Stars over Manipal...

It's exam time again and all our sky addicts are forced to train their eyes on matters more down-to-earth like textbooks and those endlessly photocopied notes! A pity since some of the best skies are available now... Was at End Point last night and the sky was good despite patches of fluffy cumulus that were scattered here and there in the sky. Comet Holmes is rapidly fading but still is a good target for even a modest pair of binoculars. Some of us had a good discussion about the structure of the Milky Way and about galaxies in general too.

The nights ahead are promising... Let's not waste them. Whenever a few of us get some free time and the night is clear, let us just move off to some reasonably dark site with a pair of binoculars and drink in the night sky!

Wishing you clear skies!

Srikumar M. Menon

The Saturn Mystery!!!!!!

In 1979 the Voyager spacecraft revealed “spokes” in Saturn’s rings. Yet recent images from Cassini have shown no spokes.This lead me to think what happened to the spokes and i finally got the answer.....

These spokes have kept planetary scientists scratching their heads for decades. It’s thought that the spokes are radial fingers of dark, extremely fine dust particles that become electrostatically charged by pulses of energy emanating from Saturn’s interior. Once charged, the dust particles are levitated out of the ring plane by Saturn’s strong magnetic field. They seem to form only in the shadowed (night time) section of the ring system, then come into view as the ring particles rotate into sunlight.

But that’s only an educated guess. “This is one of the biggest mysteries of the solar system,” admits Cassini investigator Alison Farmer. It could be related to the fact that Voyager visited Saturn when the planet’s rings were nearly edge-on to the Sun, whereas now they are tipped wide open. But it may be many years before the phenomenon is completely understood.

If anyone has any more info on the above please do write into me.....

Naval Mahajan ....

Finding Holmes!

Here is a finder chart to spot Comet Holmes. The Astro Club spotted the faint glow of light in Perseus on the night of 17th November from End Point, with a pair of 10x50 binoculars. We could also faintly make out the glow of the comet with our naked eyes using averted vision... So the rest of you sky-addicts out there, don't miss this celestial repast...!

- Srikumar M. Menon

On a more earthly note....

For those who enjoy the pleasure of observing a fast moving streak of light far away in the distant sky, an opportunity awaits on the 6th of this December.The next Space Shuttle mission STS-122 is all scheduled to be launched on that date, Carrying with it the ESA's Columbus Science Laboratory(the biggest space lab of it's type till date).The shuttle when launched will be the brightest thing in the sky, 3rd only to The Sun and the Moon, and depending on it's altitude at the time of observation, a little dimmer or brighter than the International Space Station itself. This launch of the space shuttle is coincidentally poised on a path that shall take it straight over India. (In particular, MANIPAL.)

For more details regarding observation timings and celestial coordinates,
(ONCE THE SHUTTLE IS LAUNCHED)
visit:
http://science.nasa.gov/temp/ShuttleLoc.html

You can also get email alerts regarding the Shuttle Transit if you subscribe to http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/JPass/PassGenerator

Here's to a beautiful sighting of the Shuttle Transit.(and of course, a starry night sky).
Surjodeb Basu .

SETI at Home : Did an alien call you?!

This post is a response to one of the comments posted on a previous post. I wish to thank all those who comment on our posts since appreciation and criticism are both welcome and both drive us towards the improvement of the quality of this blog.

Firstly, let me get some things cleared out about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). When we speak of extraterrestrial intelligence, we completely rule out those forms of extraterrestrial life that have probably recently evolved and are in actual terms not really 'intelligent'. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search, and no exhaustive search has so far been conducted.

SETI@home was launched by U.C. Berkeley in May 1999. It is a distributed computing project and anyone who wishes to contribute to the SETI projects can do so by downloading the SETI@home package available online. The purpose is to run signal analysis on individual computers all over the world to process the data collected and send it back to UC Berkeley.

The data is collected from the Arecibo radio telescope and these signals are then scanned for possible radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence. The process is somewhat like tuning a radio to various channels, and looking at the signal strength meter. If the strength of the signal goes up, that gets attention. The software looks for four signal patterns: triplets (three power spikes in a row), spikes in power spectra, pulsing signals that represent a digital transmission and Gaussian rises and falls in the transmission power. The details about these are extremely technical and are beyond my scope (sorry!).

Seth Shostak, an American astronomer and a prominent SETI figure believes that he will get proof of alien contact in the form of a signal between 2020 and 2025, based on certain calculations he made. Lets hope that really happens (or not! whatever!)..

I would also like to direct you to this link given below, which is an article titled 'SETI: Is it worth it?'. It very aptly and precisely explains why so much effort, time and money is being spent on something like SETI, which most people correctly (I think!) believe is such a long shot.
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/071108-seti-setiworth.html

-Mohit Gidwani

So long, Hubble!

It has always been a delight to look at pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. With its clarity and excellent image quality,it seemed as if there would be no end to it. But in the recent years NASA, in collaboration with European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency has been working on James Webb Space Telescope. JWST is the successor to HST, to be launched in 2013.

The primary focus of JWST is to observe the luminous glows which originated from The Big Bang and hence improve our understanding of the origin of our Universe. JWST will also play a key role in studying the origins of other galaxies, star formations, creation of heavier chemical elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron as well as origin of life on other planets.
What really surprises me is the fact that even though JWST is a successor to HST, there are major differences among them, the major one being the region of spectrum they observe. JWST will be highly sensitive to infrared rays whereas Hubble focussed mainly on visible radiations. Another difference to note is the size of the mirror which is 6.6m in diameter in the JWST, almost thrice as compared to 2.4m diameter of Hubble. This makes the field of view (region of space looked at) 15 times greater than that of Hubble. Interestingly,the excellent image quality we got from Hubble will be maintained.
All I can imagine is that with such a gigantic telescope extending our reach and revealing the truth behind the origin of Universe, the world of Astronomy surely has a lot to look forward to in the coming years...

Bhaskar Mahajan

Of Holmes and Watson and dirty iceballs...

Great job, Mohit! Comets are a celestial lottery that we poor earthlings hit a jackpot on rarely in a lifetime. My own interest in astronomy started in 1986 when Comet Halley paid us a visit. This particular comet (Comet Holmes) in Perseus has brightened considerably and we can hope to see it with the naked eye or with modest equipment (like Scopey!) Check out http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/10775326.html for updates on Holmes! Elementary, dear Watson...!

Srikumar M. Menon

Holmes / Comet 17P

A once in a lifetime event, the explosion of Comet 17P, and its coma (a dust cloud illuminated by the sun) that has grown bigger than Jupiter in size is now visible to the naked eye since it has unexpectedly brightened over the past few weeks... About 12 days ago, it was visible only through a telescope, until it suddenly started expanding after a sudden eruption..

The reason of the eruption is not very clear, however, scientists speculate the comet has exploded because there are sinkholes in its nucleus, giving it a honeycomb-like structure. The collapse exposed comet ice to the sun, which transformed the ice into gas which can now be seen in the from of its coma. The interesting fact to note here is that it lacks a tail, which is usually associated with such celestial bodies..

The easiest way to spot it (i'm kind of playing it fast and loose with the word 'easy' since we hardly get clear skies here at Manipal) is to look towards the constellation Perseus in the northern sky.. The comet appears as a blurry spot of light (about the same brightness as of the stars in the Ursa Major constellation).

It is an absolutely spectacular phenomenon, along the lines of when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter back in 1994.. So those who are lucky enough to spot it can share their views and comments here..

-Mohit Gidwani