One of the former Doc students in the counseling program also taught astronomy classes on campus. Since he worked for the Astronomy department he has access to the school's telescope. So, one night he opened up the roof of the Physical Science building so that we could use the telescope to look at heavens. It was amazing. We saw Jupiter and three of its moons. I could actually see the dark rings. We also saw another galaxy, stars, including the star cluster that the Subaru car company got its name from and in the spring he is going to show us Saturn. Of course, being the star gazer that I am, I found the Big Dipper on my own. Well, I thought it was the Big Dipper till Mark said the Big Dipper was north and I was looking east.
Mark then sent us a write up of what we saw with pictures that have been taken my more powerful telescopes. Anyway, if you are a star gazer you might find the information below interesting.
1. The Great Hercules Cluster.
http://www.rc-astro.com/photo/id1015_big.html This was the little ol’ globular cluster of 300,000 stars that we started the evening with. It orbits outside the plane of the Milky Way, in what is referred to as the “halo” of the galaxy.
2. Mizar A and Mizar B. The middle star of the handle of the Big Dipper.
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/peter.wienerroither/pwafods/13239+5456.htm Mizar A and B are labeled, with Alcor way off to the side. You may remember it that way in the telescope, though the orientation was likely a bit different.
3. M57, The Ring Nebula.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0303/m57ring_hst_big.jpg This was the first of two planetary nebulae we looked at – it looked like a hollowed out, green donut. Again, it’s more of a cylinder, seen right down the axis of the barrel itself. This dramatic shedding of the outer layers is a preview of what our sun will be doing in another 5 billion years. In this image, you can clearly make out the white dwarf at the center of the nebula, which is the collapsed core of the original star. I once took an astrophoto of this object, in Wisconsin, in which you could resolve the central star. Admittedly, it did not look quite like this image, though…
4. M27, The Dumbbell Nebula.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0103/dumbbell_noao_big.jpg Another planetary nebula. This one clearly shows off the bipolar nature of these objects. Again, these outflows of gas from these stars are directed and influenced by the strong magnetic fields of these stars, and the existence of a northern and southern magnetic pole is what drives the symmetrical nature of the planetary nebula itself.
5. Albireo.
http://mm04.nasaimages.org/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/Size4/NVA2-4-NA/6789/albireo_yandrik_big.jpg&userid=1&username=admin&resolution=4&servertype=JVA&cid=4&iid=NVA2&vcid=NA&usergroup=NASA_Astronomy_Picture_of_the_Day_Collecti-4-Admin&profileid=16 The binary star system that is, to the naked eye, recognized as the head of Cygnus, The Swan. Albireo is actually Arabic for “head.” The juxtaposition of a deeply blue colored star next to a gold star is pretty stunning at the telescope.
6. M31, The Andromeda Galaxy.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0210/Andromeda_gendler_sm.jpg This is, again, the closest spiral to the Milky Way. However, at a distance of 2.2 million light years away makes it hard to fathom that it’s merely a “stone’s throw away” compared to the other hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. It’s about twice the size (in terms of stellar population) of the Milky Way, harboring about 400 billion stars. The neatest thing of all, something I forgot to mention the other night is that, the measured Doppler Shift from this galaxy indicates that it is moving toward us, ever so slowly. In about 2 to 3 billion years, it will actually merge with the Milky Way. Our galaxies will become one. In the meantime, the Andromeda Galaxy will slowly become brighter and brighter in our night sky, and in a couple billion years, will DOMINATE the appearance of our night skies…
7. M45, The Pleiades Cluster.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0601/pleiades_gendler_big.jpg Also known as “Subaru” in Japanese, we looked at this one through binoculars. As you can clearly tell, this cluster is visually composed almost entirely of blue stars. That’s a little misleading, because, in general blue stars tend to be very bright compared to cooler, red stars. So, when a cluster is born, if it’s young, will have blue, white, yellow, red, etc. colored stars. And the blue stars will be VASTLY outnumbered by the red stars. Even though 90% of the stars in a young cluster will be cool and red, they are so dim that they don’t show up anywhere near as prominently. Therefore, you get a huge selection bias. So what you see isn’t necessarily representative of what’s there. So a cluster may have only 1 – 2% of its stellar population being blue stars, but these are the bright guys, so they dominate the visual appearance of the cluster until they die. The hot, massive, blue stars die first, as the largest stars actually live the shortest lives. Eventually, clusters lose their blue stars, then their white, then their yellow, until eventually old star clusters end up looking markedly red in appearance, because that’s all that’s left.
