Category Archives: Astronomy

Astronomy, Exoplanets, Space participation

With OSCAAR spot exoplanets with home telescope

The software OSCAAR/OSCAAR  at GitHub allows for small telescopes to observe the transit of an exoplanet across the face of its home star:

The original OSCAAR team at the University of Maryland created OSCAAR because we wanted to observe transiting exoplanets at our small campus observatory, but our faculty and staff at the time had never used our observatory for such observations. We experimented with different observing and analysis techniques until we got our first transit light curve of HD 189733 b in the summer of 2011. We immediately wanted to share what we learned, and in the two years since then we’ve built OSCAAR for use by others like us — with access to basic observing equipment and a drive to observe transiting exoplanets, who need a place to start.

OSCAAR is continuously being enhanced and expanded by an open community of active observers and astronomers. Our contributors today span from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to the University of Leiden, and observers getting started with OSCAAR reach from Vestal, New York to Athens, Greece. If you’re interested in using or contributing to OSCAAR, we look forward to welcoming you into the community! Don’t be shy to ask how you can get involved! Contributing to OSCAAR makes a great undergraduate research project, for example.

See also Spot Exoplanets With Your Home Telescope, Using Free NASA Software – Popular Science

The new software is called the Open Source differential photometry Code for Accelerating Amateur Research, or OSCAAR for short. OSCAAR measures changes in the brightness of stars. When exoplanets pass between their stars and Earth, they reduce the amount of light that reaches Earth. OSCAAR accounts for the distortion of light that occurs in the Earth’s atmosphere and for changes in light that may occur because there are clouds overhead.

Those who use OSCAAR will likely find giant gas planets orbiting close to their stars. Hot. (Literally.) That’s because such planets are large enough to cause enough change in their stars’ light for amateur equipment to detect. Also, because they’re close to their stars, their orbits are small, swift and measurable over the course of one night.

Asteroids & Comets, Astronomy

Video: Fireball in the sky over southeast US

A super bright meteor fireball was visible over the southeastern USA during the early hours of August 28th: Fireball outshines moon:  NASA cameras captured video of a meteor streaking past the moon. The fireball was one of the brightest observed by NASA in the past five years. – CSMonitor.com

“Recorded by all six NASA cameras in the Southeast, this fireball was one of the brightest observed by the network in 5 years of operations,” Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., wrote in a blog post Tuesday (Sept. 3).

“From Chickamauga, Georgia, the meteor was 20 times brighter than the full moon; shadows were cast on the ground as far south as Cartersville.”

Here’s a brief video of the fireball talken by a NASA camera:

Caption:

Early Wednesday morning, at 3:27:20 AM Eastern Time, a piece of an asteroid, about 2 feet in diameter and weighing over 100 pounds, entered Earth’s atmosphere above the Georgia/Tennessee border, just south of Cleveland. The meteor was moving northeast at 56,000 miles per hour, and began to break apart north east of Ocoee, at an altitude of 33 miles. A second, fragmentation occurred less than half a second later, at an altitude of 29 miles. NASA cameras lost track of the fireball pieces at an altitude of 21 miles, by which time they had slowed to a speed of 19,400 mph. Sensors on the ground recorded sound waves (“sonic booms”) from this event, and there are indications on Doppler weather radar of a rain of small meteoritic particles falling to the ground east of Cleveland, Tennessee.

Astronomy, Mars, Space Science

Video: Curiosity records a solar eclipse

The Curiosity rover continues do excellent skywatching on Mars:

This video clip shows the larger of the two moons of Mars, Phobos, passing directly in front of the sun, in an eclipse photographed by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity.

More at Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Mars Rover Views Eclipse of the Sun by Phobos – NASA JPL.

Astronomy, Space Science, SpaceCasts

Video: “What’s Up for September” from NASA JPL

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NASA JPL’s “What’s Up for September 2013” reports on some expected space science spacecraft events in September and what to look for in the night sky

A lunar night launch, Comet ISON is spotted again, and the moon meets up with Saturn, Venus, Mars and Jupiter.

Update: And here is the latest This Week @ NASA:

Astronomy, Exoplanets

Video: Breaking the Seeing Barrier for Planetary Astronomy

The SETI Institute posts this video of a talk by Franck Marchis, about Breaking the Seeing Barrier for Planetary Astronomy

Caption:

When Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope toward Jupiter in 1609 and discovered what we now call the Galilean moons, he did not realized that he had just established a new research field in astronomy. In the past four centuries, planetary astronomy, the study of our solar system bodies using telescopes, has increased our knowledge of the environment of Earth, the evolution of the planets, the origin of comets and asteroids and the formation of our solar system. Space exploration accelerated planetary astronomy in the 1960s by allowing planetary scientists to access in-situ and detailed data.

In this talk, I will discuss the contributions of telescopic observation over the past 50 years to planetary science, particularly the recent developments like adaptive optics which renewed interest in ground-based observations of planets. I will explore the contribution of all-sky surveys like Pan-STARRS and LSST, which provide several terabytes of data a week, changing radically the way we do astronomy. Looking to the future of space-based astronomy, I will consider whether the James Webb Space Telescope and ATLAST are potential successors to the successful Hubble Space Telescope.

Finally I’ll explore the way in which specialized low-cost telescopes designed to search and study exoplanets, planets around other stars, constitutes a paradigm shift in our field.