What will Scorpius look like for the Big Aussie Star Hunt? August 14, 2009
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Starting on Saturday 15th August and running through to the 23rd August, Australians are encouraged to take part in the Big Aussie Star Hunt, this year’s National Project for National Science Week. As I’ve already discussed a key component of this program is getting people across the nation to go outside at night and observe the constellation of Scorpius. They can then compare their naked-eye observations with a series of eight diagrams to find which one best matches with what they see then log their results online via a simple form on the website. With enough observations from across the nation we hope to be able to map out light pollution.
On the website you can download some excellent sky maps and finder charts prepared by Kym Thalassoudis of Skymaps.com. There are eight charts showing what Scorpius looks like at different limiting magnitudes.
Now just to make the observations even more interesting it seems that a couple of stars in Scorpius are going through an interesting phase. Mike Simonsen, regular astronomy blogger and variable star observer reports that both Antares (alpha Scorpii) and delta Scorpii are much dimmer than normal at present. Read this story, the Scorpion’s Heart and Eye Grow Faint on his blog to learn more than go out and check for your yourself next week.
Brecht’s The Life of Galileo in Geraldton August 13, 2009
Posted by astroed in Astronomy, General.Tags: galileo, Geraldton, national science week, theatre
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Next week I am in the Mid West region of Western Australia for a series of events supporting National Science Week.
One of these is on Thursday, 20 August at the Queens Park Theatre in Geraldton. The Junior Players of Theatre Eight are presenting Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo at 8pm. Prior to this at 7.30pm I will be giving a public talk at the theatre about Galileo, discussing his contributions to science, especially physics and astronomy. The play itself runs for the following two nights at 7.30pm with a matinee on at 2pm on the Saturday. Tickets are available for $10 from Queens Park Theatre on 08 9956 6662.
Poster for Theatre Eight's production of The Life of Galileo
PULSE@Parkes from VSSEC August 7, 2009
Posted by astroed in Astronomy, Education.Tags: Parkes, PULSE@Parkes, VSSEC
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We’ve just finished a PULSE@Parkes observing session at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre, VSSEC. Students from Strathmore Secondary College, Footscray City Secondary College and Braemar College controlled the iconic 64m Parkes radio telescope remotely from Melbourne to observe pulsars.
As a first this session was broadcast live via twitter (@PULSEatParkes) to followers around the world.
Here is the media release. I’ll put more details up soon.
The Big Aussie Star Hunt, 15-23 August 2009 August 6, 2009
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Get involved in this year’s National Project for National Science Week, the Big Aussie Star Hunt. This is a great opportunity to engage students and the public in astronomy. The project is designed to get people to go outside and learn more about the night sky. To achieve this there are several components:
- Tours, both a virtual one to try on your computer and an outdoors one.
- The star hunt survey which asks participants to locate Crux and Scorpius and compare their observations of Scorpius with eight diagrams to match the appropriate one. They then enter their results in a simple online form. The results are combined to produce what will hopefully be the largest night sky and light pollution survey conducted in Australia. This survey runs 15 -23 August. Submitting observations automatically enters you for a competition to win a bundle of stuff from the ABC store. There is also a schools competition.
- Tips and Tools; including reviews and links to great free software such as Stellarium, Celestia, Microsoft WorldWide Telescope and Google Sky. You can also learn how to find South using the stars,
- Special features including Aboriginal astronomy, a night sky quiz, ask an expert sections on several topics including light pollution and a photo gallery.
- A section with information for teachers. This includes my tips on how to run a viewing night and more.
- Links to other dark sky projects such as Globe at Night and other useful astronomical sites.
You can download a nine-page PDF with sky charts and background material to help with the viewing. There is also a narrated sky tour by Fred Watson that you can download as an MP3. The ABC Science Online team have done a great job developing this site and it was a pleasure working them from the initial conception onwards.
Go and visit the site then get out and look up in Science Week!
Big Aussie Star Hunt promotional poster
“Astronomy – Science without Limits”: 6th Annual NSW K-6 Science & Technology Conference August 4, 2009
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The Science Teachers’ Association of NSW is holding its annual science and technology conference for K-6 teachers on Friday 11 September 2009, 9.00 am – 4.45 pm at the Powerhouse Museum, Pyrmont in Sydney. This year’s theme is Astronomy – Science without Limits reflecting the International Year of Astronomy.
They have a great range of speakers and workshops arranged. Dr Andrew Hopkins, Head of AAT Science at the Anglo-Australian Observatory is the keynote science speaker. Andrew’s research focuses on galaxy evolution, using multiwavelength data to explore how galaxy morphologies develop and evolve, and the role of star formation and galaxy environment. Associate Professor Keith Stamp from Southern Cross University, Lismore is the education keynote speaker.
There are two workshop sessions on the program with participants able to select from seven different enticing astronomy/space-related presentations by six presenters. Topics include:
- Looking at the stars: An exploration of telescopes and images from space.
- Indigenous Astronomy: Shared Stars
- Blast off! With UniServe Science: Using Rocketry as an Introduction to Astronomy
- Failure is not an option
- Tome and the Sun, Earth and Moon
- Weather in the Solar System – an introduction to meteorology for Stage 3
- NXT Next Generation Robotics.
It should be a fantastic day of professional development and will hopefully be well attended by teachers from across the state. Unfortunately I’m unable to attend as I’ll be heading off that day to San Francisco for the ASP’s Annual Meeting and a weekend series of workshops on the Galileo Teacher Training Program. I’ll write more about these events later.
The conference will also be the official opening of From Earth to the Universe an exhibition which will run from September 2009 to March 2010 at the Powerhouse to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. From Earth to the Universe is also on the IYA’s international cornerstone projects. The site is well worth visiting and could serve as the nucleus of an astronomy image display within any school or organisation. 100 outstanding astro images may be downloaded in a variety of formats along with full captions.
Parkes Open Weekend, 18-19 July 2009 August 3, 2009
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The recent open weekend at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory was a huge success. We had over 6,500 people visit over the two days including over 3,000 people touring the telescope itself. This is no mean feat when each tour group is a maximum of 15 people led by a staff member. The open weekend was scheduled for the weekend of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. A series of talks covered a range of topics, from my one on an Introduction to Radio Astronomy to Jill Tarter, from the SETI Institute who gave the John Bolton Memorial Lecture. Other presenters during the weekend included:
- David Malin, Astrophotographer, who spoke on ‘Galileo’s astronomical legacy’.
- John Sarkissian, Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) Operations Scientist, who lectured on ‘Parkes and the Apollo Missions’.
- George Hobbs, ATNF Astronomer, who discussed ‘Parkes and pulsars’.
Members of the Central West Astronomical Society with their daylight observing display at the Parkes Open Weekend 2009.
On Saturday the queue for the telescope tours was lengthy but luckily those in it were entertained by a couple of guest from Questacon; Einstein and an astronaut on a Segway. The first family in line early on Saturday morning had driven all the way from Townsville for the event. A couple had also come from the UK primarily for the Open Weekend!
Einstein and an Astronaut at the Dish
Visitors could also do a self-guided tour down to the Parkes Testbed Facility, a 1m antenna currently being used to trial new technologies for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a new array of 36 12m antennas being built by CSIRO in outback Western Australia. CSIRO Education had a Starlab portable planetarium set up so visitors could view the night sky during the day. The Central West Astronomical Society had a wide range of optical telescopes set up so that people could do some daytime viewing of the Sun, Moon and Venus. Stunning astro images for the 2009 David Malin Awards were also on display.
Have a look at a video of a fly-by of the iconic telescope. This was taken by a colleague, David Champion from his helicopter flight around the telescope during the open weekend. This provided a nice break for David as he was one of the three astronomers observing throughout the weekend. They had a new tour group past their control room every few minutes on both days so were somewhat like goldfish in a bowl but they cheerfully spoke to each group about the observations they were making.
The weekend was a great success with perfect weather. Now only two years to the Dish’s 50th anniversary!
Cosmos and Culture at the Science Museum in London July 28, 2009
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One of my favourite places as a young boy growing up in London, The Science Museum in South Kensington, London has a new exhibition Cosmos & Culture: how astronomy has shaped our world. The website shows some of the varied exhibits on display including the 6 foot mirror from Leviathan, the Earl of Rosse’s great nineteenth century telescope in Ireland and a prototype beam splitter from LIGO. The exhibition also includes a first edition of Copernicus’ de Revolutionibus and one of William Herschel’s telescopes that he may have used to discover Uranus.
(Some of William Herschel’s eyepieces on display in the Science in the 18th Century gallery)
The BBC has a lovely slideshow of seven of the exhibits. The last one is particularly fun; the Moon Machine from Wallace and Grommit’s A Grand Day Out.
Cosmos & Culture is free and runs through to the end of 2010. If visiting the museum I’d also recommend that you go along to the Science in the 18th Century gallery as it has a fine collection of astronomical equipment from the era. Here are some photos I took of some of the displays when visiting last September.
Another must-see gallery is Exploring Space.
In praise of astronomers July 27, 2009
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The Guardian in the UK had a great editorial on Saturday 25 July; In praise of astronomers celebrating their achievements and contributions. It concludes:
Astronomers around the world compete, co-operate and confer; they are a global community, in the richest sense of the term, and we owe to them our understanding of space and time, and light, and mass, and gravity: in a word, everything.
Thanks Megan for the tip off.
St Andrews, in the footsteps of James Gregory September 21, 2008
Posted by astroed in Astronomy, Education.Tags: history, stargazer, telescopes
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On Saturday we travelled out from Edinburgh to the ancient kingdom of Fife, just north of the Firth of Forth. After a pleasant stop at Elcho Castle we arrived in the University city of St Andrews, otherwise famous of course for golf. Our goal was to visit some places in town associated with the Scottish astronomer and mathematician, James Gregory (1638 – 1675) who was Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University.
Gregory has often been compared with Isaac Newton but unfortunately died tragically young at 36 years old before his achievements were fully recognised.
Gregory is today commemorated by the type of reflecting telescope that bears his name, the Gregorian. In Gregory’s time telescope makers were still making telescopes from lenses – refracting telescopes. These suffered from problems with chromatic aberration that split the light into component colours when looking at brighter stars and planets. The other issue was that in order to get higher magnifications the refracting telescopes used longer and longer focal length. This resulted in ridiculously long telescopes that were increasingly hard to handle and point successfully at stars.
Whilst Newton is credited with building the first successful reflecting telescope, that is one that uses a primary mirror instead of an objective lens, there is strong evidence to support the case that Gregory had built an earlier one in early 1663 using a concave primary and a concave secondary. A year earlier he had published his work Optica promota that was well received. Gregory also developed an early form of what we now call calculus, another discovery normally attributed to Newton and Leibniz.
Joseph Knibb’s split-second clock, used by James Gregory.
In St Andrews we were fortunate to visit the Senate House that houses the clocks built by the clockmaker Joseph Knibb and purchased by Gregory in 1673 for timing his observations. One of these early pendulum clocks was the first to record split-seconds. It had a mechanism that used 1/3 second motions. Gregory conducted his observations from the room next door, now the St James Library. He used a transit telescope pointing south out of one o the windows. The transit line is now hidden beneath the carpet but the bracket on which his transit telescope was mounted is still visible through the window. Unfortunately a building has now been built adjacent to it, blocking the view that Gregory would have once had.
Bracket (at left) that Gregory used for his transit telescope.
In the ruins of St Andrews Cathedral, once one of the largest in the British Isles is the imposing Rules Tower. The university had suggested to Gregory that he could build his observatory on the top of the tower but declined, probably wisely given the task he would have faced lugging his equipment to the top!
Earlier in the week I had come across one of the first successful gregorian telescopes built many years later and now housed in the National Museum of Scotland.
Gregorian telescope from National Museum of Scotland.
Before we departed St Andrews we were also fortunate to visit the modern observatory of the university led by Professor Andrew Collier Cameron, Professor of Astronomy at the university. Here we inspected the 40” Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope now called the Gregory Telescope. This is still in use for exo-planet transit studies. It was actually only the second telescope of this design ever built. The first, a half-size prototype was also built for the observatory and housed in a nearby dome but has since been dismantled.
Dinner was an extremely enjoyable meal at The Hideaway in Dunfermline, run by Fred’s son-in-law. Our dinner guest was none other than the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor John Brown from the University of Glasgow. He entertained us with some magic tricks for black holes, interstellar dust and cosmic strings. A fine way to end such a wonderful day.
Professor John Brown, Astronomer Royal for Scotland having fun with cosmic strings!
Questions:
- Why was the invention of the pendulum clock important for astronomers in the second half of the 1600?
- What are some advantages of a reflecting telescope over a refracting (lens) telescope?
400 Years of the Telescope – Edinburgh September 20, 2008
Posted by astroed in Astronomy.Tags: history, stargazer
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I’m now on a tour of Europe with a group of Australian astronomy enthusiasts. We are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first recorded public demonstration of the telescope by spending 18 days travelling to sites associated with the early history of the this amazing invention. The tour is led by renowned astronomer and public face of astronomy in Australia, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer-in-Charge of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Coonabarabran. He wrote a book about these very events, Stargazer, a few years ago.
As we journey around Europe over the next few weeks I hope to post as many entries a I can about the trip. I was inspired to write this and post some accompanying questions for school students by a dynamic teacher from Queensland, Charlotte Pezaro, who I met recently at CONASTA. Her class and another one in Texas will hopefully follow our journey. As time is tight on the trip I intend to post some more detailed articles here once I get back to Australia.
Our tour started in Edinburgh in Scotalnd on Thursday 18 September. On the Friday we journeyed up onto Blackford Hill, three kilometers south of the centre of Edinburgh to the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.
The Royal Observatory Edinburgh is home to one of the world’s great collections of early astronomical books. The Crawford Collection was gifted to the nation by the 26th Earl of Crawford in 1888 and contains over 15,000 items. Gems include a first edition of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus that was owned and annotated by by Erasmus Reinholdus, Professor of Astronomy at Wittenburg. Many experts regard this as the most important copy in existence as Erasmus’ comments give us an insight into how Copernicus’ ideas were received in the early days.
We were privileged to have access to the collection’s gems. The Librarian in charge of the collection, Karen Moran, discussed some of the Sidereus nuncius, Newton’s Principae and Halley’s synopsis on comets.
Today’s Questions:
What was the most important idea in Copernicus’ work?
Why was the development of printing books important to the spread of new astronomical ideas?
