This page will contain the latest issue of the Pine Mountain IMAGE, a flyer that tells you about current sky events, workshops for teachers, and gives you projects for your students and interesting website resources to explore.
PINE MOUNTAIN IMAGE
Jan-Feb 2009 Volume 17 No 3
By Rick Kang rkang@efn.org 541-683-1381
HAPPY NEW
YEAR!
We bring this
issue to you to:
1. To let you know
about activities planned for International Year of Astronomy (IYA), this year,
2009!
2. Let you know
about upcoming events in sky to Observe.
3. To encourage you
to invite us to visit your classroom this Winter/Spring.
4. To encourage you
to make reservations now to bring your class to Pine Mountain Observatory later
this Spring.
5. To provide some
inquiry projects about the sky for your students.
(Please let me know
if you’d like a hard-copy snail mailed)
INTERNATIONAL
YEAR OF ASTRONOMY
IYA: Celebrating
Galileo’s first look at heavens through a telescope 400 years ago!
Look through a
modern telescope at a local “star party” hosted by your astronomical society,
bring your students to a Planetarium or to an Observatory, look at the IYA
websites for highlight topics each month to observe and study.
January’s hot topic
is Telescopes & Space Probes, and the featured sky object to observe is
Venus. February’s hot topic is Our Solar
System, and featured object is our Moon.
See all the rest of the list and much more at link from News &
Projects area at http://oregonsky.org/. We’ll bring a telescope to your classroom and
conduct projects about Moon and Solar System.
VIEWING
THE SKY
(Download
Stellarium for your own view of the sky on your computer, this is an excellent
FREE program!)
1. Brilliant Venus,
now high in western post sunset sky, slides by Uranus January 22nd, you’ll
need binocs or telescope to see Uranus which should appear as a greenish dot.
2. Saturn rises by
late evening, displays ring-plane crossing:
The famous ringed planet is a bright golden dot below Leo, rising in
east in late evening. If you observe Saturn
through telescope, rings not currently visible as nearly edge-on to us (the
rings, primarily chunks of ice, are only about a mile thick)!
The rings will
appear to open a bit as the year progresses (and Saturn continues to rise
earlier). They will look thinner toward
Fall, they go totally edge on in September, but Saturn is then in conjunction
with the Sun, thus invisible. The next
“ring plane crossing” is in 2038!
3. Planets will
group in pre-dawn Spring sky: By February, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, and
Pluto appear low in eastern predawn sky.
By March, Uranus and Venus join them.
Why does this
transition take place, from western evening sky this past Fall, to eastern
morning sky? Mercury and Venus outrun
Earth, swinging to opposite side of Sun from our viewpoint. What about the “superior” planets (those
orbiting the Sun outside of Earth’s orbit)?
What does Earth do? As we orbit
the Sun, we appear to cross to the other side of the Sun relative to those
planets, hence they switch from following the Sun to preceding the Sun
(sunrise) from our point of view!
Check the applet
suggested by Professor Larson on the first page of Online Resources link area
of the oregonsky website to see the mechanics of how planets orbit a sun.
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SCHEDULE
CLASSROOM OUTREACH
If we haven’t
already visited your classroom, we’d be glad to schedule a visit, many program
options, contact
Rick, rkang@efn.org, ASAP as schedule can fill
quickly.
I’m usually booked
solid by March through June!
Several of the new
programs I’m offering include:
1. Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence: based on recent information from Professor Seth
Shostak of SETI, we look at conditions for life, potential locations in Solar
System, how we find extra-solar planets, how common they are, how we define and
search for intelligent life, and conclude with two interesting predictions from
Dr. Shostak that he made in a September lecture in Portland.
2. Stellar
Populations and Characteristics: Using a
series of 42 Star Cards, each color coded and with data about a specific star
in the Milky Way, assembled by Professor Julie Lutz of UW, students explore the
statistics of characteristics of stars in our galaxy, and the evolutionary
relationships. We of course cover the
popular topic of Black Holes.
3. Build an Analog
Moon Computer: Out of a few pieces of
cardboard plus a brass brad, construct an analog device that illustrates the
relationships among Moon phase, location in sky (east, high, west), and time of
observation, facilitating understanding of reasons why we view phase changes
and cycle. This device was designed by
Nancy Whitman last Spring, Nancy
teaches Middle School at Creswell. Descriptive
link online at oregonsky website
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FIELD
TRIP TO PINE MOUNTAIN OBS.
If you’re
contemplating bringing your class to Pine Mountain, Tour Scheduler Mark Dunaway
advises to plan a date in May or later, and contact Mark ASAP, markpmo@oregon.uoregon.edu, to get
on the calendar, as dates, particularly dark Moon, fill fast! Mark advises that due to the wet and snowy
winter so far, the road will probably not be passable until May. Mark will furnish a quote on the cost of the
tour when you contact him, he recommends selecting an alternative date before
you contact him in case your first date has already been booked or weather is
bad on that date. email is best to reach
him, but you can also try phoning the Observatory at 541-382-8331. Please don’t phone Rick about scheduling PMO
tours, as Rick is in Eugene, not Bend. The campground should be useable by May, if
you want to contact a Bend school instead (to
camp in their Gym), several classes have been successful with Cascade Middle School
and Pilot Butte
Middle School, Pilot Butte or High Desert Middle Schools are closest to the road leaving Bend toward PMO.
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PROJECTS
FOR STUDENTS:
These
are all inquiry style projects:
1. Elementary:
Solar motion: Build a Sundial, correlate to time.
The goal of this
project is to investigate the apparent motion of the Sun, what the apparent
position tells us, and can be extended to exchanging solar position data with
schools overseas to develop a perspective of the Earth’s orientation to the
Sun. Technically this is a relatively
simple project, just establishing a Gnomon (Sun Stake or pole or triangle) that
casts a shadow that can be marked on the ground or on a base plate.
Data (shadow
location) can be recorded hourly, and daily/weekly. Why are there changes? How do we tell time?
What time is it
somewhere else on the globe?
2. Middle School:
Solar altitude at Noon, correlate to Seasons.
This is an
extension of the above project: Again
using a Gnomon, and carefully tracking maximum Solar angle over weeks and
months (how high is Sun at High Noon local solar time?). Why might this change? What effect might this have? In addition, Sunrise and Sunset times and angles (azimuth)
on horizon might be tabulated and correlated.
We’re also trying
to involve schools at other locations on Earth in the is project, particularly
a school in the Southern Hemisphere.
3. High School:
Track Planets against Stars, correlate distances.
Plot locations of
some of the planets against the background stars, keep track of the planets
over several months (Venus and Saturn would be good starters presently). What do you notice? How can you explain this effect? Why did ancient astronomers attribute
something special to these “wanderers”?
How did these observations lead to the idea of the Solar System?
4. All Grades: How
can you create Light? What is Light?
One of my favorite
sayings is “The Photons Are the Data!”.
(“Photon” is the
ancient Greek word for Light.)
No light, no data,
whether on Earth or from Deep Space.
How is light
created? Flip a switch you say, or get a
battery?
OK, but what does
the switch actually do, or what does a battery do? What else do you need with them to actually
make light happen, how do these SYSTEMS work?
What if you’re out
in the middle of nowhere, no switch, no battery, but you need light? What is required to be done, or to happen, or
what conditions enable creation/emission of photons? Consider sources of light in your home or
neighborhood or school, and how that light is created. Is there anything these sources have in
common?
How about in Deep
Space: What types of objects give off
light? (While you’re considering this,
consider what bright objects actually manufacture light, versus perhaps
“borrowing” light from somewhere else (reflecting the light)!) What’s the brightest natural object? Why is it so bright? (again, try to relate to
household, particularly kitchen objects)
I’ve added this
project since light and the physics of light is so critical to so many ideas in
science and engineering, and of course the key to almost all astrophysical
discoveries!
The second question
is trickier: We really don’t KNOW what
light is! We have some pretty good
models for photons, one is that they behave like ping-pong balls, the other is
that they behave like ocean waves, depends on the experiment you try!
Characterize light,
what does it do, what can it cause to happen, what are its features, what can
you measure about it? That’s about the
best we can do for now!
The first section
of this item is the inquiry lesson. Here
is some scaffolding: We are talking
about ENERGY. Light is associated with
heat, another form of energy. Light can
transform into heat as our Sunlight so often does, and vice versa in your projector lamp. Heat or other energy can raise the energy levels of electrons in atoms. When these energized electrons "fall" to lower
energy levels, the lost energy is emitted as a photon. Photons have a FLUX
RATE; amount of photons hitting or passing through a unit area per unit of time.
This is the
intensity or luminosity (for astrophysicists translates to magnitude), and is typically proportional to distance of light source from measurement location, temperature of source, and diameter or area of source. Electromagnetic energy - photons propagate (move) at the speed of light via both an electric and a magnetic "field" (hence can move through a vacuum, not needing a medium like water or air). These fields can be modeled in a sense as waves, and in the sense of wavelength and frequency, exist over a large spectrum of dimensions from many meters to microns and angstrom sized wavelengths: The electro-magnetic (E/M) spectrum
including such waves as radio, microwave, infra red, visible light, ultra violet, gamma, and
X-rays, has specific frequencies/wavelengths and associated energies (shorter
wavelength = higher energy), in a sense translating as “color”. A wave may have a high "amplitude", the vertical stretching distance of the wave, but don't confuse this with the flux rate, the number of waves or photons. Other than the specific location of the
emission source, the only other measurable characteristics of E/M radiation are its
flux rate and its energy (color). (OK,
we could measure polarization, too.)
While you’re
exploring energy, you might want to explore heat, electromagnetism, and
gravity, along with waves.
Photons can behave
as quantized packets of energy, preferring specific energy levels to form and
to dissipate. showing up visually as
absorption (dark) or emission (bright) spectral bands. We can use such patterns of bands to
fingerprint specific atomic structure, hence determine composition of material
interacting with the light (spectroscopy).
Photons can also behave like waves in the sense of creating
“interference” patterns where multiple wave fronts overlapping can either
cancel each other or reinforce each other, we can use this property to
highlight information we want like the diameter of a distant star, or to cancel
information we don’t want, like the bright starlight hiding the faint light of
an orbiting planet.
TELESCOPE
CLINIC
For those of you in
or near the Eugene-Springfield metro area:
I’ve Never Used My New
Telescope!Help is here if you received a Telescope for the
Holidays or
own a Telescope but
never used it because you don’t know how to set it up nor what to view in the
night sky:
Come to the Eugene Astronomical Society’s Scope
Clinic:Thursday, February 26th, 7-9 PM, Eugene,
EWEB North Bldg. Community Room, 500
E. 4th Ave., by river, Free. Families welcome, bring your telescope!
Limited sky viewing outside, weather permitting. More info at EAS website,
http://www.eugeneastro.org/, contacts
listed there.
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and, SPECIAL UNVEILING
Science Factory
& Planetarium in Eugene
have been selected as one of 100 US based Science Centers for unveiling and
display of two new pictures of deep space done with a NASA collaboration of
the Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer Space Telescopes. The large
images will be displayed Saturday, February 14th, at 1000 AM in the
Museum, and the Planetarium will show additional images at special shows
on Saturday and Sunday, February 14th and 15th, at 200 PM each afternoon.
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PLACES
FOR STUDENTS TO VISIT
for everyone around
Oregon:
Visit Planetariums,
Observatories, Clubs:
(web
sites linked at http://oregonsky.org/ see
the Educational Collaborators links area, and also the list of URLs in Online
Resources links area)
Many
of these organizations have IYA activities planned!
Portland: Kendall
Planetarium at OMSI, Rose City Astronomers, Haggart Observatory at Clackamas, Mt. Hood
Community College
Planetarium and Observatory
The Dalles: Goldendale Observatory & Planetarium
McMinnville: Oregon Air & Space
Museum
Salem: Night Sky 45 Club, Planetarium at Chemeketa CC
Corvallis: Heart of the Valley Astronomers
Eugene: Science Factory/Planetarium, Eugene Astronomical Society
Roseburg: Umpqua Amateur
Astronomers
Medford: Science Works Museum
at Ashland, Southern Oregon Sky Watchers Club,
Planetarium at North
Medford High
School
Bend: Sunriver Nature Center,
Central Oregon Astronomical Society,
and of course, Pine Mountain Observatory
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW URLS: CHECK the Listing of URLs under the ONLINE RESOURCES link at the oregonsky homepage for latest and most commonly used links.
We've added two URLs for pictures of Solar System objects from NASA and JPL sources.
