February 2011 - Utah-Astronomy - mailman.xmission.com

Re: [Utah-astronomy] Estimating Saturn System III observing times for NED
by Canopus56 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

Chuck, Yes that is the same one. On the internet, only a view people world wide have images of it. In Utah, the winter weather has kept us all inside. The 4AM transit time in Utah is pretty rough. I am working up a list of low-altitude System III transits for around midnight to 1AM, after Saturn rises around 11PM. - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Finding fabulous fares is fun. Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains. http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] Swap meet?
by Wayne Sumner 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

Hi Chuck, Perhaps you were thiinking of all that equipment donated to me by Iomega? I sold the scanning electron microscope and 4 other optical microscopes to L3-Com. I sold most of the 80-20 structural aluminum to a machine shop. Now that you mention it, however, I still have three VERY nice optical bench flotation tables made by Newport, along with some very nice optical bench equipment I'd be happy to sell to a loving home. It's for a good cause, too. I'm trying to purchase a 3D printer for my engineering classes, and I'm still about $10k short. Anyone interested? Wayne A. Sumner Math/Physics/Astronomy/Engineering Boy's Tennis Coach Northridge High School Davis School District (801) 402-8610 >>> Chuck Hards 02/08/11 12:09 PM >>> No, my concern was distance for Kelly. I thought you were still trying to unload small nuclear reactors and such, lol. On 2/8/11, Wayne Sumner wrote: > Hey Chuck, > I think you meant Kelly Carroll, not me, right? I didn't threaten to > bring anything large! ;-) _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy(a)mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] Swap meet?
by Wayne Sumner 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

Hey Chuck, I think you meant Kelly Carroll, not me, right? I didn't threaten to bring anything large! ;-) Wayne A. Sumner Math/Physics/Astronomy/Engineering Boy's Tennis Coach Northridge High School Davis School District (801) 402-8610 >>> Chuck Hards 02/08/11 9:39 AM >>> LOL, you'll need a semi-truck to get it all here, Wayne! As well as every folding table in the ward to set it all up! On 2/7/11, Wayne Sumner wrote: > YES! _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy(a)mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] Swap meet?
by Wayne Sumner 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

YES! Wayne A. Sumner Math/Physics/Astronomy/Engineering Boy's Tennis Coach Northridge High School Davis School District (801) 402-8610 >>> Chuck Hards 02/07/11 1:34 PM >>> Any interest in a spring swap meet? _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy(a)mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com

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Estimating Saturn System III observing times for NED
by Canopus56 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

There is a large northern storm raging across Saturn best viewed at approximately System III central meridian longitude 50. See example image - http://www.christone.net/astro/saturn/index.htm This event raised the question of when could the storm be best observed or alternatively, when would 50 deg longitude in Saturn System III best be observable from Salt Lake. I could not find an online calcultor, so I used the following method to estimate some good viewing times. 1) The Univ. of Kiev has posted a table of 0UT Saturn System III longitudes for 2011. http://space.univ.kiev.ua/ephem/11a/Pm6.html#Thr 2) My copy of the MICA ephemeris program indicates that Saturn transits SLC generally around 11UT or 4AM MDT local time during February. 3) The System III rotation period is about 10.75 hours or 33.5 degrees per hour. 4) Over 11 UT hours, System III would rotate 11 x 33.5 degs or 368.5 degrees or an adjusted rotation of plus 8.5 degrees. 5) Examining the Kiev 0UT System III longitudes and adding 8.5 degrees to each entry identified the following best 4AM times for my local observing point: Date|SIIICMLong|SIIICMLongPlus8.5 Feb 8 41.8 50.3 Feb 12 48.9 57.4 Feb 16 52.4 60.9 Feb 20 55.9 64.4 Feb 24 59.5 67.9 Feb 28 63.0 71.5 If anyone knows of an online Saturn System III calculator, please let me know. Clear Skies - Kurt

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] Swap Meet?
by Kelly_Carroll＠nps.gov 08 Feb '11

08 Feb '11

Yeah! I have a whole astrophotgraphy rig I am looking to part with. K Kelly Carroll Great Basin National Park http://www.nps.gov/grba/ Experience your America

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Southern Utah Star Party
by Stephen Peterson 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

All, I have activities this morning but will be free after say 13:00 MST Saturday. The group is invited to stop by the house, see my scopes and just get together and chat. Pass the word. Sorry about the poopey weather. Steve 917 W 3450 S Hurricane 635 5283

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] Rough Notes on Kepler team exoplanet announcement
by Canopus56 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Joe, Thanks for the clarification. The 4,000,000 was cited in the press conference as the number of stars that co-researchers examined _before the launch_ using ground based telescopes, yielding the 156,000 stars in investigational field that the Kepler CCD is looking at. Clear Skies - Kurt

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Re: [Utah-astronomy] Rough Notes on Kepler team exoplanet announcement
by Canopus56 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Joe wrote: > the estimate by the science principal investigator that 80 percent of the candidates would pan out I did only a quick listen to the conference and made some notes because I'm time pressed at the moment. The key point that I left the broadcast fuzzy on is just what were they saying their current best estimate was of the percent of stars that we see along the Milky Way have planets around them. Is it 80 percent of the 1250 heavily fetted candidates out of 4,000,000 in the investigation field, some other number or did they not say. Thanks for the pointers and the good article on your Deseret News blog. But it looks like there are some good opportunities for Patrick to beat the professionals as confirming at least one candidate and for the general public to directly participate through http://www.planethunters.org in this unique moment in scientific history. Looking backward in 100 years from now, this will be a key moment in the history books. - Clear Skies - Kurt -------- Supplemental quick notes from the press conference question and answer period notes: 1) Rate of releases and candidates will decrease. This release is the "low-hanging" fruit of low orbital period planets at higher temperatures. As orbital period increases, temperature decreases and the probability of observing a transit is inversely proportional to the orbital period. NASA researchers will tease out some more planets that have longer periods and have faint signals. 2) Candidate planets may contain false signals although aggressive pre-processing of the data has cleaned out most of the false signals. Causes of false signals include - cosmic rays hitting the CCD detector and spectroscopic binary stars. 3) These are all candidate planet systems. No candidates are being held back at this point. Last summer they held a few of the best candidates back for the Kepler team to analyze. 4) The current Feb. 2011 list of 1200 is "much more heavily vetted" as compared to last year's list of 700. 5) Kepler was in safe mode per an announcement a few days ago. The problem is probably a faulty star tracker. The problem has occurred before. Kelper is currently in standby-mode pending resolution of the star tracker issue. The star tracker problem is an ordinary shake-out engineering problem and is not expected to present a significant risk to the mission continuing.

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Rough Notes on Kepler team exoplanet announcement
by Canopus56 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

----------------- NASA Press Releases http://www-b.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-036 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html ----------------- Related Nature journal articles and commentary http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue.html Nature Vol. 470, Number 7332, dated Feb. 3, 2011 Lissauer, J. L. et al. Nature 470, 53-58 (2011) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7332/full/nature09760.html ----------------- NASA YouTube Channel Broadcast of Kepler Press Conference http://www.youtube.com/user/NASAtelevision#p/a/u/0/zZHSptpDoLQ Notes on NASA JPL Press Conference By having a spaced-based wide-field telescope (hooked to a super-sensitive CCD array), Kepler generates a fire-hose of photometry data each day. 155,000 monitored stars continuously. 1235 Candidates 9 new confirmed planets in x? star systems Of the 1235 candidates planets - 662 Neptune size 165 Jupiter size 19 super-Jupiter size There are 520 current confirmed planets based on pre-launch ground-based observations. Ground based scopes classified 4 million stars in Kepler investigation field before Kepler launch so Kepler could concentrate on a subset of systems with a habitable zone (Kaf:???) Kepler candidate planets are smaller and have a longer period than compared to pre-launch ground based exo-planets. Kepler has observed planet transits down to the size of Mars. Of 1235 candidates maybe 54 candidates are in the habitable zone with temperatures between 0 and 200 F. Others have surface temperatures from greater than 200 deg F to 4000 deg F. (Most of the candidates have surface temperatures above 1000 deg F from visual estimate from press conference chart.) 170 star systems contain multiple planet candidates. These systems are particularly important because a new supplemental mathematical analysis technique can be used to characterize the mass of the planets in a multiple planet beyond the sensitivity of basic transit observations. There appears to be a reasoning error in the speaker extrapolating the number of candidates to the sky as a whole. Speaker implies that since Kepler observing field is one-four-hundredth of the celestial dome, a useable estimate of the number of candidate planets on the celestial dome is 1,250 times 400 or about 400,000. (Kaf: The Kepler observing field is just north of the galactic plane in Cygnus. The density of stars per degree of declines radically with increases in galactic latitude - as consistent with a flat disk shaped galaxy. So, a density taken on the disk cannot be extrapolated to the celestial sphere as a whole. A better estimate would be that a two-degree segment on the galactic disk has been examined, and therefore a better napkin-back estimate is "only" 180 x 1,250 or 225,000 candidates. Note Cygnus is near the spinward apex in the Orion-Cygnus spur.) Kepler 9 is the second confirmed system with multiple planets. Three stars in Kepler 3. Of the 170 candidate planets, six new planets have been confirmed in one system - Kepler 11. Kepler 11 is the most compact system ever discovered. Observed three planets transiting at once in Kepler 11. Entire system would fit inside the orbit of Venus. Estimated rate of candidate to confirmed is one-planet-per-five candidate stars (Kaf:???). (Kaf: If it is one-in-five, then this has big implication for f_sub(p) term of Drake's equation. f_sub(p) is the fraction of star systems that have planets.) To deal with the fire-house of Kepler data, Yale University teamed up with the Citizen's Science Alliance - the creators of the GalaxyZoo and MoonZoo projects, to create www.planethunters.org - a citizen eyeballing project to try an pick out planet transits from Kelper's overwhelming volume of data. (Kaf: Recall in GalaxyZoo, citizens were used to preliminarily classify the rought type of galaxy out of a bank of millions of images.) Unlike GalaxyZoo, citizens' participating in PlanetHunters just look at boring graphs and mark anomalous peaks and valleys. Even so, in the first few weeks 16,000 dedicated ordinary citizens have made 1.6 million ordinary classifications on Kepler light-curve graphs. (Kaf: Question - why can't this be done more effectively with mathematical analysis? Why is the superior visual pattern recognition of the human brain needed - as occurred in the GalaxyZoo and Mars feature classification projects? Main points of NASA 2-2-2011 Press Conference : Kepler team announce the confirmation of 9 new exo-planets with 6 planets in one star system. Kepler team expanded their announcement from last year that they identified about 700 potential candidate exoplanet systems requiring further analysis. This re-announcement raises the candidate stars requiring further investigation by about 500 to a total of 1,235. This public release of team data is in response to the impractically of the team of evaluating all the candidates. Therefore, they are releasing the research list in order to invite the professional and amateur community (and their resources) to complete the confirmation process. The promise of Kepler to discover candidate and confirmed lower and lower mass exoplanets. There is an opportunity for ordinary general public members to contribute in over-the-internet science projects to discover new exo-planets. There is a sense in Planethunter participants that they are contributing to a significant moment in human history. Unanswered questions: What portion the 184 Jovian size candidates can the advanced amateur community work on with their telescope gear? No doubt the professionals will have the inside track to evaluate these 184 Jovian or larger candidate systems, but what portion of those 168 can amateurs get to first? Most of the candidate systems are beyond the capability of amateur gear. Context: NASA is facing large budget cuts during the month that the president is formulating a new budget. The decadal National Science Academy plan was released last week which did not recommend first priority for the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, effectively killing the project. - Kurt

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