Q4 Biography

Margaret Geller Bio 

     Margaret Geller, a magnificent American astronomer and professor, was born in 1948 to Seymour Geller and Sarah Levine Geller. The daughter of a crystallographer from Ithaca, New York State, Geller was encouraged as a small child to study science and mathematics. Her education includes a B.A from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, a M.A from Princeton University in 1972, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1974. After a period at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, England, Geller moved to Harvard in 1980 and was appointed professor of astronomy in 1988.

     Since the early 1980s Geller and her coworkers have been carrying out for the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) a red-shift survey of some 15,000 galaxies. The intention is to map all galaxies above a certain brightness, out to about 650 million light years, in a particular sector of the heavens. They were aware that to some observers the sky lacked the uniformity predicted by the big-bang theory. In 1981, for example, a 100-million-light-year gap had been discovered in the constellation Bootes. Geller considered the possibility that this was a local phenomenon, and that the predicted homogeneity would become more apparent on a much larger scale. Further investigations were expected to show a uniform distribution of galaxies.

     But when they came to plot the distribution of galaxies they saw neither a uniform spread, nor a random scattering of galaxies, but large-scale clusters grouped into enormous structures. The largest of these, dubbed the Great Wall, stretches for more than 500 million light-years. It was difficult to see how anything as massive could have been formed within the context of current cosmological theory; when Geller reported the initial results of the CfA survey in 1989 she noted, “Something fundamental is missing in our models.”The existence of this structure, the largest ever seen in the universe, presents a conundrum for theorists dealing with the early universe. She has been mapping the nearby universe for the past sixteen years and has produced the most extensive pictures yet.

      She is also a staff member of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.She is interested in mapping the distribution of the mysterious, ubiquitous dark matter in the universe, the halo of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, to understand the link between the history of our Galaxy and the history of the universe. She does this by mapping clusters of galaxies to understand how these systems develop over the history of the universe, and measuring and interpreting the signatures of star formation in the spectra of galaxies to understand the links between the star formation in galaxies and their environment. She leads a program called SHELS.

     Geller won a MacArthur fellowship- also know as a "genius award" - in 1990 for her research. SHe received the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year. In addition to galaxy distributions, Geller is interested in the origin and evolution of galaxies and X-ray astronomy. She is a member of the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Association for the advancement of Science. 

APOD 4.7

The Sombrero Galaxy from Hubble

Named the sombrero galaxy for its hat-like resemblance, M104 features a prominent dust lane and a bright halo of stars and globular clusters. Reasons for its hat-like appearance include an unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge. The very center of the Sombrero is thought to host a black hole! It's a really awesome picture to look at.

Margaret Geller Bio Sources

"ASP: Women in Astronomy: An Introductory Resource Guide to Materials in English."Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Web. 16 May 2011. <http://www.astrosociety.org/education/resources/womenast_bib04.html>.


Lawler, Andrew. "Margaret Geller: Battling Discrimination or Bureaucracy?" Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 12 Nov. 1999. Web. 16 May 2011. <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5443/1277.short>.

"Margaret Geller's SAO Home Page." Margaret Geller. Web. 16 May 2011. <https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~mjg/>.

APOD 4.6

Globular Cluster M15 from Hubble 

Stars swarm around the center of the bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 10,000 stars is still here from the earliest years of our galaxy and continues to orbit the Milky Way's center. M15 is one of only 150 globular clusters remaining and can only be seen with binoculars. It's center has one the densest concentrations of stars known and contains a high abundance of variable stars and pulsars. This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and spans about 120 light years.

APOD 4.5

The Antennae 

THIS IS SO COOL WE JUST LEARNED CORVUS! Some 60 million light-years away in the southernly constellation corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars NGC 4038 and NCG 4039 didn't collide. Instead, their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, trigerring furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. This view spans 500 thousand light years.

APOD 4.4

Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273

The spiky stars in the foreground are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way at a distance of over 300 million light years. Their distorted appearance is due to gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters. From our perspective, the bright cores of the Arp may offer an analog of their far future encounter. The release of this vista celebratesthe 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit!

Zooniverse

For my Zooniverse project I have been planet hunting like there's no tomorrow. It rocks when they test you for a transit feature and you correctly identify them!

APOD 4.3

Young Stars in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud 

Dust clouds and embedded newborn stars glow at infrared wavelengths in this false-color composition from WISE. This features one of the closest star-forming regions , part of the Rho Ophicuhi cloud complex some 400 light years distant. After forming along a large cloud of molecular hydrogen gas, young stars heat the surrounding dust to produce the infrared glow. Stars in the process of formation, called young stellar objects, (YSOs) are embedded in the pinkish nebulae seen here . 

Observations

Last night I went out in my driveway at about 10pm. Of course I saw Orion, Betelgeuse, and Rigel. I also managed to identify Gemini, and its two main sequence stars Castor and Pollux. I spotted Sirius and perhaps Lepus, but I'm not really sure.

APOD 4.2

The Milky Way Over Tenerife 

In a clear sky from a dark location at the right time, a faint band of light, the disk of our spiral galaxy, is visible across the sky. Since we are inside this disk, the band appears to encircle the earth. The image is actually a deep digital fusion of nine photos that create a panorama fully 360 across. Also depicted is a waxing moon, Barnard's loop, and the Pleiades. 

APOD 4.1

Valles Marineris 

Valles Marineris is the largest canyon in the solar system extending over 3,000 kilometers long and spanning as much 600 kilometers across and delving as much as 8 kilometers deep. The origin remains unknown, although a hypothesis stands that it started as a crack billions of year ago as the planet cooled. This pictured was compiled from over 100 images of Mars taken by Viking Oribiters in the 1970s.

APOD 3.8

NGC 6384: Spiral Beyond the Stars

To see galaxies within the universe, astronomers must look out beyond the stars of our galaxy, the milky way. The image above shows spiral galaxy NGC 6384 abour 80 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. It spans an approximate 150,000 light-years. You can see the galaxy's blue spiral arms and yellowish core.

Observation 3/17/11

I went outside on my driveway at about 9:30 pm. Directly overhead was a bright full moon. What was special about this observation today, was that there was a lighter aura circling the moon - an effect of the atmosphere. When I saw the star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion, I couldn't stop thinking about The Universe Video we watched in class today and how at any moment - tomorrow, 100 years - Betelgeuse will explode into a supernova!! Pretty neat.

APOD 3.7

Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters

Nobody is sure what lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters. The robot Cassini spacecraft (which is now orbiting Saturn) swooped past the the sponge-textured moon in 2005 and 2010 and took images with unprecedented detail. The picture above is an image from 2005 shown in false color and depicts a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface. The slight differences in color most likely show differences in surface composition. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, roatates chaotically, and has a density so low it might house a vast system of caverns inside.



APOD 3.6

Mammatus Clouds Over Olympic Valley 

Normal cloud bottoms are flat because warm moist air that rises and cools condenses into water droplets at specific temperatures. This corresponds to a very specific height. An opaque cloud forms after the water droplets form. Cloud pockets can develop that contain large droplets or ice that fall into clear air as they evaporate. Such pockets may occur in turbulent air - like near the top of an anvil cloud for example. These mammatus clouds were photographed over Olympic Valley, CA. 

Edward Pickering Bio

Edward Pickering was a prominent American astronomer who pioneered the development of the color index method for cataloging stars and who encouraged many young scientists in astronomy, including many women (which was unusually for the time). Pickering graduated from Harvard and then taught physics for 10 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he built the first instructional physics laboratory in the United States. Appointed at age 30 as director of the Harvard College Observatory, he served in this post for 42 years.

He and his staff made visual photometric studies of 45,000 stars. With funds provided by Henry Draper's widow, Anna Palmer Draper, he hired a number of women, including Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury, and Henrietta Levaitt, and produced the Henry Draper Catalogue with objective prism spectra of hundreds of thousands of stars classified according to Cannon's “Harvard sequence.” He established a station in Peru to make the southern photographs and published the first all-sky photographic map. He and Hermann Vogel (1842–1907) independently discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He also discovered a new series of spectral lines, now known as the Pickering series, that turned out to be due to ionized helium. Pickering encouraged amateur astronomers and was a founder of the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

Pickering made innovations in spectrography. Instead of placing a small prism at the focus to capture the light of a single star, he put a large prism in front of the objective, obtaining at the same time a spectrogram of all the stars in the field sufficiently bright to affect the emulsion. This made possible the massive surveys he wanted to organize and enabled the publication in 1918 of the Henry Draper Catalogue, compiled by Annie Cannon, giving the spectral types of 225,300 stars. The other innovation in instruments due to him was the meridian photometer introduced in 1880. In this, images of stars near the meridian would be reflected at the same time as the image of Polaris. The brightness could then be equalized and as the brightness of Polaris was known, that of the meridian stars could easily be calculated. More than a million observations with such instruments permitted the compilation of the Harvard catalog giving the magnitude of some 50,000 stars. He was able to include stars of the southern hemisphere in this catalog, for in 1891 he had established an observatory in Arequipa, Peru, with the help of his brother William Henry Pickering and published the first all-sky photographic map. He and Hermann Vogel (1842–1907) independently discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He also discovered a new series of spectral lines, now known as the Pickering series, that turned out to be due to ionized helium. Pickering encouraged amateur astronomers and was a founder of the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

Pickering Bio Sources (Q3)

"The Bruce Medalists: Edward C. Pickering." SSU Department of Physics & Astronomy - Home. Web. 21 Feb. 2011. <http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/Pickering/index.html>.


"Edward Charles Pickering (American Physicist and Astronomer) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia." Encyclopedia - Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Feb. 2011. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/459405/Edward-Charles-Pickering>.


Stone, David. "Edward Pickering." Boise State University Department of Mathematics. 10 Mar. 2003. Web. 21 Feb. 2011. <http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/whowaswho/P-Q/PickeringEdward.htm>.

Observations

Last night (2/20/11) I went to the stargaze at PV.
I saw so many things including Orion, Lepus, Canis Major, Jupiter, the Pleadis, Gemini, and ten 1st magnitude stars(Betelgeuse, Rigel, Canopis, Sirius etc) among many others. We made out the Heavenly G in the sky like we do in Starlab.  I wish I could get out to these more often! It was really awesome to apply what I've learned on paper to the night sky.

APOD 3.5

Rosette Nebula 

This picture reminds me so much of a flower! The colors are all very aesthetically pleasing. Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars called NGC 224. These stars formed about 4 million years ago from the nebular material and their stellar winds clearing a hole in the nebula's center - insulated by a layer of dust and hot gas. Ultraviolet light causes the nebula to glow. It can be seen towards the Monoceros and lies about 5,000 light years away!. (Spans about 100 light years across. 

APOD 3.4

Iridescent Clouds from the Top of the World Highway

A rare phenomenon known as iridescent clouds can show vivid unusual colors or a whole spectrum simultaneously making clouds appear to be different colors. These clouds are formed by small water droplets of the apparent same size. When the sun is hidden behind these thinner clouds, (as well as being in the right position), the thinner clouds diffract the light in coherent manner with different colors being deflected by different amounts. This awesome picture was taken last year outside Dawson City in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada. 

APOD 3.3

Zeta Oph: Runaway Star

In this infrared portrait taken from the WISE spacecraft, you can see the runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi as it produces the arcing intersellar bow shock. The blueish Zeta Oph, a star about twenty times more massive than our sun, moves toward the top at 24 kilometers per second! Its about 65,000 times more luminous than our sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if not for the surrounding dust. Its strong stellar wind precedes it, compressing and heating the dusty interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front.



APOD 3.2

Hidden Treasures of M78

About 1,600 light-years away and nestled in the constellation Orion, the large, bright reflection nebula is well known to people who gaze at the sky via telescope. This image was a winner from the ESO's Hidden Treasures 2010 astophotography competition. The details of this picture is amazing - especially within its blueish center. Yelllowish and compact, you can see McNeil's nebula below and right of center.



Observation 1/19/11

The other night there was a fantastic full moon. As it rose in the sky it was a deep orange color and the higher it got it turned into a nice yellow color. From my perspective, the full moon looked really really close. I pointed it out to some of my friends and family and they were impressed by its gorgeous color and great presence in the sky. :)

I was also able to spot Orion and Cassiopeia.

APOD 3.1

Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka

These bright blueish lights from east to west mark the belt of Orion. What might come as a suprise to those who know little about astronomy is that these blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light years away, born from Orion's interstellar clouds. Clouds of dust and gas adrift in this region have some interesting shapes including the Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula. This spectacular image spans about 4 degrees across the sky.

APOD 2.8

A Sun Halo Beyond Stockholm

Above, it looks like you are looking at the Sun through a lens. However, there are actually millions of lenses! In the form of ice crystals. Small, flat, six-sided ice crystals are formed as water freezes in the upper atmosphere. When these crystals flutter to the ground much of their time is spent facing flat, parallel to the ground. When an observer passes through the same plan during sunrise or sunset and during this alignment, each crystal acts like a minature lens, refracting sunlight into our view and creating phenomena like parhelia. (Sundogs)

Astronomy Cast

Ep: 108: The Life of The Sun (9/30/2008)


4.6 billion years ago+  Cold cloud of gas&dust- somehow caused to contract into a bunch of baby stars
Sun started out 10 times brighter as it is right now, sun got fainter as it contracted
then started nuclear burning in its core
during early parts of sun's life- very violent and active, powerful magnetic fields, flares
Sun settles down to main sequence (hotter in the past then today) 
Overtime our sun is heating up again (very gradual process, billions of years) 
the sun will stay a main sequence star for another 5 billion years 


About 5 billion years from now we start to run out of Hydrogen that is readily available for fusing in the center of the Sun.  When this happens the Sun is going to start contracting because there is not going to be as much pressure from the light supporting the outer layers of the Star.


in tiny stars, the burning process is able to create what we call convective mixing.  The entire Star essentially acts like a Lava Lamp, it’s able to constantly refuel the center of the Star.  


In a magical moment when it reaches a temperature ten to the 8 degrees, suddenly the Helium in the center of the Sun is able to ignite.  We call this a Helium Flash.  At this point the Sun becomes what we call a Horizontal Branch Star.


This is part of why so many of the really bright Stars that we see in the Sky are these red Stars.  We can just see red Stars at a much greater distance and this is a common phase for Stars to go through.  


We refer to the Main Sequence as the majority of the Star’s life and that’s exactly what it is.  Then it goes off and does all these really cool things but those happen essentially in the blink of a Cosmic eye.  Once the Star hits the Mira phase, just maybe four or five hundred million years after leaving the Main Sequence, at that point it starts losing its Atmosphere.

It starts transitioning from being a Star that’s burning and doing all the Star-like things to blasting its Atmosphere away starting to form a Planetary Nebula.  A Planetary Nebula is nothing more than the Atmosphere of a Star that’s been exhaled and hasn’t yet drifted so far away from its starting point that we can no longer see all the gas associated with one another.


I really like this astro cast! Hearing so much in depth about the sun clarifies many things and yet confuses me (so much info!) at the same time! 

David Rittenhouse Biography

McBride 1

Megan McBride

Astronomy Honors

 Percival 3

11 Jan 2011

David Rittenhouse Biography

            David Rittenhouse was born the son of farmer Matthias Rittenhouse in Germantown, Pennsylvania on April 8^th 1732. He is often cited as America’s second foremost scientist of the 18^th century only after Benjamin Franklin. What is an exciting fact is that Rittenhouse is on of the first great American astronomers! Almost entirely self-taught, he studied books inherited from his uncle, a furniture maker, and used his uncle's tools to construct clocks as a teenager. At a young age, Rittenhouse showed a high level of intelligence by creating a working scale model of his grandfather's paper mill. When Rittenhouse was nineteen, he started a scientific instrument shop at his father’s farm. He married Eleanor Coulston, and then after her death, Hannah Jacobs. He showed great ability in both science and mathematics and mastered Newton’s Principia. 

            Over the next thirty or forty years he made many highly-prized and innovative mathematical and astronomical instruments, most famous of which were two orreries he constructed for the Colleges of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania). These orreries show the solar and lunar eclipses and other phenomena for a period of 5,000 years either forward or backward. After moving to Philadelphia in 1770, Rittenhouse used both astronomical and terrestrial observations to survey canals and rivers and to establish the boundaries between many of the Mid-Atlantic States. He held the post of city surveyor of Philadelphia in 1774.

           

His scientific thinking and experimentation earned Rittenhouse considerable intellectual prestige in America and in Europe. He built his own observatory at his father's farm in Norriton, outside of Philadelphia. Rittenhouse maintained detailed records of his observations and published a number of important works on astronomy, including a paper putting forth his solution for locating the place of a planet in its orbit. He was a leader in the scientific community's observance of the transit of Venus in 1769, which won him broad acclaim. He also sought to solve mathematical problems, publishing his first mathematical paper in 1792, an effort to determine the period of a pendulum. He also experimented with magnetism and electricity.

Rittenhouse was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1768, serving over the years as curator, librarian, secretary, vice president and, from 1791 to 1796, its president. He was elected to its committee to observe the transits of Venus and Mercury in 1769 based on plans he had made. Over the years he received a number of honorary degrees including those from the Colleges of New Jersey and Philadelphia. In addition he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London

Rittenhouse used his scientific skills for practical purposes during the American Revolution. In 1775 he began his service on the Committee of Safety as an engineer supervising local casting of cannon, improvement of rifles, supply of ammunition and selection of sites for gunpowder mills and magazine stores. In the late 1770s Rittenhouse was a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1776, and the Board of War. From 1779 to 1787 Rittenhouse was Treasurer of Pennsylvania, and from 1792 -1795 he served as Director of the U.S. Mint. He later worked as Penn's Professor of Astronomy at Philadelphia from 1779 to 1782.

David Rittenhouse was a great man who put his intelligence to use and for the benefit of the scientific community as well as the people. We take pride in our fellow American and recognize what immense contributions he made throughout his lifetime. Rittenhouse passed away June 26^th, 1796. 

APOD 2.7

The Cosmic Web of the Tarantula Nebula 

Located in the Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy orbiting our Milky Way galaxy is the largest and most complex star-forming region in the entire galactic neighborhood! This "tarantula"is about 1,000 light-years across. The spindly arms of this nebula surround NGC 2070, a star cluster that contains some of the brightest, most massive stars known, visible in blue on the right. I've never seen anything like this before and it really just bolsters that fact that space is beautiful. 

David Rittehouse Bio Sources

David Rittenhouse (1732-1796), University of Pennsylvania University Archives."University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania. Web. 05 Jan. 2011. <http://www.archives.upenn.edu/people/1700s/rittenhouse_david.html>.


"David Rittenhouse (American Astronomer and Inventor) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia." Encyclopedia - Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Web. 05 Jan. 2011. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/504662/David-Rittenhouse>.


"David Rittenhouse." The Robinson Library. 4 Aug. 2009. Web. 05 Jan. 2011. <http://www.robinsonlibrary.com/science/astronomy/biography/rittenhouse.htm>.

Observation 12/21/10

On the day of the Total Lunar Eclipse, Dec 21st 2010 (the winter solstice) I was in Breckenridge, CO. I set my alarm and awoke to see the moon. It entered the Umbra at about 12:30 am mountain time. It was quite a sight seeing the red moon over the mountains - something I will never forget!