Comet of the Century?, Hispanic Heritage Month, Hubble Goes Deep – REALLY Deep and the Curator of the American Museum of Natural History visits the Rolnick Observatory

by Dan Wright

The Westport Astronomical Society will be celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport this weekend; October 6th! It’s a FREE event from 10-5pm in honor of latino scientists. There will be a radio station broadcasting live and we’ll be there with our incredible solar telescopes during the day with LOTS of goodies to hand out from NASA and the Solar Dynamics Observatory. C’mon out and meet this great community!

COMETS!

Comet ISON projected path
Click to Expand

We’re cautiously becoming excited about a newly discovered comet that by some estimates may be one of the brightest comets in a century or two. At the risk of going all out Kohoutek (a highly promoted comet that completely fizzled) on you, Comet ISON C2012 S1 may indeed be a “Dream Comet”. Currently a dim 18th magnitude and diving in from the Oort Cloud now close to Jupiter, it will have a close encounter with Mars, then dive within 725,000 miles of the sun on November 28, 2013 perhaps brightening to -10!

Should it survive that close shave with our star, it flings out past Venus and slides near Earth. Some breathless reports say this may be bright enough to see during the day… Again, we must remind ourselves of Kohoutek’s Law: Under Sell and Over Deliver! Regardless, a bright comet will get not just us but new people excited about astronomy and will drive people to our Dome, and that’s great for everyone.

Aruba Total Solar Eclipse
February 26. 1998
Photo by Carl Lancaster

If things do go to plan, we should be able to start seeing ISON from the Rolnick Observatory next summer. In the meantime, Comet 168P/Hergenrother just brightened rather unexpectedly and is visible at 10th magnitude in the Great Square of Pegasus. You know Bob Meadows will be spending hours with the 25 looking for this dim little sky boomerang!

If you venture to the southern hemisphere in mid March, you may be able to see Comet Pan-STARRS C/2011 L4. This may brighten to +/- 1 and allegedly be a naked eye object at sunset.

The Big Kahuna of Astronomy in the southern hemisphere this year is the total solar eclipse November 13. WAS Board Member David Ives will be heading to Australia and will try to send us some pictures from the event. It’s the rainy season that time of year so we certainly wish David good luck!

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Image

Lastly, I wanted to point out the incredible “new” photo 10 years in the making from the Hubble Space Telescope of a tiny, tiny spot in the constellation Fornax.  It’s called the eXtreme Deep Field Image and I cannot gush about this enough. I realize that the image just looks like another picture with lots of pretty little galactic smears. However, it’s literally the history of the universe in a single image! This is a picture showing galaxies just 450 million years after the big bang. Some of these galaxies are 13 BILLION years old.

Yeah, it’s cool. It’s very cool.

 2013 CALENDARS!

Now on sale for $15 to members!
Astronomy 2013 Calendars
by Terrence Dickinson

There’s a bunch of new calendars in stock and are available for purchase NOW! We have a VERY LIMITED selection of these excellent 2013 calendars, edited by Terence Dickinson. Available now to our members for $15 and non-members only $20. Click HERE to see the rest of the calendar images.

We’ve sold quite a few… Get them while you can!

NEXT MEETING: Tuesday October 16, 2012, 8:00pm

“The Cosmic History of Star Formation”

Mordecai-Mark Mac Low

Curator and Curator-in-Charge
Department of Astrophysics
Chair, Division of Physical Sciences
American Museum of Natural History

Adjunct Professor
Department of Astronomy
Columbia University

 Once, there were no stars, just hydrogen and helium gas, and dark matter.  Once stars did begin to form, there was a huge increase in the star formation rate, which has now fallen back, leaving the modern universe with star formation rates only a tenth of those at the peak.  In this talk I tell this story, and also a little of the story of how we are coming to understand this cosmic history.

Astro Web Site Of The Month
by Cal Powell

Seiichi Yoshida’s website at http://www.aerith.net/index.html contains an impressive wealth of information on comets, variable stars, and other astronomical objects. The emphasis here is on observation and data sharing; you will find a weekly update on visible comets, a five-year schedule of predicted comets with brightness estimates, Yoshida’s comet observation diary, a worldwide project (MISAO) to monitor variable stars, and tools for planning Messier-object and comet observing sessions.

Thanks to Dan Wright for bringing this site to my attention. Please send e-mail on your own personal web pages, or astronomy links that you find interesting or noteworthy to me at planetarium.guy@gmail.com

Upcoming Events at the Rolnick Observatory

Astronomy Prose

Plato

For it is obvious to everybody, I think, that this study [of astronomy] compels the soul to look upward and leads it away from things here to higher things. ~Plato

Observatory Report
by Bob Meadows

The Connecticut Star Party was September 14 to 16 in Ashford, CT.  Friday night was mostly cloudy with thin clouds.  Saturday was clear.  The keynote speaker was David Ciardi of Cal Tech, who works for NASA searching for exo-planets using the Kepler spacecraft.  WAS members attending were Bob Meadows, Dan Wright, Carl Lancaster, Todd Nelson, Adam Yates, Franco Fellah, and Tom and Meryl Zelenak.

Telescope classes on how to operate the 12 inch telescope were postponed because no one signed up.  Another class will be scheduled after the new computer and The Sky X are installed.  If you are interested in taking the class, please contact Bob Meadows.

Since temperatures have dropped, we put away the mosquito magnet.  It seemed to help a lot this year, although it did not eliminate all of the mosquitoes.

ROTATION SCHEDULE

   October

10   Bob Meadows   Bob Blasko          K. Moskovitz       *Franco Fellah

17   Mike Bellacosa                              Evan Tilley          *Bob Meadows

24   Karl Procop       Quintin Brantley   Frank Cirino

31   Bob Meadows   Tom Davis           David Ives

   November

7    Bob Blasko       Bob Tobin           Evan Tilley       *Dan Wright

14   Bob Meadows  Mike Bellacosa  K. Moskovitz    *Franco Fellah

21   Karl Procop      Quintin Brantley   Frank Cirino    *TBD

28   Tom Davis       David Ives

   December

5      Bob Blasko          Evan Tilley        *Dan Wright

12    Bob Tobin           K. Moskovitz    *Franco Fellah

19    Mike Bellacosa    Frank Cirino     *Bob Meadows

26    Karl Procop         David Ives