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Issue 39 - December, 2012 Latest Astronomy and Space News Kids Astronomy Quizzes and Games Monthly Sky Guide Internet Highlights

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Issue 39 - December, 2012

Latest Astronomy and Space News

Kids Astronomy

Quizzes and Games

Monthly Sky Guide

Internet Highlights

The good news in December is that it gets dark nice and early allowing for long observing sessions. The bad news for those of us in the North is that the price we pay for the early evenings is the cold that accompanies it. So, fill your thermos with some nice hot coffee or hot chocolate and enjoy the wonderful winter skies.

We'll start off again this month naked eye. The Geminid Meteor Shower peaks on the 13th. This is usually one of the best meteor showers of the year and should offer excellent viewing this year as the moon is in good position (waning crescent). The Geminids will seem to radiate from a point near the stars Castor and Pollux. Castor and Pollux are to the upper right of the famed Betelgeuse in Orion. Watch this area of the sky from a dark site and you can expect to see as many as 60 - 80 meteors an hour.

Telescope Targets December continues to offer wonderful views of Cassiopea, Andromeda, Auriga and Perseus. See October's and November's picks pages for targets in these constellations.

The Pleiades (M45) or also known as the Seven Sisters is a wonderful low power open cluster in the constellation Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters, and is

probably the best known, and is certainly the most obvious to the naked eye.

It is easily identified high in the Southeast early after sunset. Look for 6 stars that appear to be a miniature version of the big dipper. Point your telescope with it's lowest power eyepiece at this and you'll be shocked at how many stars are visible. They are located at a distance of 400 light years from us and contain 100 stars. This cluster is approximately 78 million years old.

Also in the same area of sky are the Hyades. This is one of those targets best seen with binoculars. The Hyades are a huge open cluster of 350 stars located at a distance of 150 Light years from us. The Hyades are below the Pleiades. Look for the "V" shaped grouping of stars and point your binoculars or your telescope toward them. The Hyades hold the distinction of being the closest open cluster to us.

Planets Jupiter is in excellent position for viewing right after sunset positioned high in the southern sky.

Saturn is also in great position for viewing in the Southeast in the early evening. Show some family or friends this superstar of the sky.

Well, that's about it for this month. Orion is rising in the south and will offer lots of targets for late evening this month also. I will detail these in January's picks.

Clear skies and good hunting!

By Kevin Daly http://members.aol.com/kdaly10475/index.html

Sky Guide - Beginner’s targets for December

The Pleiades cluster is dominated by hot blue stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. Dust that forms a faint reflection nebulosity around the brightest stars was thought at first to be left over from the formation of the cluster, but is now known to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium that the stars are currently passing through. Astronomers estimate that the cluster will survive for about another 250 million years, after which it will disperse due to gravitational interactions with its galactic neighbourhood.

Club Notes

Club Observing:

Remember the next club meets every first Friday of the month for our observing sessions held in the MAC grounds. If you wish to be informed of these sessions please email your name and mobile number to [email protected] who will confirm if the session is going ahead (depending on weather).

MAC is a proud member of

Taurus is one of the constellations of the zodiac. It sits large and prominent in the Northern Hemisphere winter sky, between Aries to the west and Gemini to the east; to the north lie Perseus and Auriga, to the southeast Orion, to the south

Eridanus, and to the southwest Cetus. Behind the star Aldebaran lie the Hyades, the nearest distinct open star cluster, that with it form a V, or an A, in the sky marking the bull's head. In the west of the constellation lie the Pleiades, one of the best known open clusters, easily visible to the eye. Another object, visible in a telescope, is the Crab Nebula (M1), a supernova remnant northwest of ζ Tauri. The explosion, seen on Earth on July 4, 1054, was bright enough to be seen by day. It is mentioned in Chinese history texts.

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

c o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t s Latest Astronomy and Space News A newly identified separate star cluster in front of the Orion Nebula Cluster ...................................................... 3

New bright and blue Supernova in NGC 1365 ........................ 3

Black Hole blast biggest ever recorded ................................. 4

"Orphan Planet" spotted ...................................................... 4

Jupiter brightens the December sky ...................................... 5

NGC 6362: stars ancient and modern ................................... 6

Hot gas bridge discovered connecting galaxy clusters ............ 6

Life and death in a star-forming cloud .................................. 7

Makemake’s mysteriously missing atmosphere ...................... 7

New super-Earth in six-planet system may be just right to support life ..................................................................... 8

A colourful and unexpected reversal at Titan ......................... 8

The Saturn Nebula .............................................................. 9

The “Outer Limits” Galaxy .................................................... 9

Kids Section Kids Korner ....................................................................... 10

Quizzes and Games Exercise your brain ............................................................ 11

Monthly Sky Guide Beginners sky guide for this month .................................... 12

Internet Highlights Special content only available with the online version of the magazine ................................................................ 13

Front cover image:

The suggestively shaped reflection nebula commonly known as the Witch Head Nebula is associated with the bright star Rigel in the

constellation Orion, spans about 50 light-years and is composed of interstellar dust

grains reflecting Rigel's starlight.

In this cosmic portrait, the blue colour of the Witch Head Nebula and of the dust

surrounding Rigel is caused not only by Rigel's intense blue starlight but because the dust grains scatter blue light more efficiently than red. The same physical process causes Earth's daytime sky to appear blue. Rigel, the Witch Head Nebula, and gas and dust that surrounds them lie about 800 light-

years away.

Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

MAC meets on the first Tuesday of the month in the Presbyterian Hall, High Street, Tullamore from 8pm.

All are welcome to attend. It also holds infrequent Observing Nights at its Observing Site in

Clonminch, or at a member’s house (weather permitting) on the first

Friday of every month..

You can see more about the club and its events on

www.midlandsastronomy.com or contact the club via e-mail at [email protected] Meetings are informal and are

aimed at a level to suit all ages.

Exercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brain 1. What state of matter is

our Sun mainly consisted of?

� Gas � Plasma � Solid � Liquid

2. We have all heard of the Hubble space telescope.

What was the first name of the astronomer with

the last name Hubble?

� Mercutio � Galileo � Edwin � Isaac

3. What in our solar system

is the Cassini Division?

� White layers of clouds on Jupiter

� The division of the large and small planets

� Space between the asteroids and Mars

� A gap in Saturn's rings 4. The smaller, Earth-like

planets are called 'terrestrial' planets.

What are the larger planets called?

� Saturnine � Jovian � Torrential � Uranian

5. Which moon of Saturn

is one of the only

two moons in the

solar system with an atmosphere?

� Titan � Io � Triton � Charon

6. The constellation 'Crux'

is probably better known as what?

� Northern Crown � Northern Cross � Southern Cross � Southern Crown

7. P o r t i o n s o f t h e constellations Ursa

Major and Ursa Minor are also known as

what?

� Great and little dog � Big and little dipper � Orion and his dog � Big and little lion

8. What is it called when

we have a second full moon within one

month?

� Blue moon � New moon � Full moon � To the moon Alice!

9. The galaxy known as IRAS F10214+4724 is

how many times bright-er than the sun?

� 500 � 7,000 � 5,000 � 300,000,000,000,000

10.What was the name of the comet that made its

closest approach to Earth on March 22,

1997?

� Hale-Bopp � Encke's comet � Halley's comet � Herschel's comet

8 4 2

9 3 8 4

5 7

6 4 1 7

4 7 2

5 6 2 9

9 8

2 8 4 7

3 2 1

SUDOKU

Check your answers

Answer 1: Plasma is usually an ionized gas, meaning that one electron has been taken or added to an accumulation of atoms or molecules.

Answer 2: Edwin Hubble was a great American astronomer from the early 20th century. One of his major discov-eries was to ascertain with proof that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way.

Answer 3: Gioovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian-French astronomer from the late 17th-early 18th century. He followed up on Galileo's work with a more powerful telescope, one that allowed him to discover four moons of Saturn and the gaps in Saturn's rings that bear his name.

Answer 4: The 'terrestrial' planets are so named because they have hard, rocky surfaces like the Earth...terra firma. The Jovian planets are named for Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods and the largest planet. They are also called the 'gas giants'.

Answer 5: Titan is though to have its own atmosphere, it is not the largest moon in the solar system. That title belongs to Jupiter's moon Ganymede! Triton, a moon of Neptune, also has a thin but viable atmosphere.

Answer 6: The correct answer was Southern Cross. The 'crux' of this matter is that you can only see the Southern Cross in the sky if you live in the southern hemisphere...it's worth the trip (unless you already live there, then no trip is needed of course!)

Answer 7: The 3 stars in the bow that makes up the handle of the Big Dipper direct ones eye toward the North Star, Polaris. Polaris lies at the tip of the Little Dipper's handle. By the way, the term 'Ursa' is Latin for 'bear'...the great and small bear.

Answer 8: The correct answer was Blue moon. I will leave this one to your imagination, as I hum the tune 'Blue Moon'...

Answer 9: The correct answer was 300,000,000,000,000. Do not, I repeat, do not look at this galaxy with your naked eye. Well, actually from Earth you would have no problem...you see, it's millions of light years away from us and barely visible with the naked eye.

Answer 10: Not coincidentally, the Hale-Bopp comet was discovered by a pair of scientists with the last names 'Hale' and 'Bopp'!

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The importance of this discovery is twofold: First, the cluster identified as a separate entity is only a slightly older sibling of the Trapezium cluster at the heart of the Orion Nebula; second, what astronomers have been calling the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) is actually a complicated mix of these two clusters.

"We need to refine what we thought were the most robust star and cluster formation observables,” said Hervé Bouy from the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madridexplains. He points out the need for a long follow-up work on Orion where "we must untangle these two mixed populations, star by star, if we are to understand the region, and star formation in clusters, and even the early stages of planet formation."

Using images from the 340-megapixel MegaCam camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) from the summit of Mauna Kea, astronomers identified the massive cluster of young stars NGC 1980 to be a clearly separate entity from the main cluster of the most-studied star formation region in the galaxy. A technique relying on the combination of optical, infrared, and mid-infrared data ensures astronomers are sampling only stars located in the foreground of the Orion Nebula. This technique also led them to the discovery of a nearby small star cluster, called L1641W.

Astronomers see the Orion Nebula as the benchmark for star-formation studies, a true golden standard, and most of the established measurements of how stars form have been derived from this important region — for example, the distribution of stellar and brown dwarf masses at birth, their relative age, their spatial distributions, and the properties of the planet-forming circumstellar disks surrounding the young stars.

But as it turns out, reality is more complicated. Recent observations with CFHT's MegaCam coupled with previous observations with the European Space Agency’s Herschel and XMM-Newton, NASA's Spitzer and WISE, as well as 2MASS and Calar Alto, revealed the cluster known as NGC 1980 as being a clearly distinct massive cluster of slightly older stars in front of the nebula. Although astronomers knew of the presence of a foreground stellar population since the 1960s, the new CFHT observations revealed that this population is more massive than first thought, and it is not uniformly distributed, clustering around the star Iota Ori at the southern tip of Orion's Sword.

Astronomers identified the massive cluster of young stars NGC 1980 to be a clearly separate entity from the main cluster of the most-studied star formation region in the galaxy.

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

"For me, the most intriguing part is that the older sibling, the Iota Ori cluster, is so close to the younger cluster still forming stars inside the Orion Nebula," said João Alves from the University of Vienna. "It is hard to see how these new observations fit into any existing theoretical model of cluster formation, and that is exciting because it suggests we might be missing something fundamental. Clusters are very likely the favourite mode of star formation in the universe, but we are still far from understanding why that is exactly."

www.astronomy.com

A newly identified separate star cluster in front of the Orion Nebula Cluster

Above: Located only 1,500 light-years away, the Orion Nebula is the brightest diffuse nebula is the sky. This image shows clearly the 3-D structure of this star formation region: a large cavity, created by the radiation pressure from new-born stars located in the brightest area of the image, lies within a huge cloud of dust and gas. Identified as a truly independent star cluster, NGC 1980 is associated with this well-studied star formation region, around the brightest star seen at the bottom of this image, Iota Ori.

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A very bright supernova has shown up in NGC 1365, the galaxy also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, visible now for southern hemisphere observers. This already elegant galaxy lies about 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax. The supernova, a type Ia, was discovered by Alain Klotz with the TAROT telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile on October 27, 2012. “The supernova is a very nice addition to the already highly photogenic galaxy,” said Rolf Wahl Olsen, who took the gorgeous image above. “I’m amazed by how blue it is; it’s really intense.” Supernova 2012fr is the bright and intensely blue star directly below the galaxy core. Olsen said that as of November 10, 2012 the supernova appeared to be nearing

its peak, with an R magnitude of 11.90. “To get an idea of how bright this event is we can calculate the absolute magnitude M of the supernova using the following formula where m is the apparent magnitude and D the distance in parsecs: M = m – 5(log10(D) – 1),” Olsen wrote. “This gives an absolute magnitude of -19.27 for SN2012fr. This means that if the supernova had occurred at a distance to us similar to Betelgeuse (643 light

years), then its apparent magnitude would be -12.80, same as the full Moon!”

www.universetoday.com

New bright and blue Supernova in NGC 1365

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Kid’s�Korner�

Our friends at the Cable Natural History Museum in Cable, Wisconsin, ask whether constellations ever break apart or change. To answer this, first let's think about what the constellations are, and then we can see whether they change.

When we look at the night sky, we see distant stars shining like faint lights. Now we know they are really brilliant lights, like the Sun, that are incredibly far away from us and from each other. Astronomers have used some wonderfully inventive methods to discover the distances to the stars, but to our eyes, they all look as if they are pinpoints of light at the same distance. As an extreme example of this, the red planet Mars is tens of millions of times closer than the red star Antares (Greek for "Rival of Mars"), but you certainly can't tell that just by looking at them when they appear near each other in our skies.

It's normal for us to find patterns in natural arrangements of things. For example, most people can imagine they see faces or other familiar objects in some clouds or rock formations. It's the same with the stars. Ancient observers, without the benefit of our modern understanding

of the nature of stars and space, saw these patterns and thought they might be important symbols. Cultures throughout history have created different names and descriptions for the arrangements of stars. The constellations most of us are familiar with were created by people living in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Many of the stories of the constellations tell us about the myths and legends of the people who gave them names thousands of years ago, but they tell us nothing about the stars themselves.

If stars never changed, then constellations wouldn't change. But the stars, including the Sun, travel in their own separate orbits

through the Milky Way galaxy. The stars move

along with fantastic speeds, but they are so far away that it takes a long time for their motion to

be visible to us. You can understand this by moving your finger in front of your eyes. Even when you move it very slowly, it may appear to move faster than a speeding jet that is many miles away.

Even the fastest stars take a long time to travel a noticeable distance. A faint star named Barnard's Star moves the fastest through our skies. Still, for it to change its position only by an amount equal to the width of the moon would take about 180 years. The constellations surely change shape, but seeing the changes would require superhuman patience!

The person who discovered that the stars move was the great British astronomer Edmond Halley, who also has a famous comet named after him. Almost 300 years ago he noticed that a few stars in charts made by Greek sky watchers were not in quite the same location anymore. Those charts were more than 1600 years old then, and even over that time, the bright stars Sirius, Arcturus, and Aldebaran had shifted position only slightly. Still, it

Do constellations

ever ever break apart

was enough for Halley to realize that those stars must have moved.

If you waited long enough, the patterns of stars you would see in the sky would change completely. The Big Dipper is the easily recognizable part of a constellation called Ursa Major, or the Great Bear. The star at the end of the handle and the one at the far tip of the bowl happen to be moving in the opposite direction from the other stars in the Big Dipper. In the

future, the handle will appear to be more bent, and the bowl

will spread out. To me, the shape in

50,000

years will be more like that of a tadpole than a dipper.

Besides their motion, the appearances of stars change as they age. Take my favourite constellation Scorpius, for example. A couple of years ago, the middle of the three stars that make the head of the scorpion became brighter. The constellation now has a new look!

The constellations are a very convenient way to locate objects in the splendid night sky, making a kind of natural map. If you knew the names of the constellations, you could follow directions to all sorts of beautiful and interesting objects, just as if you knew the names of streets, you could follow directions on how to get to a friend's house.

To make your own star finder and learn some of the constellations, go to The Space Place Web site at spaceplace.nasa.gov and click on "Make spacey things." Then I hope you will go outside to look at the stars, and use the constellations to find your way around. Remember, though, that what's important is not these patterns themselves, but rather the richness of the universe they will help you discover.

or change?

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typical quasar outflow. This definitely is an important step in piecing together the story of galaxy evolution, and in elucidating the role of quasars in that story."

www.nationalgeographic.com

swollen 8th-magnitude star. At 100x, the nebula appears as a pale green glow with a 12th-magnitude central star visible in a 3-inch or larger scope. A UHC filter will make the star disappear, but it may reveal more detail including a barely perceptible inner shell.

In a 10-12 inch telescope at 200x or more, the nebula reveals far more detail, including two slender arms radiating in opposite directions from the

To find the Saturn Nebula, also known as NGC 7009, look 2º northeast of the small cluster M73, which you met in the last article and 1º west of ? (nu) Aquarii. The nebula is small but fairly bright. At low power, it looks like a slightly

Astronomers have witnessed a record-breaking blast of gas and dust flowing out of a monster black hole more than 11.5 billion light-years away. Explosion is at least five times more powerful than previously observed events.

Black Hole blast biggest ever recorded

The Saturn Nebula Let’s look at great object in southern Aquarius. This small but amazingly complex planetary nebula lies right next to the 4th-magnitude star nu Aquarii, so it’s not hard to find. A small telescope reveals a hint of the nebula’s complexity, and at high magnification the object appears to sprout tiny side lobes that make it look like the planet Saturn. So it’s sometimes called the Saturn Nebula…

The central black hole in this quasar is true giant dynamo. It's estimated to be upward of a thousand times more massive than the one in the Milky Way, producing energy at rates about a hundred times higher than the total power output of our galaxy. Supermassive black holes are large enough to swallow our entire solar system and are notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars. But they also power distant quasars and spew out material at high speeds. The outflows have been suspected to play a key role in the evolution of galaxies, explained Arav, but questions have persisted for years in the astronomical community as to whether they were powerful enough. This newly discovered super outflow could solve major

The supermassive gravity well, with a mass of one to three billion suns, lurks at the core of a quasar—a class of extremely bright and energetic galaxies—dubbed SDSS J1106 1939. "We discovered the most energetic quasar outflow ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date," said Nahum Arav, an astronomer at Virginia Tech. Using the powerful telescopes of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, Arav and his team were able to clock the speed and other properties of the outflow. Belching out material as much as 400 times the weight of our sun every year, the blast is located nearly a thousand light-years from the quasar and has a velocity of roughly 29 million kilometres per hour.

centre. This makes it resemble the planet Saturn with nearly-edge-on rings. The nebula stretches across a compact angle of 45?x25?, a little larger than the apparent size of the planet Saturn. NGC 7009 was discovered by William Herschel in 1782 with one of his early home-built telescopes. It was named the “Saturn Nebula” by Lord Rosse in 1840. For years, Rosse got a closer look than

anyone before at hundreds of deep-sky objects with his giant Leviathan of Parsonstown. The central star of this planetary is becoming a white dwarf, an exposed core of a mid-sized star that’s run out of fuel. It will slowly radiate heat into space for the next untold billions of years.

www.oneminuteastronomer.com

Above: The Saturn Nebula (also known as NGC 7009 or Caldwell 55) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Aquarius. It appears as a greenish-yellowish hue in a small amateur telescope.

Above: Material is ejected near a supermassive black hole in the quasar SDSS J1106+1939 in an illustration.

cosmic mysteries, including how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass and why there is a relative scarcity of large galaxies across the universe. "I believe this is the smoking gun for several theoretical ideas that use the mechanical energy output of quasars to solve several important problems in the formation of galaxies and cluster of galaxies," said Arav. While Kirk Korista, an astronomer not connected to the study, believes these claims may be a bit premature, the research is expected to shed new light on the most powerful and least understood portions of typical quasar outflows. "The superb spectroscopic data of this quasar have allowed for a breakthrough in quantifying the energetics of what is probably a

Scientists believe such objects—also called homeless, free-floating, or rogue planets—can form in one of two ways. Either they're ejected from star systems, or they form independently.

About a dozen such untethered orbs were identified more than a decade ago in the Orion Nebula. Since then the pool of candidates has grown to several dozen.

A search for would-be stars called brown dwarfs has yielded something even more elusive: a potential orphan planet. Some four to seven times the mass of Jupiter, the wandering planet orbits no star, a team of French and Canadian astronomers reported recently.

The latest discovery is the first to be found outside a star-forming region, said Étienne Artigau a co-author of the study. Compared with other potential homeless planets, the new candidate is also older, colder, and much closer to Earth—approximately 130 light-years away Called CFBDSIR2149, the suspected orphan planet appears to reside in a group of young stars, though it isn't gravitationally linked to any of them. This affiliation with the so-called AB Doradus Moving Group helped scientists estimate the planet's age: 50 to 120 million years old. The object's infrared signature was detected when the team—led by Philippe Delorme—was searching for brown dwarfs several years ago. Brown dwarfs, while too massive to be considered planets, are sometimes dubbed "failed stars," because they lack the bulk to initiate nuclear reactions in their core. The unusual infrared readings

"Orphan Planet" spotted suggested that this particular body had a low mass, more like a gas giant planet than a brown dwarf. The team also looked to see if the object was gravitationally bound to anything else, Artigau said. "There's a small range where a parent star could be," he noted, adding that in astronomical terms, "small" can mean more than a hundred times the distance of Pluto from the sun. "We checked for a nearby star, which would be pretty bright, and found nothing." The absence of bright light from a nearby star also means less glare, and therefore better conditions for studying the new world more closely. And more study is exactly what's needed to confirm that it's an orphan planet.

www.nationalgeographic.com

Starved of starlight, CFBDSIR2149 (artist's conception) gives off a weak glow detectable only in infrared.

NGC 891 is the largest member of the small group of galaxies called Triangulum Spur, of which the lenticular galaxy NGC 1023 in Perseus is a member. At a distance of 31 million light years, NGC 891 spans 110,000 light years and holds the mass of 150 billion to 200 billion suns. Unfortunately, these dust lanes dim the view of this otherwise grand spiral galaxy. So it is quite a bit harder to see in a small telescope. The galaxy lies about halfway between Almaak and the easy-to-find star cluster M34 in Perseus.

Start at low power and look for its silver-needle shape about 12’ long running north-northeast to south-southwest. A 3-inch scope in dark sky will do the job, but as with most galaxies, a larger scope gives you a better view. If you’re not sure the galaxy is in your field of view, tap the side of your telescope to make the faint image jump out at you… your eye is quite sensitive to faint moving objects. Once you find the galaxy, use averted vision to see the full extent of its arms extending from a slightly thicker central bulge.

About 3.5o east of the double-star Almaak in Andromeda lies the photogenic edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891. This is a favourite target for astrophotographers, and the Hubble Space Telescope has rendered stunning detailed views of this system and its intricate lanes of dark dust across its equatorial plane. Some call NGC 891 the “Outer Limits” galaxy because it was featured in the credits of the earlier incarnation of that famous TV series.

Increase magnification to 80x to darken the background sky and get a glimpse of the dark lane running across the length of the galaxy. Again, averted vision is a must. You may also notice a 12th-magnitude foreground star near the central bulge of NGC 891 that blended into the bulge at lower power and made it appear more bulbous than it actually is.

The “Outer Limits” Galaxy

The edge-on NGC 891 is quite similar to the lovely NGC 4565 in Coma Berenices. Both needle-like galaxies resemble flying saucers pitched during flight through the foreground stars, and are the most visually appealing of all galaxies accessible to a small telescope.

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with an elevation of almost 60 degrees around midnight, makes it a great opposition for Northern Hemisphere observers.

On opposition night Jupiter rises at 4pm and is well above the crucial 20-degree elevation mark by the time the skies are astronomically dark shortly after 6pm. Jupiter traces out a huge arc across the sky during the course of the night, giving keen and hardy observers enough time to witness one complete rotation of the planet's cloud tops.

Jupiter is a magnificent sight against the brilliant backdrop of the constellation of Taurus. Jupiter has been moving retrograde (westwards) through Taurus for

some time and its current position lying between the great Pleiades and Hyades open cluster makes for a splendid imaging opportunity.

The face that Jupiter presents to us is not a solid surface like Mars or

Mercury but the cloud tops of its incredibly dynamic atmosphere with constantly changing features and detail within a familiar structure of long-lasting dark belts and bright zones that generations of astronomers have kept under constant surveillance.

Jupiter's disc can be resolved even in binoculars and a 50-mm class 'scope will show the two major equatorial belts and the polar regions. Employing a magnification of 150x will be sufficient to show lots of detail through the eyepiece; high quality refractors in the 125-mm class and above will reward the keen Jovian observer with a lifetime of enjoyment.

Jupiter's longest lasting feature is the famous Great Red Spot (GRS), a huge oval-shaped, seemingly perpetual anticyclonic storm that has been observed since the 17th century. It varies in size and intensity and currently its most intense brick-red colour, which makes it easy to see in a 50-mm 'scope, is more like salmon-pink now, making it tougher to spot in anything less than a 100-mm. The GRS drifts constantly in longitude through the southern South Equatorial Belt (SEB) and can currently be found at System II longitude of 186 degrees.

www.astronomynow.com

Jupiter brightens the December sky Jupiter comes to opposition on 3 December and is well placed for some months to come, giving amateur astronomers a great opportunity to observe and image the Solar System's largest planet and undoubtedly the most rewarding and easiest to observe planet.

Of the new planets, the one of greatest interest is the one with the outermost orbit from the star -– with a mass at least seven times that of Earth. Its orbit around the host star is at a similar distance to Earth’s orbit around our Sun, so it receives a similar amount of energy from the star as the Earth receives from the Sun — increasing the probability of it being habitable. This is where the presence of liquid water and stable atmospheres to support life is possible, and, more importantly, the planet is likely to be rotating on its own axis as it orbits around the star, creating a daytime and nighttime effect on the planet, which would be better at creating an Earth-like environment. “The star HD 40307 is a perfectly quiet old dwarf star, so there is no

New super-Earth in six-planet system may be just right to support life

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reason why such a planet could not sustain an Earth-like climate,” said Guillem Angla-Escude from the University of Goettingen, Germany. “The longer orbit of the new planet means that its climate and atmosphere may be just right to support life,” said Hugh Jones from the University of Hertfordshire. “Just as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too cold but just right, this planet or indeed any moons that it has lie

The new super-Earth planet exists in the habitable zone of a nearby star and is part of a six-planet system. The system was previously thought to contain three planets in orbits too close to the star to support liquid water. By avoiding fake signals caused by stellar activity, the researchers have identified three new super-Earth planet candidates also in orbit. “We pioneered new data analysis techniques, including the use of the wavelength as a filter to reduce the influence of activity on the signal from this star,” said Mikko Tuomi from the University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. “This significantly increased our sensitivity and enabled us to reveal three new super-Earth planets around the star known as HD 40307, making it into a six-planet system.”

A new super-Earth planet that may have an Earth-like climate and be just right to support life has been discovered around a nearby star by an international team of astronomers.

Above: Look for Jupiter as it climbs in the eastern sky in the early evening. The giant planet spends December near the centre of the constellation Taurus. in an orbit comparable to Earth,

increasing the probability of it being habitable.” Earlier this year, the Kepler spacecraft found a planet with a similar orbit. However, Kepler 22d is located 600 light-years from Earth, whereas this new super-Earth planet known as HD 40307g is much closer — located at 44 light-years from Earth.

www.astronomy.com

In a paper released in the November 28, 2012 issue of the journal Nature, scientists say in a press release that data from Cassini show evidence for sinking air where upwelling currents were seen earlier in the mission. “Cassini’s up-close observations are likely the only ones we’ll have in our lifetime of a transition like this in action,” said Nick Teanby, the study’s lead author. “It’s extremely exciting to see such rapid changes on a body that usually changes so slowly and has a ‘year’ that is the equivalent of nearly 30 Earth years.” Of the eight planets and dozens of moons in our solar system, just

Earth, Venus, Mars and Titan have both a solid surface and a substantial atmosphere. Cassini offers scientists a unique perspective during this change of seasons. The pole experiencing winter is typically pointed away from Earth because of its orbit around Saturn. Cassini provides scientists a platform to watch the atmosphere change over time and study the moon from angles impossible from Earth. Models of Titan’s atmosphere have predicted changes for two decades but Cassini is just now seeing new circulation patterns arise.

A certain slant, or shift, of light glinting off of Saturn’s moon Titan turns out to drive unexpected reversals in the moon’s atmosphere according to data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

“Understanding Titan’s atmosphere gives us clues for understanding our own complex atmosphere. Some of the complexity in both places arises from the interplay of atmospheric circulation and chemistry.” While scientists recently have watched the formation of haze and a vortex over Titan’s south pole, other Cassini instruments, such as the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS), have gathered data tied more to the circulation and chemistry of Titan’s orangish atmosphere especially at higher altitudes. The CIRS instrument also reveals subtle changes in vertical winds and global circulation. The instrument shows that atmospheric circulation extends about 100 km, or 60 miles, higher than expected. This is important in explaining the orangish tint to Titan’s atmosphere. A haze layer, first detected by Voyager 1, may be a region rich in

A colourful and unexpected reversal at Titan

small haze particles that combine to form larger aggregates that descend deep into the atmosphere giving the moon its characteristic colour. Scientists have narrowed down the atmospheric reversal to about six months near the August 2009 equinox when the Sun was shining directly on Titan’s equator. “Next, we would expect to see the vortex over the south pole build up,” said Mike Flasar. “As that happens, one question is whether the south winter pole will be the identical twin of the north winter pole, or will it have a distinct personality? The most important thing is to be able to keep watching as these changes happen.”

www.universetoday.com

Most observers will have already been following and enjoying the gas giant for some time already but it's at its brightest and biggest around opposition and is observable all night.

This opposition is particularly favourable with the dual advantage of Jupiter's very generous altitude at culmination and its large apparent diameter through the eyepiece. Jupiter appears so big to us in comparison with say Mars or even Saturn that it's easy to get blasé about it. But during its 11.86-year orbit around the Sun its distance from Earth varies; at the 2010 opposition Jupiter was at its closest and its apparent equatorial diameter was 49.9 arcseconds, as big as it can get. This time around it will be 48.5 arcseconds, not too shabby and coupled

Some interesting facts

about Jupiter

Jupiter is our largest planet, more than 1,000 Earths could fit inside it and all of the other planets together make up only about 70% of Jupiter.

Jupiter takes about 12 years to orbit the Sun, but only about 10 hours to rotate completely, making it the fastest-spinning of all the solar system’s planets.

Jupiter reflects 52% of the sunlight falling on it, more than any other planet except Venus (65%).

Jupiter’s four bright moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are easily visible through small telescopes.

Our line of sight lies in the plane of the jovian moons’ orbits, so we see occultations (when a moon moves behind Jupiter), eclipses (when Jupiter’s shadow falls on a moon), and transits (when a moon passes in front of Jupiter) at various times.

Jupiter's moon Ganymede is the solar system’s largest satellite, with a diameter of nearly 5,300km, making it even bigger than Mercury.

Above: This artist’s impression shows HD40307g in the foreground with its host star HD40307 and two other planets in the system (on the right-hand side).

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The aftershock of a stellar explosion rippling through space is captured in this new view of supernova remnant W44, which combines far-infrared and X-ray data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories. W44, located around 10,000 light-years away within a forest of dense star-forming clouds in the constellation Aquila the Eagle, is one of the best examples of a supernova remnant interacting with its parent molecular cloud. The product of a massive star that has already reached the end of its life and expelled its outer layers in a dramatic explosion, all that remains of the stellar behemoth is the spinning core of a neutron star, or pulsar. Identified as PSR B1853+01, the pulsar is the bright point to the top left in W44, coloured light blue in this image. It is thought to be around 20,000 years old, and as it rapidly rotates, it sweeps out a

wind of highly energetic particles and beams of light ranging from radio to X-ray energies. The centre of the supernova remnant is also bright in X-rays, coming from the hot gas that fills the shell, at temperatures of several million degrees. Dense knots of high-energy emission reflect regions where heavier elements are more commonly found. At the cooler edge of the cavity, gas is swept up as the supernova remnant propagates through space. At the top right of the expanding

W44 is the product of a massive star that has reached the end of its life, and all that remains of the stellar behemoth is the spinning core of a neutron star and a supernova remnant.

Life and death in a star-forming cloud

NGC 6362: stars ancient and modern

This colourful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile. This new picture, along with a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, provides the best view of this little-known cluster ever obtained. Globular clusters are mainly composed of tens of thousands of ancient stars, but they also contain some stars that look suspiciously young.

Globular star clusters are among the oldest objects in the universe, and NGC 6362 cannot hide its age in this picture. The many yellowish stars in the cluster have already run through much of their lives and became red giant stars. But globular clusters are not static relics from the past — some curious stellar activities are still going on in these dense star cities.

basic idea behind both of these options is that the stars were not born as big as we see them today, but they received an injection of extra material at some point during their lifetimes, and this then gave them a new lease of life. Although less well-known than some brighter globular clusters, NGC 6362 holds much that is of interest to astronomers and has been well studied over the years. The new image shows the entire cluster against a rich background of the carpet of stars in the Milky Way. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has also studied in detail the central parts of NGC 6362. The Hubble view shows a much smaller

For instance, NGC 6362 is home to many blue stragglers — old stars that really do succeed in passing for a younger age. All of the stars in a globular cluster formed from the same material at roughly the same time — typically about 10 billion years ago. Yet blue stragglers are bluer and more luminous, and hence more massive, than they should be after 10 billion years of stellar evolution. Blue stars are hot and consume their fuel quickly, so if these stars had formed about 10 billion years ago, then they should have fizzled out long ago. How did they survive?

Astronomers are keen to understand the secret of the youthful appearance of blue stragglers. Currently, there are two main theories: stars colliding and merging, and a transfer of material between two companion stars. The

Astronomers are keen to understand the secret of the youthful appearance of certain stars in globular clusters.

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area of sky in much greater detail. The two views — one wide-angle and one zoomed in — complement each other perfectly. This brilliant ball of stars lies in the southern constellation Ara the Altar. It can be easily seen in a small telescope. It was first spotted in 1826 by the Scottish astronomer James Dunlop using a 22-centimeter telescope in Australia.

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It may not be good practice to burn bridges but this is one super-heated bridge that astronomers were happy to find: an enormous swath of hot gas connecting two galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart, and nearly a billion light-years away.

Using ESA’s Planck space telescope, astronomers have identified leftover light from the Big Bang interacting with a filament of hot gas stretching between Abell 401 and Abell 399, two galactic clusters each containing hundreds of individual galaxies. Launched in May 2009, Planck is designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the leftover light from the Big Bang. When this radiation interacts with large-scale cosmic structures, like the hot gas bridging clusters of galaxies, its energy is modified in a specific way. This is referred to as

Hot gas bridge discovered connecting galaxy clusters the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect (SZE), and Planck is specifically attuned to finding it. This, however, is Planck’s first discovery of inter-cluster gas found using the SZ technique. The temperature of the gas is estimated to be around 80 million degrees C, similar to the temperature of the gas found within the clusters themselves. It’s thought that the gas may be a combination of cosmic web filaments left over from the early Universe mixed with gas from the clusters. The image above shows the clusters Abell 401 and Abell 399 as seen at optical wavelengths with ground-based telescopes overlaid with the SZE from Planck. The entire bridge spans a distance about the size of two full Moons in the sky.

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An international team of astronomers used the mountaintop telescopes to observe Makemake as it passed in front of a faint background star in April 2011, a brief stellar occultation that lasted only about a minute. By watching how the starlight was blotted out by Makemake, measurements could be made of the dwarf planet’s size, mass and atmosphere — or, in this case, its lack thereof. “As Makemake passed in front of the star and blocked it out, the star disappeared and reappeared very

abruptly, rather than fading and brightening gradually. This means that the little dwarf planet has no significant atmosphere,” said team leader José Luis Ortiz. “It was thought that Makemake had a good chance of having developed an atmosphere — that it has no sign of one at all shows just how much we have yet to learn about these mysterious bodies.”

First discovered in 2005, Makemake is an icy dwarf planet about 2/3 the diameter of Pluto — and 19 AU further from the Sun. It

It turns out there’s no air up there: the distant dwarf planet Makemake is surprisingly lacking in an atmosphere, according to findings made by astronomers using telescopes at ESO’s La Silla and Paranal observatories.

was thought that Makemake might have a tenuous, seasonal atmosphere similar to what has been found on Pluto, but it now appears that it does not… at least not in any large-scale, global form. Due to its small size, sheer distance and apparent lack of moons, making scientific observations of Makemake has been a challenge. The April 2011 occultation allowed measurements to be made — even if only for a minute — that weren’t possible before, including first-ever calculations of the dwarf planet’s density and albedo.

Makemake’s mysteriously missing atmosphere

As it turns out, Makemake’s albedo is comparable to that of dirty snow… a reflectivity higher than Pluto’s but lower than that of Eris and its density indicates a composition of mostly ice with some rock.

www.astronomy.com

Above: This colourful view of globular cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the La Silla observatory/ This brilliant ball of ancient stars lies in the southern constellation Ara the Altar.

A bridge of hot gas that connects galaxy clusters Abell 399 (lower centre) and Abell 401 (top left). The galaxy pair is located about a billion light-years from Earth, and the gas bridge extends approximately 10 million light-years between them.

shell, there is a smaller cavity, with the shock from the supernova remnant impacting the bight arc-shaped feature. This region is filled with hot gas that has been ionized by the intense ultraviolet radiation from embedded massive young stars. Herschel’s far-infrared eyes also can seek out regions of gently heated gas and dust farther from W44, where new stars are congregating. Examples include the arrowhead-shaped star-formation region to the right of W44, which appears to point to another trio of

intricate clouds farther to the right and above. More broadly, a number of compact objects scattered across the scene map the cold seeds of future stars that will eventually emerge from their dusty cocoons. Finally, diffuse purple emission toward the bottom left of the image provides a glimpse of the galactic plane.

www.astronomy.com

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The aftershock of a stellar explosion rippling through space is captured in this new view of supernova remnant W44, which combines far-infrared and X-ray data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories. W44, located around 10,000 light-years away within a forest of dense star-forming clouds in the constellation Aquila the Eagle, is one of the best examples of a supernova remnant interacting with its parent molecular cloud. The product of a massive star that has already reached the end of its life and expelled its outer layers in a dramatic explosion, all that remains of the stellar behemoth is the spinning core of a neutron star, or pulsar. Identified as PSR B1853+01, the pulsar is the bright point to the top left in W44, coloured light blue in this image. It is thought to be around 20,000 years old, and as it rapidly rotates, it sweeps out a

wind of highly energetic particles and beams of light ranging from radio to X-ray energies. The centre of the supernova remnant is also bright in X-rays, coming from the hot gas that fills the shell, at temperatures of several million degrees. Dense knots of high-energy emission reflect regions where heavier elements are more commonly found. At the cooler edge of the cavity, gas is swept up as the supernova remnant propagates through space. At the top right of the expanding

W44 is the product of a massive star that has reached the end of its life, and all that remains of the stellar behemoth is the spinning core of a neutron star and a supernova remnant.

Life and death in a star-forming cloud

NGC 6362: stars ancient and modern

This colourful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile. This new picture, along with a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, provides the best view of this little-known cluster ever obtained. Globular clusters are mainly composed of tens of thousands of ancient stars, but they also contain some stars that look suspiciously young.

Globular star clusters are among the oldest objects in the universe, and NGC 6362 cannot hide its age in this picture. The many yellowish stars in the cluster have already run through much of their lives and became red giant stars. But globular clusters are not static relics from the past — some curious stellar activities are still going on in these dense star cities.

basic idea behind both of these options is that the stars were not born as big as we see them today, but they received an injection of extra material at some point during their lifetimes, and this then gave them a new lease of life. Although less well-known than some brighter globular clusters, NGC 6362 holds much that is of interest to astronomers and has been well studied over the years. The new image shows the entire cluster against a rich background of the carpet of stars in the Milky Way. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has also studied in detail the central parts of NGC 6362. The Hubble view shows a much smaller

For instance, NGC 6362 is home to many blue stragglers — old stars that really do succeed in passing for a younger age. All of the stars in a globular cluster formed from the same material at roughly the same time — typically about 10 billion years ago. Yet blue stragglers are bluer and more luminous, and hence more massive, than they should be after 10 billion years of stellar evolution. Blue stars are hot and consume their fuel quickly, so if these stars had formed about 10 billion years ago, then they should have fizzled out long ago. How did they survive?

Astronomers are keen to understand the secret of the youthful appearance of blue stragglers. Currently, there are two main theories: stars colliding and merging, and a transfer of material between two companion stars. The

Astronomers are keen to understand the secret of the youthful appearance of certain stars in globular clusters.

www.midlandsastronomy.com

area of sky in much greater detail. The two views — one wide-angle and one zoomed in — complement each other perfectly. This brilliant ball of stars lies in the southern constellation Ara the Altar. It can be easily seen in a small telescope. It was first spotted in 1826 by the Scottish astronomer James Dunlop using a 22-centimeter telescope in Australia.

www.astronomy.com

It may not be good practice to burn bridges but this is one super-heated bridge that astronomers were happy to find: an enormous swath of hot gas connecting two galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart, and nearly a billion light-years away.

Using ESA’s Planck space telescope, astronomers have identified leftover light from the Big Bang interacting with a filament of hot gas stretching between Abell 401 and Abell 399, two galactic clusters each containing hundreds of individual galaxies. Launched in May 2009, Planck is designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the leftover light from the Big Bang. When this radiation interacts with large-scale cosmic structures, like the hot gas bridging clusters of galaxies, its energy is modified in a specific way. This is referred to as

Hot gas bridge discovered connecting galaxy clusters the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect (SZE), and Planck is specifically attuned to finding it. This, however, is Planck’s first discovery of inter-cluster gas found using the SZ technique. The temperature of the gas is estimated to be around 80 million degrees C, similar to the temperature of the gas found within the clusters themselves. It’s thought that the gas may be a combination of cosmic web filaments left over from the early Universe mixed with gas from the clusters. The image above shows the clusters Abell 401 and Abell 399 as seen at optical wavelengths with ground-based telescopes overlaid with the SZE from Planck. The entire bridge spans a distance about the size of two full Moons in the sky.

www.universetoday.com

An international team of astronomers used the mountaintop telescopes to observe Makemake as it passed in front of a faint background star in April 2011, a brief stellar occultation that lasted only about a minute. By watching how the starlight was blotted out by Makemake, measurements could be made of the dwarf planet’s size, mass and atmosphere — or, in this case, its lack thereof. “As Makemake passed in front of the star and blocked it out, the star disappeared and reappeared very

abruptly, rather than fading and brightening gradually. This means that the little dwarf planet has no significant atmosphere,” said team leader José Luis Ortiz. “It was thought that Makemake had a good chance of having developed an atmosphere — that it has no sign of one at all shows just how much we have yet to learn about these mysterious bodies.”

First discovered in 2005, Makemake is an icy dwarf planet about 2/3 the diameter of Pluto — and 19 AU further from the Sun. It

It turns out there’s no air up there: the distant dwarf planet Makemake is surprisingly lacking in an atmosphere, according to findings made by astronomers using telescopes at ESO’s La Silla and Paranal observatories.

was thought that Makemake might have a tenuous, seasonal atmosphere similar to what has been found on Pluto, but it now appears that it does not… at least not in any large-scale, global form. Due to its small size, sheer distance and apparent lack of moons, making scientific observations of Makemake has been a challenge. The April 2011 occultation allowed measurements to be made — even if only for a minute — that weren’t possible before, including first-ever calculations of the dwarf planet’s density and albedo.

Makemake’s mysteriously missing atmosphere

As it turns out, Makemake’s albedo is comparable to that of dirty snow… a reflectivity higher than Pluto’s but lower than that of Eris and its density indicates a composition of mostly ice with some rock.

www.astronomy.com

Above: This colourful view of globular cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the La Silla observatory/ This brilliant ball of ancient stars lies in the southern constellation Ara the Altar.

A bridge of hot gas that connects galaxy clusters Abell 399 (lower centre) and Abell 401 (top left). The galaxy pair is located about a billion light-years from Earth, and the gas bridge extends approximately 10 million light-years between them.

shell, there is a smaller cavity, with the shock from the supernova remnant impacting the bight arc-shaped feature. This region is filled with hot gas that has been ionized by the intense ultraviolet radiation from embedded massive young stars. Herschel’s far-infrared eyes also can seek out regions of gently heated gas and dust farther from W44, where new stars are congregating. Examples include the arrowhead-shaped star-formation region to the right of W44, which appears to point to another trio of

intricate clouds farther to the right and above. More broadly, a number of compact objects scattered across the scene map the cold seeds of future stars that will eventually emerge from their dusty cocoons. Finally, diffuse purple emission toward the bottom left of the image provides a glimpse of the galactic plane.

www.astronomy.com

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with an elevation of almost 60 degrees around midnight, makes it a great opposition for Northern Hemisphere observers.

On opposition night Jupiter rises at 4pm and is well above the crucial 20-degree elevation mark by the time the skies are astronomically dark shortly after 6pm. Jupiter traces out a huge arc across the sky during the course of the night, giving keen and hardy observers enough time to witness one complete rotation of the planet's cloud tops.

Jupiter is a magnificent sight against the brilliant backdrop of the constellation of Taurus. Jupiter has been moving retrograde (westwards) through Taurus for

some time and its current position lying between the great Pleiades and Hyades open cluster makes for a splendid imaging opportunity.

The face that Jupiter presents to us is not a solid surface like Mars or

Mercury but the cloud tops of its incredibly dynamic atmosphere with constantly changing features and detail within a familiar structure of long-lasting dark belts and bright zones that generations of astronomers have kept under constant surveillance.

Jupiter's disc can be resolved even in binoculars and a 50-mm class 'scope will show the two major equatorial belts and the polar regions. Employing a magnification of 150x will be sufficient to show lots of detail through the eyepiece; high quality refractors in the 125-mm class and above will reward the keen Jovian observer with a lifetime of enjoyment.

Jupiter's longest lasting feature is the famous Great Red Spot (GRS), a huge oval-shaped, seemingly perpetual anticyclonic storm that has been observed since the 17th century. It varies in size and intensity and currently its most intense brick-red colour, which makes it easy to see in a 50-mm 'scope, is more like salmon-pink now, making it tougher to spot in anything less than a 100-mm. The GRS drifts constantly in longitude through the southern South Equatorial Belt (SEB) and can currently be found at System II longitude of 186 degrees.

www.astronomynow.com

Jupiter brightens the December sky Jupiter comes to opposition on 3 December and is well placed for some months to come, giving amateur astronomers a great opportunity to observe and image the Solar System's largest planet and undoubtedly the most rewarding and easiest to observe planet.

Of the new planets, the one of greatest interest is the one with the outermost orbit from the star -– with a mass at least seven times that of Earth. Its orbit around the host star is at a similar distance to Earth’s orbit around our Sun, so it receives a similar amount of energy from the star as the Earth receives from the Sun — increasing the probability of it being habitable. This is where the presence of liquid water and stable atmospheres to support life is possible, and, more importantly, the planet is likely to be rotating on its own axis as it orbits around the star, creating a daytime and nighttime effect on the planet, which would be better at creating an Earth-like environment. “The star HD 40307 is a perfectly quiet old dwarf star, so there is no

New super-Earth in six-planet system may be just right to support life

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reason why such a planet could not sustain an Earth-like climate,” said Guillem Angla-Escude from the University of Goettingen, Germany. “The longer orbit of the new planet means that its climate and atmosphere may be just right to support life,” said Hugh Jones from the University of Hertfordshire. “Just as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too cold but just right, this planet or indeed any moons that it has lie

The new super-Earth planet exists in the habitable zone of a nearby star and is part of a six-planet system. The system was previously thought to contain three planets in orbits too close to the star to support liquid water. By avoiding fake signals caused by stellar activity, the researchers have identified three new super-Earth planet candidates also in orbit. “We pioneered new data analysis techniques, including the use of the wavelength as a filter to reduce the influence of activity on the signal from this star,” said Mikko Tuomi from the University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. “This significantly increased our sensitivity and enabled us to reveal three new super-Earth planets around the star known as HD 40307, making it into a six-planet system.”

A new super-Earth planet that may have an Earth-like climate and be just right to support life has been discovered around a nearby star by an international team of astronomers.

Above: Look for Jupiter as it climbs in the eastern sky in the early evening. The giant planet spends December near the centre of the constellation Taurus. in an orbit comparable to Earth,

increasing the probability of it being habitable.” Earlier this year, the Kepler spacecraft found a planet with a similar orbit. However, Kepler 22d is located 600 light-years from Earth, whereas this new super-Earth planet known as HD 40307g is much closer — located at 44 light-years from Earth.

www.astronomy.com

In a paper released in the November 28, 2012 issue of the journal Nature, scientists say in a press release that data from Cassini show evidence for sinking air where upwelling currents were seen earlier in the mission. “Cassini’s up-close observations are likely the only ones we’ll have in our lifetime of a transition like this in action,” said Nick Teanby, the study’s lead author. “It’s extremely exciting to see such rapid changes on a body that usually changes so slowly and has a ‘year’ that is the equivalent of nearly 30 Earth years.” Of the eight planets and dozens of moons in our solar system, just

Earth, Venus, Mars and Titan have both a solid surface and a substantial atmosphere. Cassini offers scientists a unique perspective during this change of seasons. The pole experiencing winter is typically pointed away from Earth because of its orbit around Saturn. Cassini provides scientists a platform to watch the atmosphere change over time and study the moon from angles impossible from Earth. Models of Titan’s atmosphere have predicted changes for two decades but Cassini is just now seeing new circulation patterns arise.

A certain slant, or shift, of light glinting off of Saturn’s moon Titan turns out to drive unexpected reversals in the moon’s atmosphere according to data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

“Understanding Titan’s atmosphere gives us clues for understanding our own complex atmosphere. Some of the complexity in both places arises from the interplay of atmospheric circulation and chemistry.” While scientists recently have watched the formation of haze and a vortex over Titan’s south pole, other Cassini instruments, such as the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS), have gathered data tied more to the circulation and chemistry of Titan’s orangish atmosphere especially at higher altitudes. The CIRS instrument also reveals subtle changes in vertical winds and global circulation. The instrument shows that atmospheric circulation extends about 100 km, or 60 miles, higher than expected. This is important in explaining the orangish tint to Titan’s atmosphere. A haze layer, first detected by Voyager 1, may be a region rich in

A colourful and unexpected reversal at Titan

small haze particles that combine to form larger aggregates that descend deep into the atmosphere giving the moon its characteristic colour. Scientists have narrowed down the atmospheric reversal to about six months near the August 2009 equinox when the Sun was shining directly on Titan’s equator. “Next, we would expect to see the vortex over the south pole build up,” said Mike Flasar. “As that happens, one question is whether the south winter pole will be the identical twin of the north winter pole, or will it have a distinct personality? The most important thing is to be able to keep watching as these changes happen.”

www.universetoday.com

Most observers will have already been following and enjoying the gas giant for some time already but it's at its brightest and biggest around opposition and is observable all night.

This opposition is particularly favourable with the dual advantage of Jupiter's very generous altitude at culmination and its large apparent diameter through the eyepiece. Jupiter appears so big to us in comparison with say Mars or even Saturn that it's easy to get blasé about it. But during its 11.86-year orbit around the Sun its distance from Earth varies; at the 2010 opposition Jupiter was at its closest and its apparent equatorial diameter was 49.9 arcseconds, as big as it can get. This time around it will be 48.5 arcseconds, not too shabby and coupled

Some interesting facts

about Jupiter

Jupiter is our largest planet, more than 1,000 Earths could fit inside it and all of the other planets together make up only about 70% of Jupiter.

Jupiter takes about 12 years to orbit the Sun, but only about 10 hours to rotate completely, making it the fastest-spinning of all the solar system’s planets.

Jupiter reflects 52% of the sunlight falling on it, more than any other planet except Venus (65%).

Jupiter’s four bright moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are easily visible through small telescopes.

Our line of sight lies in the plane of the jovian moons’ orbits, so we see occultations (when a moon moves behind Jupiter), eclipses (when Jupiter’s shadow falls on a moon), and transits (when a moon passes in front of Jupiter) at various times.

Jupiter's moon Ganymede is the solar system’s largest satellite, with a diameter of nearly 5,300km, making it even bigger than Mercury.

Above: This artist’s impression shows HD40307g in the foreground with its host star HD40307 and two other planets in the system (on the right-hand side).

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typical quasar outflow. This definitely is an important step in piecing together the story of galaxy evolution, and in elucidating the role of quasars in that story."

www.nationalgeographic.com

swollen 8th-magnitude star. At 100x, the nebula appears as a pale green glow with a 12th-magnitude central star visible in a 3-inch or larger scope. A UHC filter will make the star disappear, but it may reveal more detail including a barely perceptible inner shell.

In a 10-12 inch telescope at 200x or more, the nebula reveals far more detail, including two slender arms radiating in opposite directions from the

To find the Saturn Nebula, also known as NGC 7009, look 2º northeast of the small cluster M73, which you met in the last article and 1º west of ? (nu) Aquarii. The nebula is small but fairly bright. At low power, it looks like a slightly

Astronomers have witnessed a record-breaking blast of gas and dust flowing out of a monster black hole more than 11.5 billion light-years away. Explosion is at least five times more powerful than previously observed events.

Black Hole blast biggest ever recorded

The Saturn Nebula Let’s look at great object in southern Aquarius. This small but amazingly complex planetary nebula lies right next to the 4th-magnitude star nu Aquarii, so it’s not hard to find. A small telescope reveals a hint of the nebula’s complexity, and at high magnification the object appears to sprout tiny side lobes that make it look like the planet Saturn. So it’s sometimes called the Saturn Nebula…

The central black hole in this quasar is true giant dynamo. It's estimated to be upward of a thousand times more massive than the one in the Milky Way, producing energy at rates about a hundred times higher than the total power output of our galaxy. Supermassive black holes are large enough to swallow our entire solar system and are notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars. But they also power distant quasars and spew out material at high speeds. The outflows have been suspected to play a key role in the evolution of galaxies, explained Arav, but questions have persisted for years in the astronomical community as to whether they were powerful enough. This newly discovered super outflow could solve major

The supermassive gravity well, with a mass of one to three billion suns, lurks at the core of a quasar—a class of extremely bright and energetic galaxies—dubbed SDSS J1106 1939. "We discovered the most energetic quasar outflow ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date," said Nahum Arav, an astronomer at Virginia Tech. Using the powerful telescopes of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, Arav and his team were able to clock the speed and other properties of the outflow. Belching out material as much as 400 times the weight of our sun every year, the blast is located nearly a thousand light-years from the quasar and has a velocity of roughly 29 million kilometres per hour.

centre. This makes it resemble the planet Saturn with nearly-edge-on rings. The nebula stretches across a compact angle of 45?x25?, a little larger than the apparent size of the planet Saturn. NGC 7009 was discovered by William Herschel in 1782 with one of his early home-built telescopes. It was named the “Saturn Nebula” by Lord Rosse in 1840. For years, Rosse got a closer look than

anyone before at hundreds of deep-sky objects with his giant Leviathan of Parsonstown. The central star of this planetary is becoming a white dwarf, an exposed core of a mid-sized star that’s run out of fuel. It will slowly radiate heat into space for the next untold billions of years.

www.oneminuteastronomer.com

Above: The Saturn Nebula (also known as NGC 7009 or Caldwell 55) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Aquarius. It appears as a greenish-yellowish hue in a small amateur telescope.

Above: Material is ejected near a supermassive black hole in the quasar SDSS J1106+1939 in an illustration.

cosmic mysteries, including how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass and why there is a relative scarcity of large galaxies across the universe. "I believe this is the smoking gun for several theoretical ideas that use the mechanical energy output of quasars to solve several important problems in the formation of galaxies and cluster of galaxies," said Arav. While Kirk Korista, an astronomer not connected to the study, believes these claims may be a bit premature, the research is expected to shed new light on the most powerful and least understood portions of typical quasar outflows. "The superb spectroscopic data of this quasar have allowed for a breakthrough in quantifying the energetics of what is probably a

Scientists believe such objects—also called homeless, free-floating, or rogue planets—can form in one of two ways. Either they're ejected from star systems, or they form independently.

About a dozen such untethered orbs were identified more than a decade ago in the Orion Nebula. Since then the pool of candidates has grown to several dozen.

A search for would-be stars called brown dwarfs has yielded something even more elusive: a potential orphan planet. Some four to seven times the mass of Jupiter, the wandering planet orbits no star, a team of French and Canadian astronomers reported recently.

The latest discovery is the first to be found outside a star-forming region, said Étienne Artigau a co-author of the study. Compared with other potential homeless planets, the new candidate is also older, colder, and much closer to Earth—approximately 130 light-years away Called CFBDSIR2149, the suspected orphan planet appears to reside in a group of young stars, though it isn't gravitationally linked to any of them. This affiliation with the so-called AB Doradus Moving Group helped scientists estimate the planet's age: 50 to 120 million years old. The object's infrared signature was detected when the team—led by Philippe Delorme—was searching for brown dwarfs several years ago. Brown dwarfs, while too massive to be considered planets, are sometimes dubbed "failed stars," because they lack the bulk to initiate nuclear reactions in their core. The unusual infrared readings

"Orphan Planet" spotted suggested that this particular body had a low mass, more like a gas giant planet than a brown dwarf. The team also looked to see if the object was gravitationally bound to anything else, Artigau said. "There's a small range where a parent star could be," he noted, adding that in astronomical terms, "small" can mean more than a hundred times the distance of Pluto from the sun. "We checked for a nearby star, which would be pretty bright, and found nothing." The absence of bright light from a nearby star also means less glare, and therefore better conditions for studying the new world more closely. And more study is exactly what's needed to confirm that it's an orphan planet.

www.nationalgeographic.com

Starved of starlight, CFBDSIR2149 (artist's conception) gives off a weak glow detectable only in infrared.

NGC 891 is the largest member of the small group of galaxies called Triangulum Spur, of which the lenticular galaxy NGC 1023 in Perseus is a member. At a distance of 31 million light years, NGC 891 spans 110,000 light years and holds the mass of 150 billion to 200 billion suns. Unfortunately, these dust lanes dim the view of this otherwise grand spiral galaxy. So it is quite a bit harder to see in a small telescope. The galaxy lies about halfway between Almaak and the easy-to-find star cluster M34 in Perseus.

Start at low power and look for its silver-needle shape about 12’ long running north-northeast to south-southwest. A 3-inch scope in dark sky will do the job, but as with most galaxies, a larger scope gives you a better view. If you’re not sure the galaxy is in your field of view, tap the side of your telescope to make the faint image jump out at you… your eye is quite sensitive to faint moving objects. Once you find the galaxy, use averted vision to see the full extent of its arms extending from a slightly thicker central bulge.

About 3.5o east of the double-star Almaak in Andromeda lies the photogenic edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891. This is a favourite target for astrophotographers, and the Hubble Space Telescope has rendered stunning detailed views of this system and its intricate lanes of dark dust across its equatorial plane. Some call NGC 891 the “Outer Limits” galaxy because it was featured in the credits of the earlier incarnation of that famous TV series.

Increase magnification to 80x to darken the background sky and get a glimpse of the dark lane running across the length of the galaxy. Again, averted vision is a must. You may also notice a 12th-magnitude foreground star near the central bulge of NGC 891 that blended into the bulge at lower power and made it appear more bulbous than it actually is.

The “Outer Limits” Galaxy

The edge-on NGC 891 is quite similar to the lovely NGC 4565 in Coma Berenices. Both needle-like galaxies resemble flying saucers pitched during flight through the foreground stars, and are the most visually appealing of all galaxies accessible to a small telescope.

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The importance of this discovery is twofold: First, the cluster identified as a separate entity is only a slightly older sibling of the Trapezium cluster at the heart of the Orion Nebula; second, what astronomers have been calling the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) is actually a complicated mix of these two clusters.

"We need to refine what we thought were the most robust star and cluster formation observables,” said Hervé Bouy from the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madridexplains. He points out the need for a long follow-up work on Orion where "we must untangle these two mixed populations, star by star, if we are to understand the region, and star formation in clusters, and even the early stages of planet formation."

Using images from the 340-megapixel MegaCam camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) from the summit of Mauna Kea, astronomers identified the massive cluster of young stars NGC 1980 to be a clearly separate entity from the main cluster of the most-studied star formation region in the galaxy. A technique relying on the combination of optical, infrared, and mid-infrared data ensures astronomers are sampling only stars located in the foreground of the Orion Nebula. This technique also led them to the discovery of a nearby small star cluster, called L1641W.

Astronomers see the Orion Nebula as the benchmark for star-formation studies, a true golden standard, and most of the established measurements of how stars form have been derived from this important region — for example, the distribution of stellar and brown dwarf masses at birth, their relative age, their spatial distributions, and the properties of the planet-forming circumstellar disks surrounding the young stars.

But as it turns out, reality is more complicated. Recent observations with CFHT's MegaCam coupled with previous observations with the European Space Agency’s Herschel and XMM-Newton, NASA's Spitzer and WISE, as well as 2MASS and Calar Alto, revealed the cluster known as NGC 1980 as being a clearly distinct massive cluster of slightly older stars in front of the nebula. Although astronomers knew of the presence of a foreground stellar population since the 1960s, the new CFHT observations revealed that this population is more massive than first thought, and it is not uniformly distributed, clustering around the star Iota Ori at the southern tip of Orion's Sword.

Astronomers identified the massive cluster of young stars NGC 1980 to be a clearly separate entity from the main cluster of the most-studied star formation region in the galaxy.

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

"For me, the most intriguing part is that the older sibling, the Iota Ori cluster, is so close to the younger cluster still forming stars inside the Orion Nebula," said João Alves from the University of Vienna. "It is hard to see how these new observations fit into any existing theoretical model of cluster formation, and that is exciting because it suggests we might be missing something fundamental. Clusters are very likely the favourite mode of star formation in the universe, but we are still far from understanding why that is exactly."

www.astronomy.com

A newly identified separate star cluster in front of the Orion Nebula Cluster

Above: Located only 1,500 light-years away, the Orion Nebula is the brightest diffuse nebula is the sky. This image shows clearly the 3-D structure of this star formation region: a large cavity, created by the radiation pressure from new-born stars located in the brightest area of the image, lies within a huge cloud of dust and gas. Identified as a truly independent star cluster, NGC 1980 is associated with this well-studied star formation region, around the brightest star seen at the bottom of this image, Iota Ori.

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A very bright supernova has shown up in NGC 1365, the galaxy also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, visible now for southern hemisphere observers. This already elegant galaxy lies about 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax. The supernova, a type Ia, was discovered by Alain Klotz with the TAROT telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile on October 27, 2012. “The supernova is a very nice addition to the already highly photogenic galaxy,” said Rolf Wahl Olsen, who took the gorgeous image above. “I’m amazed by how blue it is; it’s really intense.” Supernova 2012fr is the bright and intensely blue star directly below the galaxy core. Olsen said that as of November 10, 2012 the supernova appeared to be nearing

its peak, with an R magnitude of 11.90. “To get an idea of how bright this event is we can calculate the absolute magnitude M of the supernova using the following formula where m is the apparent magnitude and D the distance in parsecs: M = m – 5(log10(D) – 1),” Olsen wrote. “This gives an absolute magnitude of -19.27 for SN2012fr. This means that if the supernova had occurred at a distance to us similar to Betelgeuse (643 light

years), then its apparent magnitude would be -12.80, same as the full Moon!”

www.universetoday.com

New bright and blue Supernova in NGC 1365

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Kid’s�Korner�

Our friends at the Cable Natural History Museum in Cable, Wisconsin, ask whether constellations ever break apart or change. To answer this, first let's think about what the constellations are, and then we can see whether they change.

When we look at the night sky, we see distant stars shining like faint lights. Now we know they are really brilliant lights, like the Sun, that are incredibly far away from us and from each other. Astronomers have used some wonderfully inventive methods to discover the distances to the stars, but to our eyes, they all look as if they are pinpoints of light at the same distance. As an extreme example of this, the red planet Mars is tens of millions of times closer than the red star Antares (Greek for "Rival of Mars"), but you certainly can't tell that just by looking at them when they appear near each other in our skies.

It's normal for us to find patterns in natural arrangements of things. For example, most people can imagine they see faces or other familiar objects in some clouds or rock formations. It's the same with the stars. Ancient observers, without the benefit of our modern understanding

of the nature of stars and space, saw these patterns and thought they might be important symbols. Cultures throughout history have created different names and descriptions for the arrangements of stars. The constellations most of us are familiar with were created by people living in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Many of the stories of the constellations tell us about the myths and legends of the people who gave them names thousands of years ago, but they tell us nothing about the stars themselves.

If stars never changed, then constellations wouldn't change. But the stars, including the Sun, travel in their own separate orbits

through the Milky Way galaxy. The stars move

along with fantastic speeds, but they are so far away that it takes a long time for their motion to

be visible to us. You can understand this by moving your finger in front of your eyes. Even when you move it very slowly, it may appear to move faster than a speeding jet that is many miles away.

Even the fastest stars take a long time to travel a noticeable distance. A faint star named Barnard's Star moves the fastest through our skies. Still, for it to change its position only by an amount equal to the width of the moon would take about 180 years. The constellations surely change shape, but seeing the changes would require superhuman patience!

The person who discovered that the stars move was the great British astronomer Edmond Halley, who also has a famous comet named after him. Almost 300 years ago he noticed that a few stars in charts made by Greek sky watchers were not in quite the same location anymore. Those charts were more than 1600 years old then, and even over that time, the bright stars Sirius, Arcturus, and Aldebaran had shifted position only slightly. Still, it

Do constellations

ever ever break apart

was enough for Halley to realize that those stars must have moved.

If you waited long enough, the patterns of stars you would see in the sky would change completely. The Big Dipper is the easily recognizable part of a constellation called Ursa Major, or the Great Bear. The star at the end of the handle and the one at the far tip of the bowl happen to be moving in the opposite direction from the other stars in the Big Dipper. In the

future, the handle will appear to be more bent, and the bowl

will spread out. To me, the shape in

50,000

years will be more like that of a tadpole than a dipper.

Besides their motion, the appearances of stars change as they age. Take my favourite constellation Scorpius, for example. A couple of years ago, the middle of the three stars that make the head of the scorpion became brighter. The constellation now has a new look!

The constellations are a very convenient way to locate objects in the splendid night sky, making a kind of natural map. If you knew the names of the constellations, you could follow directions to all sorts of beautiful and interesting objects, just as if you knew the names of streets, you could follow directions on how to get to a friend's house.

To make your own star finder and learn some of the constellations, go to The Space Place Web site at spaceplace.nasa.gov and click on "Make spacey things." Then I hope you will go outside to look at the stars, and use the constellations to find your way around. Remember, though, that what's important is not these patterns themselves, but rather the richness of the universe they will help you discover.

or change?

www.midlandsastronomy.com

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www.midlandsastronomy.com

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

c o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t sc o n t e n t s Latest Astronomy and Space News A newly identified separate star cluster in front of the Orion Nebula Cluster ...................................................... 3

New bright and blue Supernova in NGC 1365 ........................ 3

Black Hole blast biggest ever recorded ................................. 4

"Orphan Planet" spotted ...................................................... 4

Jupiter brightens the December sky ...................................... 5

NGC 6362: stars ancient and modern ................................... 6

Hot gas bridge discovered connecting galaxy clusters ............ 6

Life and death in a star-forming cloud .................................. 7

Makemake’s mysteriously missing atmosphere ...................... 7

New super-Earth in six-planet system may be just right to support life ..................................................................... 8

A colourful and unexpected reversal at Titan ......................... 8

The Saturn Nebula .............................................................. 9

The “Outer Limits” Galaxy .................................................... 9

Kids Section Kids Korner ....................................................................... 10

Quizzes and Games Exercise your brain ............................................................ 11

Monthly Sky Guide Beginners sky guide for this month .................................... 12

Internet Highlights Special content only available with the online version of the magazine ................................................................ 13

Front cover image:

The suggestively shaped reflection nebula commonly known as the Witch Head Nebula is associated with the bright star Rigel in the

constellation Orion, spans about 50 light-years and is composed of interstellar dust

grains reflecting Rigel's starlight.

In this cosmic portrait, the blue colour of the Witch Head Nebula and of the dust

surrounding Rigel is caused not only by Rigel's intense blue starlight but because the dust grains scatter blue light more efficiently than red. The same physical process causes Earth's daytime sky to appear blue. Rigel, the Witch Head Nebula, and gas and dust that surrounds them lie about 800 light-

years away.

Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

MAC meets on the first Tuesday of the month in the Presbyterian Hall, High Street, Tullamore from 8pm.

All are welcome to attend. It also holds infrequent Observing Nights at its Observing Site in

Clonminch, or at a member’s house (weather permitting) on the first

Friday of every month..

You can see more about the club and its events on

www.midlandsastronomy.com or contact the club via e-mail at [email protected] Meetings are informal and are

aimed at a level to suit all ages.

Exercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brainExercise your brain 1. What state of matter is

our Sun mainly consisted of?

� Gas � Plasma � Solid � Liquid

2. We have all heard of the Hubble space telescope.

What was the first name of the astronomer with

the last name Hubble?

� Mercutio � Galileo � Edwin � Isaac

3. What in our solar system

is the Cassini Division?

� White layers of clouds on Jupiter

� The division of the large and small planets

� Space between the asteroids and Mars

� A gap in Saturn's rings 4. The smaller, Earth-like

planets are called 'terrestrial' planets.

What are the larger planets called?

� Saturnine � Jovian � Torrential � Uranian

5. Which moon of Saturn

is one of the only

two moons in the

solar system with an atmosphere?

� Titan � Io � Triton � Charon

6. The constellation 'Crux'

is probably better known as what?

� Northern Crown � Northern Cross � Southern Cross � Southern Crown

7. P o r t i o n s o f t h e constellations Ursa

Major and Ursa Minor are also known as

what?

� Great and little dog � Big and little dipper � Orion and his dog � Big and little lion

8. What is it called when

we have a second full moon within one

month?

� Blue moon � New moon � Full moon � To the moon Alice!

9. The galaxy known as IRAS F10214+4724 is

how many times bright-er than the sun?

� 500 � 7,000 � 5,000 � 300,000,000,000,000

10.What was the name of the comet that made its

closest approach to Earth on March 22,

1997?

� Hale-Bopp � Encke's comet � Halley's comet � Herschel's comet

8 4 2

9 3 8 4

5 7

6 4 1 7

4 7 2

5 6 2 9

9 8

2 8 4 7

3 2 1

SUDOKU

Check your answers

Answer 1: Plasma is usually an ionized gas, meaning that one electron has been taken or added to an accumulation of atoms or molecules.

Answer 2: Edwin Hubble was a great American astronomer from the early 20th century. One of his major discov-eries was to ascertain with proof that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way.

Answer 3: Gioovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian-French astronomer from the late 17th-early 18th century. He followed up on Galileo's work with a more powerful telescope, one that allowed him to discover four moons of Saturn and the gaps in Saturn's rings that bear his name.

Answer 4: The 'terrestrial' planets are so named because they have hard, rocky surfaces like the Earth...terra firma. The Jovian planets are named for Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods and the largest planet. They are also called the 'gas giants'.

Answer 5: Titan is though to have its own atmosphere, it is not the largest moon in the solar system. That title belongs to Jupiter's moon Ganymede! Triton, a moon of Neptune, also has a thin but viable atmosphere.

Answer 6: The correct answer was Southern Cross. The 'crux' of this matter is that you can only see the Southern Cross in the sky if you live in the southern hemisphere...it's worth the trip (unless you already live there, then no trip is needed of course!)

Answer 7: The 3 stars in the bow that makes up the handle of the Big Dipper direct ones eye toward the North Star, Polaris. Polaris lies at the tip of the Little Dipper's handle. By the way, the term 'Ursa' is Latin for 'bear'...the great and small bear.

Answer 8: The correct answer was Blue moon. I will leave this one to your imagination, as I hum the tune 'Blue Moon'...

Answer 9: The correct answer was 300,000,000,000,000. Do not, I repeat, do not look at this galaxy with your naked eye. Well, actually from Earth you would have no problem...you see, it's millions of light years away from us and barely visible with the naked eye.

Answer 10: Not coincidentally, the Hale-Bopp comet was discovered by a pair of scientists with the last names 'Hale' and 'Bopp'!

www.midlandsastronomy.com

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Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

Issue 39 - December, 2012

Latest Astronomy and Space News

Kids Astronomy

Quizzes and Games

Monthly Sky Guide

Internet Highlights

The good news in December is that it gets dark nice and early allowing for long observing sessions. The bad news for those of us in the North is that the price we pay for the early evenings is the cold that accompanies it. So, fill your thermos with some nice hot coffee or hot chocolate and enjoy the wonderful winter skies.

We'll start off again this month naked eye. The Geminid Meteor Shower peaks on the 13th. This is usually one of the best meteor showers of the year and should offer excellent viewing this year as the moon is in good position (waning crescent). The Geminids will seem to radiate from a point near the stars Castor and Pollux. Castor and Pollux are to the upper right of the famed Betelgeuse in Orion. Watch this area of the sky from a dark site and you can expect to see as many as 60 - 80 meteors an hour.

Telescope Targets December continues to offer wonderful views of Cassiopea, Andromeda, Auriga and Perseus. See October's and November's picks pages for targets in these constellations.

The Pleiades (M45) or also known as the Seven Sisters is a wonderful low power open cluster in the constellation Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters, and is

probably the best known, and is certainly the most obvious to the naked eye.

It is easily identified high in the Southeast early after sunset. Look for 6 stars that appear to be a miniature version of the big dipper. Point your telescope with it's lowest power eyepiece at this and you'll be shocked at how many stars are visible. They are located at a distance of 400 light years from us and contain 100 stars. This cluster is approximately 78 million years old.

Also in the same area of sky are the Hyades. This is one of those targets best seen with binoculars. The Hyades are a huge open cluster of 350 stars located at a distance of 150 Light years from us. The Hyades are below the Pleiades. Look for the "V" shaped grouping of stars and point your binoculars or your telescope toward them. The Hyades hold the distinction of being the closest open cluster to us.

Planets Jupiter is in excellent position for viewing right after sunset positioned high in the southern sky.

Saturn is also in great position for viewing in the Southeast in the early evening. Show some family or friends this superstar of the sky.

Well, that's about it for this month. Orion is rising in the south and will offer lots of targets for late evening this month also. I will detail these in January's picks.

Clear skies and good hunting!

By Kevin Daly http://members.aol.com/kdaly10475/index.html

Sky Guide - Beginner’s targets for December

The Pleiades cluster is dominated by hot blue stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. Dust that forms a faint reflection nebulosity around the brightest stars was thought at first to be left over from the formation of the cluster, but is now known to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium that the stars are currently passing through. Astronomers estimate that the cluster will survive for about another 250 million years, after which it will disperse due to gravitational interactions with its galactic neighbourhood.

Club Notes

Club Observing:

Remember the next club meets every first Friday of the month for our observing sessions held in the MAC grounds. If you wish to be informed of these sessions please email your name and mobile number to [email protected] who will confirm if the session is going ahead (depending on weather).

MAC is a proud member of

Taurus is one of the constellations of the zodiac. It sits large and prominent in the Northern Hemisphere winter sky, between Aries to the west and Gemini to the east; to the north lie Perseus and Auriga, to the southeast Orion, to the south

Eridanus, and to the southwest Cetus. Behind the star Aldebaran lie the Hyades, the nearest distinct open star cluster, that with it form a V, or an A, in the sky marking the bull's head. In the west of the constellation lie the Pleiades, one of the best known open clusters, easily visible to the eye. Another object, visible in a telescope, is the Crab Nebula (M1), a supernova remnant northwest of ζ Tauri. The explosion, seen on Earth on July 4, 1054, was bright enough to be seen by day. It is mentioned in Chinese history texts.

www.midlandsastronomy.com

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Each month we will try and bring you the best of the web for astronomy online resources such as movies, podcasts and free software. If you have any suggestions for content in these pages please contact us at [email protected]

Please click on the links provided to view the material and not the images.

Here is a great with interview premier astrophotographer, Thierry Legault, about tracking spy satellites in the sky. It's a story of mutual surveillance, adept tracking and ultimately one man's quest to do "things that nobody has done before."

www.midlandsastronomy.com

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

The Man Who Shoots Space: Interview with Thierry Legault Internet

Highlights

Useful free astronomy resources

IFAS Website http://www.irishastronomy.org

Stellarium http://www.stellarium.org

Virtual Moon Atlas http://www.astrosurf.com/avl/UK_index.html

Celestia http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html

Sky Maps http://skymaps.com/index.html

Heavens-Above http://www.heavens-above.com/

Virtual Star Party – The Blue Snowball Edition

http://youtu.be/TeIgVe1LcRk

The Secret Lives (and Deaths) of Stars

Cosmic Journeys: Birth of a Black Hole

http://youtu.be/7h_mB0WW0jM

Podcast: Animals in Space

http://www.astronomycast.com/

The Lure of the Red Planet - Part 1 of 2

Part 1 of 2 on a NASA lecture on the exploration of Mars.

http://youtu.be/UAecap7-3z4

Midlands Astronomy Club have created a Facebook page so that our members and non-members alike can: • Keep up-to-date on future out-

reach events. • Be informed of upcoming

lectures. • Have online access to the

latest astronomy news as it happens.

• See photos of all club events and activities.

Find us on www.facebook.com

We always think about humans in space, but the cold hard reality is that animals have always been first in space. First to fly, first to orbit, and sadly, first to die. Let's learn about how our animal companions have been our trusty partners in space exploration, and let's recognize their noble sacrifices over decades of experiments.

Podcast: The Jodcast

http://www.jodcast.net/archive/

A podcast about astronomy including the latest news, what you can see in the night sky, interviews with astronomers and more. It is created by astronomers from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank for anyone interested in things out of this world.

http://youtu.be/1Vm7N5D5sg0

Departing Space Station Commander Provides Tour of Orbital Laboratory

http://youtu.be/UgYmX-vG9a4

n her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory. The tour includes

scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities.

http://youtu.be/doN4t5NKW-k

www.midlandsastronomy.com

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Each month we will try and bring you the best of the web for astronomy online resources such as movies, podcasts and free software. If you have any suggestions for content in these pages please contact us at [email protected]

Please click on the links provided to view the material and not the images.

Here is a great with interview premier astrophotographer, Thierry Legault, about tracking spy satellites in the sky. It's a story of mutual surveillance, adept tracking and ultimately one man's quest to do "things that nobody has done before."

www.midlandsastronomy.com

Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine Midlands Astronomy Club Magazine

The Man Who Shoots Space: Interview with Thierry Legault Internet

Highlights

Useful free astronomy resources

IFAS Website http://www.irishastronomy.org

Stellarium http://www.stellarium.org

Virtual Moon Atlas http://www.astrosurf.com/avl/UK_index.html

Celestia http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html

Sky Maps http://skymaps.com/index.html

Heavens-Above http://www.heavens-above.com/

Virtual Star Party – The Blue Snowball Edition

http://youtu.be/TeIgVe1LcRk

The Secret Lives (and Deaths) of Stars

Cosmic Journeys: Birth of a Black Hole

http://youtu.be/7h_mB0WW0jM

Podcast: Animals in Space

http://www.astronomycast.com/

The Lure of the Red Planet - Part 1 of 2

Part 1 of 2 on a NASA lecture on the exploration of Mars.

http://youtu.be/UAecap7-3z4

Midlands Astronomy Club have created a Facebook page so that our members and non-members alike can: • Keep up-to-date on future out-

reach events. • Be informed of upcoming

lectures. • Have online access to the

latest astronomy news as it happens.

• See photos of all club events and activities.

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We always think about humans in space, but the cold hard reality is that animals have always been first in space. First to fly, first to orbit, and sadly, first to die. Let's learn about how our animal companions have been our trusty partners in space exploration, and let's recognize their noble sacrifices over decades of experiments.

Podcast: The Jodcast

http://www.jodcast.net/archive/

A podcast about astronomy including the latest news, what you can see in the night sky, interviews with astronomers and more. It is created by astronomers from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank for anyone interested in things out of this world.

http://youtu.be/1Vm7N5D5sg0

Departing Space Station Commander Provides Tour of Orbital Laboratory

http://youtu.be/UgYmX-vG9a4

n her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory. The tour includes

scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities.

http://youtu.be/doN4t5NKW-k