March 2008 - Utah-Astronomy - mailman.xmission.com

Re: [Utah-astronomy] Planning an observing trip to Utah
by Jerry Foote 27 Mar '08

27 Mar '08

Hi Quentin, As Kim said the weather at that time of year is always a little unpredictable. As it is before the monsoon season it can be nice. At that time of year it does change on a day-to-day basis. The area is very dark and very clear so if you can get to Bryce you would have some very nice seeing. Are your travel plans set yet? If not a delay to the Bryce Festival would really be worthwhile. Over 40 scopes, lectures every night for 4 nights and a lot of geeky astronomers, (sorry about that Patrick). To say nothing about the great steak fry that the park service puts on at 1:00 AM on Saturday night. Jerry Foote ScopeCraft, Inc. 4175 E. Red Cliffs Dr. Kanab, UT 84741 435-216-5450 jfoote(a)scopecraft.com

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Triple play tonight
by Patrick Wiggins 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

I just realized we've a triple pass of satellites coming up shortly. ATV rises in the SSW at 9:03 disappearing in the S two minutes later. ISS follows the same track starting at 9:07. Ditto for shuttle starting at 9:08. Maximum altitude above the horizon for each will be abut 30 degrees. patrick

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Girl Scout Star Party, Friday April 11 in Provo Canyon -- Need help!
by Richard Tenney 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

Here's the request I received: ============================================ The Girl Scouts of Utah - Scenic View (Wasatch front) Service Unit is hosting a weekend at Trefoil Ranch Girl Scout Camp April 11 & 12. (Friday and Saturday). Our theme is science and technology hoping to broaden the girl's awareness of the subjects. We would greatly appreciate assistance a Friday night Star Party. The hope is a short lecture on solar systems,stars and planets, then we will split the girls into smaller group giving them an opportunity to gaze as constellations through the naked eye, view through a telescope and any other idea you may have. We anticipate about 200 girls that we will split them into groups small enough to rotate around possibly as many as 4 activities as not to overwhelmed any one activity. Can you help. I have to confess I know next to nothing about the subject although I think it is REALLY COOL!!!!! ==================================== The location is at Trefoil GS ranch, which is the very end of South Fork Canyon Road in Provo Canyon (the road that runs South from Vivian Park, before the turnoff to Sundance (if you are heading from Provo; if you are driving down the canyon from Heber, it will be a left turn after you pass the turnoff to Sundance). The sky is normally fairly dark there, though the horizons are pretty limited in the canyon, but we will also have a first quarter moon that night. With 200 scouts I'm going to need several volunteers to help. Please reply to the list and/or call me and let me know if you can help out Friday night, April 11, either with a telescope or with the lecture(s). Thanks! /Rich - cell is 801~380~3331 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] 2 Utah astro articles 3-22 Trib
by Canopus56 24 Mar '08

24 Mar '08

Joe wrote: > Much better story in Deseret News > http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695264177,00.html You article was the definitely the better of the two. I really enjoyed it. - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ

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2 Utah astro articles 3-22 Trib
by Canopus56 24 Mar '08

24 Mar '08

March 22 Trib ======================== http://www.sltrib.com/ci_8658963 USTAR: Utah bets on science dollars Recruiting world-class researchers could bring a financial windfall to state By Brian Maffly The Salt Lake Tribune If scientists could achieve breakthroughs in forecasting this "space weather" and devise technologies to ease the chaos generated by solar winds, millions in taxpayer dollars would be saved annually, Utah State University physics professor Robert Schunk says. ============================ http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_8658947 Study proves theory about origin of cosmic rays. Theory has been around more than 40 years, but lacked solid proof. By Sheena McFarland A new study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, has proven that cosmic rays likely are generated at least 150 million light years, or 870 billion billion miles, from Earth. ======================= - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] While we slept - GRB080319B
by Canopus56 22 Mar '08

22 Mar '08

Dave wrote: > Kurt, you left out the most astounding bit from > the news release; the estimated distance of > the GRB. Yikes! . . . "A redshift of 0.94 > translates into a distance of 7.5 billion > light years, . . ." Yep, particularly measured against the typical deep redshift object accessible by amateur telescopes - quaser 3C273 in Virgo at 1.9 billion light years. 3C273 should be well positioned in the next dark sky frame coming up on April 2. For the details, see McGaha2006: McGaha, J. March 2006. The Outer Limits: Observing Quasers at High Redshifts. S&T. 111(3):69-72 (List of quasers visible to amateurs). Here's uber-imager Anthony Ayiomamitis's image of 3C273: http://www.perseus.gr/Astro-DSO-QSO-3C273.htm 3C273 is a pretty underwhelming object that I did track down once to have a look at. I only liked it for the experience of have 2 billion year old photons hitting the eyeballs - light from a time when there were only single-celled anareobic bacteria battling it out with the newly evolved blue-green algea for whether there would be an oxygen-reducing or a oxygen-based atmosphere on the Earth. Too bad there wasn't any residual brightness to GRB080319B to see per Patrick's post. Most of the professional web posts described it as rapidly dimming. - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ

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Echostar 1 & 2
by Patrick Wiggins 22 Mar '08

22 Mar '08

While playing around in my observatory this morning I managed a series of 10 pictures of two of the satellites Dish Network broadcasts from, Echostars 1 & 2, drifting past a few stars. A single image is posted on the UA gallery here: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com/main.php?g2_itemId=11066 But, just for fun, I also zipped all 10 into a single file and posted it to: http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/temp/ECHOSTAR.ZIP When I get some time I plan on putting all ten shots into a "movie" but I figured if I posted them maybe others might want to do the same. Sun's up. Turning in. patrick p.s. 11 hours of observing last night/this morning and the scope's corrector plate didn't dew up or freeze over once. There's something to be said for spring. :)

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While we slept - GRB080319B
by Canopus56 22 Mar '08

22 Mar '08

Any residual visual light from this supernova that occured last night - the most distant naked eye visual object ever seen from Earth - will probably be washed out by the full Moon, but here's a finder chart anyway. May be worth throwing a quick binocular on it: My amateur finder chart at: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com/main.php?g2_itemId=11063 Decimal position data from Swift Uvot image files at: http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/sdc/list?seq=sw00306757000.013 converted to ra-dec: Right-ascension 217.917 143139.99 Declination 36.304 +361813.1 Approx. 2 degs due south dec of gam Boo. NASA Press releases http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/mar/HQ_08086_Swift_Detects_GRB.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/brightest_grb.html ====== "This burst was a whopper," said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far." Swift's Burst Alert Telescope picked up the burst at 2:12 a.m. EDT, March 19, and pinpointed the coordinates in the constellation BoÃ¶tes. Telescopes in space and on the ground quickly moved to observe the afterglow. The burst is named GRB 080319B, because it was the second gamma ray burst detected that day. Swift's other two instruments, the X-ray Telescope and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, also observed brilliant afterglows. Several ground-based telescopes saw the afterglow brighten to visual magnitudes between 5 and 6 in the logarithmic magnitude scale used by astronomers. The brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. From a dark location in the countryside, people with normal vision can see stars slightly fainter than magnitude 6. That means the afterglow would have been dim, but visible to the naked eye. . . . . GRB 080319B's optical afterglow was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The most distant previous object that could have been seen by the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth." ======= Blogged reports from around the world by professional observatories http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php?view=burst&GRB=20080319B Swift site xray and visual camera images http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/swiftsc.html - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

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While we slept - GRB080319B
by Canopus56 22 Mar '08

22 Mar '08

Any residual visual light from this supernova that occured last night - the most distant naked eye visual object ever seen from Earth - will probably be washed out by the full Moon, but here's a finder chart anyway. May be worth throwing a quick binocular on it: My amateur finder chart at: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com/main.php?g2_itemId=11063 Decimal position data from Swift Uvot image files at: http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/sdc/list?seq=sw00306757000.013 converted to ra-dec: Right-ascension 217.917 143139.99 Declination 36.304 +361813.1 Approx. 2 degs due south dec of gam Boo. NASA Press releases http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/mar/HQ_08086_Swift_Detects_GRB.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/brightest_grb.html ====== "This burst was a whopper," said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far." Swift's Burst Alert Telescope picked up the burst at 2:12 a.m. EDT, March 19, and pinpointed the coordinates in the constellation BoÃ¶tes. Telescopes in space and on the ground quickly moved to observe the afterglow. The burst is named GRB 080319B, because it was the second gamma ray burst detected that day. Swift's other two instruments, the X-ray Telescope and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, also observed brilliant afterglows. Several ground-based telescopes saw the afterglow brighten to visual magnitudes between 5 and 6 in the logarithmic magnitude scale used by astronomers. The brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. From a dark location in the countryside, people with normal vision can see stars slightly fainter than magnitude 6. That means the afterglow would have been dim, but visible to the naked eye. . . . . GRB 080319B's optical afterglow was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The most distant previous object that could have been seen by the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth." ======= Blogged reports from around the world by professional observatories http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php?view=burst&GRB=20080319B Swift site xray and visual camera images http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/swiftsc.html - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

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Feb. 20 eclipse from the Moon
by Canopus56 21 Mar '08

21 Mar '08

Defense department satellites were capturing their usual images of the Earth (every 102 minutes) during the eclispe last Feb. 20. Here's a cool looking time composite image of the eclipse shadow on the Earth from NASA - http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17963 - Kurt P.S. - Sorry for the triple send mail click on the last past about a GRB. The wireless connection was breaking in and out - causing the multi-post. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ

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