6 April 2006

Tonight Kin and I attended an astronomy lecture at Columbia University. It was another of those "buy my book" lectures but interesting none the less. The book, which was just released is The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos by Joel Primack & Nancy Abrahms.

Primack is a professor at a left coast university (UC Santa Barbara I think it was) and it sounds like Abrahams is some sort of lobbyist for the scientific community.

I am not big on cosmology which is what this book is all about, but I was able to follow the lecture pretty well. Abrahams introduced the topics in common language then Primack would talk briefly about the hard science. They had a lot of fly-through movies of different parts of the universe that illustrated how the 3-D model of the universe has been developed. It was kind of like going to the planetarium and seeing the new sky shows that are more universe fly throughs than shows of the stars, only better done.

As I understood the talk, their premise is that we need to view ourselves at the center of the universe and act responsibly toward it. The book is in eight chapters, each of which illustrates a different way of looking at the universe

Here are the few notes I made in my Palm, which doesn't like my Grifiti, that I was able to interpret:

• Earth is half way through it 1 million year period of habitability
• Composition of the universe

  Dark Energy	50.0%
  Cold Dark Matter	25.0%
  Invisible Atoms	4.0%
  Hydrogen and Helium	0.5%
  All other visible matter	0.1%

  
  That doesn't add up to 100% and I may have gotten a few numbers wrong but the general principle is correct. I am not sure their diagram, which was a pyramid from the largest proportion up to the smallest, which is the portion which the earth and humans are made of, added up to 100% either.
• The universe can be broken up into components which occupy 60 different orders of magnitude of size from the smallest known thing up through the size of the universe and humans are in the middle of that scale
• No animal can be increased in size greater than 3x its normal size.
  At 3x normal size its bones would be 9x its normal size (3x3)
  and its volume would be 27x its normal size (3x3x3).
  The weight of the animal would cause it to crush itself
• A mouse dropped down a 1000' well will be shocked by the fall but get up and walk away.
  A rat dropped down that same well will be killed.
  A man dropped down the well will be broken.
  A horse dropped down the well will be mush.
• Regarding the density of objects in the universe, the nearest neighbor star to a star in NYC would be in Australia.

NYPL claims to nave 11 copies of the book on order, one for my local library, and I am number two on the hold list when they start to arrive.

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Observing Location	Old Library Steps, Columbia University, Broadway @ 116 St, New York, NY
Observational Period	1830-1915 EDST
Atmospheric Conditions	There was a nice blue sky with no clouds, but the sun was still up so there were no stars either. Unfortunately Unfortunately university buildings blocked the sun so I was deprived of its warming rays. Transparency Excellent Seeing Excellent
Instruments	Canon 15x50 IS binocular - Charlie
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway

Target	Moon
Constellation	Cnc
Category	Lunar
Time	20060406.1830 EDT
Comments	The terminator was not a straight line so I could tell that the moon was just passed first quarter (20060405.0802 EDT). I scanned around to see if I could see Castor and Pollux or Saturn but was not able to find any of them. Saturn should have been doable and I am sure I would have gotten it if I had had my tripod.

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Observing Location	TotL
Observational Period	2145-0100 EDST
Atmospheric Conditions	Peter emailed in the afternoon proposing we meet at TotL to try and observe 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, saying CSC had been blue all day today. I had been seeing white out my window all day today. But when it was time to head to Columbia the clouds were breaking up and I tool my binocular sans tripod. After the lecture Kin rode his bike down to the park and I took the bus. The sky was very clear and the air stable. I did not notice any wavering in the moon images and Peter commented about the Airey disk being solid. We were approaching Mag 5.0 naked-eye. Transparency Excellent Seeing Excellent
Instruments	Canon 15x50 IS binocular - Charlie Tacahaschi 102 refractor - Peter Celestron binocular - Kin
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway Peter Tagatac Kin Lee

I didn't make any notes about what we observed so am sure that I will be forgetting something.

Peter had the Tac refractor with diagonal mirror so we got some nice views of the Moon and Saturn even though the magnification stayed below 100x. It is interesting that in photography is is almost a sin to use a telextender because of the deleterious effect it has on the image quality while Barlows, which are essentially the same thing, are acceptible in astronomy and do not degrade the image greatly. We used both 2x and 3x Barlows and other than making it hard to find the optical axis of the lens I did not notice any degradation of the image, it remained sharp all the time.

Target	Moon
Constellation	Cnc
Category	Lunar
Time	20060406.2200 EDT
Comments	The moon looked really nice where we were looking at it along the terminator in Mare Imbrium. There was terracing evident on the floor of the old crater. Up near Plato the Alps looked like a bunch of separated termite mounds. The Alpine Valley, Vallis Alpes, looked like a gash in the surface of the Moon. It took me a good while to find it but Peter eventually talked me onto the Straight Wall, Rupes Recta. This is the first time I have been behind the Tac in a good while and I was having trouble getting my bearings. I was thinking that it was up and down reversed as well as left right reversed. Once I got that figured out it was a lot easier to make Peter's descriptions fit with the view in the eyepiece.

Target	Saturn
Constellation	Cnc
Category	Planet
Time	20060406.2300 EDT
Comments	I didn't take note of the ring division but think I saw both poles. Titan was bright and easily seen a good distance above the planet. More difficult to see were three other moons between Titan and Saturn. There was one off to the left and two to the right.

Target	73P/Schwassman-Wachmann
Constellation	Boo
Category	Comet
Time	20060406.2330 EDT
Comments	Not Seen We found that the orbital elements that Peter and I have downloaded from Andreas' site for Planetarium are slightly different and putting the comet on opposite sides of the kite of Bootes. Based on the MPC number Peter's elements are newer than mine, but not necessarily more correct. His elements place the comet below the kite between η Boo and ζ Boo while mine place it high of the line between ρ Boo and Arcturus. When I got home I pulled out the elements I had just downloaded from neo.hpl.nasa.gov and inputted the first six fragments into planetarium and none of them show up anywhere near where the ephemeris data downloaded from the Minor Planet Center at Harvard say the comet is. That ephemeris seems to indicate that the planet is where Peter's data shows it but they only give positions for every five days and today is not one of them. I am going to have to input all of the fragments and send the file to Andreas and see if he can explain what is going on. From the elements I have entered so far it looks like the fragments cover a lot of sky and maybe the ephemeris provided by MPC is for the center of the cluster or a bright chunk that I haven't entered yet.

Target	Jupiter
Constellation	Lib
Category	Planet
Time	20060407.0015 EDT
Comments	When Jupiter was clearing the trees I checked Planetarium and found that Io appeared to be in transit. Peter checked it in Astromist and confirmed the transit and a shadow transit so we gave it a try. We didn't see either Io or its shadow but did get some nice stable views of the planet and its other moons. The northern hemisphere appeared to be gray-blue to me and the southern cream colored. Peter characterized the northern as greenish. The NEB was more prominent, darker, than the SEB. The margins of the equatorial belts appeared a bit lumpy like there were knots died in them. The GRS was supposed to be rotating onto the disk and the SEB did not extend all the way to the limb of the planet on its leading edge as did the NEB so we infer that that was the GRS. Red Jr. trails the GRS so it would have been on the back side of the planet.

Target	Meteor
Constellation
Category	Meteor
Time	~20060407.0045 EDT
Comments	While looking at Corona Borealis to see how many stars I could see there I saw c meteorite. Peter was looking to the north and missed it but thought I had seen two of them because I said "Woooow!...Woooow!" The meteor tracked across about 15-20° of the sky and brightened twice during that time. It was very bright and there were individual points of light at the edges of the tail. I would guess that this was about 0045 EDT. It came from high overhead between Alkaid in UMA and Cor Caroli in Canis Venitaci and streaked down to towards Arcturus in Bootes (that would be a distance of 30°). It was bright and a golden yellow in color and very well defined against the dark sky. It is one of the most spectacular meteors I have seen.