Cepheid variables

I read a little astronomy and spent most of the night outside stargazing with my binoculars. I was mostly interested in theConstellation Cepheus and the surrounding stars. One star is Delta Cephei a variable star that has a constant change in brightness every five and a third days. This star lends its name to the class of Cepheid variables that were important in determining the size of our galaxy and the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy by Edwin Hubble in 1924 who found cepheids in that galaxy and ended the planetary nebula vs. island universe debate; before Hubble it was believed that these galaxies were where solar systems were being formed in our own Milky Way Galaxy and Hubble showed that the Andromeda Galaxy was two million light years away; I believe Astronomers have refined that to 2.4 million light years. I think I’ll keep an eye on Delta Cephei for the next few night!

I thought to myself a few months ago that maybe Red Dwarfs would be a good place to search for intelligent life. One idea would be that they were transplants from another star system whose sun had started on it way off the HR scale and wanted someplace more stable; and Red Dwarfs are very stable after the first billion years (also life could form there after that time)and that Red Dwarfs lasts trillions of years. Anyways I did a few searches and found that SETI is just now considering them.

M Dwarfs: The Search for Life is On

Coronal mass ejection (CME) activity of low mass M stars

ISS and Shuttle Flyby

I sat outside waiting for the ISS and Shuttle flyby that would take place at 7:44pm and come out of the southwest with a magnitude of -3.1 which would rival Venus! I called Mac and Ron Dehart up to let them know. Kevin called just before they flew over. He wouldn’t see them from Tucson because of rain clouds. There they were in the sky right on time! It looked to me as if the Shuttle had departed the ISS and the separation grew as they came overhead. Wow what a sight! I had them in the telescope for a bit but decided to just use the binoculars. As I described the flyby to Kevin I thought to myself that there are bags of water just like me aboard enclosed in cylinders under pressure in orbit around our planet! The night wasn’t done yet! As I was looking out towards Cygnus in the Milky Way I saw seven satellites within an hour until the Moon popped up to wash away the stars. That was more than I’ve ever seen in one sitting. Some nights I only see one or maybe two, and sometimes not a one. This was a magical night for me!

Moon and Venus

Friday 27 - Stoney invited me over for dinner to finish off them beans and rice, but we couldn’t quite manage to do it and fed the rest that was left to the rabbits. I took a shower while I was there and I’ll be nice and clean for potluck tomorrow. As I was getting into the Gross Polluter to leave for home I saw the Moon and Venus very close to each other in the evening sky. I got out my camera and took several pictures of them. When I got home I called Seimi and had him go outside for a look-see. Very cool!

Cosmological Principle

        I went for my evening walk listening to an astronomy lecture on “Homogeneity” which has to do with the Cosmological Principle, and how the universe is both Isotropic and Homogeneous. Isotropy is the uniformity of the universe in all directions that we look. Homogeneous is the composition of matter spread out in a very large area, is the same everywhere; the larger the area you view the more Homogeneous it becomes, the smaller the area you view the less Homogeneous it is (this is a tough one to understand). Okay, let’s try this: If you spill a pound of salt thinly and evenly on a large floor and you look at it very closely you would see the individual grains, but if you stand at a distance all you will see is a white flat surface. The Cosmological Principle is what scientists use in their mathematical models of the universe and the beginnings of the Big Bang.        There was one part that was of interest to me when they talked about after the Big Bang, how was it that matter was able to “talk” to each other so that matter would be the same everywhere. They said this was due to Cosmic Inflation, but they also said that there are other theories, one being that light could travel faster early on in the Big Bang; I’ll have to read up on this because it kind of goes along on my thinking about Black Holes shrinking, where matter is squeezed to a point that it loses space time and that exotic particles can exceed the speed of light and escape from a singularity. (Of course this is my imagination exceeding the limits of my knowledge)

Molecules in Space

        Went for my evening walk re-listening to the astronomy lecture on “Molecules in Space”. In the very early universe free protons flew around at very high energies and temperatures hitting each other and sometimes bonding to form molecular hydrogen (two protons: H2) which would cool down. Once enough molecular hydrogen was created and cooling down the universe to several thousand degrees, the first stars, hundred times larger than the Sun, could form. These massive stars had a lifespan of a million years or so until they went supernova creating heavier elements and cooling down the universe to a point where stars wouldn’t ever be that massive again. At least that’s how I understood it.

Moon Dog

From Bob's Stuff

Thursday December 11- The Moon was full and really bright and I saw something I’ve never seen before (from Wikipedia): “A moon dog or moondog (scientific name paraselene, plural paraselenae, i.e. "beside the moon") is a relatively rare bright circular spot on a lunar halo caused by the refraction of moonlight by hexagonal-plate-shaped ice crystals in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. Moondogs appear to the left and right of the moon approximately 22° away. They are exactly analogous to sun dogs, but are somewhat rarer because in order to be produced the moon must be bright and therefore full or nearly full. While a moondog may be brightly colored, the lunar halos they form in typically appear colorless to the naked eye because their light is not bright enough to activate the color photoreceptors in humans." Well the one I saw HAD color like a rainbow, and I tried to photograph it but it didn’t come out as bright as I could visually see it, but I got it! Just click on the image that I uploaded to get a better view. Like I mentioned last night in my journal this full Moon would be the brightest of the year.