Moved the 12" Telescop to the shop. Lecture 4

        Got home to take a short nap, then I went on my evening walk and listen to lecture four of the astronomy class. More about absorption lines: wrote about that yesterday, emission lines: when energetic electrons radiate energy to seek a lower orbit, and emissions nebulae: where the clouds of dusty interstellar gas, or the remains of dying stars, are ionized with ultraviolet radiation by hot stars nearby. Oh there’s so much more! But I think I got a little bit of an understanding of it now in my tiny brain. I’ll need to study this more because it seems to be very important and I want to make sure I get it down pat.
        Decided to move the Big 12” Telescope out of the battery room and into the new shop where I’ll have easy access to it. The sky was a little hazy but not as bad as the last few nights. I set it all up, collimated the focus, and then trained it on Scorpio and its stars. The brightest in the constellation is Antares whose size is 700 times greater than the Sun. Played around in that area of the sky for a few hours.

Spectra and Electron Orbits

Went for my evening walk listening to the rest of lesson 3. It was about how electrons in orbit around a nucleus get excited by photons and change orbits depending on how much energy the photon carries. Depending on which frequency the photon and orbit of the electron determines what frequency the electron can accept and the orbit the electron will jump to. The spectra of a star can help in finding out the star’s makeup, if it is moving towards or away from the observer, and if it is a binary system it can tell the mass of the two stars and their period. I’ll have to delve more into this!