Moon, Venus, and Jupiter

This was the sight to the west just a little while ago: a crescent moon with Venus hanging out a little below, with Jupiter looking down on them. It was noteworthy because all three are so bright! Tomorrow night (Sunday), Jupiter will be about even with the moon soon after sunset. You can learn more about what's coming in the night sky here.

And although I tried various camera settings I didn't get a very good photo. Fortunately Sky & Telescope offers a free astrophotography primer. Here's hoping for some warm nights to try out various settings!

Leap Second--Don't Wait Up For It!

11:59:60

So I was listening to an astronomy podcast and they talked about the leap second. What?!? That got my attention. 

This is a leap year, so I know that we have a February 29 this year. That's because the earth's orbit is 365.242199 days, so we have to add an extra day every four years. (Like how I have those extra decimal places? Let me tell ya, I'm feeling like a mighty proud geek right now!)

But I sure haven't heard of a leap second before. Apparently the earth's rotation isn't exactly the same all the time. Earthquakes, melting of ice sheets, and unknown factors can cause the earth to rotate at slightly different speeds. Our time system was based on measuring the amount of time from the sun's zenith (high point) one day to the sun's zenith the next. That time is 24 hours, which is divided into 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per hour. 

Then along came some people who needed (or wanted?) to measure time more exactly, hence the atomic clock, which uses atoms and measures wavelengths to determine time. So now we have a problem with this ultra precise time measuring system not jiving with what the earth is actually doing. 

Some super-smart people decided that the thing to do would be to add (or subtract) a second when necessary. This year, we need to add a second. So at the end of June, instead of the clock going from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00, it will go from 11:59:59 to 11:59:60 to 12:00:00. 

Of course something like changing time is a little controversial, which you can read about here, along with a whole lot more info about leap seconds. It will take a little longer than a second to read, so you'll have to decide if it's worth the time we'll be gaining.

Night Skies

A number of events have recently converged to make me want to be more of a night owl. Not because I want to go chasing mice or go swooping through the air (although that certainly does hold appeal from time to time), but because I want to spend more time gazing up at our wonderful night skies.

I've always appreciated the wonderful night skies out in the middle of the Great Basin. Driving for over an hour to get anywhere means we don't have much light pollution, and since our elevation is nearly a mile high, the atmosphere is thinner and the stars that much clearer. But appreciation is a little different than understanding, and I'm finding that now I really want to understand what's out there in that big, black abyss.

Maybe it's partly due to listening to Douglas Adams' A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book I remember reading in my teenage years. Listening to it recently made me roll with laughter and applaud his creative genius. Perhaps I'm more interested in the night skies because I've been finding out more about the nearby Astronomy Festival at Great Basin National Park this summer June 14-16 (which happens to coincide with the Snake Valley Festival June 15-17--a good time visit the area). Or maybe my curiosity is piqued by some Astronomy magazines I found, which show some outstanding photographs. They also contain some fascinating language that make me scratch my head:

black holes (are there red holes? blue holes? red holes? white holes?)
light years (are there heavy years? sound years?)
dark matter (what about light matter? obscure matter? transparent matter?)
extragalactic (would you like some fries with that? how about supergalactic?)
spiral galaxy (which way does it circle? Is it like toilets spiralling in different directions in the northern and southern hemispheres?)
white dwarf (okay, this isn't discrimination, right?)

Now that I have all you who actually know something about astronomy shaking your heads and hoping that I switch hobbies immediately, let me tell you, no, you can't get rid of me that easily. I think I'm going to try to wrap my head around this. After all, it's just a little creepy to look out at all those points of light in the night sky and think about someone on some other planet orbiting one of those little lights looking back at us. A good kind of creepy. A kind of creepy that puts me in my place and makes my worries seem pretty miniscule. And the huge dimensions of the universe are making my head want to bulge out until it has to be contained in an ever-enlarging galaxy. (Okay, astronomers, how many other basic principles did I just mix up in this paragraph?)

So in addition to the magazines and a couple of books, another place I've been gathering some astronomy information is from podcasts. One I particularly like is 365 Days of Astronomy. They have a podcast every day, usually about 10-15 minutes long (which is great for my attention span). The podcasts began in 2009, which was designated as the Year of Astronomy (you remember that, right?), and has continued since then. They're slowly running out of material, which means that they are replaying the best podcasts again, calling them encores. That's good for me! Two podcasts I particularly liked were on February 3, about what to look at in the night sky, and February 5, about space travel in science fiction (remember The Millenium Falcon or "Beam Me Up, Scotty?")

 Listening to the podcasts has made me go out and find Mars, which is in the photo above to the left of the moon. My night photography skills have a long way to go, but you can expect to see more night sky photos--and little bits of astronomy added to this blog from time to time. I won't become an astronomer over night--or even over several nights as I rarely am able to stay awake past 9 p.m., but hopefully little by little I can start understanding what exists beyond our rotating blue orb.

Feel free to share other good astronomy links, your thoughts on the night skies, or what star you'd like to visit in the comments.

A Starry, Musical Night

One of the benefits of living in the desert is the lack of atmosphere. That means low humidity and clear night skies, without too much bending of light rays and so forth. I'd try to explain further, but I don't want to confuse you with all the technical jargon (ha, ha). I just know that I really appreciate our nighttime temperatures dropping by 20 degrees or more so we can sleep well during the summer.

And when you live out in the middle of nowhere, you also have very low light pollution, making it a wonderful place to enjoy looking up at the night sky. When you see the myriad of stars in the vast night sky, suddenly all your problems seem quite minor.

To celebrate the great night skies, we went to the first evening of an Astronomy Festival at Great Basin National Park last night. There was a concert with a variety of sky- and star-related musical acts, and Desert Boy even got to participate.

He was so eager to sing, he sang the first time all by himself. Then we told him he had to do it again with the other kids, and he willingly obliged. He likes being on center stage, our little drama king (and with the three-year old tantrums he's been having lately, drama king is the perfect nickname for him right now!).


To see more from the concert, click here.

Happy Summer Solstice

It's coming...
...just a few minutes more...
...ah, the first rays of the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere.
Summer Solstice used to make me feel a little sad because the days get shorter (in the Northern Hemisphere) after June 21. I felt like I was missing out on daylight. Now I have a different perspective: shorter days mean more sleep!

Hope you enjoy the longest day of the year! And for my Southern Hemisphere friends, enjoy your slumber, because your days are going to be getting longer the next six months!

Desert Destination: Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex

Every Monday we visit a desert destination.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a desert location that makes one realize how small our planet Earth is. That place was the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, which has an array of antennas that communicate with spacecraft that might be billions of miles away. 

Yikes. I can't even fathom that distance. And to imagine we have communications that far away? Why, we don't even have cell phone coverage where I live, how can we possibly communicate with tiny little spacecraft we can't even see anymore?

Goldstone is located on the Fort Irwin Military Base about 35 miles north of Barstow, California.

When driving towards Fort Irwin, I noticed some signs that I don't usually see. 

The tank next to the Welcome sign provides an interesting message, especially with the gun pointed right at the cars driving on the highway!

After going through the security booth (which took awhile--I felt like I must be a decent human when they finally finished checking my documents and didn't find me appearing as wanted on any of the government databases), I headed down the road marked as Ammo Route. I'm not quite sure what that was about...and I wasn't sure I wanted to ask!

The desert skies darkened and opened, allowing a deluge of water to fall upon the desert. I managed to snap a photo of the entrance sign to Goldstone, but my windshield was splattered with rain drops. 

The road to the main Goldstone complex is fascinating. Tucked away in the creosote bushes are huge antennas, pointed in different directions up in the sky. They are placed in basins so that the surrounding mountains block stray signals from other sources.

The different arrays are given different names, some after planets, like the Venus station. 

At the main Goldstone complex, our group went into a classroom for an excellent presentation from the outreach coordinator, Karla Warner. Our group was the maximum size of 50, but groups as small as a single family can also go on the tour. Generally two tours a day, four days a week are given. Reservations are required by calling Karla at 760-225-8688 or emailing her at kwarner@gdscc.nasa.gov. About 4,000-5,000 people a year tour the Goldstone complex.

After the presentation, we had time to peruse the exhibits that covered a range of space-related themes.

Then it was time to go 12 miles further into the complex to the Mars Station, home of the largest antenna, 70-meter Mars. You can see how big it is compared to the tiny cars in the bottom right of the photo. 

Side note: Do you see all the bright blue sky? The storm dumped for about 20 minutes and then was over.

The antenna is so large because the signals coming from space can be extremely weak--as weak as a billionth of a billionth of a watt--20 billion times less than the power required for a digital wristwatch.

The shape of the antenna is extremely important to hear the whisper of the signal coming from tiny spacecraft so far away. To help figure out what the signal is, the extremely sensitive receivers use amplifiers that are cooled to within a few degrees above absolute zero (-273 degrees C; -460 degrees F) to reduce the background noise generated by the electronic equipment.

The antennas also send signals to the spacecraft, telling them to turn on computers, take photos, activate instruments, and make course corrections. 

Here are just a couple rows of equipment that are used to record the data received. There are many more rows in this section of the building. And another part of the building is used to house the data to be sent. 

Goldstone is in California, a state known for its earthquakes. So above all this sensitive equipment are round beams that the equipment cases are connected to. A strong earthquake might make the floor rattle and roll, but the computers and recorders will be safe.

California is not always in the optimum position to talk or listen to spacecraft because of the earth's rotation, so there are two other deep space facilities: near Canberra, Australia and near Madrid, Spain.
Here's a glimpse into the control room at Goldstone. Different computers control different antennas. For routine communications, 34-meter beam-waveguide antennas are the most common. Other types of antennas include high efficiency, azimuth-elevation, and hour-angle declination. (I really don't know what those mean, but I'm trying to sound intelligent. I remembered to take a little brochure with me from the tour so I could get my facts straight, because there's no way I could have remembered all this.)

And if you'd like to make sure I haven't told any lies--or you just want to learn more, you can visit the Deep Space Network website.

On the drive back out of Goldstone and Fort Irwin, I passed several desert tortoise crossing signs, but unfortunately didn't see any desert tortoises.

However, I did see a sea monster making its way across the lake dry bed. I would have liked to have stayed longer to make its acquaintance, but I was a little afraid because I was on the Ammo Route, and I still didn't know what that was.

I saw a sign before a bridge that declared the weight limit was 64 tons. I didn't think that was for the sea monster.

Sure enough, there were more tank crossing signs. The brake marks on the pavement make me wonder if someone didn't take the sign seriously enough.

And finally we reach the end.

Spring Break

For their spring break, the Society of Physics Students from Millikin University came out to our valley to enjoy the dark skies and different scenery from Illinois. One of the first things they did upon arriving was take out their many telescopes and set them up. They have a lot of neat equipment.

This is definitely not your usual spring break location (notice lack of leaves on the trees), but at least the weather for the week is predicted to be fairly warm and there's no snow on the ground. That's especially good because some of them are camping.

Here's Bobby, checking one of the telescopes that he's outfitted with a solar filter so he can look at the sun. I took a quick peek and saw the giant glowing red orb. Apparently we have just passed a solar minimum in the 11-year sunspot cycle, meaning there are very few sunspots right now. Over the next few years there should be more sunspots appearing. 

This large telescope was really heavy and required quite a bit of counterbalance weight to keep it on the tripod. The students and professors were very excited about the really dark skies out here. Being at a higher elevation means less atmosphere, so the skies are crisper and it's possible to see more stars.

Uncle Andrew is one of the participants. He's managed to have quite a few adventures this week, not too different from previous ones, where participants felt lucky to get out alive! More coming soon...

Cosmic Ray Center, Millard County, Utah

Out in the isolated West Desert of Utah a strange sight may cause drivers along US Highway 6 & 50 to take a second look. Is that a tanning bed out in the sagebrush?  And another? And another, each spaced out in lines that cross the highway?

These strange apparatuses are part of a study being conducted west of Delta, Utah, to measure cosmic rays. Educational institutions from Japan, Korea, Russia, China, Taiwan, and the United States are involved. The headquarters is in Delta, and that's where the data is also processed.

The study is "to observe cosmic-ray-induced air showers at extremely high energies using a combination of ground array and air-fluorescence techniques." Okay, what does that mean? It probably makes perfect sense to my brother, the physicist, but for those of us who are not immersed in physics, it may be a little nebulous.

First off, what are cosmic rays? Here's the simplistic answer: tiny stuff you can't see with the naked eye that comes from outer space. Now here's the official answer: The term "Cosmic Rays" refers to elementary particles, nuclei, and electro-magnetic radiation of extra-terrestrial origin. These may include exotic, short-lived particles such as muons, pi-mesons or lambda baryons. (okay--did any of you have fun saying "muons"? I started imagining cows flying through space. Sorry for this tangent, but I couldn't help myself. Moo.)

Cosmic rays weren't discovered until the 1930s, when Austrian physicist Victor F. Hess went up in a hot air balloon over 17,000 feet high, measuring radiation along the way. He was surprised to find that the radiation increased with altitude, and surmised that radiation was entering the earth's atmosphere from outer space. He called this phenomenon "cosmic radiation," and later it was coined "cosmic rays." For his trouble, he earned a Nobel prize in 1936.

Next, what is a ground array technique? The ground array uses 576 scintillation detectors. Here's what one looks like:

And from its better side:
These scintillation detectors are laid out in a grid, each 1.2 km away from the next. The research area covers 760 square kilometers. Helicopters were used to install them, with each one weighing about 250 kg. 

The map below shows the ground array of scintillation detectors.

On the sides of the grid are fluorescence detectors. Sorry, I haven't made it to any of them to photograph yet, but researching this study has piqued my interest and I may have to wrangle an invitation. The fluorescence detectors are able to detect cosmic rays with much less energy (between 3x10^16 eV and 10^19 eV to be exact) than those detected by the scintillation detectors (which only detect cosmic rays greater than 10^19 eV).

Let's get back to the tanning beds--oh, I mean scintillator detectors. They are double layer scintillators which sample the charge particle density of the air shower footprint when it reaches the earth's surface. Okay, I took that last sentence directly from the project website. I think that means when the cosmic rays get close to earth, these detectors see how close together they are. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

The solar panel on the scintillator detector collects enough energy to power it for an entire week in complete darkness. Unless Yellowstone explodes and we're shrouded in really thick ash blocking out the sun, we probably don't have to worry about that. 

The magazine Science took note of this huge project, called the Telescope Array. It came about when two rival groups merged, using their two different techniques in this one project. Despite its name, no telescopes are part of the project; they had been included in an earlier proposal. Japan put up $13 million of the $16 needed to install and operate the project, but it was never planned to be installed in Japan because of the increased humidity there. 

One of the reasons to study cosmic rays is that physicists had been noting more higher energy cosmic rays than expected. Some can hit the ground with the force equivalent of a golf ball hitting the fairway. It makes me want to duck under one of those thick scintillation detectors so I can avoid getting hit.

This post just scratches the surface of this interesting project, which includes lots more acronyms (like TALE) and terms (such as "energy spectrum"). To learn more about this project, visit the Telescope Array website. And if you happen to be driving near the project area, you might  think about particles falling from outer space all around you. Someday we might understand what's out there.

Other Worlds

Did you have a good night celebrating the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009? Perhaps things don't look quite like they should.

Is it you? Or are aliens invading the earth and getting ready to take over in 2009?

Wishing you a wonderful 2009!

And when you see the moon, wherever you are, you know that we are all connected in some shape or form. 

Full Moon

When the last full moon came up over the mountains, I ran outside and tried to capture its majesty. This was apparently a rather large full moon, 30 percent larger than normal due to its closer distance to the earth.

I enjoy the extra light of full moons which brighten up the landscape. I couldn't resist photographing this stream, with the moonlight so strong it cast shadows on the water.

The full moon brings out the coyotes, and as they howl the world seems just a little wilder. Tomorrow I'll highlight some of the other wildlife that's out at night--I have some incredible pictures, so be sure to check back!

A Bright Night Sky

Last night I couldn't help but notice the bright night sky. A crescent moon was out, but there was more than that.

Below it were two bright objects. My first photo was a little overexposed, but I've included it here so you can see the other two objects well--Venus is on the bottom and Jupiter is to the right.

Finally I have a somewhat decent photo. I need some practice with astrophotography (Bobby, help!). Our moon is only 252,000 miles away. Venus is 94 million miles away, and although it is a lot smaller than Jupiter it appears brighter due to its closeness. Jupiter is 540 million miles away. Although this grouping isn't considered a major astronomical event, I still think it's pretty cool.

The Days Are Getting Shorter

As we get to the end of September, each day we are losing about 2 to 3 minutes of daylight. That doesn't sound like a lot, but over the course of a week, that's about 18 minutes. I used to really dislike the days getting shorter, but now I enjoy the silver lining--my husband comes home earlier! The life of a rancher is often sunrise to sunset, so it's nice to have more time together.

If you'd like to see the sunrise and sunset calendar for your area, click here.