Enjoying Jupiter through new eyes

After a couple of weeks of wild weather, including snow, ice storms, high wind, and heavy rain, the greater Seattle area is enjoying something most unusual: a clear, calm winter night.

Jupiter doesn't look quite like this through my backyard telescope,
but a Tele Vue Radian eyepiece is giving better views than
I've ever had before. Cassini snapped this one on its way to
Saturn in 2000. Photo: NASA.

The timing is both right on and a bit off for astronomy buffs in the area. At nightfall the Moon was pleasantly centered between Venus and Jupiter, making for a picture postcard view. However several area astronomy clubs have their monthly public star parties scheduled for Saturday evening, and the forecast is for the clouds to move back in after our brief respite from precipitation.

I took advantage of the clear night to haul my telescope out of the basement and take a look. I had a peek at the gibbous Venus, and looked at the crescent Moon for a bit. But I have been watching Jupiter for most of the evening. I find the clockwork of old Jove’s moons endlessly fascinating. Io was in transit across the giant planet’s disk between about 7 p.m. and 9:15. Io’s shadow is following about an hour and 15 minutes behind, and will complete its transit of Jupiter at around 10:30.

I’ve got to throw in a plug for a relatively new eyepiece in my case. Last year right after Christmas I used some gift cash (thanks, Mom!) to buy a 10mm Tele Vue Radian. Using it to look at Jupiter this evening made me feel as though the scales had fallen from my eyes and I was seeing the planet for the first time!

I have an 8-inch “Intelliscope” from Orion, and it’s pretty much as it came out of the box (though my aching neck convinced me to replace the straight-through finderscope with a right-angle model, and I added a Telrad finder, which is pretty useless from my West Seattle backyard observing location, given the few bright objects that can be seen through the thing.) My high-power eyepiece had always been the 10mm Sirius Plossl that came with the scope. It’s OK, but has minimal eye relief. I typically found that I got much better views from a 17mm Plossl and a 2x Barlow.

Then I sprung for the Radian. Wow. I got some eye-popping views of Saturn through it earlier this year, but looking at Jupiter with its detailed bands, zones, and clouds, the difference a top-quality eyepiece can make is readily apparent. Even in transit, Io was easy to spot. The Red Spot stood out clearly, and though seeing has not been all that transparent this evening, in moments of clarity I’ve seen detail on Jupiter tonight that I’ve never seen under the best of conditions before. The Radian set me back about $235.

By the way, Tele Vue has discontinued the 10mm Radian and some are speculating they’ll drop the line entirely in favor of the new Delos line that came out in the middle of last year. They have the same eye relief but a wider field of view. I’m really impressed with the Radian. I have one other Tele Vue eyepiece, a 24mm Panoptic, and it, too, is marvelous, offering tremendous, wide-field views. They’re on the pricey side, but well worth it for the quality views they deliver.

What are your favorite eyepieces?

Alas, as I’m wrapping up this post at about 11 p.m. Friday the clouds have indeed rolled in. I had planned to get back out there. I’m working on the Astronomical League Urban Observing program, and one of the last items I need to spot is NGC 3242—The Ghost of Jupiter. It’s a planetary nebula that’s only visible around here from about now until early spring. We don’t get enough clear nights this, or any, time of year. NGC 3242 transits a little after 2 a.m. Saturday. It looks like it will do so behind the clouds and the quest will have to wait for yet another night.

Let’s hope for some clearing for a peek at the Ghost of Jupiter, and for all of those clubs planning star parties for Saturday evening. Check our calendar for details about one near you.

Beyond pretty pictures; amateurs contributing to astronomical science

Ralph Megna is an amateur astronomer only in the sense that he doesn’t get paid for his work. But he’s making some major contributions to the science and working with the big guys.

Megna is a co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Solar System Studies, an amateur organization that is building several observatories in Landers, California, in the Mojave Desert east of Riverside. He’s a long-time astronomy enthusiast, but a real estate developer by daytime profession. He and several colleagues at the Center, CS3 for short, recently wrapped up a project to provide some critical data for NASA’s DAWN mission to Vesta and Ceres. This is somewhat akin to a hobbyist who is pretty good at softball suddenly being asked to play second base for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Ralph Megna of the Center for Solar System
 Studies is an amateur astronomer, but he and CS3
colleagues are doing real work with NASA.
Megna spoke Sunday at the annual banquet
of the Seattle Astronomical Society.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Megna talked about the experience Sunday night as the keynote speaker at the annual banquet of the Seattle Astronomical Society. The involvement with NASA came because, as DAWN approached Vesta, it couldn’t make much sense out of data collected by a framing camera, a key part of the craft’s navigation.

“Their own stuff turned out to be crap,” Megna said of NASA’s data on Vesta. They knew of the work being done at CS3 and turned to them get better information about Ceres.

“We were recruited by NASA to collect some specialized photometric data,” Megna said. CS3’s Earth-based telescopes and cameras made precise observations of Ceres and its phase angle, rotation, albedo, and the like. They imaged the asteroid between last September and earlier this month. The data will help DAWN better navigate its way when it leaves Vesta and heads for Ceres this summer.

“We were told by NASA that this was the first time in NASA history that it had turned to amateurs to provide it with mission-critical data in order to guide an interplanetary spacecraft,” Megna said. “We were pretty proud to be asked to do that.”

Megna’s talk was titled “Beyond Pretty Pictures: How Amateur Astronomers are Making Discoveries & Changing Solar System Science.” He noted there’s been an explosion in interest in astrophotography in recent years.

“We’ve now probably passed the one billionth picture of M42,” Megna joked about the Orion Nebula, one of the most photographed celestial objects. Part of their mission at CS3 is to push the envelope.

“We’re exploring some new territory with respect to the contributions that amateur astronomers can make to real science in astronomy,” he said, adding that the main thing that makes those contributions possible is relatively inexpensive and readily available technology, especially scientific-quality CCD cameras.

“That single thing has really leveled the playing field between us and professionals and has made it possible for us to make real contributions to real science,” Megna said. Amateurs are making amazingly precise observations of variable stars, finding supernovas, monitoring planets, tracking exoplanet transits, and doing his thing—asteroid photometry.

“All of these things are now possible because, frankly, the technology has become accessible and affordable to amateur astronomers,” he said. “The kind of information that amateurs are collecting gets sucked up by the computer models that are being created by professional astronomers and astrophysicists. This has led to some exciting new theories on the evolution of the solar system.”

Chief among these is the Nice model of solar system evolution, which proposes that the gas giant planets were once much closer to the Sun, but migrated out, flinging lots of material clean out of the solar system in the process. Megna said much of the data that the model crunched was collected by amateurs.

Discoveries of binary asteroid systems and measurements of asteroid shapes and orbital dynamics are cool and important, but Megna said that’s not really what drives him.

“I can’t tell you what a rush it is to watch that light curve get composed by the computer on the screen and know that I am the first person in human history to know what the length of a day is on another celestial body,” he explained. “This may be a footnote to a footnote to a footnote in science, but it is a moment of discovery.

“This moment of personal discovery is an incredibly important motivator to what I do,” Megna added. “It hearkens to the notion of being an amateur astronomer. The origin of the word amateur is to love; I do this because I love to do it.”

He’s pretty good at it, too.

Enceladus and the platinum age of planetary exploration

Ours is a great time to be alive if you have an interest in learning about other worlds, at least according to Ron Hobbs, a NASA Solar System Ambassador and museum educator and public programs assistant at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

“For most of us the golden age of planetary exploration was the ‘70s and early ‘80s,” Hobbs said. “The time of the Apollo Moon missions—particularly those that did a lot of science—the Viking missions to Mars, and of course Voyager.”

At least four distinct plumes of water ice spew out from the
south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus in this dramatically
illuminated image, shot on Christmas Day 2009 by Cassini.
Light reflected off Saturn is illuminating the surface of the moon
while the Sun, almost directly behind Enceladus, is backlighting
the plumes. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

After that, things slowed down a lot, but in recent years there’s been something of a renaissance in the solar system.

“The first decade of the 21st Century has been as good as, if not better than, the golden age,” Hobbs believes. “Some people have called it the platinum age of planetary exploration. And if there’s a flagship of that platinum age of planetary exploration it’s got to be the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.”

Hobbs gave a talk about Cassini, titled “Seven Years in the Saturn System,” last month at the museum. The presentation featured lots of the spectacular photography from the mission, including the discovery of seasonal colors on the second-largest planet in the solar system. Hobbs also discussed discoveries about Saturn’s rings and the intense study of the huge moon Titan. But the most fascinating part of the talk centered on the moon Enceladus, which Hobbs says has joined the astrobiologists’ short list, along with Mars and Europa, for further study.

That’s largely because of the discovery of enormous geysers at the south pole of Enceladus, which spew out ice crystals that form Saturn’s E-ring and cover Enceladus with fresh snow, making it one of the brightest objects in the solar system. The interesting thing about the E-ring is that it contains salt.

“The salt had to come from somewhere,” Hobbs explained, “so somewhere down in Enceladus there must be water in association with hot rocks. So you’ve got an energy source, you’ve got water. We don’t know yet, but maybe we have organic chemicals. If we do, this becomes one of the likeliest places we could find life in the solar system.

“Enceladus has rapidly become one of the most important bodies for us to study,” he added.

Cassini’s work in the Saturn system is planned to continue until the summer of 2017, when it will make a handful of spectacular proximal orbits very close to Saturn’s cloud tops before it runs out of fuel and is crashed into the ringed planet.

That’s presuming Cassini keeps working. Hobbs notes that while the warranty has long since expired, the school bus-sized craft hasn’t missed a beat since it was launched in 1997.

“Space is a harsh environment, particularly when you go a billion miles from the Sun,” Hobbs noted. “It gets cold out there, and every time you go into the shadow of Saturn or one of the moons, it drops dramatically. So given our experience with technical things, it is kind of a surprise” that Cassini is still functioning, he said. “On the other hand, we in America seem to be building some really good stuff these days.”

It will be fascinating to see what wonders Cassini finds before the mission ends five years from September.