Astronomy Log

This week at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge we had a talk by Ken Day entitled “A Cook’s Tour of the Solar System” as part of the Introduction of Astronomy course I am partaking in via the Cambridge Astronomy Association.

Ken took us through all of the planets in the solar system, plus comets and asteroids. He gave explanations about each object in the solar system and backed up each item with some great full colour images in his presentation.

I picked up a new useful facts such as:

• The word “Planet” means wanderer in Greek.
• The Sun is 109 times the diameter of the Earth.
• Venera 9 the Russian probe to Venus in 1975 only lasted 23 minutes once it landed due to the harsh surface environment.
• Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the Solar System which is on Mars.
• There are dark “spokes” in Saturn’s rings - something that I did not know.

There was no trip out to any of the IOA telescopes tonight, a bit of a shame as it was a clear night, but instead we were joined by Green Witch the astronomy retailers from near Cambridge.  They bought a few items with them including Philip’s astronomy book, some binoculars and a Skywatcher telescope and some eyepieces.  They also handed out flyer’s offering us 5% off anything we purchased.

Green Witch set up a Celestron NexStar 5 telescope outside and they gave us the chance to view Mercury and the Moon. Everybody rushed outside after the talk so there was a queue to view Mercury, which everybody wanted to see.

Whilst the NexStar was being re-aligned on Mercury (the scope seemed to drift a lot, and not track that well) it was strange to see how similar the menu options were on the Celestron to the Meade, as I have never used or really seen a Celestron NexStar before. After two cups of coffee it was time to go home.

Week 2 of the Introduction to Astronomy course was presented by Peter Howell entitled “Sunshine and Green Cheese”. Peters talk covered details on the Moon and the Sun.

Peter started by talking about the Sun, and gave a great talk on every aspect of the Sun, including information that sunspots appear in magnetic pairs. Also that charged particles from the Sun give rise to the Northern and Southern lights. It was also interesting to hear that a supernova 10 billion years ago produced gold.

Peter then discussed in depth about the various stages of the moon, and why First Quarter is called what it is, and he pointed out all the Apollo landing sites on the Moon.  Peter also showed images of interesting areas of the Moon to look at, including Schroter’s Valley, Rupes Recta fault line and the Hadley Rille.

Peter handed out paper moon maps as well as sheets in order to allow you to construct your own sun dial (diptisch dial). It was very interesting to find out that the equation of time varies heavily between summer and winter, indicating that the Earth rotates at different speeds through out the year.

After the talk was over and we had tea, we ventured out to the Institute of Astronomy’s outside Observatory building which houses the library. The library room holds a number of very old and interesting astronomy and cosmology books together with the latest astronomy journals and magazines.

Whilst in the library room we managed to see slides taken between 1945 and 1985 by the Schmidt telescope. 

The Schmidt instrument was built in 1952 by Grubb-Parsons of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and replaced an older telescope in the existing dome, which had been made by T. Cooke & Sons Ltd. of London & York at the time of the move of the Solar Physics Observatory from South Kensington to Cambridge.

It is a `Classical Schmidt’ - the simplest and most efficient form of the ingenious wide-field camera invented in 1930 by Bernhard Schmidt of Hamburg Observatory. Light from the sky falls upon a 61 cm (24-inch) mirror with a spherical reflecting surface, at the bottom of the tube. It is reflected to a focus in the centre of the tube and half-way up it, 163 cm (64 inches) from the primary mirror. At the focus a photographic plate P 15 cm (6 inches) in diameter, which must be bent to fit a curved surface, records the star images in an area of sky 5 degrees in diameter. (The full Moon is half a degree in diameter.)

Below are some images I took with my mobile phone that were produced by the Schmidt Camera of Halley’s Comet in 1986 and another part of the cosmos.

Tonight I attended the first night of the Cambridge Astronomy Associations Introduction To Astronomy course which was held at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.

Tonights talk was entitled “Things that go bump in the night” by Brian Lister. Brian took us through the basics of the solar system with some very interesting images of various craters. This included the Mead crate on Venus which is 280km wide, as well we the 65km wide crater in Quebec and the 200km Hellas Basin crater on Mars. There were also images of the Abulfeda crater chains on the moon.

Brian also conducted a couple of experiments, one was to demonstrate how stars explode, by inflating and exploding a balloon in a cardboard box full of packing material. See the video of this below, the experiment did not quite work as expected, or as I expected anyway.

After the talk was over and we had our tea and biscuits we headed out to one of the telescopes on the Cambridge site to view Saturn.

We used the Northumberland Equatorial University Observatory which was built in 1838. “The Northumberland” is the only remaining large instrument from the early days of the University Observatory. For many years it was one of the world’s largest refracting telescopes.

The main structure was built by the engineers Ransomes of Ipswich, and the fine mechanical work by the London Instrument makers Troughton and Simms.

The polar axis frame and the telescope tube are made of Norwegian fir. The original Cauchoix lens is not used anymore and the optics are now up to date, with a 12 inch aperture visual achromatic doublet designed by Dr R.V. Willstrop of the Institute and it was constructed by the local firm A.E. Optics Ltd, installed to mark the 150th anniversary of the telescope.

The steel dome covering the telescope was made in 1932, which was a replacement for the original 96 year old wood structure. The telescope was last used in a regular Observatory research programme for the micrometrical measurement of double stars in the 1930s. Although the telescope is still used for visual observations by members of the University Astronomical Society and for public observing at the Institute of Astronomy during the winter months.  So it’s great to see it still being used after 150 years.

Last night I attended the monthly meeting at the Cambridge Astronomy Association (CAA) at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Tonight was a special lecture called the Michael Penston lecture.

Michael Penston was based at the Institute of Astronomy. In 1990 he was due to give a talk to the CAA, but had to cancel due to illness. Sadly, Michael died soon afterwards. In March 1991 the CAA held a lecture in memory of Michael, and a collection was made for cancer research. By the next year a fund had been set up in his name, administered by the Royal Astronomical Society, to help up-and-coming astronomers establish themselves in their chosen profession. Each year since then the CAA members are asked to make a donation to the fund after the talk.

This year’s lecture was given by Sir Martin Rees, who is a Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College. Sir Martin holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University.

After studying at Trinity college, Cambridge, Sir Robert held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of Kings College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy here in Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years (1977-82 and 1987-91) as director of the Institute of Astronomy. In 2005 he was appointed to the House of Lords, elected President of the Royal Society and last year in 2007 was awarded the Order of Merit.

The talk itself was entitled “The Next Ten Plus Years  in Cosmology” which lasted about 45 minutes, and was very interesting.  The talk was accompanied with many varied and amazing photos.  Some of the main topics covered included the possibility of a 4th dimension and how the universe may be textured.

I did want to include the talk on this post as an audio file, as I recorded the talk via my mobile phone voice recorder, but unfortunately the recording was very quiet, perhaps the application was not made for distant recordings, I should have sat a lot closer to the front.

Just to mention, the CAA and Institute of Astronomy are running a 6 week introductory course on astronomy in April and May. Hopefully I will get to see and use some of the main telescopes on site so I am planning on attending and blogging details about it once it starts. I shall try and include photos as well.

On Friday 15th February I took a trip to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, for my first ever meeting of the Cambridge Astronomy Association.  I had viewed their website before, but something caught my eye which was a talk by Ralph Bell from Green Witch in Cambridge about imaging with a web cam and how to process it using Registax.

I did not have a clue what to expect when I arrived at 7.45pm for the talk at 8pm.  I did feel quite privileged to actually be visiting the Institute of Astronomy where actual real professional astronomers study and work, I’m sure most local astronomy groups don’t meet in such elaborate surroundings.

I was given a thoroughly warm welcome by Brian Lister the Chairman and told the basics of the site and what goes on.  The association has regular seminars, outings, open days and more.  They also have a library where you can hire books and a telescope booking system, which allows you to even borrow telescopes and use them at home.

The meeting was attended by what seemed around 50 people. Ralph’s talk lasted about 1.5hrs and thoroughly enjoyable and I was learning new things straight away. I had never really read the Registax manual but Ralph took us through the manual process which was brilliant! Ralph if your reading this can you do a seminar on the Meade DSI?

After the talk we all had tea or coffee and biscuits as well as a chat session. I originally thought I would just attend the meeting for the sum of £1, but I ended up joining for 14  months for the sum of £4.

In summary, find out about your local association or astronomy club and give it a go, you can probably learn a lot and discuss ideas with other astronomers, as the hobby of astronomy sometimes does feel a lonely one, being out on your own in the dark most nights.