APOD 3.1

This week's APOD is a special one from January 12th. It isn't actually a picture but several hundred pictures put together to show how big things are in comparison to the things we know of today. This applet is called Scale of the Universe 2 and it allows one to go as small as one plank length which is the predicted length of a single string from the string theory that everything is made of strings and go as large as the estimated size of the universe which is several times the size of the observable universe which is billions of light years in diameter. I chose this because it is an amazing way of showing just how small we are in comparison to the universe and beyond anything we can even comprehend as a species. It is just incredible and humbling to see these incredible sizes and comparisons. It goes from 10 to the 27th meters to 10 to the negative 35th. That span is just way too much larger for anyone to really understand in any way.

APOD 2.8

It's been a while! To kick things back into gear, I have chosen a picture from December 24th for the last APOD of the first semester.

This is a picture of a bubble nebula named Sharpless 308. This huge sphere of gases like hydrogen was blown up the the bright star in the middle called a Wolf-Rayet star which is actually over 20 times the size and heat of the sun but with a very short life span. This is pre-supernova explosions causing this bubble to expand to over 60 light years in diameter. This nebula is 5200 light years away and is located near the Big Dog constellation. This has been around for about 70,000 years and is continuously growing and enveloping more and more stars and planets. I chose this because it is just so cool and unique to everything else I have seen in a while.

William Herschel Biography

Sir William Herschel, also known as Frederick William Herschel, was born on November 15^th 1738 in Hannover, Germany. He was brought up in a very musical home with an older brother and sister where both of his parents were proficient musicians. Accordingly, he became a band boy with the Hanoverian Guards where he was happy and very talented. Soon after that, he volunteered for the military for a brief time only to stop due to the realization of a weak immune system and delicate health. In 1757, he left Germany with his father and headed to England. The rest of his family joined him after he took up residence and made a life there. In 1781, Herschel used a small, handheld telescope no more than seven inches long to notice a small disk-like object and thought that it was an undiscovered comet. After continuing the study of this object over a few months, he learned that it was actually an undiscovered planet. At first, he wanted to name it Georgium Sidus after king George the third but other astronomers didn’t like the name and thus he eventually chose the name Uranus after the god of the skies. Due to this discovery, Herschel got a pension of about two hundred pounds per year as well as got knighted and title the “King Astronomer”. Due to this new income, Herschel could spend all of his time in astronomy instead of having a job and doing it in his spare time. Herschel created his own telescope that was a little over forty feet long with an array of stands and ladders. While standing on the ladder and looking through the telescope, Herschel would explain various descriptions of things he thought were interesting in the sky while she would draw and write them down at the bottom of the structure. Due to the immense size of the telescope he couldn’t actually rotate it, only move it along the single strip of path allowed by the array. Using this telescope and method along with various other tactics, William was able to discover a very large number of nebulae and properly document them. Herschel’s son actually took his father’s telescope to South Africa and made a variety of observations and then published them in a catalog in 1864. These observations included 5100 objects, 4630 of which  were discovered solely by the Herschel family. The catalog what titled, “The General Catalog of Nebulae”. In 1785, Herschel came up with the idea of the disc theory of the stellar system. This anticipated the shape of our galaxy as we know it today to be the spiral shape. Herschel coined the term nebulae since he believed that all nebulae are clusters of stars like an island nebulae. He even discovered the infrared range of sunlight. So that he could interpret the difference between all of his discovered star clusters, he created the theory of the evolution of stars to emphasize their densities relative to each other. He did this by contrasting a cluster of tightly packed stars with others that were scattered. The theory states that no matter what, over time the stars, even the scattered ones, would slowly come together into their own tightly packed clusters. Herschel also coined the name “asteroids” for the bodies of rock that he discovered in 1801. In 1787, Herschel discovered two moons around Uranus, Titania and Oberon. In 1789, he used his large telescope to find Saturn's sixth and seventh moons, Enceladus and Mimas. He was so  famous, in fact, that he had an asteroid named after him, the asteroid 2000 Herschel. Two years before his death, he was elected vice president of the newly formed Royal Astronomical Society in 1820 and president the year after that. His last published paper was a catalog of 145 double stars. He died in 1822 and is buried in Berkshire, England.

Quarter 2 Biography Citation

Here is the links I will be using to do my biography on William Herschel

http://messier.seds.org/xtra/Bios/wherschel.html

http://www.ing.iac.es/Astronomy/telescopes/wht/

http://www.nndb.com/people/661/000096373/

http://space.about.com/od/astronomerbiographies/a/herschelwilliam.htm

http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/lesson/scopes/herschel/

http://www.astrolapalma.com/en/william-herschel-telescope

http://www.astroleague.org/al/obsclubs/herschel/fwhershs.html

APOD 2.7

This weeks APOD is taken from today, December 13th and is an image of the Geminid Meteor shower. While this image was taken in 2012, it gives a good idea to the viewer what it will look like tonight. That's right, the night of December 13th and the morning of the 14th will look like this in select places around the world. This is a yearly thing that is looked forward to by astronomer everywhere. This image was taken over three hours with a time lapse camera and it really shows just how amazing beautiful flaming space rocks heading for one's head can look like. Fortunately, we have the atmosphere to protect us from dying and allow us to see the amazing spectacle in the image above. This image was taken in China and this year it will be somewhere else but, unfortunately, us Floridians won't be able to see it. The meteors that rain down are actually traveling at 14 miles per second. I know that I am looking forward to seeing what they looked like this year tomorrow.

Observational Study 11/25 - 12/7

It has been a while since I last made an observational post so I have made several observations to talk about. These weeks, I saw the moon go from waning crescent to new moon to waxing crescent all the while getting closer and closer to Venus until they were right next to each other. I have also been using computers and equipment to watch the movement of Comet ISON as I passed near the sun. I was able to see tons of stars and almost all of the constellations we have studied so far. I also noticed that constellations are changing position slightly every night until they are starting to fall below the horizon and out of view since we are getting into winter and out of fall. There were fewer clouds and it was dark enough to see quite a few things in the sky. On some nights, I went several times and noted the approximate positions of the things in the sky and could clearly see how they changed so much in only a few hours. All in all, not a bad two weeks for observations.

APOD 2.6

This weeks APOD was difficult to pick since there are so many amazing photos to choose from over a span of 2 weeks but I decided to use the one from November 29th 2013.

This is an image of a before (right) and after (left) of comet ISON's trip around the sun. This is an infrared image and is actually screenshots of a youtube video uploaded by NASA that I found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pCroW5ACSE
 ISON actually got within only 1 million kilometers of the sun which sounds far away, but is extremely close which is why it is so much dimmer in the after picture. In the video, you can see that it speeds up greatly when it gets close to the sun. This is not speeding up the picture, the gravity from the sun is so strong it worked like a slingshot that shot the comet even faster than it was already going. I chose this because I actually found it a while ago to use in my project.