Weekend viewing

The Weather Channel indicates that this weekend's forecast is extremely favorable for nighttime viewing of the sky. While the waxing gibbous moon will make the sky rather bright, you can still find some things if you look up.

Jupiter shines bright in the east just after sunset and is visible all night. Even a modest pair of binoculars can reveal 3-4 points of light around it - the Galilean moons. Galileo was the first to observe these 4 large moons of Jupiter and the fact that they orbit Jupiter, not Earth, was one of the first major pieces of observational evidence supporting the heliocentric, or Sun-centered, model of the Solar System. Turn your binoculars to them and over the course of just an hour you can see them change position with respect to one another.

While you have your binoculars out, check out the nearby Pleiades star cluster. This group of stars, located in the constellation of Taurus, rises around 7:30 p.m. and is visible all night. It looks like a miniature Dipper and can be seen near the center of the image below:

This star cluster is littered with young stars, which appear blue because they are quite massive and therefore quite hot - much hotter than the Sun. 7 are visible to the unaided eye, but through binoculars or a small telescope the cluster really comes to life. Check it out!

Also, keep your eyes peeled for the occasional meteor. The November Leonid meteor shower is approaching in a couple weeks, so spotting one or two random meteors while you are outside this weekend can help build the anticipation for this upcoming meteor shower, which typically puts on a great show.

M31: The Andromeda Galaxy

Tuesday night was a beauty here in Oneonta. A few students and I went up to College Camp to take some images with the 16-inch telescope using a mounted digital SLR camera, which I will feature in the next few postings. Initially the camera was piggybacked to the telescope to take wide-field images. With autumn comes the appearance of Andromeda, and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), so this was a prime target. Here is an image that came out of it:

Seven images were stacked to produce this image. Despite it being at a distance of 2.5 million light-years from Earth, the Andromeda Galaxy can actually be seen with the naked eye from a dark location. In the autumn season, go outside after sunset and look high in the eastern sky for a big square of relatively bright stars. This is Pegasus. To the north (left) of Pegasus is Andromeda, appearing in the image below as the flying horse's back legs:

The light blue oval above Andromeda is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Looking right at it makes it difficult to see, so you may need to avert your eyes to the side just a bit and look for a faint fuzzy. That faint fuzzy is light that has been traveling for 2.5 million years to be absorbed by your eyeballs. Let that sink in!

Solar Observing

Sunday was a beautiful day! The sun was shining, the snow was melting, and at least for most of the day there wasn't a cloud in the sky. This afforded me the opportunity to get out the 4.5-inch Orion reflecting telescope to look at the Sun. Of course, I had a special solar filter that fit over the open aperture of the telescope, which made looking at the Sun safe for my eyes. (Note: Never look at the Sun through a telescope without a special filter!)

The Sun's activity has been on the rise recently, meaning the occurrence of northern lights will likely be increasing over the next couple years. We just had a nice show last week - which Oneonta missed due to rain that night - but hopefully there will be more to come. An increase in solar activity is typically tied to an increase in the number of sunspots, and it was sunspots that I was hoping to observe.

While there were no giant sunspots, there was one set of spots that was nicely visible through the eyepiece at 17X magnification, along with a few tiny ones peppered across the Sun's face. Here is an image I took by holding up my digital camera to the eyepiece:

In the upper-left "quadrant" you can see a small dark sunspot. The image is rotated such that the "top" of the Sun is actually to the bottom-left (a result of the Newtonian design of the telescope). Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a sharper picture of the sunspot with the camera, but the view through the eyepiece was great!

After sunset I noticed that the sky was clear so I put on warm clothes and drove up to the observatory at College Camp. However, by the time I got there (~9:30 p.m.) it had mostly clouded over so I went home disappointed. Jupiter rises at sunset these days, so you can see it shining brightly in the east after the Sun goes down. Through even a modest-sized telescope the 4 Galilean moons are easily visible, and I had hoped to observe the motion of those moons over the course of the evening. No luck this time, but the weather forecast is looking promising for tomorrow or Wednesday.