Winter 2011/2012
Previous Editions of the M111:
Are now begin kept on discreet file. Should you wish a particular issue, just ask.
Greetings...
Welcome all ye weary travelers to a new type of M111... "On Line"... But never on time! It's not always easy being cheesy, but I do my best to get material in here and keep it as current as possible. As always, if you have something to contribute? Let me know!
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Words From Da' Prez
Greetings, fellow StarGeezers! The Hunter moon is waning, reminding us that fall is here and winter's not far away. Still a little time to get some reasonably comfortable nights of observing before hauling out the winter gear! Looking back, it was a whirlwind summer. Between all our public nights, the new building going up, school and scout troops, our "Starry Nights" program, and our Hidden Hollow Star Party, plus our many member nights we've spent a lot of time in the dark! Whew! Thanks again to all our wonderful volunteers for making this happen.
On a sadder note, in September, we lost one of our beloved members, Leroy Winegardner. Everyone has fond memories of far ranging conversation with him ranging from motorcycle touring, to telescopes, and to life itself. He will be missed! It was also sad to lose big blue's storied mirror in an unavoidable accident. We are working hard to get it replaced and hope to be up and running with a shiny new mirror sometime next year. Mirrors take a long time to make right!
Thanks again and we look forward to being of even more service in the future! Hope to see everyone soon! ~Cap'n Mark
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Re-thinking an Alien World: The Strange Case of 55 Cancri e
Forty light years from Earth, a rocky world named "55 Cancri e" circles perilously close to a stellar inferno. Completing one orbit in only 18 hours, the alien planet is 26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to the Sun. If Earth were in the same position, the soil beneath our feet would heat up to about 3200 F. Researchers have long thought that 55 Cancri e must be a wasteland of parched rock.
Now they're thinking again. New observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that 55 Cancri e may be wetter and weirder than anyone imagined.
Spitzer recently measured the extraordinarily small amount of light 55 Cancri e blocks when it crosses in front of its star. These transits occur every 18 hours, giving researchers repeated opportunities to gather the data they need to estimate the width, volume and density of the planet.
According to the new observations, 55 Cancri e has a mass 7.8 times and a radius just over twice that of Earth. Those properties place 55 Cancri e in the "super-Earth" class of exoplanets, a few dozen of which have been found. Only a handful of known super-Earths, however, cross the face of their stars as viewed from our vantage point in the cosmos, so 55 Cancri e is better understood than most.
Artist?s rendering compares the size Earth with the rocky "super-Earth" 55 Cancri e. Its year is only about 18 hours long!
When 55 Cancri e was discovered in 2004, initial estimates of its size and mass were consistent with a dense planet of solid rock. Spitzer data suggest otherwise: About a fifth of the planet's mass must be made of light elements and compounds - including water. Given the intense heat and high pressure these materials likely experience, researchers think the compounds likely exist in a "supercritical" fluid state.
A supercritical fluid is a high-pressure, high-temperature state of matter best described as a liquid-like gas, and a marvelous solvent. Water becomes supercritical in some steam turbines - and it tends to dissolve the tips of the turbine blades. Supercritical carbon dioxide is used to remove caffeine from coffee beans, and sometimes to dry-clean clothes. Liquid-fueled rocket propellant is also supercritical when it emerges from the tail of a spaceship. On 55 Cancri e, this stuff may be literally oozing - or is it steaming? - out of the rocks.
With supercritical solvents rising from the planet's surface, a star of terrifying proportions filling much of the daytime sky, and whole years rushing past in a matter of hours, 55 Cancri e teaches a valuable lesson: Just because a planet is similar in size to Earth does not mean the planet is like Earth. It's something to re-think about.
Get a kid thinking about extrasolar planets by pointing him or her to "Lucy?s Planet Hunt," a story in rhyme about a girl who wanted nothing more than to look for Earth-like planets when she grew up. Go to http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/story-lucy.
The original research reported in this story has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory, a post-doctoral associate in Professor Sara Seager's group at MIT.
This article was written by Dr. Tony Phillips and provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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Article by Tammy Plotner - The Expanding Universe - Credit To Hubble Or Lemaitre?
Perhaps one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century may have gone down in the history books as credited to the wrong person. Now known as the Hubble Constant, the theory of an expanding Universe was first speculated by Belgian priest and cosmologist, Father Georges Lemaitre. How did this oversight occur? It may very well be the hand of the man himself who was unpretentious enough to pass on his findings.
According to the the November 10th issue of the journal Nature, astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute is calling for closure about a conspiracy theory of who should be properly credited for the discovery of the expansion theory. For almost a hundred years we've been led to believe American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble was the man who explained the universal expansion in 1929 - although he never won a Nobel prize for his work. His findings were based on the achievements of Vesto Slipher, who - through the use of redshift - calculated recessional velocities and paired them with distances to the same galaxies as Hubble's work. This led Hubble to demonstrate that the further away a galaxy was, the faster it would recede - the Hubble Constant.
However, two years before Hubble published his work, a quiet man called Georges Lemaitre published the same conclusions based on Slipher's same redshift data and Hubble's calculated distances.
How did this happen and why didn't Father Lemaitre get credit? According to news release, it may have been because the original paper was published in French, in a rather obscure Belgian science journal called the Annales de la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles (Annals of the Brussels Scientific Society). Chances are, we never would have known except for a later translation which was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1931 - a paper which just "left out" Lemaitre's 1927 calculations! Of course, there were people who knew these passages had been omitted since 1984 and the ensuing debate accused not only the editors of the Monthly Notices, but Hubble as well.
However, before any accusations can be made, let it be noted that astrophysicist Mario Livio combed through an exhaustive archive of hundreds of letters to the Royal Astronomical Society and the RAS meeting minutes - as well as Father Lemaitre's Archive. What he found was the good Father had simply omitted the passages himself when he translated the papers to English. In one of two "smoking-gun letters" uncovered by Livio, Lemaitre wrote to the editors: "I did not find advisable to reprint the provisional discussion of radial velocities which is clearly of no actual interest, and also the geometrical note, which could be replaced by a small bibliography of ancient and new papers on the subject."
What is left for us to ponder is "why" Georges Lemaitre didn?t want to take credit for this discovery. Can there really be an altruistic scientist? One who puts the simple act of discovery above himself?
Livio concludes, "Lemaitre's letter also provides an interesting insight into the scientific psychology of some of the scientists of the 1920s. Lemaitre was not at all obsessed with establishing priority for his original discovery. Given that Hubble?s results had already been published in 1929, he saw no point in repeating his more tentative earlier findings again in 1931."
Excuse me, folks? After having read the original news release, I think we should rename the Hubble Telescope to read the "Humble Telescope".
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Welcome To Our New Members
Welcome to our newest members, Tim Jankowski and Tom Burns. If you're thinking about joining, come on in! Right now, your $40 membership gets you in until the end of the 2011 year and this means membership to the Astronomical League, the Richland Astronomical Society and Friendly House... the rest goes to covering our electricity and insurance. Our on-line application for membership is now currently updated and running smoothly! In the meantime, if you prefer to print off regular registration and bring it with your dues to our regular monthly meetings. If you can't find what you're looking for, please feel free to email me!
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In Memory Of Leroy Winegardner...
Orion Nebula by Leroy Winegardner
You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.
"What do you want with one of those blame things?"
I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"
Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight," he said.
"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it might as well be me."
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,
And he could wait---we'd see to him tomorrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one for Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn't sentient; the house
Didn't feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?
Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,
Was setting out, up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three, the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.
We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?
--Robert Frost
Godspeed, Leroy...
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NASA SpacePlace For Educators
NASA has just published the latest issue of the Space Place Newsletter: News and Notes for Formal and Informal Educators. The newsletter is all about the many useful and--it goes without saying--free resources on the Space Place website that can be helpful for kids and adults interested learning about science, technology, and space.
For your convenience, a .pdf version of the newsletter may be downloaded from http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/educators. We would like to encourage you to either e-mail it, or print, photocopy, and mail it to others who may find it interesting. We hope you and your colleagues find the newsletter and the NASA SpacePlace website helpful.
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2011 Officers and Board Members
-
Mark Vanderaar - President/Grant Coordinator/Board Member
- Terry McQuistion - Vice President/Board Member
- Bob Kocar - Treasurer/Board Member/Grant Coordinator
- Bruce Scodova - Observatory Director/Board Member
- John Neumann - Assistant Observatory Director/Board Member
- Dan Everly - Board Member/Chairman
- Dave Mohrbacher - Secretary/Board Member
- Mike Romine - NSN Public Outreach Coordinator
- Tammy Plotner - President Emeritus/Webmaster/Astronomical League ALCor
Please feel free to contact us at any time.
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OPT Rewards
Are you hankering after a new telescope? Do you have an eyepiece you've always wanted? Got your eye on an astronomy book? Don't shop around... Shop at OPT!
Oceanside Photo and Telescope is more than just one of our Hidden Hollow sponsors - they are also a source of our club rewards program. Not only is OPT one of the country's largest and most reputable telescope dealers, but they're also offering a great discount to WRO members! Take a look around on the website. When you find something you want to order and go to check out, simply put "Warren Rupp Observatory" into the club affiliation box and... poof! You automatically get a discount. There's only one thing. The discount doesn't show until you get your final bill. How much? It could be just a few dollars and it can be as much as 20%! Now that's using a real rewards program!
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