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SOCIETY NEWS

MEETING VENUE Music Block, Ashmole School, Southgate, London N14 5RJ.

The day for meetings is usually the third Thursday of each month. The exceptions are August, when currently we do not hold a meeting, and this now currently applies to the

December Christmas Meet, though that may change back in the future? However, in case of changes, it is always advisable to double-check the dates below.

IMPORTANT Remember we have had a change of meeting room.

Neither of the Sixth Form Centre rooms turned out to be really suitable, so we have been given a room in the Main Music Block, which is the two

storey building, next to the original Music Room. See the next page

For more on this, and general meeting information, also check the website: www.ashastro.co.uk. Latest update January 2014

Doors open - 7.30pm : Main speaker - 8.00pm : Finish - 10.00pm sharp! New or updated information is in italics

Apologies for the lack of a December issue of 2002. As there was no meeting, and both your Editor and Chairman were up to their eyes with other things, it

was decided to delay that issue and combine it with the January.

2014

Below are the currently scheduled dates for this year. Confirmation as to which meetings will be held are due to be announced after the next Committee Meeting. This has also had to be delayed, but hopefully will take place before the February

meeting.

January 16th : Roger O’Brien : “To the Moon and Beyond” February 20th : TBA March 20th : TBA April 17th : Jerry Stone : TBA May 15th : TBA June 19th : TBA July 17th : TBA August : Summer Break September : 18th : TBA October 16th : AGM November 20th : TBA December : Probably no meeting this month COVER

Well, Comet ISON is probably somewhere in this image, taken on 26th November 2013. However it is lost in the glare, and not helped in that it was far fainter than had been predicted. That’s comets for you. More non-images of ISON on the Sky Views page!

Photo – Mat Irvine

SOCIETY NEWS MEETING ROOM

Due to the new rooms we had been given in the Sixth Form Centre not

being entirely suitable, we have moved again, this time to the Main

Music Block. This is the two-storey building,

next to our original room, the now-demolished Music Room (marked

with the X - see the main photo on left.) Note, especially for those

walking, the easiest route from the Main gate is as the arrow depicts,

ie not the route you’d likely think of taking through the car park! We

will be meeting in one of the first floor rooms, details will be posted as you come in. We hope a first floor will be suitable

for all – as there isn’t a lift. If anyone feels they will have difficulty – please let the Chairman know – contact details on back page.

MEETING PREVIEW : 16th January 2014

Roger O’Brien : “To the Moon and Beyond”

Having been largely ignored by the space community for some years, our nearest astronomical neighbour in space is getting some sorely-missed attention.

Roger will be dealing with three space missions. Two specifically deal with the Moon, LADEE and the first Chinese Lunar Lander, Chang'e 3, (top right). He'll also move further out into the Solar System with MOM.

LADEE - Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer – (centre right) looks at the Moon's very tenuous, for want of a better term, atmosphere.

Chang'e 3 is the first lander since Luna 24 in 1976. There is also a small rover, Yutu or ‘Jade Rabbit’. LADEE is attempting to detect atmospheric effects of the landing.

MOM – Mars Orbital Mission, (bottom right), is another first, the first Indian Mars mission, now on its way.

The probe is informally called Mangalyaan, which is Sanskrit for ‘Mars Craft’.

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MEETING REVIEW : 21st November ”Michael Franks : “Roll A Rocket”

Having organised an event at the Metropolitan Bar Baker Street, late last year (recorded in 200 Vol 42, Issue 1, November 2013) Michael volunteered to repeat the performance at the November meeting. For this he used the same free model paper rockets available to download from the Internet, including versions of Soyuz and the Saturn IB launchers and four generic ‘film pot’ rockets. To these he added 20 traditional 35mm film canisters (yes they are still available!), and Alka-Seltzer tablets!

Michael first used a PowerPoint Presentation to show the story behind this, and where the on-line paper rockets can be found. These are wide and varied and even include one for the Soviet Lunar Lander, the LK, (Lunniy Korabl or Lunar Ship) that although planning was fairly advanced, never made it to the Moon. Then, with the desks protected with newspapers – it can get a bit messy- everyone set off building their own. On completion, they didn’t take that long to build, it was outside to see how they flew. The rockets were powered by Alka-Seltzer and water. You put half a tablet of Alka-Seltzer into a film pot, quickly add water invert the film pot and slide the paper rocket onto the film pot, and quickly move away! Most of the rockets usually went off with a satisfactory whoosh, though Michael pointed out they did not fly as

high as they did at the Baker Street pub, probably due to the colder temperature. It appears everyone enjoyed a somewhat different meeting! Photos by Michael Franks

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Michael Franks

Part I of this article is in the November’s 2002, but to remind you, geocaching is a hi-tech form of treasure hunting using GPS. Boxes have been hidden all round the world for geocachers to find. On 12th October 2013 Richard Garriott travelled to the International Space Station and left a geocache there, number GC1BE91. In October NASA Astronaut Rick Mastracchio announced that when he

travelled to the ISS in November 2013, he would find the Geocache. Groundspeak who operate the Geocaching Website www.geocaching.com announced they would like geocachers round the world to hold events to wish a Rick a successful launch. Rick launched successfully on 7th November and on 17th November 2013 the first find of a geocache in space took place. Here is Rick's historic log :

“FTF November 17, 2013

The geo space bug (TB5JJN1) has made it to the Russian Service Module, panel 218. He traveled from Waterbury, CT

to Houston, TX to Cologne, Germany to Moscow, Star City Russia, to Baikonur Kazakhstan where it launched on a

Russian Soyuz Rocket to the International Space Station. He has traveled around the space station and will continue to do

so for the next 6 months. When he is not traveling he will be staying with me in my very small crew quarters. He

hangs/floats on my wall and waits for more adventures while I do research and perform experiments here on ISS.

Thanks for getting this little guy started Cizzors. Every

journey starts with the first step and you took the first step of this one.”

Images :

Top : Rick Mastracchio on board the ISS with the Travel Bug.

Below : The Bug in position on the ISS storage locker.

[Editorial note: As before, to access any website links in this article, those viewing the digital copy can directly click on the blue links.

(Computer OS’s vary, it could be ctrl-click.) However those with the hard copy will have to note down the URL, and manually type it into a

search engine! ]

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CHAIRMAN’S QUARTERS

2014 is now upon us and many a prediction for the coming year will be made, but it is interesting to see what predictions were made, say 50 years ago, about this one. It just so happens that the author Isaac Asimov (left) did just that at New York’s World’s Fair in 1964, (right). These are some of the things he came up with:

“Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare

‘automeals’, heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.”

“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on Earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.”

“Men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colours that will change at the touch of a push button.”

“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.” “The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived

batteries running on radioisotopes.” “Highways, in the more advanced sections of the world, will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be

increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”

“Vehicles with ‘robot-brains’ can be set for particular destinations that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.”

“Wall screens will have replaced the ordinary [television] set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.”

“The world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000.” “Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient

micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavours.” “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by

any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary ‘Fortran’.”

“Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.”

“The most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!” in our, ”A society of enforced leisure.”

See you at the next meeting.

JIM

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Halton C. Arp : The Astronomer Who Challenged Big Bang Theory

Halton Christian Arp, a provocative American astronomer whose dogged insistence that astronomers had misread the distances to quasars cast doubt on the Big Bang Theory of the Universe and led to his exile from his peers and the telescopes he loved, died on December 28, 2013, in Munich at the age of 86.

As a staff astronomer for 29

years at the Hale Observatories, which included the Mount Wilson and Mount

Palomar Observatories in Southern California, Dr. Arp

was part of their most romantic era, when

astronomers were peeling back the sky and making

discovery after discovery that laid the foundation for the

modern understanding of the expansion of the Universe.

But Dr. Arp was no friend of orthodoxy. A skilled observer with regular access to the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, he sought out unusual galaxies and collected them in “The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” (1966), showing them interacting and merging with loops, swirls and streamers that revealed the diversity and beauty of nature. But these galaxies also revealed something puzzling and controversial. In the expanding Universe, as discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929, everything is moving away from us. The farther away it is, the faster it is going, as revealed by its redshift, the stretching of light waves, also known as the Doppler Shift. Dr. Arp found that galaxies with radically different redshifts, and thus at vastly different distances from us, often appeared connected by filaments and bridges of gas. This suggested, he said, that redshift was not always an indication of distance but could be caused by other, unknown, physics. The biggest redshifts belonged to quasars, the brilliant point-like objects that are presumably at the edge of the Universe. Dr. Arp found, however, that they were often suspiciously close in the sky to relatively nearby spiral galaxies. This suggested to him that quasars were not so far away after all, and that they might have shot out of the nearby galaxies. If he was right, the whole picture of cosmic evolution given by the Big Bang - a Universe that began in a blaze of fire and gas 14 billion years ago and slowly condensed into stars and galaxies - would have to go out the window. A vast majority of astronomers dismissed Dr. Arp’s results as coincidences or optical illusions. But his data appealed to a small, articulate band of astronomers who supported the rival theory, called the Steady State Theory, and had criticized the Big Bang for decades. Among them were Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, who had invented the theory, and Geoffrey Burbidge, a witty and acerbic astrophysicist at the University of California in San Diego. “When he died, he took a whole cosmology with him,” said Barry F. Madore, a senior research associate at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. Halton Christian Arp was born on March 21, 1927, in New York City, the only son of August and Anita Arp. His father was an artist and his mother ran institutions for children and adolescents. Halton grew up in Greenwich Village and various art colonies and did not go to school until fifth grade. After bouncing around public schools in New York, he was sent to

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Tabor Academy, on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, a prep school for the United States Naval Academy. After a year in the Navy, he attended Harvard, where he majored in astronomy. He graduated in 1949 and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in 1953 at the California Institute of Technology, which had started an astronomy graduate program to prepare astronomers for the use of the 200-inch Mount Palomar telescope, (below). At Harvard, he became one of the best fencers in the United States, ultimately competing in world championship matches in Paris in 1965. Cutting a dashing figure, he would adopt a fencer’s posture when giving talks. “He would strut across the stage and then strut back, as if he were duelling”, Dr. Madore said. Dr. Arp became a staff astronomer at the Hale Observatories after stints as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Indiana University. His breakthrough occurred, as he recalled, on a rainy night at Palomar in 1966, when he decided to investigate a chance remark by a colleague that many of his peculiar galaxies had radio sources near them in the sky. Looking them up in the Palomar library, he realized that many of those radio sources were quasars that could have been shot out of a nearby galaxy, an idea first explored by the Armenian astronomer, Victor Ambartsumian, a decade earlier. “It is with reluctance that I come to the conclusion that the redshifts of some extragalactic objects are not due entirely to velocity causes,” Dr. Arp wrote in a paper a year later. He combed the sky for more evidence that redshifts were not ironclad indicators of cosmic distance, knowing that he was striking at the heart of modern cosmology. He turned out to be an expert at finding quasars in suspicious places, tucked under the arm of a galaxy or at the end of a tendril of gas. One of the most impressive was a quasarlike object known as Markarian 205, which had a redshift corresponding to a distance of about a billion light years but appeared to be in front of a galaxy only 70 million light years away. The redshift controversy came to a boil in 1972, when Dr. Arp engaged in a debate, arranged by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with John N. Bahcall, a young physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study. Timothy Ferris described the event in his 1977 book The Red Limit: “When the debate was over, it was difficult not to be impressed with Arp’s sincerity and his love for the mysterious galaxies he studied, but it was also difficult to feel that his case had suffered anything short of demolition.” As Dr. Arp’s colleagues lost patience with his quest, he was no longer invited to speak at major conferences, and his observing time on the mighty 200-inch telescope began to dry up. Warned in the early 1980s that his research program was unproductive, he refused to change course. Finally, he refused to submit a proposal at all on the grounds that everyone knew what he was doing. He got no time at all. Dr. Arp took early retirement and joined the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics near Munich, where he continued to promote his theories. He told his own side of the redshift story in a 1989 book, Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies. Jim Webb - adapted from an article in Space & Cosmos by Dennis Overbyejan

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Sky Views Left : Conjunction of Mercury and Saturn on 26th November 2013. Mercury is the lower,

brighter, of the two. In theory Comet ISON is also in this image, close to the

horizon, but lost in the glare of the rising Sun. (This event is shown on the COVER.)

Below : The Moon on 5th December. Even with a modest camera telephoto lens

(300mm) the craters are just visible on the terminator

Bottom: The Moon and Venus, also on 5th

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THE NIGHT SKY : THE PLANETS January – February 2014

MERCURY : Was at superior conjunction (far side of the Sun) on 29th December. Now back in the evening skies for January. Reasonably bright at -0.6 in the southwest, the planet is also fairly separated from the Sun, making viewing of this elusive planet easier. It will reach greatest elongation on January 31st. Then it will be around 10 degrees above the horizon, 45 minutes after Sunset, close to a very slender crescent Moon, which will only be one-day old, and will need good seeing and a clear horizon to observe. Still close the following day, February 1st (see The Night Sky map) with a slightly-easier-to-see two-day old Moon. In conjunction with Neptune from the end of January through to early February, with the closest approach being 5th February VENUS : Reached inferior conjunction (directly between the Sun and Earth) on 11th January, and moving into the morning skies by the end of the month. The very thin waning crescent Moon will be about 4 degrees (eight x Moon widths) below on 29th January. MARS : Rises around midnight in Virgo, magnitude 1.6, and about one hour earlier by the end of the month, with the magnitude increasing from +0.9 to +0.3. With modest magnification and good seeing it is possible to see markings on its reddish surface, such as the Syrtis Major and the Polar regions. JUPITER : Reached opposition on 5th January and visible all night in Gemini, dominating the south-eastern skies at around 60 degrees. Moon close by on 14th. The magnitude is around -2.7 with a disk 47 arc seconds across. A small telescope will reveal the four Galilean satellites and The Great Red Spot which seems to be somewhat larger than usual. SATURN : Still in the morning skies, in Libra. It is low down in the east before Sunrise, rising around 03.00hrs at the beginning of the New Year and around magnitude +0.6. The waning crescent Moon close by on 25th January. On the positive side, the rings are even more open than previous years, at 22 degrees, but the bad news is that Saturn will not rise that high in the skies, so needs a low horizon for any hope of reasonable viewing. And this situation is due to last for the next few years. URANUS : In Pisces. The planet was at opposition on 3rd October 2013. Magnitude around +5.7 which means it is just on the edge of naked eye visibility, as that is usually taken to be a maximum of +6. But this assumes ideal viewing conditions and 20:20 vision! Moon close 3rd February. NEPTUNE : In Aquarius around Magnitude +8.0 Moon to the north on 8th December. In conjunction with Mercury on 5th February. (See also MERCURY). One and two-day old crescent Moon close 31st January and 1st February.

COMETS

As will be fairly well known by now, Comet ISON didn’t survive its journey around the Sun at the end of December. Apparently even Hubble can’t spot the remnants. So far there are no predictions for naked-eye comets for 2014, but as we also know, comets are notoriously unreliable when it comes to predictions, so you never know…

THE MOON

New 1st January First7th Full 15th Last 24th New 30th

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THE NIGHT SKY : MAP

1st February 2014 18.00 GMT/ UTC

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KEY

MERCURY SATURN

VENUS URANUS

MARS NEPTUNE

JUPITER

PLUTO

Patron: Sir Arthur C. Clarke, C.B.E., B.Sc., F.R.A.S., F.B.I.S. President : Frederick W. Clarke, F.Ph.S.(Eng), F.B.I.S.

Vice President : Walter T. Baker

ASH COMMITTEE MEMBERS : 2012 – 2013 CHAIRMAN : Jim Webb email chairman@ashastro.co.uk [www.glservices.org] SECRETARY: Charles Towler email secretary@ashastro.co.uk TREASURER : Gordon Harding MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY: Alister Innes email memsec@ashastro.co.uk

EDITOR, P.R.O. and VICE-CHAIRMAN (and current WEBMASTER) : Mat Irvine email editor@ashastro.co.uk [www.smallspace.demon.co.uk] GENERAL MEMBER : Mitchell Sandler GENERAL MEMBER : Liz Partridge JUNIOR MEMBER : Nicholas Lucas GENERAL MEMBER AT LARGE : Gary Marriott

GENERAL INFORMATION : info@ashastro.co.uk