When you want to see the stars, find someplace dark
Early this week we were surprised to find a set of plumeria lei on one of the pillars in front of our building. Bright white and yellow, the scent of the flowers hanging heavy around the loading dock door. Quite a contrast in a world of dark red cinder and cold, a bit of the tropics that lie far below the summit.
Why would someone leave the lei at our door? A thank-you for what we do? A gentle protest at our presence on the mountain? I wonder as we drive down, lost in thought.
When you shine a powerful laser into the sky, someone is likely to notice.
That someone is likely to be the Federal Aviation Administration, who, for some reason, seem to be concerned about the possibility of our illuminating a passenger airliner with an AO laser.
Enter TBAD, the Transponder Based Aircraft Detector. All commercial and most civil aircraft carry a 1090MHz ADS-B transponder that identifies the aircraft and provides basic data. The transponder is part of an aircraft tracking system now used by air traffic control centers around the world to supplement, or in some cases replace, radar systems. An idea… Create a directional antenna that can determine if a 1090MHz transmitter is in the beam of the antenna and mount that antenna to the telescope. With such a system we can detect an aircraft approaching our beam and shutter the laser. The idea was conceived by Tom Murphy and Bill Coles at the University of California San Diego. Thus TBAD can alternately mean Tom and Bill’s Aircraft Detector.
A quandry… Our regular astronomy club meeting was the same night as Keck’s evening with astronomers lecture. These invitation events are presented to donors, featuring a lecture from a professional astronomer beneath the palm trees of the Fairmont Orchid resort. A number of our members go to both events and faced a choice of which event to attend.
A solution was proposed… Cancel the club meeting in Waimea and head for the lecture down at the resort instead. To cap the evening we would bring along a few telescopes to share the sky.
The club setup five telescope ranging from Purrcynth’s 80mm refractor to Cliff’s 24″ Dobsonian. It was an impressive line of telescopes. I setup next to Maureen with her new 10″ SCT, a nice match for the 11″ NexStar I use for public work. Arriving before the guests we had a line of telescopes setup and ready for viewing well before dark. As Venus and Jupiter appeared in the sunset we began providing views to the early arriving guests.
Maureen sharing her telescope with guests at Keck's Evening with AstronomersThe lecture was presented by Dr. Chris Martin of Caltech, covering a subject that is often overlooked, the environment between the galaxies, vast expanses of space that are anything but empty. Here can be found enormous reservoirs of gas, accounting for the majority of normal matter in the universe, something astronomers call the intergalactic medium.
I enjoyed the lecture. Having a somewhat more than average astronomy education, I find so many public lectures a bit repetitive, I have heard it before. Not this night! Dr. Martin covered a lot of material I had never previously encountered. How the universe is filled with streamers of moving gas, influenced by the gravity of dark matter the gas streams into the galaxies and clusters of galaxies, allowing the formation of new stars in an extraordinarily dynamic process. It was a view that has altered the way I see the universe.
At the base of a large antler coral, a pair of butterflyfish that really didn’t want to leave, even when a large and noisy diver is sitting just a few feet away. I love these opportunities, any chance to get a closer shot of a fish that usually swims quickly away when approached.
Just testing how some HTML works within a WordPress post…
Yeah, this may look ugly!
They are everywhere in the tide zone, an extraordinarily common species. So common I usually forget to take a picture. A closer look shows a cool animal. The spines are modified, no sharp needles here, armor plates instead. An excellent arrangement for resisting the fury of the waves and still giving protection from would be predators.
Public awareness of a unique astronomical event, the Transit of Venus, is appearing. While avid sky-watchers have been anticipating this event for years, the general public is mostly unaware of the event.
This seems to be changing… A number of articles have appeared in the mainstream press this last week, from MSNBC to Fox News, providing information about the transit.
Yes, it is the same article on all of the sites, all apparently picked up from the Space.com site. There is some lesson here on the nature of corporate news today. In any case it is nice to see an astronomical event getting coverage. Any opportunity to get more astronomy onto the public stage is to be taken advantage of.
A transit is a less spectacular event, not exactly a total solar eclipse. It is quite interesting from an astronomical and historical standpoint. There are other articles, the transit is getting more press as the date approaches. In the run up to June 5th it will be interesting to see just what the public response to this event will be.
W. M. Keck Observatory press release…
Engineers and astronomers are celebrating the much anticipated first light and first two nights commissioning of the MOSFIRE instrument, now installed on the Keck I telescope at W. M. Keck Observatory. MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer For Infra-Red Exploration) will vastly increase the data gathering power of what is already the world’s most productive ground-based observatory.
“This is a near-infrared multi-object spectrograph, similar to our popular LRIS and DEIMOS instruments, only at longer wavelengths,” explained Keck Observatory Observing Support Manager Bob Goodrich. “The dedicated MOSFIRE project team members at Keck Observatory, Caltech, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz are to be congratulated, as are the dedicated observatory operations staff who worked hard to get MOSFIRE integrated into the Keck I telescope and infrastructure. A lot of people have put in long hours getting ready for this momentous First Light.”
The first unprocessed image from MOSFIRE was made on the night of April 4, despite thick cirrus clouds over Mauna Kea. The subject was two interacting galaxies known as The Antennae. Additional images adn spectra were gathered on the night of April 5, as part of the continuing commissioning of the instrument.
MOSFIRE gathers spectra, which contain chemical signatures in the light of everything from stars to galaxies, at near-infrared wavelengths (that is, 0.97-2.45 microns, or millionths of a meter). Infrared is light which is beyond red in a rainbow—just beyond what human eyes can detect. Observing in the infrared allows researchers to penetrate cosmic dust clouds and see objects that are otherwise invisible, like the stars circling the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It also allows for the study of the most distant objects, the light of which has been stretched beyond the red end of the spectrum by the expansion of the universe.
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