TGT #24 - A Clouded, Dark Eclipse; + 7 more [May 16, 2022]
This Just In--Lunar Colonists Need Better Plant Soil, Filling in Nova Details, Angry Sun?, Dark Lunar Eclipse; Moon-Gazing--Planets/Moon Dawn Meet-and-Greet, A Meteor Outburst?; Astro Moms Book
Cover Photo - The Eclipse via Ipad
In This Issue:
Cover Photo —The Eclipse via Ipad
Welcome to Issue 24
This Just In —
* Good Water, Maybe. Good Soil, No
* Final Link in the Nova Story
* An Angry Sun?
* A Clouded, Dark Eclipse (Cover Story)Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - Evenings: Nothing to See; Mornings: A Giant Meet and Greet!
* Observing—Plan-et —
- Mars Points Closely to Two Giant Worlds
- Possible Meteor Outburst on the 30th?* Border Crossings
Astronomy in Everyday Life - A Book of Lessons from Astronomical Mothers
The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #25 May 11, 2022 Issue Highlights.
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine, #24 ! The Galactic Times is One Year Old!
Like its sister publication, The Classroom Astronomer, this The Galactic Times debuted a year ago on May 15th. We’ve survived a year and want to thank everyone who has subscribed and helped to make both publications through that first trip around the Sun! We expect when the two astronomy books we’re working on come out this summer (WE HOPE!) and we start on our craters book (Shhhh, don’t say anything), TGT will start to have excerpts on them. Meanwhile we’re offering a one-year-old TCA anniversary rate, 55% off our $55 rate, but only until its next issue, May 21th. See the end of this issue for the links. Astronomy education conference season is beginning, more teachniques will fill TCA pages!
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Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
This Just In—
* Good Water, Maybe. Good Soil, No
Colonies on the Moon just got a lot harder. You need power? Check—solar. Water? Check—under polar shadowed craters. Soil to grow plants? Uh oh…
University of Florida researchers Anna-Lisa Paul and Robert Ferl announced in Nature:Communications Biology that a inedible flowering plant, thale cress, was planted in soils brought back from three Apollo missions, and compared with plants grown in volcanic Earth soils. They grew but….wow, were they stressed. Genetic flaws abounded, they grew more slowly, had stunted roots. Worse were plants grown in soils from the lunar surface, where cosmic rays and solar wind affect the soils’ composition. These are drastically affected so much that plant genetic codes of hundreds of genes are indicated by soil stress. especially from soil iron particles. So, yes, lunar soil can be used….but…..no mention was made of trying the experiments on plants one could *eat*…..
* Final Link in the Nova Story
There is the general story and then there are the details. A nova is a white dwarf that has an atmosphere or surface that explodes. That star itself doesn’t blow up; that’s a supernova. Usually a white dwarf gets this oomph from the accretion of extra hydrogen gas from a companion star. Once it gets too much, boom! But it isn’t quite that straight-forward. It has been expected that before the BIG explosion, like the whoosh in the barbeque pit when the lighter fluid first ignites, there is a fireball as ‘it catches.’ But that had never been seen because it happens before we see the big bright nova explosion that gets our attention.
But now we have.
The nova YZ Scuti in July 2020 reached magnitude 3.7, easily naked eye visible, a nine-magnitude rise. But the detectors eROSITA, which scans the sky in X-rays every 4 hours got lucky and happened to scan the position during its ‘fireball’ phase. Four hours before, nothing. Four hours later, nothing. But during that intermediate four hours, it saturated the detector.
A few hours later the nova was detected by the All Sky Automatic Survey for Supernovae, rising to its peak brightness in four days. A gamma-ray emission was also detected, something seen before, but never in the proper sequence of visual, gamma and X-ray emissions before. So the story is now documented completely with evidence.
* An Angry Sun?
Our Sol, so placid in daylight, has been having a temper tantrum of late. It has been on the upswing in a new sunspot cycle, and also it has been flinging out copious amounts of X-rays. In the past 30 days, it has had large 9 X-ray events, an average of one every three days.
There are several levels of these, associated with solar flares, the two highest being X (greatest) and M-levels. Since May began there have been 4 solar flares, two on the 3rd alone and one on the 4th.
* The Clouded, Dark Eclipse (Cover Photo)
Just my luck….just about the only place in Alabama with thunderstorms was The Galactic Times World HQ. It began to rain 30 minutes before penumbral contact and ended just after totality ended. I did get to see a few minute minutes of bleary-eyed end partial phases, after 1AM, but mostly I got to watch the eclipse on my iPad, taking screenshots about every half hour. Most of the livestream came via timeanddate.com, with various sites in the Americas and Morocco, Africa, though sometimes the transmission would disappear at key moments. Like a minute before my final necessary screenshot…..
But my intrepid team of observers in Massachusetts and Georgia tell me that this was a dark eclipse, one of the darkest ones in years. Naked eye, but just barely, and not so much blood red as old rust red. In the 1960s I saw an eclipse so dark it had faded to below 6th magnitude! I would have loved to have made a magnitude measurement of THIS totality.
Sky Planning Calendar
Moon-Gazing
Moon passages by a star, planet or deep sky object are a good way to find a planet or other object if you’ve never located it before.
Our evenings are planet-free, though just barely. Mercury is technically still east of the Sun in twilight—good luck with finding that—and Saturn rises at midnight at the last day of the month—if your jurisdiction doesn’t acknowledge daylight savings time.
On the other hand, the rest of the planets and the Moon are all pointing each other out in the dawn sky.
Of course, May 16 is the Full Moon for some Readers and a Total Eclipse of the Moon night, as covered in the last Galactic Times, and in The Classroom Astronomer #25 where we’ve put a special free issue up on its website with instructions on how to use a total eclipse and a small ball to measure the Moon’s distance and size. Go to www.classroomastronomer.com and click the link…and then subscribe at a reduced rate for our one year anniversary!
May 17 Perigee.
May 22 After a restful week, a surge of activity! This morning, it’s the Last Quarter Moon and you’ll find it below (south, technically) about 4-degrees from Saturn.
May 24 Mars and Jupiter are passed close by the Moon by 3-degrees during the day so you find them to the Moon’s left that dawn….
May 25 …and to the Moon’s right on this dawn. That ‘passed close by’ is an Eastern Hemisphere thing.
May 26 Before US midnight Venus is a mere 0.2-degrees from the Moon, but it hasn’t risen yet. In Southeast Asia and Micronesia, it will be behind the Moon. Covid conditions willing, a good time for a visit? For North Americans….
May 27 …you’ll find Venus a couple degrees to the right of the Moon.
May 28 Uranus is now only 0.3 degrees from the Moon, emerging from the solar glare and its solar conjunction…and it is in point-blank conjunction, i.e. occulted, by the crescent Moon this morning if you view it from South America or West Africa.
May 30 New Moon
Observing---Plan-et….
May 17 Mars is your guide to the outermost planet Neptune, passing 0.6-degrees south of the big but faint fellow. Then…
May 29 Almost like the Revenge of the Giant Planets…..Jupiter, which began the month nestling with Venus, has tire-screamed its way almost to the end of the parade of planets! On this day it is only 0.6-degrees away from Mars, which it is brighter than yet per-square arc-second, Jupiter is actually dimmer than (look at it with a telescope and you’ll see what the difference is).
Smaller Worlds: A possible news flash. On the night of May 30th-31st, there is the chance of a major but brief meteoric outburst. The Tau Herculids, which are associated with comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, may cross the Earth’s orbit that evening and, because during a recent passage when it essentially broke up into myriad pieces and brightened to naked eye brightness, far brighter than normal, it may have a huge debris field that can produce an large number of meteors that night radiating from the summer constellation of Hercules, in the east. Or maybe not…..worth a watch, especially on a US Memorial Day Monday night/Tuesday morning holiday.
Border Crossings
Yay! Astrology and Astronomy match! Well, for a little while. Your friendly neighborhood astronomer says the Sun is in Taurus these whole two weeks. Astrologically, however, it is in Taurus….only until May 19th, after which it is in Gemini. No (more) bull!
Astronomy in Everyday Life
A Book of Lessons from Astronomical Mothers….
Mother’s Day has passed but this arrived afterwards and, well, it is never too late to celebrate Moms, right?
This free e-book, in PDF and epub format, was put together by Paola Pinilla, Maria Claudia Ramirez-Tannus, and Martha Irene Saladino Rosas, and was a project of the Elisabeth Schiemann Kolleg of the Max Planck Society and the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard-Foundation in Germany. Dr. Paola Pinilla is a group leader at MPIA in Heidelberg and an associate professor at MSSL/ UCL and studies planetary formation. Dr. Maria Claudia Ramirez-Tannus is an MPIA fellow working on massive star formation and the effect of extreme environments on protoplanetary disks. Dr. Martha Irene Saladino: She is an science communicator as well as an astrophysicist and was the creator of all the illustrations in the book
Inside are more than 70 mini-survey responses from women who are astronomers and mothers, ranging from very new in the field to full professors, from all over the world. Illustrations include their photographs, sometimes with their families, and some have pictures of their research, too. The questions discussed what they enjoyed most about being a mother, the biggest challenges in combining career and motherhood, the effects on both of those by the pandemic, and what positive effects motherhood has had on their astronomical careers. Some even gave recommendations of what to do to juggle the career, motherhood and pandemic problems.
A spot check of responses, roughly every 5 to 10 showed some interesting and useful trends:
Among the challenges were frequent comments about learning time management skills, and giving up some of their research projects, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, but always for the benefit of their children (interestingly, partners were not often mentioned, though those that were were either mentioned with thanks, or as long separated from them themselves during the pandemic). Other challenges were that it was hard to travel, of course, which meant at first fewer observing runs or presentations at conferences, key components of astronomers’ careers. For some, it made incomes unstable. Being tired is a given. Juggling two sets of guilts, work AND family related, was also related.
The pandemic impacts included no day care, and protecting the children from fear. But it also meant for those with young children especially, more time together.
Advice? It was only two years. You have a career of 30-40. You’ll get over it. Other advice was get a hobby, get yourself an hour of alone time each day, get counseling if you need it. Above all, know that you aren’t alone.
There were actually some positives! Frequently, the moms mentioned increased efficiency in their work and home, relating back to that time management stuff. For some, there was an increase in work-life balance, and a realization that “it is just a job.” Many enjoyed getting increased insights into their kids thoughts and lives, and for those involved in education, made them more insights into the minds of their students’ lives and hardships.
This can be found online in numerous places for free. One of those is Dr. Saladino’s website, https://misaladino.com/mothers-in-astronomy/.
Enjoy!
The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #25 May 11, 2022 Issue Highlights.
Cover Photo - The Shadow of Earth
Welcome to Issue 25 - We Are One Year Old!!
Sky Lessons- Measuring the Moon’s Size and Distance During a Total Lunar Eclipse, with Tennis Ball and Shadow Drawings
The Galactic Times #23 Inbox Magazine Highlights
Astronomical Teachniques - From Science to Stanzas, Astronomy Education Poetically Written (Part 1)
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