Our NOVA Newsletter for May-Jun 2019 is available as a pdf file. An archive of older issues can be found on our Newsletter page.
Contents of Volume 2019, Issue 3, May-June 2019:
Jim Bernath, In Memoriam: 1929-2019 by Suzanna Nagy
President’s Message by Leigh Cummings
#Flarewell Iridium by Ken Jackson
“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure – especially if you are collecting old space junk” – excerpt from an interview of Jim Bernath by Flash News, July 1998).
The Jim Bernath collection of astronomy and space artifacts will be featured at this year’s Astronomy Day and Science Rendezvous – Saturday 11:00am to 3:00pm May 11th at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus. Come, see, and touch meteorites, pieces of tile from the space shuttle, the iconic Canadian logo and flag produced for the Canadarm, and other space memorabilia. Parts of the collection are shown in the video below but it is a hands-on display best experienced in person at Astronomy Day!
Jim was a member of RASC since 1975 – that is 44 years. To many, he was known as “Mr. Space of Canada” and a self-described “Specialist in NASA and the Space Shuttle Programs”. Unlike many collectors, Jim didn’t keep his artifacts private but instead chose to display and share them with the public. Jim regularly traveled with his van of curiosities across Canada and the United States. He would set up displays in schools, auditoriums, and malls – wherever he could find a crowd.
At the RASC General Assembly in October of 1981, Jim was one of the recipients of the Best Centre Display. Jim was a regular in presenting his display at our annual Astronomy Day events. Adults and especially kids buzzed around his display tables and loved to hear him explain all of the details of missions and memorabilia.
2018’s International Astronomy Day event was Jim’s last time with us. His fragile health precluded him from bringing the last few pieces of his displays to the event. Instead, Jim was setup next to the tables for the Jim Bernath Collection and he spent the entire afternoon giving away autographed posters of space and the space shuttle with a line-up of children waiting to meet him. He was a rock-star and it was a great send off for him because sadly, shortly after the event, Jim was admitted to long term care and passed away a few months later.
Over the past few years, RASC Vancouver began to acquire pieces of Jim’s displays and created RASC Vancouver’s Jim Bernath Collection to carry on his legacy. It has now become an integral part of our outreach programming.
“His warm charm, wit, and his love of all things astronomical will be missed. Thank you Jim for your generous service on Earth.” – Pomponia Martinez, past-president of RASC Vancouver.
Parts of this article are taken from a tribute to Jim Bernath by Suzanna Nagy, the past president of RASC Vancouver, that will appear in a upcoming issue of the Journal of the RASC.
Save the date solar observers! On Wednesday morning, May 1st 2019, the International Space Station is predicted to make a three-star transit of the Sun around 09:40:00 am – the time will vary somewhat based on your location.
The transit should be visible for a narrow 6.2 km slice over the lower mainland ranging from Bowen Island and proceeding south-east over Maple Ridge. The Trottier Observatory at Simon Fraser University is located within 0.16 km of the center-line of that slice.
Warning: Protect your eyes when solar observing!
Never look directly at the Sun. Always use a proper solar filter specifically designed and approved for solar observation, available at astronomy stores; that meet the requirements for ISO Standard 12312-2:2015.
The web site https://transit-finder.com is a fantastic resource to get predictions of ISS solar and lunar transits. Just select your location on a map it it will provide you with ISS transit predictions over the next 10 days.
The transit on May 1st only lasts 1.26 seconds so don’t blink. Also, the ISS is fairly small at 0.41 arc-minutes – about the same angular size as Jupiter – so you will likely need a telescope, with a proper solar filter, to spot it.
More details for observing from near the Trottier Observatory at SFU from the transit-finder.com site:
★★★ Wednesday 2019-05-01 09:41:05.64 • Solar transit
ISS angular size: 41.22″; distance: 670.38 km
Angular separation: 0.6′; azimuth: 110.3°; altitude: 35.9°
Center line distance: 0.15 km; visibility path width: 6.19 km
Transit duration: 1.29 s; transit chord length: 31.7′
R.A.: 02h 34m; Dec: +15° 08′; parallactic angle: 36.3°
ISS velocity: 24.7 ′/s (angular); 4.81 km/s (transverse)
ISS velocity: 5.60 km/s (radial); 7.38 km/s (total);
Direction of motion relative to zenith: 176.0°
Sun angular size: 31.7′; 46.2 times larger than the ISS
Hmmm….thinking about how to image a black hole with my telescope after last week’s release of the first black hole picture. I have a relatively small Celestron EdgeHD 8 inch (200 cm) telescope and a ZWO ASI 178 cmos camera for imaging. Imagers know that matching the angular size of a target to angular resolution of a telescope/camera is an important consideration, so I did that for the b\lack hole and my equipment.
The Hamburg Observatory released a nice image of the region around the black hole and its containing galaxy, M87, that shows some angular sizes.
I added the full moon for some additional context but a quick summary is:
My telescope/camera combination has a theoretical image scale of roughly 0.25 arc-seconds per pixel (Astronomy Tools has an online image scale calculator). So that means that the event horizon would cover
25 micro-arc-seconds / 0.25 arc-seconds/pixel = 0.0001 pixels
or one ten-thousandth of a pixel! Not likely to be visible, especially since the Earth’s atmosphere typically limits the practical resolution to about 1 to 2 arc-seconds.
Never the less, M87 is still a cool imaging target because it is possible to catch a jet of plasma shot out from the galaxy at relativistic speeds.
The above image was taken using a Celestron Edge HD 8 and ASI 178 camera in poor conditions – heavy light pollution in Bortle class 7 skies from my front yard in Coquitlam and a full moon rising in the east. It is just a single 30 second exposure. Still the jet can be seen pointing almost straight up from the galaxy!
The jet is thought to be powered by the black hole at the galaxy’s core and its surrounding accretion disk of material. In 1999, observations from the Hubble Space Telescope measured the speed of M87’s jet at four to six times the speed of light. This faster-than-light speed is actually an illusion caused by the relativistic velocity of the jet: the time interval between light pulses emitted by the jet is less than the actual interval due to the relativistic speed of the jet moving in the direction of the observer.
So we can’t see the black hole directly with smaller telescopes but we can see one of its cool effects.
RASC Vancouver’s Scott McGillivray talks about the first image of a black hole and the Israeli Moon lander.
Join us on May 11th at Simon Fraser University’s Science Rendezvous and International Astronomy Day 2019. Science Rendezvous is the largest science festival in Canada that seeks to engage the public (and especially kids!) through interactive science activities, demonstrations, and laboratory experiences. Participants can explore dozens of hands-on science activities and demonstrations that will delight all ages at the South and East hallways of the Academic Quadrangle at SFU’s Burnaby campus, Saturday, May 11th from 11 am – 3 pm.
RASC activities include the Jim Bernath Meteorite Collection, several talks, Apollo rockets and mission display, solar telescope observing (weather permitting), and numerous craft and activity tables for children.
Pre-register for talks by RASC Vancouver speakers using the links below:
Talks are in the Academic Quadrangle rooms AQ 3149/AQ 3150.
More details are available from the Festival of Learning or Simon Fraser University’s event page.
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Dr. , Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6
Burnaby, V5A 1S6 CA
View on a Google Map
Trappist 1 is a pretty cool planetary system:
I didn’t realize that all seven planets in the Trappist 1 system are in resonance where their orbital periods are related by small integer ratios. For example, for every 2 orbits of the outermost planet, the next planet inward orbits 3 times. In our own solar system, Pluto and Neptune are also in a 2:3 resonance. The Trappist 1 system has a much longer resonance chain that involves all its planets. In fact it is the longest know chain of resonant exoplanets. For every 2 orbits of the outermost planet, the more inner ones complete 3, 4, 6, 9, 15, and 24 orbits respectively.
Initially, it seemed like the orbits of the Trappist 1 planets would not be stable with some planets being flung out of the system, colliding, or becoming moons of other planets in less than a 1/2 million years. A Canadian astronomer, Daniel Tamayo, is the lead author on a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that explains how this system could have formed and remained stable for over 50 million years – the maximum that they could simulate on their supercomputer – by accounting for the initial conditions when the planets formed and their subsequent drift into position.
Resonances are also key to music. Matt Russo is an astrophysics-colleague of Tamayo who is also a musician. He arbitrarily assigned the note C to the outermost planet and set notes for the other planets based on their relative orbital periods. You can listen to the Trappist 1 resonances in the video below.
The SYSTEM Sound site also lets you make your own music using the TRAPPIST-1 planets as your instrument .
Our NOVA Newsletter for Mar-Apr 2019 is available as a pdf file. An archive of older issues can be found on our Newsletter page.
Contents of Volume 2019, Issue 2, March-April 2019:
The Vernal or Spring Equinox occurs today, March 20 at 2:58 pm PDT: Welcome to Spring!
Equinoxes occur at a time when the Earth is not titled either towards or away from the sun – yesterday (in Winter) the Northern Hemisphere was titled away from the sun and tomorrow it will be titled towards the sun (Spring). This corresponds to when the sun passes directly over Earth’s equator and crosses the celestial equator in the sky. You can use Stellarium to see that the sun is located in constellation Pisces and how it moves from south of the equator to north of the equator.
Crossing the celestial equator is important for determining right ascension – the celestial equivalent of longitude. The zero point for right ascension is defined to be the point where the sun crosses the celestial equator at the vernal equinox. This is also known as the First Point of Aires which is a mystery because the we just saw that the sun is in Pisces.
Hipparchus defined the First Point of Aries in 130 BCE when the sun was located in the constellation Aries during the spring equinox. Due to the Earth’s precession that point has been moving westward at a rate of approximately 1 degree every 72 years and is now located in Pisces – mystery solved.
Bonus: There is also a full “super” moon tonight – the last supermoon of 2019 – and the forecast is for clear skies so get out and have a look.
Charles Messier was a French astronomer who compiled and published a list of nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies, which came to be known as the Messier objects. Messier was mainly hunting for comets but sometimes ran across objects that looked like comets but were subsequently disproven. Messier’s original list identified 103 such objects that comet hunters should “ignore” – seven additional entries have been added over the years, bringing the total to 110.
A Messier Marathon is an attempt to observe all 110 objects in a single night. The best time of year to attempt a Messier Marathon is often around a new Moon in March. This weekend, March 9th&10th, is just a few days past the new Moon and the forecast for the Lower Mainland is for mostly clear skies so it provides a nice opportunity.
But some objects in Messier’s list will not be visible from latitudes above 40° north this weekend. Alan Whitman, a BC resident, has a “cover page” article in the April edition of Sky and Telescope magazine that suggests April 4th-5th, 2019 is the perfect night for a Messier Marathon from latitudes above 49° north. Even then, observing all 110 objects may not be possible.
Planning is required for a serious attempt and the Calgary RASC Centre has some good planning tips and a great planning tool. Howard Trottier recommends a book by Don Machholz as a guide to Messier Marathons.