SHARING THE P, B AND J

BBC2's Stargazing Live presenters: Brian Cox and Dara O Briain. Photograph courtesy of the BBC.

byANDY FLEMING

The late NASA astronomer and science populariser Dr Carl Sagan once wrote about his passion for science stating that when you’re in love with someone or something, you want to tell the world. And he was in love with science and astronomy.

To socialise is a strong human trait, we are after all perhaps the most social of animals; hence the popularity of internet social media such as Facebook and Twitter. And such media are a potent tool when it comes to inspiring others to become involved with our own interests and hobbies. It’s what the Chief Executive Officer of the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society, the Science and Planetary Guy Bill Nye calls sharing the P, B and J; the Passion, Beauty and Joy of astronomy and space exploration.

So who inspired you into the subject of astronomy, space exploration and science? Was it one

The late Sir Partrick Moore, presenter of BBC1's Sky at
Night programme for over fifty years.

of the pioneering popularisers of the twentieth century using broadcast media to convey their interest and passion and to help inspire you into the hobby or perhaps scientific career?

Perhaps it was Jacob Bronowski, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan or Sir Patrick Moore. Or perhaps it was one of the contemporary popularisers of science such as Dr Brian Cox or Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. It could have been reading up on the lives and thoughts of the early Ancient Greek natural philosophers or indeed perhaps discovering the paradigm-shifting discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein or Hubble. Or it could have been a friend or family member who shared and inspired you into their passion, perhaps even throwing in some optical equipment such as a pair of binoculars or a telescope!

Whoever it was, why not give something back to the subject and spread the word of science? If you’re enthralled by astronomy and have experienced the spiritual uplift of realising your place in space and time you quite possibly have a yearning to share your interest and lobby to support initiatives in science and space exploration.

You may be a member of your local astronomical society, but you’re possibly wondering what else can you do to promote your passion and hobby? In the twenty first century there’s much you can do without even leaving the comfort of your own home. For starters, why not join an astronomy forum, or even better, join the blogosphere. You’ll soon be publishing by registering free for a service such as Google Blogger, or start a traditional website at one of the free web hosts such as http://www.webs.com/. If you can find objects in the night sky through a telescope and know how to switch a computer “on”, you’ll find publishing on the internet easier than A, B, C!

If you’re into astro-imaging then this is a great place to upload and showcase your images

, videos or sketches. Alternatively you can publish your own astronomy posts on subjects of your choice. These may include your observing notes, articles and news from the world of astronomy and cosmology that you may wish to publicise. In addition to your own articles, guest bloggers can be engaged and of course press releases and photographs can be reproduced without royalties from organisations such as NASA, JPL, ESA, the European Southern Observatory, the W M Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii and indeed virtually every other astronomical research establishment in the world! Publicising your posts for free on social media and bookmarking sites such as Reddit, Stumbleupon, Facebook or Twitter will mean your blog will soon be attracting thousands of readers and subscribers, along with all of their comments (which you can moderate!).

M31, the stunning Andromeda Galaxy 

M27 the Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula.

In addition to the internet there’s also astronomy society member magazines where you can share your experiences with other astro-folk. Or perhaps you could share your passion by producing an astronomy society meeting presentation on a subject of your choice.  

Of course, there’s also helping at a star party, perhaps at a planetarium or, as I have done recently in connection with BBC2’s Stargazing LIVE at another venue altogether.

In the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds takes the inter-relationship between birds, other wildlife and the natural environment, including the night sky and I had great fun helping out at a star party with members of the general public, who were thrilled to view the night sky through a large 200mm Newtonian Reflector. The staff too at the superb RSPB field centre at Saltholme near Port Clarence, were also thoroughly enthralled!

If you have connections with the media then network and utilise your contacts and skills. Local newspaper editors particularly like ready made articles about astronomy, cosmology and science in general. This is particularly the case now as competition from the internet and new media means many newspaper groups no longer have the funds to employ dedicated science correspondents. Well-written press releases with succinct information and contact details are much appreciated. An example of what can be achieved is illustrated by a recent interview I had with Stuart Arnold at the Northern Echo. My input was part of a story that again was being published to celebrate BBC2‟s Stargazing LIVE entitled Fresh Focus on the Night Sky.

Astronomy Live and On Air direct from the presenter on
local FM radio.

Of course if one’s work and passion for astronomy can be included in the free-to-air broadcast media then a real sense of fulfilment can be achieved and you can literally have the attention of thousands of viewers or listeners for maximum impact! Perhaps eventually your astro-photography will be featured on the BBC1’s very popular Sky at Night programme. Now that would be an inspiration indeed for all budding astro-imagers!

I managed to dovetail my lifelong interest in radio, music and astronomy into a weekly five minute slot on my programme on a local radio station that and was well aware of the popularity of astronomy due in part to the success of Dr Brian Cox’s numerous BBC television series. Recordings of the weekly segment were edited and stored as a podcast download on iTunes.

And then there is the possibility of narrating and publishing your own podcast or presenting a strand on a pre-existing podcast or web radio show, such as the segment I present on Podcast-UFO.

Don’t forget to tailor the broadcast to the general public. Of course one is always open to the accusation of ‘dumbing down’ the subject, but since April, 2012 I’ve managed to cover subjects in an interesting and inspirational style as diverse as black holes, exoplanets orbiting Alpha Centauri B, astrophysics, numerous constellations, SETI, along with a monthly ‘What’s Up?’ segment. It’s amazing what you can communicate in a few minutes on the radio, and hopefully through my sound bites, the seeds are being sown in the minds of some of our listeners to explore the subject further.

Popularising astronomy either via star parties and outreach work or via the media is a very rewarding past time and one I can certainly recommend to anyone. Carl Sagan said many times that it is the birth-rite of every child to know their true co-ordinates in space and time, and by now you may think you can help in and enjoy the task of enlightening the public.

Your involvement will also bring one further massive benefit for astronomy and science that I haven’t mentioned: the public are the ones who pay the bill via their taxes for much astronomical research and exploration either solely in the UK or as collaborative efforts with other countries via projects such as the European Space Agency or the Large Hadron Collider.

It’s vitally important that amateur astronomers get as many members of the public interested in science as possible to bring pressure to bear on elected politicians to save funding for science. When politicians and the electorate are confronted by cost-saving measures, it’s another field that’s cut, rather than the scientific seed corn upon which our future technology, economy and ultimately the UK‟s future success will be built.

Who knows, something may even be done about light pollution… now that would be a real result!!

FEEL THE PB&J (PASSION, BEAUTY, AND JOY) OF THE COSMOS? SHARE IT!

ASTRONOMY 101: BINOCULARS

Despite having a couple of sizable telescopes my favourite piece of astronomical equipment is still a humble pair of binoculars that I bought at a car boot sale for under 5GBP!  They are portable, light and easy to use on cold, damp but clear nights!

My 10 x 50 Super Zenith binoculars bought for 5GBP second hand.
 With a Field of View (FOV) of 5.5 degrees they make for fantastic
views of open star clusters and some of the brighter deep sky
objects such as M31 The Andromeda Galaxy and M42, the Great
Nebula in Orion.

And they are all you need to get the ‘wow’ factor from a selection of objects that are annoyingly just beneath naked eye visibility in this month’s night sky. From a reasonably dark location in the Northern Hemisphere binoculars will bring the Andromeda Galaxy into view, along with the star forming nebula in the hunter’s sword in the constellation of Orion after dusk.

The moons of Jupiter will magically appear, as will a multitude of star clusters.  Paradoxically, some objects actually appear more spectacular through binoculars than through a telescope, due to their large field of view. The Seven Sisters or Pleiades is an example of this, and binoculars show that there are many more stars in the cluster than just seven!  The Moon is stunning at any time with its craters such as the magnificent Tycho and Copernicus.  Binoculars will give you great views of the lunar Mare or Seas such as the Sea of Tranquility where men first landed in July 1969!

ASTRONOMY 101: THE MOON

Our Moon is far more important to all life on Earth than most people realise.  Simply illuminating the night sky or being responsible for ocean tides is of relatively little significance when one realises its true effect on the Earth and us.  It has been intrinsic to the very evolution of life itself, and by definition the appearance of homo sapiens!  And it's not hard to see why it is so important. 

The Moon with labelled 'seas' and craters.

To start with it is the only Moon of a major planet in the solar system that is so large relative to its parent planet, indeed many astronomers consider the Earth/Moon system to be a double or binary planetary system.  At 385,000 kilometres distant it is the closest celestial body to the Earth.

The Moon was created from the Earth itself, confirmed by the geological experiments undertaken during the NASA Apollo program.  Unlike the Earth, there is very little iron on its surface and it consists of terrestrial mantle material.

ASTRONOMY 101: THE SUN

The Sun is an ordinary star and is the brightest object in our sky.  As such you should certainly never look at the Sun directly and certainly never through binoculars or a telescope.

It’s one of more than one hundred billion stars that populate our Milky Way galaxy.  It’s a gigantic ball of hydrogen 870,000 miles wide.  The Sun has a diameter 109 times that of the Earth and is one third of a million times its mass.

The Sun collapsed from a cloud of hydrogen gas approximately 4.5 billion years ago.  The pressure and temperature of the hydrogen in its centre became so great that nuclear fusion chain reactions started where 600,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted into helium each second.  In the process, under Einstein’s famous equation E equals M C squared, a small amount of mass is lost as energy including light.

This energy is what we and all living things depend on for our existence.  The visible light we see from the Sun takes eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles before it reaches our eyes and is only a small part of the energy released from our star.  Its nuclear reactions also produce vast quantities of ultra violet light along with deadly x-rays and gamma ray radiation.  Indeed if it wasn’t for the Earth’s protective magnetic field this radiation would strip off our life-giving atmosphere and all life on Earth would be burnt to a crisp.

Temperatures at the core of our star Sun reach a staggering 10 million degrees Celsius, but it’s surface is less hot at about 5,000 degrees Celsius.

The Sun consists of approximately 75% hydrogen and 25% helium and is halfway through its life.  In 4.5 billion years it will run out of its hydrogen fuel and will start to fuse helium into even heavier elements.  In the process it will become a bloated Red Giant star that will engulf the orbit of the inner planets.  Finally it will puff off its outer layers as a planetary nebula before contracting to the size of the Earth.  It will have become a white dwarf star made of pure carbon diamond… a cosmic ember.  I don’t think however we’ll be around to see it!

FEEL THE PB&J (PASSION, BEAUTY, AND JOY) OF THE COSMOS? SHARE IT!

SPACE, SANITY, PREJUDICE AND UFOs

Graphical representation of one of the ubiquitous black triangle UFO sightings, this time near Amsterdam, Holland and during daylight hours, Black triangles feature in a large number of reported sightings.

ByANDY FLEMING

Immediately your friends, acquaintances and colleagues discover that your hobby is amateur astronomy, you can prepare for the two main predictable questions: what do you think about black holes, and have you ever witnessed a UFO? Well here’s what I think: I love black holes though I’ve never directly witnessed such a beast, and yes, I’ve seen a UFO that may or may not have originated on another world. Oh, and I believe in them both despite never observing the former with my own eyeballs. There you are, a sceptical amateur astronomer who is prepared to place his lack of professional reputation and total lack of funding on the line and lose nothing apart from any meagre credibility in the astronomical community.

My friends’ former question about black holes is, of course a perfectly commendable scientific query about an actual astronomical entity, although still the subject of much speculation rather than fact. On the other hand, the enquiry about UFOs raises another subject altogether. It’s commonly referred to, often in a derogatory fashion as ‘ufology’ and involves a whole battery of educational disciplines including, physics, astronomy, biology, sociology, psychology, history and religion, not to mention some aeronautical engineering, just thrown in for some good measure. Just like religion on its own, it may well be that astronomers, whether amateur or professional are not necessarily the best qualified individuals to comment and encroach on another field of research.

Granted, ufology generally conjures up a whole smorgasbord of fact, fiction, wild speculation, the paranormal, the super-natural, hearsay, conspiracy theories, vivid imaginings, plain old charlatanry and sheer profiteering by certain so-called ‘experts’, but these are not the exclusive domains of ‘ufology’. It may well turn out that what we think of as our current scientific grasp on reality (whatever that word means) may not be so firm after all. There is, of course the whole cosmos set out before us. But there is also a whole cosmos set out within. As Carl Sagan (1980) noted we are the Cosmos with consciousness. In defining reality, we really need to establish which reality we’re talking about as the cosmos has surprises and characteristics that look increasingly beyond our measure.

On the subject of black holes, astronomers are qualified to make valid professional comments as their field of study has gathered overwhelming (albeit indirect) observational proof of the existence of them, and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, one of the foundations of modern physics, has predicted their existence since 1915. Indeed, most astronomers now believe that there is a black hole of super-massive proportions at the centre of each galaxy, including our very own Milky Way. The enormous velocities of stars at its centre as they rotate around something with a gargantuan mass is indirect evidence from mathematical calculations that this object, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced ‘A-star') must be something with the density of a black hole.

Leaving astronomy to one side for now, my thoughts, views and beliefs about UFOs, unlike my studies of black holes go one step further. I’ve actually seen one, in the flesh, perhaps not up close and personal, but a “Close Encounter of the First Kind” in the night sky nonetheless. So what did it look like, this object over my home area of Teesside in north east England? Well, I’ve made a graphical representation for illustration purposes using free Stellarium Planetarium software, a favourite tool for amateur astronomers. In the true spirit of astronomy and science one has to be sceptical before making extraordinary claims. Such claims do after all, require extraordinary evidence.

Before I go further, I’d better repeat the commonly held definition of the acronym 'UFO': a guided spacecraft of non-human origin, emanating from either beneath the Earth, its oceans or an alien world. The proper definition of 'natural or unnatural unidentified aerial phenomena' is somewhat more useful.  As I mentioned earlier, it is probable that what I saw may very much have been of terrestrial origin, but as an amateur astronomer I can certainly discount what I know it wasn't.

SATURN, THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Big beautiful Saturn, complete with its astonishing set of rings. The Cassini Division is the black radial where astronomers believe a moon has cleared out the icy debris via its gravity. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL Cassini Imaging Team.

ByANDY FLEMING

If there is one celestial object that is both readily visible in even the worst light polluted skies, and yet full of the astronomical “wow” factor, it has to be Saturn, our solar system’s beautiful ringed gas giant planet.

For anyone new to telescopic observing, Saturn is usually an early and easy target. The planet has fascinated me for a long time, revealing an interesting bright disk when viewed through my 10x50 binoculars, but definite and tantalising “handles” or “ears” when viewed with some old 12x50s - very much in accordance with Galileo’s findings in the early seventeenth century. It yearns for greater magnification.

Saturn is like an old friend to me, both often gracing our skies and never failing to impress when other planets, like Mars, often fail. Having had an hour observing the Moon, I simply couldn’t wait any longer to observe Saturn with my 200mm Dobsonian. Like most people, when I first observed Saturn I was unprepared for the awesome views of the planet as revealed through a large, quality telescope with a sturdy mount.

STELLARIUM: A STAR AMONGST PLANETARIUM SOFTWARE

Stellarium's astronomical object search facility.

Many people with 3G mobile phones and portable media devices such as Apple‟s iPod have been amazed at the quality of applications, especially those relating to astronomy and navigating your way around the night sky. Most of my colleagues who are not amateur astronomers have hours of fun with these planetarium "apps‟ for their devices. However, the software for computers pre-dates that for mobile devices by many years and it is much more substantial, effective and interesting.

The astronomy planetarium software genre for use by the general public dates back to the early 1990s with the release of ground- breaking programs such as Redshift. Excellent though such early software was, the applications available were limited by the technology of the era, and pale into insignificance by the plethora and quality of the substantial applications available today.

When it comes to planetarium software for both the PC and the Apple Mac there‟s a huge choice of capable programmes on offer including Imaginova‟s Starry Night in all its various incarnations, United Soft Media‟s Redshift, Sky X, SkyMap and Cartes du Ciel (Star Charts).

The bad news is that although these products come complete with bells and whistles and are used by amateur and professional astronomers alike, they‟re not free, and in their various editions can cost anything from £30 up to £200. In addition these heavyweights have unnecessarily high hardware requirements. Starry Night in its professional editions requires at least 2GB of RAM and a fast dual core processor. It also claims a massive slice of valuable hard drive space real estate.

As usual, the internet comes up trumps yet again with a highly capable free alternative, Stellarium. It is used in professional planetariums worldwide and is GPL desktop software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL graphics software. The software allows you to see what you can observe with the naked eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

BACKYARD ASTRONOMICAL SKETCHING

ByANDY FLEMING

It seems to be a natural progression... you start with naked-eye observing, then move on to binoculars, then to visual observations with a telescope, and finally you progress to sketching. For the past few years I‟ve been perfectly content just to assemble my telescope in the back garden and enjoy a tour of objects of interest in the night sky. It was just plain, simple, relaxing, no-strings-attached observing.

However, having looked at some of the artistry contained in Observing the Deep Sky (Darren Bushnall, Crowood Press, 2005) I finallyfelt inspired me to act... and what a great feeling it is to have something to show at the end of an observing session!

Let me state from the outset that I‟m no artist... I tend to draw along straight lines! However, I hope that you enjoy my sketches (above), and that they inspire you to try sketching yourself. In addition to having something to show for your observing session, drawing the objects requires far greater attention to detail in the view through the eyepiece. 

Another benefit is that you‟re far more likely to recognise the object in future observation sessions, as what you see through the eyepiece is, of course, frequently very different from what is shown in photographic images.