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After doing the Stargazer's Log for six years (it came on line here
on February 28, 1999), I feel a bit sad that I must bid you all "Adieu!"
but
it is only for a little while. I am moving to EarthLink where I will
re-
surface in a week or two with a slightly different name, focus, and style.
You are all welcome to join me at http://home.earthlink.net/~rzduch
Today is February 19, 2005 .... Tonight's big bright Moon is squarely within Gemini among the Twins, Castor and Pollux, and planet Saturn -- effectively squelching the view of Saturn's rings and its largest moon, Titan. The rising first-magnitude Spica (Alpha Virginis) clears my eastern horizon here in New Hampshire by about 10 pm; which means that planet Jupiter, being some six degrees higher, has already cleared the horizon murk and offers its famous dance of the Galilean moons to the small telescope user. Jupiter, the brightest "star" up there after the Moon sets, is high in the southwestern sky just before dawn. At culmination tonight are the famous Bode Galaxies* in Ursa Major, the deep-sky galaxy Leo III (UGC 5364), and the first-magnitude star Regulus* (Alpha Leonis). On with the show ....
Born in Torun, Prussia, on February 19, 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus
would eventually become a giant in cosmology -- but only after his death
in May of 1543 with the publication of his life's work, De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium, even before his deathbed grew cold. During
his life, Copernicus quietly earned his living as both a Canon of the Church
and a Chancellor of the Realm, all the while studying Astronomy, Mathematics,
Greek and Medicine. Some ten years before his death, news of
his astounding (and quite dangerous)theories regarding a heliocentric universe
began to surface; but Copernicus, being a wary and cautious man, kept himself
in low-profile and his work away from publication while he was alive.
His ideas, essentially that the Sun was the center of the Universe, were
in direct contradiction to the Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy and
the precepts of the Church. Copernicus' publication delivered a mortal
blow to this fourteen-hundred-year-old system and the Renaissance had at
last come to Astronomy .... The other half of the Bode Galaxies,
NGC 3034* (M82, Cigar Galaxy) in Ursa Major at Ra 09 55.8 Dc 69
41, is "very long, narrow, and bright, especially in its northern limb,
but rather paler than M81," so said Admiral Smyth who observed it in the
1830s from rural England. The Bode Galaxies are covered in Up
There [p25], in the subpage "Bode Galaxies" below, and in Burnham's
Celestial Handbook, page 1983 ....
Deep-sky observers with their big backyard telescopes love to hunt
down faint fuzzies like UGC 5364 at Ra 09 59.4 Dc 30 45 on
the Leo Minor-Leo border about 3.5 degrees east of 15 Leonis, which is
a faint naked-eye star located in extreme northwest Leo. Also known
as Leo III or Leo A, this very faint (mag 13), rather large (5x3') barred
galaxy is an irregular dwarf less than a million light-years away but difficult
to see because of its awful surface brightness. Pictured in Astronomy,
May 1999, page 47, this wispy thing is a member of our Local Group and
it was recently featured as NASA's astronomy picture of the day on November
10, 2004. If you don't have a "go to" telescope, put 15 Leonis at
the southern edge of your telescope's field of view, shut off the motors,
and drift for 16 minutes whereupon UGC 5364 will be at the northern edge
of the field. Voila! .... Few observers know that big, bright
Regulus* (Alpha Leonis) is a multiple star and one of its components,
known as the Indigo Star, is visible in the small telescope. See
Up There [p26] for more details.
Editor's Note: Our Local Group of galaxies is but one of many
such groups. See the subpage "The Groupies" far below for more about
these distant neighbors. (02/19/05)
---------------------
Most scientific discoveries are serendipitous; that is, they occur
by accident and good fortune. But the discovery of a tiny planet
cruising in the outer fringes of our solar system happened by design on
February 18, 1930, when a junior assistant at Lowell Observatory,
who had been hired specifically to compare photographs taken on different
nights, spotted a wee 15th-magnitude blip near Delta Geminorum that had
moved a bit. Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), a 24 year old farmboy from
Kansas adept at discovering comets, had found Pluto. The discovery
photos can be seen in Astronomy, February 2004, page 38, and a picture
of the youthful Tombaugh appears in Sky & Telescope, February
2004, page 84 .... The famous eclipsing binary, Algol (Beta
Persei*), puts on another of the month's most convenient naked-eye shows
tonight. Algol consists of two different stars locked in a gravitational
embrace (binary stars) whose orbital plane lies directly in our line of
sight; meaning that from where we stand, the stars eclipse one another.
Algol dims noticeably when the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter
star (nothing much happens when the reverse occurs; that is, when the brighter
star passes in front of the dimmer star). Tonight's minimum light
occurs at 20:37 EST (01:37 UT Feb 19). For more information see Sky
& Telescope, February 2005, page 79. Historically, Algol's
antics were correctly deduced by an 18 year old English astronomer named
John Goodricke back in 1782 and the world has enjoyed its performances
ever since. Full story in Up There [p143] ....
Often visible in binoculars on dark nights, the galaxies NGC 3031*
(M81) and NGC 3034* (M82) in Ursa Major are now at their highest
and best for mid-night viewing. Discovered by the German astronomer
Johann Bode (1747-1826) in 1774 (almost eight years before Messier logged
them into his famous catalog), the pair has astonished telescope users
ever since with its extraordinary beauty. For the story about the
"Bode Galaxies," as they are known informally, look under "SubPages" far
below. But for a much more thorough discussion see Burnham's Celestial
Handbook in which he devotes no less than 13 pages to these splendid
objects.
Editor's Note: The currently accepted distance to the
Bode Galaxies is about 11.8 million light-years. A fine picture of
the pair appears in Astronomy, March 2005, page 63. Featured as NASA's
astronomy picture of the day February 12, 2004, M81 is believed to harbor
a core black hole of 63 million solar masses. Many observers consider
M81 as one of the best of its genre in light-polluted skies. In the
event you have a "go to" telescope plug in Ra 09 55.6 Dc 69 04 otherwise
look for NGC 3031 (M81) as a large spiral galaxy about two degrees southeast
of the naked-eye 24 Ursae Majoris. (02/18/05)
---------------------
The bright (mag 10), very large (5x3'), much elongated spiral galaxy
NGC 2976 at Ra 09 47.3 Dc 67 55 is found about two degrees SSE of
the prominent naked-eye star 24 Ursae Majoris in northwest Ursa Major.
Listed in the Herschel 400 list (meaning it was discovered by Herschel),
the galaxy is a member of the Ursa Major Group which lies some 10 million
light-years away. See the subpage "The Groupies" far below for more
information about the various groups of galaxies living in our end of the
universe. NGC 2976 has a brilliant surface brightness (the brightness
per unit area) despite having a rather peculiar grainy appearance, easily
noticeable in its picture appearing in the March 2005 issue of Sky &
Telescope on page 26 .... The dim (mag 12) NGC 3003
at Ra 09 48.6 Dc 33 25 found about halfway between the faint but naked-eye
stars 13 and 20 Leonis Minoris in western Leo Minor is a nearly edge-on
spiral galaxy (5x2') that doesn't have very much going for it except that
for the galaxy-starved deep-sky boys it represents the beginning of their
season for hunting down faint fuzzies; so like skiers testing out their
equipment in the first snowfall, these fellows like to drag out their big
stuff for this one. Night Sky gives it a four star (out of
five) rating and suggests an 8-inch telescope at 100x .... Of the
hundreds of bright red M-type stars up there, four or five are truly extraordinary
and R Leonis at Ra 09 47.6 Dc 11 26 is one of the best with its
"strong reddish glow at maximum light" (Harrington) when it often hits
an easy, naked-eye magnitude of 4.4. But for most of its 312 day
cycle however it hangs out at magnitude 11 where it "needs at least a 6-inch
telescope" (Mullaney) to bring it up. These pulsating M-type
stars are huge gas-bags that huff and puff as they expand and contract.
And back in 1996, a team of Italian and South African astronomers measured
R Leonis using one of Hubble's more exotic sensors and found it to be 925x1040
solar diameters. Egg-shaped no less, and so big that it would extend
to the orbit of Jupiter if placed at the center of our solar system (Astronomy,
December 1966, p28). When the star next comes up (June?) look for
a naked-eye red star found about a binocular field west of first-magnitude
Regulus (Alpha Leonis).
Editor's Note: Unfortunately, tonight's culminating objects
are not visible right now. The faint galaxies are simply overwhelmed
by the strong moonlight and won't be visible until early March. The
variable R Leonis is hiding out at depth (probably around magnitude 11)
and is therefore much too dim to be very impressive. It will peak
in early June, at which time it will be visible low in the southwest during
the evening (I will remind you). (02/17/05)
---------------------
The Italian monk Giordano Bruno, having written that innumerable Suns
exist and populated Earths revolve about them, is burned at the stake for
these heretical views on February 16, 1600. The event is significant
in that Galileo surely must have been aware of Fra Bruno's fate when he
began to observe the skies with his new telescope and soon thereafter published
his findings in 1610 .... On February 16, 1948, astronomer
Gerard Kuiper (1905-1973) discovers Miranda, the 5th-largest of the many
moons and moonlets of planet Uranus (which currently has a moon count of
27) .... Antlia, a small and sparse southern constellation
now totally visible at mid-night from my neck of the woods, is home to
the deep-sky galaxy NGC 2997 at Ra 09 45.6 Dc -31 11 located about
halfway between the naked-eye stars Eta and Theta Antliae in western Antlia.
This non-barred spiral is faint (mag 9) and large (10x6') with a very bright
nucleus that obviously attracted the attention of
astronomer Carl Seyfert who dubbed it a "Seyfert galaxy," thus qualifying
it as a galaxy with a hyper-active, highly illuminated, energetic core
and situated somewhere on the road to becoming a quasar. Despite
its great distance (55 million light-years), it can sometimes be spotted
in binoculars but it is best observed in an 8-inch telescope at 100x (Deep
Sky). Its picture appeared in Astronomy, April 2003, page
77 .... The exotic W Ursae Majoris at Ra 09 43.8 Dc 55 57
is a Sun-like G2V star with a dwarf companion orbiting in such close proximity
that every four hours its light dims from 7.7 to 8.5 as the two stars take
turns passing in front of one another. "The brightening and fading,"
says Covington, "are gradual because each star is nearly always partly
in front of the other one." W Ursae Majoris is the type star for
the entire class of dwarf eclipsing binaries. It is found about 4.5
degrees NNE of the naked-eye Theta Ursae Majoris .... Coming
up to peak about now (Friday) are the reddish M-type variables R Camelopardalis
and S Ursae Majoris. The former is way up in Camelopardalis
at Ra 14 17.8 Dc 83 50 about midway between the naked-eye Beta Ursae Minoris
and Polaris, while the latter is far to the south just above the Big Dipper's
handle at Ra 12 43.9 Dc 61 06. Both are coming up from the depths
of magnitude 13 to about magnitude 7 and both, being in sparse areas, are
best suited for the "go to" telescope.
Editor's Note: Gerard Kuiper, a Dutch-American astronomer
at Yerkes Observatory, is best known for his insistence that a second asteroid
belt existed beyond Pluto, in the distant outer reaches of our solar system.
The "Kuiper Belt" was officially recognized in 1992. Kuiper is now
regarded as the father of modern planetary astronomy.
(02/16/05)
---------------------
How to pursue the gentle
art of stargazing the easy and fun way .......... A
Gentle Art
A terminator, marking
the advancing lunar sunrise, is easily seen on ..... Lunar
Day 9
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