News Round Up

At the top of this week's news is the safe return of Discovery earlier this evening. In other NASA news, it's not too late to vote for the name of the next Mars rover. After recent naming poll incidents, NASA has been clear that is a "non-binding poll." You can also send your name to Mars aboard that same spacecraft.


Universe Today announced this week its participation in "Live Telescope," which is pretty much what it sounds like. The Northern and Southern Galactic and Warren Rupp Observatory in Central Victoria, Australia, will broadcast a view through their telescope via webcast. At around 9:00 UT (which is nighttime there), they will start webcasting the view through their video eyepiece, and they won't stop until morning. Recent targets include the Jewel Box Cluster, Alpha Centauri, M11 and Alpha Crucis. You can tune in by visiting Universe Today.
And finally, to all the die hards out there (you know who you are!), I wish you a happy Messier Marathon! Too bad it's completely socked in here.

Stephen Colbert + ISS =

Here's a bit of pop culture crashing into space science. As you may recall from an earlier post, NASA encouraged the public to help select a name for the new node on the International Space Station. Well, the public heard, and maybe not in the way NASA anticipated. Stephen Colbert, of the Colbert Report, encouraged his viewers to vote not for the NASA suggested names but for the name "Colbert" as a write-in. And they did. In fact, Colbert got more votes than any other name.
Does that mean that NASA is obligated to follow the vox populi and give Colbert his/its due? Nope. The fine print indicates that the agency will take voter feedback into consideration, but may select a different name. Did you vote?

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Space Module: Colbert - Name NASA's Node 3 After Stephen
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Saturn and Its Moons

Enjoy this beautiful image, and if you want to know more, read on!


This image is a quadruple transit of four of Saturn's moons: Enceladus, Dione, Titan and Mimas. Titan is the largest one, and you can easily see the shadow of Titan on the cloudy "surface" of Saturn. For a bigger image, click on the image to go the Hubble website. I definitely recommend it, it's breathtaking in high resolution.

GLOBE At Night

This week marks the start of GLOBE At Night. (This is known to those of us in the biz as GaN.) The goal of GaN is to get a broad survey of light pollution from all around the world. How can this be done? Simple - by you! All you need to do is look at their magnitude charts (magnitude is the measure of how bright something is), and compare your view of Orion with those charts to determine how many stars you can see. Then report your results (it takes about a minute and half the first time, less on subsequent visits). Lather, rinse and repeat as many times as you like between March 16 and 28.
Why would we do this? Is there any sort of point to this exercise? Of course. I wouldn't waste my precious blogging breath to tell you about it if there weren't. Many people have never even heard about light pollution, but I'm going to assume that you are intelligent enough to realize that light pollution is the result of so many city lights pointed up instead down that the light of the stars is drowned out. By participating, you're helping collect data on local light pollution. In short, you're odoing citizen science. In addition, you can download family activity packs, school lesson plans and nifty posters and postcards. So go out tonight and do your part!

Don't Let My Technical Issues Stop You...

...from finding out more about the launch of the Kepler spacecraft! NASA says that the launch window is 10:49 to 10:52 PM, with a second window at 11:13 to 11:16 PM ET. We'll be camping in the Everglades, so we will be on the lookout. (Hopefully Little Dudestronomer will be asleep by now.)
I meant to post more, but we're having some gigantic virus issues here at home, so you'll just have to wait to hear more from me. I'll be sure to update you when we get back from our little expedition and/or our computer will start up properly.

One In a Million

Well, really it's more like one in a hundred billion. We're talking about our Earth, and estimates of how many Earth-like planets there could be in our galaxy.
If you're as old as I am (or older, or a bit younger), you'll recall being taught in school that there were only 9 planets in the universe. Not our solar system, not our galaxy, only 9 in the entire universe. That's a total of nine worlds that we knew of, in all of space, everywhere we knew of. That was a pretty lonely prospect. And if you're like me, it made you think that solar systems like ours must be extremely (almost impossibly) rare.
That all changed when I was in high school. In 1995, the first year I worked at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, I came into the Space Lab for my work shift and saw a newspaper clipping on our news board. The article itself didn't seem anymore spectacular than the others we had up at the time, but when I read it, my heart skipped a beat: scientists had found a planet orbiting a star called 51 Pegasi. The planet was a gas giant about half the mass of Jupiter that orbited at an incredible 4.23 days! To put that in perspective, Mercury takes 88 days to orbit the sun.
This was the beginning of a revolution (no pun intended) in planetary science. First of all, we knew there were other solar systems out there. Secondly, this first one was dramatically different from our own. Finally, and perhaps most incredibly, no one could see this world - its existence was extrapolated using mathematics.
51 Pegasus b (as this planet has been dubbed - "51 Peg a" would be the host star) was found using a method called spectroscopy. If you're familiar with this technique, skip to the next paragraph. If not, it's not too complicated; read on. Anything with mass has gravity, and the more mass you have, the more gravity you have. That is to say, the sun exerts its gravity on us, but we also exert a lesser gravitational force on it. In fact, although we say we orbit the sun, both the sun and Earth orbit a central point that is within the physical space of the sun, but not at the sun's center. If you watched to sun from another point in space, you would see the sun orbit around this central point; it wouldn't make a huge arcing circle, it would just seem to wobble in place. Spectroscopy measures the wobble of stars by looking for very regular (but extremely slight) changes in its distance to Earth. This method is sometimes called Doppler spectroscopy because it relies on measuring the Doppler effect of these stars, light red-shifting or blue-shifting as it comes to Earth. Here's a diagram from Wikipedia:

Now astronomers use a variety of methods for detecting planets that orbit other stars. We'll discuss later in the week, as we get closer to the launch of the Kepler mission. You'll be hearing about it in the news, and I have no less enthusiasm for the topic than the rest of the world. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, console yourself with this thought - Earth may be one in a hundred billion, but at least it's not alone.