Monday, 7 April 2025

The Astronomy Show on Drystone Radio

 Join me, Martin Lunn MBE tonight and every Monday evening from 7.00 pm-9.00 pm on the award-winning Astronomy Show on Drystone Radio, probably the only regular astronomy show on any radio station in the country. 

I will take my weekly look at the night sky and look at all the latest news in astronomy. There will be the astronomical anniversaries this week plus the latest news from the astronomical societies in the north of England.


The Astronomy Show every Monday evening only on Drystone Radio live online at www.drystoneradio.com DAB radio in Bradford and East Lancashire, or 102 and 103.5 FM and can also be heard later on the Drystone Radio Podcast.

 

Sunspots observed with a Cooke telescope in Somerset in 1929

 Mr R. L. Robinson, Minehead, Somerset using a Thomas Cooke and Sons 6 inch telescope made a series of drawings of sunspots large and small in October, November and December 1929. These spots were of considerable interest because they rapidly changed in appearance on a daily scale. 

In many cases details of structure were obtained using a Dawes eyepiece, by which a great deal of the surrounding photosphere can be shut off or even a large part of a spot can be isolated. This is often a great advantage, especially in observing the changes of detail in a bridge or projection.


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Sunday, 6 April 2025

A little ramble through Aquarius the Water Bearer

 Aquarius is one of the most ancient of constellations. The Babylonians saw this area of sky as a man pouring water from a jar and it is still represented this way today. Aquarius is one of the zodiacal constellations and according to the Greeks it is linked to Ganymede, cup bearer to the Olympic gods.

It’s in the Zodiac a belt of stars made up of 12 constellations that stretch around the sky, actually there are 13 constellations in the Zodiac, no one ever talks about Ophiuchus. The zodiac is where the Sun, Moon and planets will always be found in the sky. Many people get confused with astronomy and astrology, astronomy is the science of the stars while astrology is the pseudo-science that tries to link people’s characteristics with the positions of the planets against the starry background.

The Arab astronomer Al Biruni saw it as Amphora a two handled wine jar. The Egyptians referred to the constellation as Monius or water. While in China with Capricorn, Pisces and a part of Sagittarius it was seen as a serpent or turtle. The Anglo Saxons called it se Waeter-gyt the water pourer.

Although Aquarius which can be seen in the autumn is the 10th largest constellation is not a particularly bright one. It can be found below the square of Pegasus. The most prominent part of the constellation is the Y shaped figure of 4 stars representing the water jar itself centred on the star zeta. Together with gamma, eta and pi this little area is often called the ‘Water Jar’. With it being low in the sky any mist or moonlight means that not even the brightest stars can be seen with the naked eye.


The brightest star is not alpha but beta whose name is Sadalsuud which means ‘luck of lucks’ is of mag 2.8 and is about 540 light years away. It is a G class supergiant with a temperature of 5,400`C slightly cooler than the sun.

The second brightest star is alpha at mag 2.9 is another  G class supergiant star, again slightly  cooler than the Sun it has a proper name which is sadalmelik which means ‘luck of the king’. Alpha is about 520 light years away. It has a surface temperature of around 4,900`C.

Delta or Skat which means ‘leg or shin’ is the third brightest star at magnitude 3.3 and about 113 light years away. It is an A class star with a surface temperature of about 8, 700`C much hotter than the Sun.

The following stars make up the water jar

Gamma or Sadachbia, its name means ‘luck of the homes’ (tents).The star has a magnitude of  3.8 and is 164 light years distant. It is an A class star with a surface temperature of about 10,200`C, our Sun is about 5,800’C

Zeta which is slightly above and to the left of gamma is an unnamed and  is a binary star, which means there are two stars here, however without a small telescope you would not be able to see the two stars. Zeta is located at the centre of the water jar asterism. The two stars are yellow white type stars one is a F3 star at magnitude 4.2 the other a F6 giant at magnitude 4.5 . Both are hotter than the Sun . The pair are 92 light years away and when we put the brightness of the two stars together they appear in the sky as a single star to the naked eye as a star of magnitude 3.6.

To the left of zeta is eta is a star of magnitude 4.0 and is 168 light years away, It is a B class star with a surface temperature of 11,000 degrees ‘ C twice the temperature of the Sun.

Just to the right of zeta is pi the faintest of the water jar group of stars at magnitude 4.6, it is a B class  giant star with a whopping large temperature of 26,700’ C. Pi is 780 light years away.

One other star I feel I need to mention is :-

TRAPPIST -1 which stands for Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope. A solar system with 7 Earth size planets. They all are between the size of Mars and Earth. The system lies around 40 light years away.  It is too faint to be seen with the naked eye.

As the title of the project indicates astronomer are searching for planets transiting or passing in front of the star they orbit. TRAPPIST -1 was discovered back in 2016.

The star in question here is a small red dwarf star. It is much smaller than our Sun. Astronomers want to know if any of the planets can support life. One big problem with red dwarf stars is that they produce very powerful flares which may make it very difficult if not impossible for life to exist on any plants orbiting a red dwarf star.

The idea of looking for a slight change in brightness of a star when something passes in front of it is not new. The idea was first put forward by the deaf astronomer John Goodricke in York in 1782. Collaborating with his colleague Edward Pigott together they observed a star in the constellation of Perseus. The star called ALGOL t marks the eye of the medusa. The star names are Arabic and Algol means the ‘Winking Demon’. We know today that Algol is a double star system and the stars are orbiting and eclipsing each other causing the brightness of the star to change. With the star names being Arabic I wonder if the Arab astronomers also realised that this star changed in brightness. If they did no records have survived. The light changes on Algol are much more than on TRAPPIST-1.

In the 18th century the French astronomer was looking for comets. He found around a dozen or so, non were particularly import, however he kept coming across a large number of fuzzy looking objects similar to comets. These caused him a lot of problems so he drew up a list on non-comet objects to avoid becoming confused with these objects. It is strange to report today that his comets are nearly forgotten to history but that his list of non-comet objects The Messier List of 110 objects is still used by astronomers today.

There are two Messier objects: -

 Messier 2

A globular cluster discovered by the Italian astronomer Maraldi on September 11th 1746, who believed it to be a nebulous star.  Globular clusters are densely packed collections of ancient stars. Roughly spherical in shape, they contain hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of stars.

Charles Messier rediscovered the cluster exactly 14 years later on September 11th 1760. It was only in 1783 that William Herschel who 2 years earlier had discovered the planet Uranus was able to see through a larger telescope and realise that M2 was made up of numerous stars.

M2 has a diameter of about 175 light years and contains about 150,000 stars, it is one of the most compact globular clusters, and most of the brightest stars are red and yellow giant stars. M2 appears to be about 13 billion years old that is about 3 times the age of the Earth and Sun. M2 is about 33,000 light years away.

M2 is  north of Beta Aquarii,  M2 has a magnitude of 6.5 which means that it is  below naked eye visibility but can easily been seen with a pair of binoculars. In binoculars it will appear as a large, fuzzy ball with little or no resolution. It is possible to just see some stars around the edge using a 6 inch telescope, a larger telescope above 10 inch will resolve into stars.

In the 1830s, John Herschel (son of William who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781)  saw it as “It is like a heap of fine sand!” which is perhaps as apt a description as can be rendered. Through a large telescope, the globular cluster does resemble a glittering mass of sparkling granules.

Messier 72 

M72 is east of the 3.8 mag star epsilon Aquarius, this is the faintest globular cluster in the Messier list.

At mag 9.2 this globular is easy to miss, M72 actually spreads across 98 light years and like M71 is classified as a good open globular, and  is 56,400 light years away.

It can just be glimpsed in larger binoculars but require a reasonable size telescope to see it well. The cluster is racing towards us at about 160 miles per second so maybe many 1000s of years from now owners of small telescopes will be able to see it better.

Messier first observed M72 in 1780 who said its light was faint

 

 

M73

This was one that fooled Messier in that it is not a star cluster of galaxy but just a close group of stars. A trio of 10th mag stars in a poor field is in Aquarius is how Admiral Smyth described this most unremarkable Messier object in his Cycle of Celestial Objects  published in the 19th century .

This group of stars is situated close to M72  and  is actually a grouping of 4 stars with no apparent connection, except that they lie in the same line of sight. Asterisms like this can be seen in any part of the sky. Messier just got fooled by it.

The optics of Messier’s telescope were not as good as modern optics and this is why the group probably looked fuzzy to him.  This could have been combined with poor atmospheric conditions when he observed them.

Messier first observed M73 in 1780 and described it as a cluster of 3 or 4 faint stars which at first glance resembles a nebula, and which does contain some nebulosity.

Although the stars appear to be close together in space in fact they are not. The stars are all at different distances to the Earth. The stars appear as an object of magnitude 9. They cannot be seen with the naked eye and a reasonably large telescope would b needed to see them.

There are two other nebulous objects to mention on Aquarius , the first is NGC 7009 the Saturn Nebula so named because it looks the planet Saturn. The letters NGC stand for the New General Catalogue that was introduced in 1888, even today we still use the term NGC. It is  a planetary nebula this is a star in the process of throwing all of its gas away into space before it becomes a white dwarf star. This is the ultimate fate for our Sun in a few billion years’ time.

It was discovered by William Herschel in 1783 he thought it looked a little like a planet hence the name planetary nebula. This nebula is around 5,200 light years away.

The name  Saturn nebula was given to the object by Lord Rosse from his observatory at Bir Castle in Ireland using what at the time was the largest telescope in the world. The telescope had a mirror 72 inches wide was built in 1845.

Here is another planetary nebula in Aquarius this is NGC 7293 the Helix Nebula which at 655 light years distance is the closest planetary nebula to us.

Meteor showers

There are two meteor showers associated with Aquarius. Meteors or shooting stars as many people like to call them are connected to comets. They have nothing at all to do with stars but are grains of dust that burn up as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. A comet is a large dirty snowball travelling around the Sun, it leaves a trail of dust behind it and if the Earth happens to pass through one of these dust streams we see lots of meteors or a meteor shower. There are several meteor showers during the  year.

The eta Aquarids meteor shower occurs during early May with the maximum number of meteors seen around the 5th  May when around 40 meteors per hour can be seen. The meteor shower is so named because all the meteor in the sky seem to start their path across the sky from the star eta Aquarius. The comet connected with this meteor stream is none other than Halley’s Comet. There are two meteor showers connected with Halley’s comet, the other is in October and is called the Orionids.

The second meter shower is the delta Aquarids which peaks around abut July 30th when around 20 meteors per hour can be seen. This meteor shower is connected with comet Macholtz .


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Saturday, 5 April 2025

Asteroid Circe discovered 170 years ago on April 6th 1855

On April 6th 1855 the asteroid Circe was discovered by J Chacornae at Paris. Circe is named after the enchantress daughter of the Sun, celebrated fore he knowledge of magic and venomous herbs. Circe changed the companions of Odysseus into pigs. She had no influence on Odysseus because Hermes protected him. Odysseus lived a year with Circe, his friends were transformed into men.

Asteroid number 34 Circe  it is around 113 km across and orbits the Sun once every 4.4 years.


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Friday, 4 April 2025

Spectroscopic changes seen in 1906 in gamma Cassiopeia with a Cooke telesscope

 Stanley E Percival, Merriott Vicarage, Somerset observing with a 3.75 inch Thomas Cooke and Sons telescope reported that the bright hydrogen line C has been very bright recently in Gamma Cassiopeia. 

He reported on May 2nd 1906 that he failed to see the C line, while on May 4th he saw it quite distinctly. On May 18th although the sky was clear and the spectrum steady he barely glimpsed it. 

He notes that in Miss Clerke’s ‘Problems in Astrophysics’ page 248 that it has previously behaved in a capricious way, and if my small Cooke telescope is to be trusted it looks like it is doing so again.

 Spectroscopic changes appear to have started around 1927 so this could be a much earlier report than is generally accepted. The spectroscopic variations did seem to occur some years before the light changes were detected.

Today gamma Cassiopeia is the prototype of a class of eruptive variable stars, theses gamma Cassiopeia stars show irregular light variations of around one magnitude which can last for weeks or decades. Normally magnitude 2.2 gamma has been seen as faint as magnitude 3.0 and as bright as magnitude 1.6



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Thursday, 3 April 2025

A little ramble through Apus the Bird of Paradise

 Stars in the southern hemisphere were of course unknown to European astronomers because no one had travelled there before the 1400s. This is why most of the constellations in this part of the sky are referred to as modern constellations.

One example is Apus the Bird of Paradise which unfortunately like many of these modern constellations contains few if any bright stars. Johann Bayer called the constellation Apus Indica the Indian Bird. That title has been dropped today and it is just referred to as Apus.

Apus is what is called a circumpolar southern hemisphere constellation, this means that from countries like Australia and New Zealand it can be seen all year around. This is much like the familiar group of stars we call the Plough which can be seen all year from countries such as Britain and is called a northern circumpolar constellation.

This constellation is best seen in July which of course in the southern hemisphere is during the winter.

Apus the bird of paradise was introduced to the sky in the 1590s by the Dutch astronomer and cartographer Petrus Plancius from the observations of Dutch navigators Pieter Keyser and Frederick Houtman, when they voyaged to the southern hemisphere and visited countries such as Indonesia or what at that time was known as the Dutch East Indies.

Plancius had produced in 1589 a celestial globe using what information was available regarding the southern stars. These included constellations such as Crux the Southern Cross and Triangulum Australe the Southern Triangle as well as the Magellanic Clouds which were called Nubecula Major and Minor. These were reported by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan c 1480-1521 as he journeyed around the world. These we know today are nearby Large and Small Magellanic Clouds which are nearby galaxies to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Plancius knew that the Dutch navigators Pieter Keyser and Frederick Houtman would be travelling to the southern hemisphere so he met them and trained them to draw and note features in the sky so he could replicate them on a new star globe he was producing. With the knowledge that Keyser and Houtman provided Plancius in either 1597 or early 1598 produced a new celestial globe with an additional 12 constellations. None of these can be seen from Britain and they describe mostly animals and subjects that travellers of the day had seen as they explored the southern hemisphere.

The name of the constellation is derived from the Greek word apous, which means “footless.” (Birds of paradise were at one point in history believed to lack feet). The Greater Bird of Paradise known in India had a magnificent white, yellow and red plumage but unsightly legs, which were cut off by the natives desiring to offer the white man only the attractive part of the bird. There are no myths associated with the constellation.

In China the constellation was referred to as E Cho the Curious Sparrow or the Little Wonder Bird.


Apus is located near the south pole star, there are no bright stars in Apus, the brightest are alpha at magnitude 3.8 and is around 430 light years away. The sky must be clear and dark to see this star.  It is a K class giant star with a surface temperature of around 4,000 degrees it is cooler than the Sun.

Apus is an example of a constellation where using Johann Bayer’s Greek alphabet sequence does not work. This is because the second brightest star is gamma with a magnitude of 3.9 compared to the brightness of beta which is magnitude 4.2.

Although the Milky Way flows through Apus there are no bright clusters of stars to be seen. The brightest is NGC 6101 a globular cluster lying around 50,000 light years away. However, at magnitude 9.2 a telescope would be needed to see it.


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Wednesday, 2 April 2025

Moon above Mars on April 5th

 After passing close to Jupiter a couple of days ago the Moon can be seen just below Mars on April 4th and on April 5th it will be just above Mars which is in the constellation of Gemini the twins. Mars is near  Pollux and Castor the two brightest stars in Gemini.



Last night April 1st it was possible to see Earthshine on the Moon this is when light from the Sun is reflected from the Earth onto the Moon and we can see the dark ghostly outline of the unlit part of the Moon, you might be able to see it again tonight.



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