Yearly Archives: 2013

'Casts, amateur astronomy, astrocast.tv, astronomy, Orion, Orion Nebula, our night sky, star charts, stargazing

Stargazing in February

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It CAN Be Done!

The first month of the year is behind us now, leaving 11 more months of sky sights to check out. February for many northern hemisphere observers is still the winter season, so of course you have to dress warmly unless you live in relative sunny climes. For southern hemisphere viewers it’s late summer, so the dress code’s a little different. No matter what you wear, though, there ARE some great sky sights to check out.  I outline a few of them in my monthly video called Our Night Sky, produced for Astrocast.TV. You watch it here.

A chart view of Orion, showing Betelgeuse in the shoulder of the giant. The three belt stars run through the middle, and just below them is the Orion Nebula starbirth region. Courtesy Zwergelstern on Wikimedia Commons.

I always come back to Orion for my sky gazing this time of year. It’s just a gorgeous star pattern.  What I like most about Orion: it provides a lot of interesting stuff to look at. There’s Betelgeuse, for example. It’s a red supergiant star in his shoulder, and it’s likely to pop off as a supernova anytime (well, “anytime” is relative — it could be in the next million years).

Notice the three stars across Orion’s middle. Just beneath them lies a spectacular star birth region called the Orion Nebula. It’s about 1,500 light-years away from us and it just blazes with hot young stars, set among clouds of gas and dust that are still forming stars.

I’ve been stargazing since I was a kid. I didn’t always know what I was looking at, but over time (and using star charts and taking a few astronomy classes and teaching in the planetarium) I got to know the sky pretty well. You don’t have to do all that to explore the sky. You can start very simply: take it one constellation at a time.  Look at it with your naked eye, then scan it with binoculars or a small telescope.  Chances are, you’ll find something cool and interesting to check out each time you look.

People often ask me what star charts they should get. I always recommend they check out Sky&Telescope.com or Astronomy.com. Those two sites (and their associated magazines) have very useful star charts that you can customize for your location. If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you can get a wonderful app called Starmap. (Disclosure: I’m working on a project for these guys, but I was using their sky maps (free of charge on their site) long before they contacted me to work with them.)  I also very much like Skymaps, which provides both northern and southern hemisphere charts.  I also wrote about some good astronomy books and apps just before Christmas — check them out  here and here if you’re looking for some more extensive, tree-based information about where to look during your sky gazing sessions.  Now, get out there and check out the sky!  (Just be sure and dress for the weather!)

 

 

astronomy

Cosmic Age

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It’s all Relative

I spent the first half of January traveling.  The first trip was to the American Astronomical Society meeting, where the fire hose of astronomy information was at once refreshing and overwhelming!  The biggest story I took away from that meeting was the amazing plethora of planets out there!  It seems that there are likely millions of them out there in the galaxy.  That’s based on actual observations of planets around other stars and also of the circumstellar disks of material around many stars that will eventually result in new worlds.

The second trip was a private one to celebrate a relative’s significant birthday. On the second day of the partying, I sat in the backyard of another relative’s home, watching my niece play with a new puppy. The Sun was setting, and I got to thinking about how everything in the universe grows and changes. My niece is a toddler, but soon she’ll start school. She’ll think she’s “grown up”.  In due time, she’ll be 15 or so, and she’ll start dating. She’ll think she’s “grown up”.  Eventually she’ll do college, get a job. At each of those points, she’ll think she’s grown up.  I have done those things, and yet, I still don’t think I’m “grown up” yet. Meaning, I’m not finished growing. And, I suspect if I asked the person whose birthday we were celebrating, “Are you grown up?” the answer might be a surprising “No.”

So, I was also thinking about the Sun and its evolutionary path.  It began as a small clump of gas and dust, got bigger and bigger, and eventually got hot enough in its core to start fusing hydrogen to helium.  Was it grown up then? Was it mature?  What does “mature” mean for a star?  The Sun is still doing nuclear fusion in its core, and will for at least a billion or so years more. When it stops, does THAT mean it’s mature? Or past mature?

What about galaxies?  If you look far enough across space and back in time, you can see shreds of galaxies that are really the seeds of the galaxies we know today. They combined (through collision and interaction) to form these larger galaxies.  Our own galaxy formed that way, and is still cannibalizing smaller galaxies today. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, but does that mean it’s mature?  It turns out that when spirals interact, as the Milky Way and Andromeda will do in a few billion years, they end up as ellipticals. Does that mean ellipticals are mature?  In some sense, we don’t have enough data and the universe hasn’t been around long enough for us to find the “end points” of galaxies. We can see the end points of stars — planetary nebulae and supernova remnants, for example — but what does a mature galaxy look like?

Humans are short-lived compared to stars and galaxies, so anything billions of years old (or even thousands of years old) looks mighty old to us. But, the universe itself is still young. It will continue expanding for quite some time to come.  The future universe — like the future of an individual human being — is an unfolding story.