Story Transcript
Newsletter December 2022
Next Meeting Oreti Sands clubrooms. Christmas Quiz December 1st at 7.30pm.
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Welcome to November. Hello all, Another year under the belt. And quite a notable one as well. On a sad note, we bade farewell to David Little, a long-time supporter of our society. Before he passed, David donated an observatory building to us. This has been successfully installed at our rooms and will be ready to commence service next winter. It is a great shame that David did not see all this happen. David also stunned us with a bequest from his will that will see us able to prosper and grow for the foreseeable future. This was an extremely generous donation, and we will make sure that David is well remembered by the community. Plaques commemorating him and his generosity to the society are to be mounted on the new observatory and in the club rooms.
Dates to Remember in
The only other comment I have at this December. stage, is a huge thankyou to the December meeting and committee and members who made Christmas Quiz. Oreti the year such a success. Let’s see you rooms, 7.30pm. all at the Xmas meeting with your 10 or December 1st. so astronomy questions and answers, and a small plate for a shared supper. So, in the meantime, have a great festive season, a fantastic New Year, and we will see you in 2023. Regards, Phil Burt. 2 of 27
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Often, we get asked now and then about how to print out pages from the newsletter. The picture below should help. This page should appear every time you load a newsletter.
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The Evening Sky in November 2022.
All five of the naked-eye planets are in the early evening sky, but some are easier to find than others. Venus and Mercury are low in the southwest. At the beginning of the month brilliant Venus sets 40 minutes after the Sun. Mercury is then above Venus but may be hard to see in the twilight. By mid-month Venus is setting an hour after the Sun. Mercury, above and right of Venus, sets 30 minutes later. Mercury sinks back into the twilight as it moves between us and the Sun. On the 28th it will be just to the right of Venus but may be too faint to see by eye in the twilight. Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are spaced across the evening sky. Jupiter is the brightest ‘star’ in the sky after Venus sets, shining in the northwest with a steady golden light. Saturn is due west, well below and left of Jupiter. It is the brightest ‘star’ in an empty region of sky. Mars is the brightest orange red ‘star’ in the northeast. Nearby are orange stars Aldebaran and Betelgeuse. Mars is at its closest distance for this year on the 8th, 82 million km away. It is still small in a telescope. At 100x magnification it looks as big as the full moon does to the naked eye. The Moon will appear close to Jupiter on the 2nd and again on the 29th. It is near Mars on the 8th. The Moon is below Saturn on the 26th and above it on the 27th . The brightest true stars are in the east and south. Sirius, the brightest star, but fainter than Jupiter and Mars, is due east at dusk, often twinkling like a diamond. Left of it is the bright constellation of Orion. The line of three stars makes Orion's belt in the classical constellation. To southern hemisphere sky watchers they make the bottom of 'The Pot'. The faint line of stars above the bright three is the Pot's handle or Orion's sword. At its center is the Orion Nebula, a glowing gas cloud nicely seen in binoculars. Rigel, directly above the line of three stars, is a hot blue-giant star. Orange Betelgeuse, below the line of three, is a cooler red-giant star. Left of Orion is a triangular group making the upside-down face of Taurus the bull. Aldebaran, at one tip of the V shape, is one eye of Taurus. The stars on and around the V, except for Aldebaran are the Hyades cluster. Aldebaran is not a member of the cluster but on the line-of sight. Further left is the Pleiades/Matariki/Subaru cluster, a tight grouping of six naked-eye stars. Canopus, the second brightest star, is high in the southeast. Low in the south are the Pointers, Beta and Alpha Centauri, and Crux the Southern Cross upside down at this time of the year. In some Maori star lore the bright southern Milky Way makes the canoe of Maui with Crux being the canoe's anchor hanging off the side. In this depiction the Scorpion's tail, just setting, can be the canoe's prow and the Clouds of Magellan are the sails. The Milky Way is wrapped around the horizon. The broadest part is in Sagittarius, low in the southwest around Venus. It narrows toward Crux in the south and becomes faint in the east below Orion. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the Galaxy. The Galaxy’s thick hub or central bulge is 27 000 light-years away, in Sagittarius. The nearby outer edge is the faint part of the Milky Way below Orion.
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The Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC, high in the southern sky, are two small galaxies about 160 000 and 200 000 light-years away, respectively. They are easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night as misty patches of light. Very low in the north is the Andromeda Galaxy. In binoculars in a dark sky it looks like a spindle of light. It is a bit bigger than our Milky Way Galaxy and nearly three million lightyears away. *A light-year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Notes by Alan Gilmore, University of Canterbury's Mt John Observatory, P.O. Box 56, Lake Tekapo 7945, New Zealand.
Visible from here, the Carina Nebula or Eta Carinae Nebula is a large, complex area of bright and dark nebulosity in the constellation Carina, located in the Carina– Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The nebula is approximately 8,500 lightyears from Earth. (See P7) 6 of 27
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Aurora Australis. Lego Mosaic by Donella Evans.
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The inspiration for my 2022 Lego mosaic came from the photograph taken by my son, Daniel Evans. Daniel captured the image at Waipapa Point in the Catlins, May 2017. The mosaic consists of more than 65,000 Lego bricks, and took every moment of my spare time for several months to complete.
Thanks to Lloyd Esler for providing this.
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2023 RASNZ/AstroNZ Calendar The RASNZ and AstroNZ are again publishing a calendar, each month containing a stunning astrophotograph from the NZ Astrophotography Competition. It also features moon phases, sunrise and sunset times, astronomical events, and a bonus section containing Alan Gilmore's NZ Night Sky Observers' go-to resource - monthly star charts and commentary. It has been decided not to order these through our society but to ask you to order them yourselves. They won't be available before our December meeting so would have to be mailed out if we procured them, and you would receive them later. Go to the RASNZ website https://www.rasnz.org.nz/ where you will see a link to the calendar order page. They will cost you $20 each, or $175.00 for a pack of 10. The $16 quoted for affiliated societies would not be cheaper for you after we added our postage to you.
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Fun Facts
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Artemis Spectacular.
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Bob Evans
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https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/so lar-system/#/sc_artemis_1 Bob suggests you check this out for a great animation.
90 seconds after ICP separation the ICP can be seen floating away in the distance in the centre of the picture.
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Unlike in this lift off from Canaveral, no frogs were wittingly harmed in the Artemis launch!
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Moon Phases for 2022
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ISS Visible passes for October 2022 https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_artemis_1
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Astronomy Picture of the Month from NASA. .
Explanation: Stars can make beautiful patterns as they age -- sometimes similar to flowers or insects. NGC 6302, the Butterfly Nebula, is a notable example. Though its gaseous wingspan covers over 3 light-years, and its estimated surface temperature exceeds 200,000 degrees C, the aging central star of NGC 6302, the featured planetary nebula, has become exceptionally hot, shining brightly in visible and ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This sharp close-up was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope and is processed here to show off remarkable details of the complex planetary nebula, highlighting in particular light emitted by oxygen (shown as blue), hydrogen (green), and nitrogen (red). NGC 6302 lies about 3,500 light-years away in the arachnologically correct constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). Planetary nebulas evolve from outer atmospheres of stars like our Sun, but usually fade in about 20,000 years. 21 of 27
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Night Sky December 2022.
This data is set for Auckland, so some names and dates may need to be altered to protect the innocent. It should be a reasonable guide to what we might expect to see from here.
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Observatory Progress!
Great Work Team!
Need we comment? The 10” Mead is in place and ready for final installation. We have waited a while for this moment. There is still more to do in order to have all prepared for next year. The building needs painting and minor repairs, and the interior has yet to be fitted out with power and other odds and ends. Working bees will be advertised over the holidays. 23 of 27
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A couple of issues ago we showed the lovely old brass telescope that Lyn Russell and her husband re-discovered as they cleaned out their holiday house. It is a terrestrial telescope and has been re-united with it’s tripod. Judging by the view in this photograph it would almost certainly show some spectacular images of the skies above. Thanks, Lyn, for bringing us up to date.
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NASA experienced a data connection glitch between the Orion spacecraft and ground control for nearly an hour early this morning, in a surprising disruption to the craft’s otherwise fair-weather journey around the Moon. Data was lost between Orion and NASA’s Mission Control at Johnson Space Centre for 47 minutes, from 1:09 a.m. ET to 1:56 a.m. ET, according to a NASA blog post. The data loss occurred while the team was working on a communication link between the spacecraft and the Deep Space Network, the array of antennas that connect spacecraft with ground controls. Orion is currently eight days through a 25.5-day journey to the Moon and back. The Artemis 1 spacecraft performed a successful flyby of the Moon on Monday, during which time NASA temporarily—and expectedly—lost contact with Orion for 34 minutes as the capsule passed behind the Moon. The Monday flyby was the Orion capsule’s closest approach of the Moon. The spacecraft is now en route to its distant retrograde orbit, and its next scheduled burn is Friday, November 25 at 4:52 p.m. ET. NASA isn’t exactly sure what caused the issue, and the team is now examining data from before and after the communication disruption to understand what went down. “The reconfiguration has been conducted successfully several times in the last few days,” NASA wrote, making the recent anomaly a bit of a head-scratcher. The issue was resolved on the ground side—that is, Orion didn’t correct the issue on its end. Data recorded on Orion’s end during the outage will also be scrutinized. Orion is otherwise performing well, and the NASA team isn’t actively anticipating another outage. The space agency has troubleshooted more than a dozen anomalies with Orion during the past eight days, but nothing terribly serious, as Mike Sarafin, Artemis 1 mission manager, told reporters on Friday. That said, getting to the bottom of this latest issue would certainly assuage any worries the team might have. At the same time, and as Orion continues on its journey, NASA will keep a watchful eye on the spacecraft’s communications. 26 of 27
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Front Cover Picture
Yes, I realize this is the third time this photo has appeared! Just excited, that’s all. And not particularly excited about the two posers, but what’s standing in the middle. Tuck your shirt in!
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