Mars

Mars will be at opposition at 20:35 03 March 2012 UT. Mars will have a visual magnitude of -1.23, a size of about 13.9 arcseconds and be about 0.67 AU away from Earth in the constellation of Leo. Mars will appear as a bright red-orange object that should rise at about the same time the sun sets.

Sounds good so far right, easy target! Well the answer is yes and no. In a modest 3″ – 4″ backyard reflector Mars will appear as a bright reddish orange disk with some detail here and there depending on the sky conditions at that time. Under high magnification and good seeing you can tease out a polar cap and some surface detail when the conditions are right. Follow these steps to ensure your best viewing.

• Choose a calm night with good seeing conditions. So long as the stars aren’t twinkling too much your chances of decent seeing even under a little haze are good.
• Stay up late! Mars doesn’t rise high in the sky until later in the evening. Make sure Mars rises up past the atmospheric muck and skyglow for best results.
• Use the highest magnification allowed by your scope. I would begin with magnification around 90x and work my way up until things get blurry then step back a bit.
• Make sure your scopes mirror has become acclimated to the outside temperature. Once temperature has become steady on the mirror and tube your results will get better
• Switch out some filters if you have them. Colors of yellow, orange, red, green and blue can tease out certain features such as Deserts, polar cap boundaries, cloud bands, etc… Your mileage may vary between filters but go for it!
• Stay with it! Keep your eye on the planet and watch as conditions change on Mars and Earth. You may get glimpses of great clarity and the details will pop out at you. Stick with it for best results
• Keep in mind that Mars is only twice as big as our moon, but as much as 200 times farther away during opposition.

If you can get a picture and send it to iskywatch.com so we can post it! We would love to hear your method of viewing mars as well. All posts are welcome…

If you are in the Chicagoland area try to stop by the Hickory Knolls Mars Madness party we are throwing that evening. Click here for details… Hickory Knolls

Clear Skies…

Rich Wagner

www.iskywatch.com

“I am a night sky enthusiast,” said Walker, who grew up in Mount Morris, Ill. As a child, he was “really into” astronomy and loved lying on a blanket in the backyard, just watching the stars.

“I could see the Milky Way and lots of stars,” Walker said. “Then I grew up, went into the Army and moved out to the suburbs,” and didn’t think much more about those nights looking at the sky.

Two years ago, however, when his then-4-year-old daughter asked him questions about the stars and planets, it re-ignited that passion, he said.

Walker (no relation to this reporter) got a telescope and began watching shows about stars and planets on TV. Walker and other Chicago-area amateur astronomers do what they call “sidewalk astronomy,” setting up telescopes outside the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and offering passers-by a chance to see a star and the planets on their own.

He also realized that his daughter, now age 6, probably won’t have the chance to grow up seeing the stars and planets the same way he did — because of light pollution.

So Walker founded the website www.OneDarkSky.com, a site dedicated to amateur astronomy and the night sky in general.

He and others like him want to promote turning off lights in the cities at night, to give others the opportunity to really see what the night sky can be.

Some may say that if he wants to see the night sky, he should just drive out to the countryside — that the city is a place of bright lights and that nothing can, or should, be done about it.

But he suspects those people have never really seen what the sky can look like at night, Walker said.

Smart lighting

Night sky enthusiasts say they are not trying to make the U.S. or the Chicago region into a picture of North Korea — nighttime shots of nothing but blackness over the land.

“We are trying to educate people. What we are looking for is smart and responsible lighting at night,” Walker said.

The lights in parking lots that light the sky but not the parking lot, the neighbor’s yard light that stays on all night, the streetlights that are on from dusk to dawn with no shielding from the night sky — all those cause the light pollution that blocks views of the stars.

If there are laws about noise pollution — not keeping neighbors awake with noise from parties — then why, Walker asks, can a neighbor’s yard light be kept on all night, shining into his house?

He had one neighbor whose backyard light was so bright that even more than a block away from his home he could use that light to cast shadow puppets for his daughter.

Lights on all the time also give residents a false sense of security, he said. One United Kingdom study he referenced showed that crime went down when the lights were turned off at night — the criminals didn’t like being out in the pitch black either, and flashlights just drew attention to their actions, Walker said.

Targeting pollution

There also is a push in Cook County and the Cook County Forest District to reduce the amount of light pollution in the county, Walker noted.

“The Cook County Board and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County are considering a lighting ordinance that celebrates starlight and aims to reduce the light pollution so prevalent in the Chicago metropolitan area,” he said. “The ordinance has already been presented and a vote is scheduled for the beginning of February.”

Voters in Campton Hills approved of such a “dark sky” ordinance in a 2009, and Barrington Hills has passed local rules limiting light pollution.

Walker, several friends in the amateur astronomy community, and other like-minded organizations “are preparing for a grand celebration of our night skies in 2012.”

In July, the Astronomical League will host its annual conference in Chicago,

Called ALCon2012, the conference corresponds to both the 150th anniversary of modern astronomy in the Western Hemisphere and the 175th anniversary of the city of Chicago, Walker said.

Original article posted @ Courier News

It’s too early to say where pieces of the unmanned Phobos-Grunt probe could fall. But on Sunday afternoon – the middle of the re-entry window – the nearly 15-ton probe is projected to be over the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles southwest of Indonesia, the Roscosmos space agency said Wednesday.

Twenty to 30 fragments, weighing a total of up to 440 pounds, could survive the heat of re-entry, Roscosmos said, according to the state-run Ria Novosti news agency.

The craft is carrying 7.5 tons of toxic fuel. That fuel is expected to burn up on re-entry, Ria Novosti reported, citing Roscosmos.

The $163 million probe, launched on November 9, was supposed go to Mars’ Phobos moon, where it was to collect soil and rock samples. A capsule containing the samples was to then return to Earth.

But the probe’s propulsion system failed to work after it reached low-Earth orbit.

The craft falling to Earth also contains a Chinese satellite, the Yinghuo-1, which was to be delivered to Mars orbit, where it was to observe the Red Planet. The Yinghuo-1 was going to be China’s first mission to Mars.

The U.S. Strategic Command, which says its Joint Functional Component Command for Space routinely tracks space objects, released a statement saying that “recent reports estimating (Phobos-Grunt) re-entry between January 13-17 are consistent with JFCC-Space and other United States government analysis.”

“Predictions of re-entry date, time and location can change significantly due to many changing factors, such as solar weather and orientation of the spacecraft,” the command said in the statement.

The probe’s loss is the latest in a series of recent setbacks for Russia’s space program.

On August 24, a Progress M-12M space freighter carrying food and other items to the international space station broke up over southern Siberia after failing to separate from its Soyuz-U carrier rocket, RIA Novosti reported.

Six days earlier, Russia lost a sophisticated Express-AM4 telecommunications satellite when the launch vehicle put it into the wrong orbit.

El Gordo — which means “the fat one” in Spanish — is officially known as ACT-CL J0102-4915 and “is located more than 7 billion light-years from Earth, at a time when the universe was half its current age,” study co-author John Patrick Hughes at Rutgers University told SPACE.com. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old.

The monster galaxy cluster has mass about 2 quadrillion (that’s 2 followed by 15 zeroes) times that of the sun, making it “the most massive known cluster in the distant universe.”

A galaxy cluster behemoth

Galaxy clusters form through mergers of smaller groups of galaxies. These events depend on the amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe, and thus could shed light on these enigmas. [See the El Gordo galaxy cluster]

Dark energy seems to make up 73 percent of all the mass and energy in the universe, and is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. Unseen and as-yet-unidentified dark matter makes up about 23 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe — scientists know it exists because of the gravitational effects it has on galaxies. The regular matter that makes up humans, planets and stars constitutes only 4 percent of the universe.

El Gordo was discovered using NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory in space and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. Its Spanish nickname is a nod to the Chilean connection.

The scientists detailed their findings today (Jan. 10) at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society here during a presentation that included a separate announcement of the discovery of the most distant galaxy cluster ever seenin the early universe.