The Night Sky Guy

Planetary Bonanza this Week!

Seems like this week is packed with planetary news – hard to keep up with what’s going on in the Cosmos! First off we heard at the beginning of the week that the oldest material in the solar system was discovered lodged inside a North African meteorite. Based on the anaysis of a pea-sized mineral found inside the space rock the new age of the solar system is 4,586.2 million years old – pushing back the age by 2 million years. May not sound like much when we are talking about billions of years – but it makes a huge difference in terms of helping bolster the theory that a nearby ancient supernova explosion may have seeded our solar system with heavy metals and helped give birth to our sun and planets.  The late astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “we are all made of starstuff”.  This now really holds true – just think  that all the iron that is in our bodies was forged inside a massive star that exploded 5 billion years ago!

Next story to make the news mid-week was that an alien star about 127 light years away hosts five to seven planets the size of Neptune. What is really interesting here is that one of the planets may be the least massive one every detected-roughly about 1.4 times the mass of Earth. This has yet to be confirmed, but this planetary system may turn out to be the most similar to our own solar system ever discovered.  It will be worth keeping tabs on this story and see what develops when researchers may confirm this potential terrestrial-like world.

Finally on Thursday afternoon, NASA announces that its planet-hunting probe, Kepler, has discovered two Saturn-sized planets orbiting the same sun-like star. Here again they are saying that there are hints of a third possible, Earth-sized planet lurking.

I think we are getting pretty close to hearing the first confirmed detection of an Earth-sized planet. Maybe within the year? Crossing my fingers.

Exciting times we live in!

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Mars Hoax on Again!

It’s late August and like clockwork everyone around the world is being bombarded by a bogus stargazing email, the contents of which have become an urban legend of sorts and never fails to pique peoples interests – I am talking about the annual Mars email hoax landing in your inbox. Every year since 2003 a chain email makes its rounds throughout the internet that touts that on August 27th the planet Mars will be closer than ever before to Earth and it will appear as big as the full moon in the sky to the naked eye.Thank goodness this is not true for if the Red Planet was indeed that close its gravitational pull would wreak havoc with our own planet. But the email is based on some reality.

Mars did in fact have a very close encounter with Earth back in the summer of 2003 when it was only 56 million km away – the closest it had come to us in over 60,000 years. The planet however still only appeared as a very bright reddish star in the sky. But those who had a telescope trained on it noticed that even at low magnification Mars appeared as big as the full moon does through the telescope. This observation was relayed from one amateur astronomer to another that year and it got sent on to other people and so on. Unfortunately, as is the case with many stories, some of the crucial facts were left out along the way and the story got twisted into a hoax.

Read my National Geographic News article published last time this hoax made its rounds on the net.

Also check out the NASA story too.

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Jupiter Hit Again!

August 20, 2010, at 18:22 Universal Time, Japanese amateur Masayuki Tachikawa recorded a brief flash on Jupiter (upper right of center)

A Japanese backyard astronomer reports seeing a distinct flash in the upper cloud deck of Jupiter on Friday August 20th. The optical flash was recorded through his 6 inch refracting telescope using a webcam.

You can read a report and check out his video of the event.

What caused the flash of light? Most probably an asteroid or comet – maybe something a few meters in size. It appears similar to the impact flashes seen on the planet this past June and July 2009.

So far no other observers have seen any remnants of an impact.  Stay tuned for more details as they become available.

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Stargazing TV Icon Dies

Some sad news in the astronomy world today….Known to millions across Canada and the US as PBS television’s  Star Hustler, Jack Horkheimer has died at his Miami, Florida home Friday at the age of 72 after a lengthy illness.  Always a flamboyant showman,  Jack was a true inspiration for generations of backyard stargazers with his weekly late night 5 minute show about upcoming naked-eye astronomy highlights.  Each and every one of his some 1,700 shows he would end with his signature sign-off, “Keep Looking Up!”

He was a one-of-a-kind, funny and passionate advocate of astronomy who just loved to spread the word about the hobby through his show and as director of the Miami planetarium.

I had the good fortune to interview him for the last time earlier this year for a story I was writing about observing our Moon and he was simply a joy to chat with.  His deep love for the night sky and desire to communicate its many wonders was readily apparent to me and despite his respiratory illness he was battling, he never lost any of his eloquency and excitement for the universe.

Being an astronomy popularizer myself for nearly 20 years,  I can say that Jack was a trailblazer and opened the cosmic door to the mass media and made astronomy cool to the public at large.  I know he taught me a lot about public communication of science – how to convey astronomy jargon in simple and entertaining ways, and I think he set an example of how to be a passionate ambassador of the starry heavens. Thank you Jack!

You can see his final shows in the coming weeks on your local PBS station or online. The last episode with Jack will air the first week of September and talk about the Summer Triangle.  Reading his online bio,  Jack wrote a funny epitaph for himself which I think reflects well his quirky personality…“Keep Looking Up was my life’s admonition, I can do little else in my present position.”

Here is this week’s episode for your enjoyment…

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Perseids Wrap Up

The Perseid meteor shower has come and gone and reports coming in to the  International Meteor Organization (IMO) say that from dark locations, rates at peak time on the night of August 12th were about 140 shooting stars per hour.  However most people I talked to from city suburbs, rates were much more modest – around 20 to 60 meteors per hour. That is still a great showing, thanks to the moon not being in the sky at peak times. Here are a few photos …

Karine Laurin, Lac Herman in the Parc du Mont-Tremblant, QC, Canada

David A Harvey, Mount Lemmon, Arizona, USA

meteor racing across Cygnus the swan,; Credit: Andrew Fazekas

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Perseids Ramping Up

Last nights numbers of pre-peak Perseids are very encouraging. About 48 hours before the predicted peak observers reported seeing on average around 20 to 30 meteors per hour! …With any luck those number should double or triple by Thursday night.

courtesy of IMO; click image to enlarge

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Aurora Alert Tonight

On Sunday morning the Sun’s entire Earth facing side erupted in activity which resulted in it belching out a supercharged cloud of particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME) that has Earth in  its crosshairs. Tip of the hat to Spaceweather.com for breaking this story. The CME will be in two parts with the first section already having slammed into Earth’s magnetic field around 1:30 pm EDT today. It doesn’t look like it was a big eruption on the solar flare ‘richter’ scale – C class - but forecasters are calling on  45% chance of geomagnetic activity int  overnight hours tonight.

Snapshot from NASA satellite of August 1st solar blast

Best chance to spot the northern lights is to look towards your local northern horizon late night – usually around midnight. Those living in high latitude have a better chance of  seeing something than those living closer to the equator- this usually means that folks living in Canada and bordering states are better placed for even fainter, more commonly occuring auroras.  The display may be faint so if you are out in the dark countryside you have a better chance of catching it . What will it look like? Most likely it will appear as a green or pinkish glow with shimmering curtains of light that spread across the lower sky.  Of course clear skies help!

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Planets Begin Sky Snuggle

Saturday night planets put on sky show in the west

Over the course of the next couple of weeks a trio of the brightest planets in the evening sky will slowly meetup to produce an impressive tight triangular formation the first two weeks in August.

But you don’t have to wait because you can go outside the next few nights already and watch as the planets, Venus, Mars and Saturn slowly converge low in the western sky just after sunset. This Saturday night – july 31st- planets Mars and Saturn will be their closest for the year – less than 2 degrees apart.

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Scores of Sister Earths Found?

Kepler Discovery Slide; Click to enlarge

Has NASA’s Kepler mission identified up to 140 candidate Earth-sized planets? Maybe, maybe not…. The internet is abuzz with chatter of new  information NASA scientists may have released recently at a conference in the UK during a lecture on the Kepler mission and some of its preliminary exoplanet search findings.

Meanwhile, this tantalizing but admittedly speculative news comes on the heals of  a new scientific paper released last week officially describing the first 6 weeks of operation of the space telescope. The authors say they may have found 706 possible candidate planets around distant star systems with “some of these sizes from as small as that of the Earth to larger than that of Jupiter” . At this point the NASA science team members are just saying that these numbers are referring to candidates earth-like planets that have apparent signatures they are looking for.  But we have to take a deep breath and wait some more because a lot of followup work will have to be done any many of these early candidates will probably be eliminated as false positives in the coming months of observations and data analysis.  But as Space.com reported last week, NASA researchers do believe that Earth-sized planets may be much more common.  “Among the hundreds of candidate planets, a large percentage of them appear to be Earth-like – that is, small and rocky, rather than large and gassy, like Jupiter.”

Anyway, check out the following video of a talk given by one of the space telescope investigators.   Definitely whets the appetite for hearing more…

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Celestial Teapot

Teapot pattern in the southern sky

One of the greatest wonders of the night sky is the Milky Way and while you may not really be able to see it in all its splendor under a light polluted city, you can find it’s centre.  First look for a giant Teapot pattern of stars low to the southern horizon. This marks the brightest stars in the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer. Coming out of the Teapot’s spout, like celestial steam, is the glow of the Milky Way galaxy. In fact when you stare at this region of the sky you are looking towards the centre of our galaxy more than 30,000 light years away. With telescopes and binoculars you will notice that this whole area is packed with countless number of stars.  From a dark countryside locale a ghostly ribbon of light arches into the overhead sky – that celestial steam you see from the Teapot- continues to stretch across most of the late night summer sky. Amazing to think that what you are looking at is one of the spiral arms of our home galaxy – right there in front of you,

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