the image via:
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-s-high-definition-panoramic-view-of-the-andromeda-galaxy
And... Andromeda is one of the few heading toward our own Milky Way...
to collide with us in 3 billion years or so... unknown is the impact to our solar system... it could be minimal
Crash of the Titans: Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WEI8WBJkKk
See also these related ‘Andromeda + Milky Way’ articles on Astronomy.com / Astronomy Galaxy.
http://astronomy.com/search?q=andromeda+and+milky+way
in particular, see:
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-These still images from Astronomy magazine, which show the Andromeda Galaxy, which is moving to join our Milky Way in some 2.5 billion years - http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2016/04/andromeda-galaxy)
Astronomy magazine provides this updated map of our solar system’s place in our galaxy in their November, 2013 issue:
Dark Skies over Zion National Park
We took an awesome trip in October, 2010... on the way to my cousin’s wedding in Phenix, we visited:
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-Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ
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-Phoenix
http://vanvooren.us/VV/Utah_and_Arizona.html
The Big Dipper, 5am, October, 2010; Zion NP, which is in SW / Southwest Utah.
Lowell Observatory
Most Arizona telescopes / observatories are in the south, near the U.S. - Mexico border.
While driving to the Grand Canyon, I found a brochure at a gas station that reminded me that Pluto was discovered in Flagstaff, in Northern Arizona, at the Lowell Observatory (not near the Mexican border). Percival Lowell predicted Pluto’s existence and his assistant Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, at Lowell Observatory, shortly after Lowell’s death.
Separate from Pluto, and equally interesting is that Lowell was “interested in the canals of Mars, as drawn by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who was director of the Milan Observatory.”
“Although Lowell's theories of the Martian canals, of surface features on Venus, and of Planet X are now discredited, his practice of building observatories at the position where they would best function has been adopted as a principle.[19] He also established the program and setting which made the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh possible.[24] Craters on the Moon and on Mars have been named after him. Lowell has been described by other planetary scientists as "the most influential popularizer of planetary science in America before Carl Sagan".[25]
“While eventually disproved, Lowell's vision of the Martian canals, as an artifact of an ancient civilization making a desperate last effort to survive, significantly influences the development of science fiction – starting with H. G. Wells’ influential The War of the Worlds, which made the further logical inference that creatures from a dying planet might seek to invade Earth.”
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell
We had an awesome time at Lowell Observatory, staying far longer than we expected, seeing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot with our own eyes in the Clark Telescope, through which Tombaugh first saw Pluto with his own eyes.
Lowell Observatory also partnered with the Discovery Channel to build the DCT / Discovery Channel Telescope, which is a few miles away from Flagstaff’s lights.
Pictures from that trip are on our Utah and Arizona page:
http://vanvooren.us/VV/Utah_and_Arizona.html
That page also notes:
Also at Lowell, Vesto Slipher obtained used the spectrograph to identify the first evidence of the expanding universe
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-he observed that the spectra of most galaxies were red-shifted, shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, which means they are moving away from us.
Edwin Hubble, born in Missouri
The man for whom the telescope is named - Edward Hubble, was born in Marshfield, Missouri, ~ 10 miles Northeast of Springfield, ~ the 90-mile marker on Interstate 44. I-44 is named the “Edward P. Hubble Memorial highway“ as it runs through Marshfield / Webster County:
http://www.house.missouri.gov/content.aspx?info=/bills041/bills/SB767.htm
&
http://www.marshfieldmo.gov/for-visitors/history-of-marshfield
Marshfield is the County Seat for Webster County. Outside the County Hall is a quarter-scale replica of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Which leads us to...
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-... The story of how Edwin Hubble built on the efforts of several other astronomers to define the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, and how that led to Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre to deduce that that such expansion must have had a singular beginning and that beginning could only gave started by God, through the Big Bang.
The short summary...
Edwin Hubble...
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-... used data collected by Henrietta Leavitt Swan,Harlow Shapley, Georges Lemaitre, Albert Einstein, and many others, including Vesto Slipher’s spectrographic evidence, as collected at Flagstaff, AZ’s Lowell Observatory
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-... combined it with Hubble’s own observations made at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, outside Los Angeles, which used the regularity of Cepheid variable stars to calculate interstellar distances
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-... combined it with the concept of the Big Bang, as developed by Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, who viewed the expanding universe to have needed a starting point... later called the Big Bang... the starting point being God - http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/science/faith-and-science/a-day-without-yesterday-georges-lemaitre-amp-the-big-bang.html
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-and developed the Hubble Constant, which describes the ever-expanding nature of our universe
Why is Hubble recognized?
Several people’s efforts, in the early 1900s, led to Hubble’s success:
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-Henreietta Leavitt Swan, working at the the Harvard Observatory, in 1908, discovered that a specific type of variable stars, Cepheid variable stars (named for the constellation Cepheus, the king), changed their brightness in a predictable pattern. (#WomeninSTEM!)
“The data on her graph dell on a straight line: Cepheids a thousand times as luminous as our sun completed their bright-dim-bright cycle in three days; Cepheids ten thousand times as luminous as our sun took thirty days to complete their cycle. By 1912 she had graphed enough data to publish an article, “Periods of twenty-five Variable Stats in the Small Magellanic Cloud,” in the Harvard College Observatory Circular.”
source ” The Perfect Machine - Building the Palomar Telescope” by Ronald Florence, p. 12.
Ms. Leavitt’s observations helped link the period of the brightness with the size of the stars, and also led to determining distances to stars, which helped Hubble confirm the distance to the Andromeda galzxy, confirming it is outside our own galaxy, which then helped lead Hubble to determine the Hubble constant (more on this below)..
Henrietta Leavitt: Unsung Heroine in Science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70cFwfNW7gQ
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-Harlow Shapley, also born in Missouri (Nashville, near Joplin), expanded on Ms. Leavitt’s observations. He was able to observe that Cepheid variable stars were distributed in groups, many near the constellation Sagittarius. He used these insights to estimate the size of our Milky Way galaxy (fairly accurately given what could be observed then) and our sun and solar system’s position in the galaxy - away from the center. He also incorrectly asserted that the Milky Way contained most of the universe.
source: http://www.britannica.com/biography/Harlow-Shapley
See also: http://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/shapley_obit.html & http://blogs.britannica.com/2010/11/harlow-shapley-and-the-scale-of-the-universe-picture-essay-of-the-day
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-Vesto Slipher, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, used a spectrograph to observe both radial velocities of galaxies, and to observe that most stellar objects’ spectrum are red-shifted, which shows that everything is moving away from everything else.
(save the Andromeda Galaxy, which is moving to join our Milky Way in some 2.5 billion years - http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2016/04/andromeda-galaxy)
Photographs: courtesy VanVooren family photos from family trip that included a visit to Lowell Observatory
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-Albert Einstein, working at a patent office in Switzerland, published his Theory of Relativity in 1915.
“One conclusion of Einstein’s theory was that the universe could not be static: It had either to be expanding or contracting.”
source ” The Perfect Machine - Building the Palomar Telescope” by Ronald Florence, p. 65. -
“In January 1933, both Lemaitre and Einstein traveled to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." Duncan Aikman covered these seminars for the New York Times Magazine. An article about Lemaitre appeared on February 19, 1933, and featured a large photo of Einstein and Lemaitre standing side by side. The caption read, "They have a profound respect and admiration for each other."”
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source: “‘A Day With Yesterday’: Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang”
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-Edwin Hubble, working with Milton Humason, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, CA, were able to observe that the more distant the objects the faster they receded.
The Hubble Constant was published in 1929, and shows that the universe is expanding at a constant rate... and ever-increasing rate... the things in the universe farthest from us are moving away from us the fastest..
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-Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest in Belgium, determined the universe was expanding. When he shared this with Albert Einstein in 1927, Einstein agreed with the deduction.
It was in 1931, after Hubble, that Lemaitre observed that an ever-expanding universe must have had a beginning, and that this beginning must have been started by an outside force - God.
“If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.”
source: http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/science/faith-and-science/a-day-without-yesterday-georges-lemaitre-amp-the-big-bang.html
Lemaitre’s theories were confirmed in 1964 when Arno Penzias and others observed cosmic background radiation in a radio telescope.
Lemaitre’s theories were not accepted by all. Some mocked him by calling the start of the expansion a “big bang,” which is the term now used to describe what is widely accepted - that the universe did begin with a bang, also called a singularity.
See also: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8847...
and Marcia Bartusiak’s “The Day we Found the Universe” -
https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/day-we-found-universe-unabridged/id314755851
Final things to share...
Our sun
Our sun is an average star, falling mid-way in the main-sequence of stars, yellow a mid-temperature star.
This Hertzsprung-Russell diagram shows the relative sizes and colors of stars:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/HRDiagram.png
While officially an average-size star, our sun is quite small compared to the giants, as this diagram shows. Antares is the red star in Scorpio (summer constellation also called Maui’s fish hook by Hawaiians); Antares is also called the heart of the scorpion... look at it and you’ll surely see why):
Chelybinsk Meteor - February, 2013; Russia
A meteor struck Siberia/Russia in February, 2013.
This is the only known meteor to ever harm a person (the Tunguska meteor in 1908 is not known to have had any injuries or casualties)... ... and many were injured... and it happened in 2013!
PBS's NOVA program aired an episode focused on the crash, how scientists determined from where it came (and why it wasn't found before crashing), etc. While already broadcast, the show is still available to watch online.
It is quite an interesting show, as they shared how scientists came to learn how it wasn’t seen before striking the earth, and talks much about the math used to determine from where it came.
Also... there are humorous scenes ~ the 19-minute mark relating to why there were so many cameras recording the meteor (including trucks of cows overturning)
See:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/meteor-strike.html
and also look for it on the PBS section/station on Apple TV.
