The SUNY Oneonta 1-meter Telescope

With the Clear Sky Chart indicating two clear nights in a row, I decided to get out the 1-meter telescope owned by SUNY Oneonta to do some observing tests before tonight's public viewing. As evening approached, I was joined by some local wildlife:

The 1-meter telescope is mounted on a trailer, which makes for convenient travel if one wanted to take it to an event.

This telescope is designed with three mirrors: a primary mirror 1 meter in diameter, a secondary mirror up at the top (the aperture end), and a flat tertiary mirror inside that directs the light to the eyepiece on the side of the telescope.

Combined with what is called an altitude-azimuth (or "alt-az") mount, the telescope has a focal ratio of f/4.3, making it a fast telescope with a wide field of view. While this doesn't lend itself well to high magnification, its high light-gathering power (due to the large aperture) allows it to display faint objects fairly well.

I began by looking at Saturn while waiting for the evening twilight to fade to black. Saturn is low in the southwest after sunset so to view it you end up looking through a lot of the Earth's atmosphere. This meant that the image was a bit ripply as the heat of the day rose up from the ground through the air, so once it was dark I turned my sights elsewhere.

Nestled in the plane of the Milky Way within the constellation of Sagittarius, the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) and the Swan Nebula (Messier 17) were a bit difficult to distinguish. They appeared as slight grey haze. However, once I added an ultra high contrast filter, these features suddenly popped out from the background and were amazing! Tendrils of gas became visible where none had been before.

Satisfied that the 1-meter could easily see some of the brighter emission nebulae in our northern sky, I shifted to the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), a planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae form when a red giant star gradually sloughs off its outer layers of gas, exposing the hot core. This remnant core, then called a white dwarf, emits high energy radiation that causes the blown out gas to glow. Located high in the northern sky right now, the Cat's Eye Nebula gave off a pleasing teal color. Since most nebulae simply look grey through the eyepiece, the fact that this one looks teal means it must be quite luminous, providing enough photons to stimulate the color-responsive cones in our eyes. Beautiful!

To put the telescope to the test, I then turned to the Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51), a spiral galaxy that is interacting with a nearby smaller galaxy. At first I couldn't locate it, but I knew it had to be visible in such a large telescope so I kept hunting. Finally, I realized that the telescope's alignment must have gotten lost somehow - apparently it does that after awhile - so after resetting the alignment using two nearby stars I quickly and easily found M51. The disk of the galaxy was easily seen, as was the neighboring galaxy, and one prominent spiral arm could be seen extending out to touch its neighbor. This was my first time having observed this galactic pair located some 23 million light-years away and it was surely a sight to indulge one's eyes.

I then fired up the 16-inch telescope and viewed the Dumbbell Nebula (Messier 27), and the Ring Nebula (Messier 57), two more planetary nebulae. These two objects are easily within the grasp of our 16-inch Meade LX200, but the 1-meter wasn't able to observe them due to their location near the zenith. Its drive motors didn't want to set the telescope straight up. However, the view through the 16" was still fantastic.

After doing some preliminary tracking diagnostic tests on the 16-inch, I closed up shop around 12:45 a.m. and headed home. Seeing M8, M17, and M51 all for the first time was a great experience and my next goal is to mount one of our CCD cameras to the telescope for some imaging.

For more information about the SUNY Oneonta Observatory and the 1-meter telescope, visit http://employees.oneonta.edu/smolinjp/astronomy.html. Tonight is the final public observing night of the summer, so if you're around town tonight at sunset come on up to College Camp to join us! Check out our fall schedule too, at http://employees.oneonta.edu/smolinjp/observing_nights.html.

Happy viewing!

Mars ho!

Early this morning EDT, NASA landed the largest rover yet onto the planet Mars, the fourth rock from the Sun. The Mars Science Laboratory, containing a car-sized rover named Curiosity, landed in Gale Crater via a sophisticated "sky-crane" technique involving a hovering component that gradually and gently lowered the rover to the surface.

Once it had landed, it beamed back a signal of its success and its first images of the crater surface in black and white:

Color images will come later when the main cameras have been activated. At this point, mission scientists are no doubt chomping at the bit to get the rover moving and exploring. Its primary mission is to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life. While this may seem like an ambitious goal, NASA scientists have tried this type of thing before with the Viking landers so they know what sorts of tests don't work as expected. The Curiosity rover, outfitted with a huge array of instruments, should be able to perform far more complex measurements and analyses to measure the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and to search for any potential chemical building blocks for life. Orbiting spacecraft had previously identified certain minerals within the crater that may have formed in a watery environment, so Curiosity will study these minerals further. If water did indeed exist to facilitate this mineral formation, then it may have also allowed microbial life to exist within the environment as well. Within the Gale Crater there also exists a mountain roughly 3 miles high named Aeolis Mons that Curiosity intends to investigate.

Mars has drawn the attention and inspired the imagination of humanity for well over 100 years. Since Percival Lowell's time spent at the telescope observing what he believed to be canals made by an intelligent but dying civilization, mankind has wondered about the existence of life on our red neighbor. While the existence of such canals was later dismissed, observations of changing dark features on the Martian surface and a spectrum that mimicked that of chlorophyll seemed to suggest that Mars may be covered with some form of vegetation that changed with the seasons. These observations led to the development of many great science-fiction thrillers, from "The War of the Worlds", written in 1898 by H.G. Wells and adapted into both a terrifying radio program and two movies, to "Invaders from Mars" and "Mars Attacks", people have wondered about the possibility of

hostile life on this mysterious world. Other speculative movies linking life on Mars to life on Earth include "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet". And let's not forget "John Carter" and "Total Recall." While these movies vary in quality, they all address the idea of sending humans to Mars or being visited by beings from Mars.

While the Mariner missions revealed to us that Mars appears to be a dead planet, it does retain some characteristics that make it somewhat Earth-like. A wispy thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, canyons, mountains, and polar ice caps all bring to mind thoughts of Earth. However, its vast lifeless deserts and cratered surface more closely resemble the Moon. Mineralogical evidence that liquid water may have at one time existed on Mars have motivated mission after mission to explore its surface and look for fossilized evidence of life. Now that we have landed the most sophisticated instrument lab yet, we may be able to finally answer this question once and for all.

You can keep up with the Curiosity rover's progress and scientific findings via the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/.