APOD 11/19/13

NGC 6357 is forming massive stars, and astronomers do not know the reasons why as of now. Pictured above is a star forming it's own "interstellar castle" as complex interactions between interstellar winds, radiation pressures, magnetic fields and gravity take place. The nebula is glowing because of ionized hydrogen gas. The central part of NGC 6357 (shown) lies about 10,000 light years away near the constellation Scorpius. I chose this photo because of it's stunning appearance and because it fascinates me that with all we can see and record and know about our universe, there are events we do not understand and phenomena we cannot explain.

Color Acuity

I took the color acuity test twice and scored an 18 the first time and a 7 the second. The second time I took the test I did the excersizes in a different order, moving from the easiest excersizes to the most difficult. I think that's what improved my score.

Observation Time:

9/29/13

Observed waning crescent moon, venus and antares which is present in scorpius. Observed Vega, Deneb and Altair in the summer triangle. All observations were naked eye observations, no app was used.

10/2/13

Observed waning crescent moon and venus. I was in a parking lot so it was too bright to view much else. Naked eye observations, no app used.

10/7/13

Observed waxing crescent moon and the Summer Triangle. The sky was dark which made it easy to see other stars, but identifying which constellation is which is difficult. My phone wasn't working so I could not use SkyMap.
10/9/13

Observed waxing crescent moon, venus and antares. I thought I found Cassiopeia but it was actually Cygnus, as identified by SkyMap. Observations occurred in my driveway.

10/10/13

Observed waxing crescent moon, venus and Cygnus. Observations were naked eye observations and no app was used, observations occurred in my driveway.

10/13/13

Too cloudy to observe anything from my driveway.

10/15/13

Observed waxing Gibbous moon, as well as the constellations I've identified before. Scorpius, Cygnus and the summer triangle. Cassiopeia is easy to find as well. I didn't need to use the app this time, and all observations were naked eye observations in my driveway.

10/16/13

Observed Cetus and Andromeda with the help of SkyMap. Antares is always easy to find because it appears to be flashing red and white. Observed Venus, which is easy to find because it's close to ecliptic and because of it's brightness.


10/17/13

Observed Pegasus, Andromeda and Cetus. I've been varying the times that I've gone out to watch stars, and realized that stars always flash when near the horizon which means several times I've thought I saw Antares it was actually just another star near the horizon. I think for future I'll just check myself with SkyMap to make sure I'm identifying things correctly. The summer triangle is so easy to see, and makes it easy to star hop.

Johannes Kepler

Kepler was born in southwest Germany in 1571. He spent several years of his young life living with his grandparents, and as an adult reflected upon the character of his parents very unfavorably. He wrote of his father, “He destroyed everything. He was a wrongdoer, abrupt and quarrelsome.” He received his education at a Protestant seminary where he primarily studied theology. He taught as a professor of mathematics. Kepler was the first to publicly defend the Copernican system, and received criticism from Martin Luther as well as the Catholic Church.  After the publication of his first book, The Cosmographic Mystery, he was invited by Tycho Brahe to move to Prague and begin calculating the distances of orbits. When Brahe passed away in 1601, Kepler replaced him as the Imperial Mathematician, the most prestigious mathematician appointment in Europe and gained access to his observations before Brahe’s family could claim them and use them for financial gain. His first assignment under Brahe had been to explain the retrograde motion of Mars, which he eventually attributed to elliptical orbits, countering Copernicus’s idea that the orbits were perfectly circular. Kepler also observed the planets had changing velocities, and appeared to move faster when closer to the sun. This became his second law of planetary motion, and stated that planets sweep out equal amount of area over the same amount of time. His third law explained the relationship between how long it takes planets to orbit the sun and how far away they are from the sun. In 1615 there was a witch-hunt in Kepler’s hometown, and his own mother was accused of witchcraft. Her charges were not dismissed until five years later, and Kepler himself was in charge of her defense. Kepler is most known for his laws of planetary motion, but he made many other notable discoveries as well. He was the first to discover that refraction is responsible for vision in our eyes, and that using two eyes enables depth perception. He created eyeglasses that corrected both nearsighted and farsighted vision. He also explained how a telescope worked, describing images, magnification and the properties of reflection. Kepler also claimed that gravity was caused by two bodies, and that the moon was the cause of the tides on Earth. Kepler, earlier in his life, calculated the birth year of Christ.             

                                                            Sources Cited

Voelkel, James R. Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

"Johannes Kepler Biography." Space.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

"The Galileo Project | Science | Johannes Kepler." The Galileo Project | Science | Johannes Kepler. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.                                                                                   

Johannes Kepler Sources

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/kepler.html

The Galileo Project



http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kepler/

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

APOD: Io's Surface

One of Jupiter's moons, Io, pictured above, is the solar system's most volcanically active body. The surface of Io is constantly being formed and reformed by lava. Io lacks craters, which indicates that the lava flow is so consistent that craters don't have time to form and remain before they are covered by lava. Astronomers speculate that strong tides are what cause Io's volcanic activity. Space seems like something that stays constant and unchanging because usually when discussing geological or universal time we talk in millions or billions of years. The fact that Io changes so constantly makes it a universal anomaly.

APOD: Trifid Nebula

The Trifid Nebula pictured above lies around 5,000 light years from Earth near the constellation Sagittarius. Also known as M20, the Trifid is a place where stars can be formed. Three kinds of nebulae exist within the Trifid and they are the red emission, blue reflection and dark nebulae. Red emission nebulae are dominated by light emitted by hydrogen atoms. Blue reflection nebulae are produced by dust reflecting starlight and dark nebulae are where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette. The nebula is about 40 light years across.

NASA Photo of the Day

The Crab Nebula is the remainder of a supernova left behind after the death of a large star. The supernova was noted in the constellation Taurus nearly one thousand years ago. The Crab is the strongest persistent source in the sky, with measured flux exteneding to above 10 TeV. I chose this photo because of the nebula's resemblance to veins in the human body. That's pretty cool.