Astronomy

You know it is cold when the very air starts to freeze.

This is what happens in a Martian winter when no sunlight reaches the polar region. It grows so cold that the atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide, begins to freeze and fall to the ground as snow. Frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice, accumulates into a permanent polar cap. While the extent of this polar cap waxes and wanes with the Martian seasons, there is always some ice.

The image below, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows of a section of the southern permanent polar cap. Late summer has caused much of the polar cap to sublimate (convert back to gas), exposing some of the rock under the ice.

Here much of the terrain is shaped by the annual freeze and thaw cycles. These pits are probably the result of these cycles and are about 60m (200ft) across. Soon the region will return to the darkness of winter and the pits will be re-buried in the ice.

Mike Brown did more than give a lecture while in Hawai'i. He just finished a four day observing run using Keck 2 with AO and OSIRIS, as well as gathering data with NIRSPEC. The target? Among other things Mike and his team observed Neptune and the large moon Triton. Triton is thought to be a captured KBO (Kuiper Belt Object). These objects, including well known Pluto, and lesser known, but just as large objects like Eris, Haumea, Makemake and Quaoar, are Mike's area of expertise.

It is always nice to see a system I help maintain operating well and producing images like this...

We were doing more engineering tests with the K1 laser Sunday night. And as usual, Dan Birchall, working the night over at Subaru, took advantage of the opportunity to do some time lapse photography. Enjoy...

I do not usually post random YouTube vids here. But sometimes I just have to. I seriously suggest you select 1080pHD and expand to full screen now.

The shot starts over the west coast of North America heading south. This particular orbit went right down Central and finally South America. You can pick out a lot of major metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Mexico City, etc., by the lights. Also spectacular is the lighting in several storm complexes along the coast of Mexico and further into South America.

Living in Arizona I often witnessed dust devils. From little swirls of dried grass and leaves, to monsters powerful enough to bounce a car around. Here on the dry and hot side of the Big Island of Hawai'i we get them from time to time as well. Towers of dust above the kiawe trees, bright against the blue waters of the ocean. Impressive demonstrations of what a little heat can do with air.

It was a surprise to scientists that the thin carbon dioxide air of Mars can also form dust devils. But they have proven to be quite common. Tracks crisscross those rocky plains, traces in the red dust. Both the rovers and the orbital probes have spotted dust devils in action.

Planning a night of observing is a challenge. There is the choice of equipment, setting up observing lists of objects to target. And then there is deciding where to go.

Finding a dark spot can be a challenge in Hawai'i. Almost every bit of land is gated and tied up in bureaucratic rules. We often use the area around the Mauna Kea VIS to observe. Located at 9,000ft on the south side of Mauna Kea the area has much to recommend it for amateur astronomy. This land is under the administrative control of OMKM, who actively support astronomy, both professional and amateur. But the area does have a number of lights, and there is regular vehicle traffic, even in the middle of the night. Thus I have been actively looking for other places.

The area around the MK VIS is state land, under the control of the State of Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. Just below the VIS is the start of a back road that almost entirely circles the mountain, R-1, also part of the Na Ala Hele trial system, a road designated for public access. Perfect! All I need is a place just enough out of the way to avoid any lights or activity in the night.

Any day that starts with two flat tires is bound to be an interesting day.

Yes, not one, but two flat tires in a matter on moments. I felt the first tire blow out and as we inspected the damage a hissing could be heard from the opposite side. The summit road is known to be a problem, and flat tires are not an uncommon event. We do get practice changing tires on this road. Fortunately other Keck vehicles were coming up behind us, and we could ask for another spare to be brought down from the summit. In the meantime we spent a pleasant half hour waiting for the second spare. The weather was beautiful, and so was the view from high on the side of Mauna Kea.

I had planned on working on one of the cameras in Interferometry. The camera has been having trouble automatically filling with liquid nitrogen. In addition I had a list of smaller issues that needed to be dealt with. Unfortunately one of those minor issues turned out to be not so minor.

Thus I spent much of the day troubleshooting Fast Delay Line #5. Used to compensate the optical path between the two telescopes, the delay line is a cart that runs on rails, carrying a set of mirrors. The cart should track very smoothly, changing the path length on the order of micrometers (a few ten thousandths of an inch), instead it visibly jittered and jumped along the rail, something wrong in the motor control software or circuitry. It took much of the day, but in the end it was tracking smoothly.

The entire day was busy from beginning to end. I attempted to finish the last few tasks on my list as the last few minutes of the day sped away. The rest of the guys were ready to leave about a quarter to five, while I was still connecting a few last metrology cables. "Yes, I am coming!" I answered on the radio for the second time. I grabbed my tool bag and headed to the door as the clock hit 17:00.

One of those days I return home exhausted. I will have to head up again, quite soon, to deal with other problems still unfinished. Hopefully a somewhat less complicated day.

Something was wrong... it was not raining.

Four previous times we have attempted to do this, hold a star party for the students of Waikoloa Elementary School. Four times it has been either cloudy, or outright raining. Yes, raining in one of the driest areas of the island, a place that gets, maybe, ten inches of rain each year.

We even had clear skies!

It was a great event, perfect skies, several big telescopes, and hundreds of eager eyes.

Early in the evening I was worried that it was all for naught. About 7:30pm we were all set up and had a total of two guests, a mother and her daughter. They were getting a private showing of the sky at my telescope, with good views of Saturn, star clusters and nebulae. But where was everyone else? Classroom announcements had been made. Flyers had been sent home with every student. Two people?

They hit us just after 8:00pm, a steady stream of students and parents drawn to see the sky. I would guess that well over two hundred folks came by the star party. The skies in Waikoloa are wonderful for this sort of thing. Nice and dark, with the summer Milky Way glowing brightly overhead. We slewed from globulars to nebulae, to binary stars. Steady lines of folks waiting to look through each telescope. I have never gotten tired of the reaction when someone sees something spectacular through the eyepiece for the first time.

Cliff used his 24" 'scope to hunt down the new supernova in M101, visible as a small star like object at the edge of a faint halo. I was wondering which star was actually the supernova. Examining some photos afterwards I realized we were looking at the correct object. It will be interesting to observe this event over the coming week, as a nearby Type 1A supernova it should get quite bright.

My thanks to the guys from WHAC who supported this event. Mr. O, our school contact had everything perfectly arranged, from the flyers, to insuring the lights and sprinklers were off for the night. It was a great event, I expect we will do this again.

W. M. Keck Observatory press release...

Uncovering the Secrets of the Great Supernova

Kamuela, HI – A once-in-a-lifetime nearby stellar explosion now unfolding in a neighboring galaxy has astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory scrambling to ask questions that can’t be answered at any other ground-based telescope in the world. The first big question: What causes this pivotally important type of stellar cataclysm?

Observing this spectacular supernova, dubbed PTF11kly, began on August 24, with the detection of the explosion in the nearby Pinwheel Galaxy, a.k.a. M101, by the automated Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey. That survey is designed to detect short-lived astronomical events as they happen.

Next, the brightening point of light was observed by the Grand Canary Telescope in the Atlantic and the star’s light was split into the first information-rich spectrum. Then, as the Earth turned and presented different telescopes to that part of the sky, the Lick Telescope in California got another spectrum of the exploding star, followed soon by a very high quality spectrum from the HIRES instrument on the Keck I telescope in Hawai’i.

Both Lick and Keck astronomers confirmed that the explosion is a Type Ia supernova – the kind that pop off occasionally in very distant galaxies. There has not been another Type Ia supernova this close to Earth in decades, and none have ever before been caught so early in the process of this type of stellar death.

“Nearby Type Ia’s are very rare,” said postdoctoral astronomy researcher Brad Cenko of the University of California at Berkeley.

Astronomers have long adored Type Ia supernovae because they seem to behave in a very predictable manner: brightening and reaching the same luminosity, before fading away. As a result when they happen in very distant galaxies, they are recognizable and can be used as “standard candles” to measure cosmic distances.

Such measurements led to one of the biggest cosmological discoveries of recent years: galaxies are moving further apart and the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. That discovery, in turn, pointed to the existence of a sort of weird anti-gravity force astronomers call “dark energy.”

“Given the importance of this supernova for both the Type Ia supernova distance scale and for constraining the progenitors of Type Ia’s, Keck Observatory responded rapidly and deployed assets to acquire both spectroscopy and adaptive optics imaging,” said Keck Observatory Director Taft Armandroff. Keck adaptive optics cancel out Earth’s atmospheric distortions to starlight.

Astronomers do not really know what causes Type Ia supernova, despite their importance. And that is why having one occur in a nearby galaxy and be studied so soon after its explosion began is so exciting for astronomers.

“Type Ia supernovae underlie one of the most important astronomical discoveries in the last few decades,” Cenko said. “But we still don’t know what their progenitor systems are.”

It’s generally believed that there are at least two stars involved in creating a Type Ia supernova. One star is most likely a white dwarf – a kind of dead star. What the other one is, no one is exactly sure. It could be another white dwarf, main sequence star (like our sun) or a red giant star.

One way to find out is look at high-resolution images of the Pinwheel Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope before August 25 and see if there was a star in the same location.

“Keck and Hubble are pretty well matched in terms of spatial resolution,” said Keck support astronomer Jim Lyke. “So we can do a direct comparison.”

“We need very accurate images at very high resolution to match Hubble images,” agreed Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory astronomer Peter Nugent, who is the lead of the PTF Type Ia supernova program and chiefly responsible for the discovery of PTF11kly. The only way to do that is with Keck adaptive optics.

So in addition to gathering spectra of the supernova, astronomers started on the night of August 25 to take pictures of the supernova with the Keck II telescope adaptive optics system. Their hope is to get a very precise location of the star in the Pinwheel Galaxy so that they can look at those Hubble images and see if there was anything – like a red giant – there beforehand.

“If it was two white dwarfs it would be too faint to see,” said Cenko. Even if nothing is found in Hubble images, it will still be useful, he said, because it will put some limits on how large the stars could be to create a Type Ia supernova, and bolster the theory that two white dwarfs are the cause.

Another source of clues to the cause of the supernova are changes in the spectra as the explosion continues, Cenko explained. If, for instance, the companion star to the white dwarf was large, it would have likely shed lots of material in its final death throes. Then, when the explosion followed, that same material would be hit by the explosion itself. The shock waves of those collisions would create telltale signals in the spectra of the star as its explosion continues to expand into space.

“Because we don’t know the progenitor system (of Type Ia supernovae) we don’t have a good grasp on how diverse the Type Ia class might be,” said Joshua Bloom, another UC Berkeley astronomer who is leading the Keck research team. “It is a bit troubling that we really don’t know.”

But with the advent of the Pinwheel supernova, hopes are high that a lot more will be learned about these cosmic yardsticks.

W. M. Keck Observatory Position Announcement...

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates two of the world’s largest optical/infrared telescopes located on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Each telescope is equipped with full a suite of instruments designed to perform exciting, cutting edge astronomical research. The Observatory seeks an Instrument Technician to work in close collaboration with instrument engineers and support astronomers and be responsible for technical support of these facility astronomical instruments. In addition this position may include working in other areas in which Keck is a world leader such as adaptive optics, lasers for artificial guide star adaptive optics, and other telescope systems as needed.

The successful candidate is committed to WMKO’s core values, adheres to company policy, works well with others and is a motivated, self-starter who can handle multiple tasks and priorities within a fast paced environment.

Minimum qualifications include:

• An AS degree in Electronics or Engineering degree or equivalent
  
• Three years experience in a highly technical or science operations environment
  
• Experience and ability working with and around complex and sensitive optics and instrumentation
  
• Experience in at least one of the following three areas:
  
  • Operation and maintenance of vacuum dewars
    
  • Cryogen systems (liquid and/or closed cycle)
    
  • Handling , alignment, and maintenance of optics

Desirable qualifications include:

• Experience working at an astronomical observatory
  
• Instrumentation experience at an astronomical observatory
  
• Electronics design experience
  
• Experience using Unix
  
• Experience working with lasers

This position requires you to submit your resume on-line with your cover letter that states why you are uniquely qualified for the position.

This is a regular position with a competitive, comprehensive benefits package. The position is opened until filled. Employment is conditional on successful completion of drug tests. This position requires you to submit your resume on-line with your cover letter that states why you are uniquely qualified for the position. Additional information about WMKO and this position may be found on our web site at www.keckobservatory.org. EEO/M/F/D/V

Research on white dwarfs using the Keck 1 telescope...

Astronomers studying the atmospheres of planet-munching white dwarf stars have found that some stellar meals included the same ingredients as Earth.

Remains of rocky bodies that once circled the white dwarfs pepper the gas envelopes around the dead stars. The ratios of elements in these remains — called “pollution,” since it mars the star’s normally pristine hydrogen or helium atmosphere — tell astronomers what the bodies were made of and where they might have come from. Although about as common as normal stars in the Milky Way, white dwarfs aren’t the most obvious choice for astronomers looking for traces of extrasolar planets — but, it turns out, the dense, collapsed stars may be incredibly useful.

Read the rest of the article at Science News...

W.M. Keck press release...

Young people these days. They go through high school and college, trying to find their way in the world with gloom, doom and debt all around them. The path to becoming a highly skilled and employable worker is not easy, despite the unending media reports that America needs such people more than ever. Is it any wonder, then, that today’s youth are often characterized as an aimless, unmotivated generation?

Well yes, actually, it is a wonder. Just a few minutes of conversation with some of the young people who have been summer interns at Keck Observatory makes it crystal clear that the listless youth stereotype is totally false. What’s more, it becomes obvious that Hawaii is no backwater when it comes to science and technical careers.

“Hawaii is great because students like me have access to places like Keck and the HPA Energy Lab,” said Mariko Thorbecke, currently a digital communications intern at Keck Observatory as well as an intern at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy Energy Lab. At Keck she is tasked with researching and assembling a video recording and webcasting system so that future Keck Astronomy Lecture Series will be broadcast around the world on the Internet.

Although Thorbecke started her Keck internship with a primary interest in computer science and a love of physics instilled by her HPA physics teacher, Jerry Bleckel, she has since discovered a range of new interests and other career paths open to her. Communicating science is one of them.
“I would have never thought of a career in astronomy,” said Thorbecke. “I thought it was just stars and planets.” Now she sees it as a fantastic field where physics and technology are redefining the nature of the universe.

Christina Balkaran, another one of Keck’s summer interns, was already in love with astrophysics when she started her position with support astronomer Greg Wirth. She came to the Big Island from her home state of Connecticut, where she is studying astrophysics at Connecticut College. Balkaran’s project has been to process loads of raw data about a dwarf galaxy that is orbiting the Andromeda galaxy. The data were collected with the Keck II telescope’s DEIMOS instrument several years ago, just waiting for someone like Balkaran to analyze it for new information about the cosmos.

“I’m very, very lucky,” said Balkaran, who is part of the first generation in her family to attend college. She was not only able to work on a real astronomy project with astronomers at a world-class observatory, but she also discovered there are skills involved in being an astronomer that go beyond understanding physics and outer space. There is also a huge amount of engineering and computer programming done at Keck, which was both a surprise and an opportunity for Balkaran to pick up some of those skills at Keck. “It really makes you appreciate what everyone does here.”

Engineering intern Sean Jones is taking home similar lessons. He earned his internship through the Akamai Workforce Initiative, which has been sending college students to Keck, CFHT and other observatories on the Big Island for years. Jones is an engineering student at UH Manoa and an Oahu native. His project helped to design a new platform that will be placed high up on the walls of one of the Keck telescope domes to hold equipment for the next generation in adaptive optics systems (a technology which cancels out the starlight-distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere).

“This was a whole project design, from scratch,” Jones said. “I did make a lot of progress and I think learning this design process will serve me very well.”

But perhaps an even bigger revelation for Jones was discovering that there are actually real engineering careers in Hawaii.

“It gave me some insight into good jobs that are not the Mainland,” said Jones. “After this, I see there are definitely opportunities for mechanical engineers in Hawaii.”

Nor are the interns the only ones gaining from their time at Keck.

“We do get real benefits,” said Keck Operations Engineering Manager Craig Nance. Over the years, Nance has mentored five Akamai interns who how have done important and sometimes very high-profile projects. For example, if you have ever looked online at the Keck Observatory webcams on Mauna Kea, you are seeing the product of an Akamai intern. Another intern installed anemometers to measure wind speeds in the air ventilation tunnels of the big telescope domes. These have allowed engineers to learn how much air was moving and whether energy could be saved—and the observatory made a bit greener—by turning down the giant fans that keep the telescopes at a steady temperature (the answer was yes, energy could be saved).

There is also a less obvious, incidental benefit to Keck, which comes from having young people working among Keck’s professional staff, some with decades of experience and at the peaks of their careers.

“The interns’ energy and enthusiasm helps to freshen my view of what I do,” said Keck librarian/archivist Peggi Kamisato, who has mentored interns in the past.

And of course, there is always a benefit of all these young people taking the momentum they build at Keck out into the world to build their careers and contribute to other workplaces, explained Hilton Lewis, Keck’s deputy director. That sometimes even leads interns, years later, right back to Keck and other observatories as full-time staff.

“We are, after all, helping to generate future engineers and scientists to lead the future of astronomy,” said Lewis.

Young people these days. They face big challenges, and they’re more than up to them.

A warm summer evening is the perfect time to be out under a dark sky enjoying the stars. All the better is there is a meteor shower to add to the already spectacular show. On the evening of August 12th the Perseid Meteor Shower will peak.

A typical Perseid shower will produce up to 60-100 meteors an hour, what regular meteor observers would call 60-100ZHR. The peak is predicted for 01h to 13h UT on Aug 13th (15h Aug 12th to 03h Aug 13th HST).

Unfortunately this years peak will correspond to full Moon, badly diminishing the prospects for observing this shower. Next year, 2011, will offer a much improved viewing opportunity for this shower with little significant moonlight to interfere.

Seasons come around
The Earth orbits once more
Orion in the dawn

Yes, I suck at writing haiku. Somewhat better at photography...

Safety, Health and Environmental Affairs (SHEA) Officer

The W. M. Keck Observatory seeks a Safety, Health and Environmental Affairs (SHEA) Officer to implement safety, health, and environmental program requirements, identify hazards, assess risks; mitigate hazards and recommend hazard abatement controls. The SHEA Officer provides expert advice and training on accident prevention, occupational health, and environmental issues to the WMKO Safety Committee and employees.